Who are we, as individuals, as a species? Why are we here on Earth? And what’s life really about? Well, there is something quite extraordinary happening. A process is unfolding, right now, and we are all a part of it: the evolution of humanity.
Modern day spiritual messenger and author of the best-selling book series Conversations With God, Neale Donald Walsch, is putting it in words that deeply resonate with millions of people around the globe.
Book one in the Conversations With God series was issued in 1995 and became a true publishing sensation, staying on the New York Times best-sellers list for no less than 137 weeks. It was followed by three more phenomenal books in the same series, the last one being published last year: Awaken The Species.
But the fact that Neale’s books strike a chord with their readers and spread like wildfire is no surprise. At least not to Neale himself. Because the wisdom he shares, or so he explains, comes from a place we all know – a place inside ourselves. Neale Donald Walsch, in that light, is simply a messenger of an idea whose time has come: the idea of who we are, an individuation of divinity.
All things are one thing, and all things are part of the one thing there is. Separation is an illusion.
– Neale Donald Walsch
A conversation with Neale Donald Walsch about his mission, the purpose of life, our soul’s agenda, and the evolution of mankind.
The conversations with God that started with an angry letter
Neale Donald Walsch uncovered the sagacity he shares in his books and teachings after writing an angry letter to God more than two decades ago.
He did so at a point in his life where everything seemed to come crumbling down for him – physically, emotionally, and financially. At the time, he experienced nothing but struggle and failure. A feeling many of us can surely relate to: “Why is nothing working for me?” Or we’d ponder in moments like these, “What am I doing wrong?”
In his letter to God, Neale demanded to know why he encountered all of the misfortune he perceived and what it would take to make his life work. And to his own astonishment, his questions were heard.
Soon after his cry for help he found himself receiving answers. And it was immediately clear to him that these answers were not coming from him, but through him. From God.
However, Neale reminds us strongly, God is not apart from us. We only think we are apart from God. Just as we think we’re apart from each other.
Each of us are to God, as the wave is to the ocean.
– Neale Donald Walsch
Ever since he received these profound insights, Neale Donald Walsch has embarked on three missions in life, or as he puts it himself: “I was given three invitations: One, change the world’s mind about God. Two, give people back to themselves. Three, awaken the species. And I spend almost all of my waking moments engaged in some aspect of those three missions.”
Why Neale refuses to be seen as someone with superpowers
Despite the fact that many (including myself) may look at him in awe for what he is able to bring into the world, Neale himself refuses to be depicted as somebody who has some sort of special superpower.
“I will simply not allow it,” he states. “I haven’t been given some magic combination that opens the lock that opens the safe where all the treasures are found.”
Instead, Neale knows that the wisdom that comes through him resides in all of us – as does God.
“The information was accessible to me because it’s accessible to everyone.”
“God lives and resides within all of us. Each of us are to God as a wave is to the ocean. The wave is not disconnected from the ocean in any way. It’s merely an individual expression of the ocean. It arises from the ocean, expresses as a powerful wave, then recedes back into the ocean, then arises again as another kind of wave, then recedes back into the ocean. But the wave is not something other than the ocean. It’s an expression of the ocean. So are we. We are not something other than God, we are simply an expression of God.”
And “not a single one of us is more special than another,” says Neale.
The opposite way of thinking – that there are some people “more special” than others – is, in fact, what has caused humanity many problems since the dawn of time. It has caused people to believe that some are more deserving than others, that some have more rights than others, and that there is reason for discriminative or seclusive behavior. Even reason for violence and war. And – of course – none of that is true.
The idea that someone is more special than someone else is what has been the destruction of the world.
– Neale Donald Walsch
The reason his books have become so widely read, Neale says, is because people recognize their own truth in it: “One of the most often heard statements from people who’ve read my books through the years – the thing they say to me more often than any other thing is, ‘Hey, you wrote my book.’”
So rather than wondering why Neale is the one receiving this information, he thinks it is much more interesting to ask the question: “Why are so many people on Earth – hundreds, thousands of us – receiving these answers right now?”
The mission and purpose we all share
Awakening the species is not just his mission, Neale elaborates: “As anyone who has read Book 4 knows, it’s the mission that we are all invited to undertake… So I join the other eight billion people in that mission.”
Similarly, the purpose of his life, is not just his purpose. It’s that of all of life. And that is “to recreate ourselves anew in the highest version of the grandest vision we ever had about ourselves.”
Unfortunately, however, most people do not hold a vision of that, says Neale. Much less a vision of who they want to be.
“And the few people who do have a vision,” he goes on to say, “only have one in terms of what they want out of this physical life: They say ‘I want to be earning such and such income,’ or, ‘I want to have this particular job,’ or, ‘I want to find this particular kind of life partner.’”
But according to Neale those things have nothing to do with the reason that we’re here.
98% of the world’s people are spending 98% of their time on things that don’t matter.
“Maybe their personal vision is to earn a certain amount of money, and they have a goal to reach a certain income level by the age of 29, or 35, or 43. But most people that I have encountered do not have a vision for themselves with regard to their soul’s agenda.”
And we could all fare much better if we’d do some more soul searching, he teaches.
But instead, we’re wondering whether we’re making enough money, whether we’re having enough fun, or taking off enough pounds, or making enough friends, or getting enough sex. And all of these things have nothing to do with the agenda of our souls, Neale restates: “We’re spending 98% of our time on things that absolutely don’t matter.”
“Sadly,” he continues, “most people don’t realize that until they’re on their deathbeds, and they look back on their life and say: ‘What was that all about?’”
Life will never make sense to your mind if you try to understand it with your mind alone, Neale teaches: “Only when your mind combines with the soul can you begin to approach life in a way that it makes any sense.”
Uncovering your soul’s agenda with life’s 4 magic questions
So what should we be asking ourselves instead of all of these earthly questions? Well, Neale suggests the following:
What’s your spiritual reason for being in a body?
Not a small question to ponder perhaps. But there is a way to break it up into a more easily digestible exploration:
“I invite people to ask themselves four questions in order to find the answer to that larger inquiry,” Neale says. These are what he calls ”life’s four magic questions”:
- Who am I?
- Where am I?
- Why am I where I am?
- And what am I being invited by life to do about that?
Neale advises us all to ask those questions every day, maybe even several times a day, as a means of getting clear on what our next grandest vision is.
When asked to answer these questions for himself, his reply – again – was comprehensive and enlightening:
“I am an individuation of divinity. I am a messenger of God, that’s who I am. I am a spiritual being having a physical experience. I am a metaphysical entity with an eternal life that has a body, that has a mind. Some people call that body ‘Neale,’ but that’s the smallest part of who I am.”
“Where am I? I’m in the realm of the physical. I came here from the realm of the spiritual. I will leave here and go the realm of pure being. And then I will return to the realm of the spiritual and then I will return to the realm of the physical in another incarnation, and yet another, and yet another, and yet another through all of eternity.”
“Why am I where I am? I am where I am because it is only in the realm of the relative where I may express and experience what I’ve come to understand in the realm of the absolute. The realm of the absolute also being called ‘the spiritual realm.’ When I’m in the spiritual realm, everything is absolutely what it is. It’s always here, always now, always love. Love, always, here and now. That’s the realm of the spiritual.“
I move into the realm of the physical so that I can experience and express.
– Neale Donald Walsch
It’s only in the realm of the physical that we’re encountering contrasts, the law of opposites. And Neale explains that it is in this encounter that he finds the blessing of being able to experience who he is.
“To put it in simple terms, I can’t experience being the light unless I am in the darkness. If I’m standing in the middle of the sun, I can be the light, I can say, ‘I am the light, I am the light, I am the light,’ but I can’t experience it because there’s nothing but light all around me. If I want to experience being the light, I would have to go to a place where there is the opposite, the so-called darkness. So I will place myself in an environment in which I can experience myself as that.”
Being the light, he reassures, is just a metaphor here: “But I am saying I am a messenger. So I would have to put myself into a place where there is no message, or where the message is the opposite of what I am bringing.”
Mind versus soul—which one are you listening to?
After posing life’s four magic questions, Neale invites people to check in with themselves during the day to see if what they are doing is in line with their higher purpose with another interesting question – a “measuring stick” that he uses:
What does this have to do with the agenda of my soul?
“Ask yourself that question before anything you do, before going out on a date, before having dinner, before watching a television program, before reading a book, before having sex, before petting your dog, before going for a walk. If you ask the question before anything, ‘What does this have to do with the agenda of my soul?’ for about a month, if you do that for 30 days, you’ll start to get very deeply connected with the purpose of your life.”
And if you’re unsure that the answers you find are coming from your soul, Neale suggests you give it the “tummy test”: “The tummy knows. You can feel deep inside of yourself whether the answer makes sense at a high spiritual level, or whether you’re just kidding yourself. You can tell.”
If we listen deeply to the still, small voice within, we almost always should be able to tell the difference between the desires of our mind and ego and our soul’s agenda.
The emergence of highly evolved beings
An awakened species sees the units of all life and live into it. Humans in an unawakened state often deny it or ignore it.
– Neale Donald Walsch
As people align with their soul’s purpose, they start to behave differently. They start to awaken and become what Neale Donald Walsch refers to as Highly Evolved Beings (HEB’s).
HEB’s understand at a deep level that everything and everyone is connected. Rather than performing any acts that could even so much as potentially hurt or damage another being in any form or way, they become more service-oriented and will start acting out of love, not fear.
And awakening to this alternative state of being is precisely what humanity is invited to do here on this planet according to Neale.
In Conversations With God, Book 4: Awaken The Species and in his Quest on Mindvalley he shares the 16 specific examples of traits and behaviors that HEB’s demonstrate, which include seeing the unity of all life, telling the truth – always, doing what they say – always, never killing any sentient being, and experiencing and expressing unconditional love for everyone.
So how you can tell if one is a Highly Evolved Being? There is no shortcut to describing that without making it sound simplistic, Neale stressed during the interview. That’s why he listed these 16 different behaviors in detail in his last book. “But if you really want a simple, one-sentence answer: by the way they care.”
And anyone can become highly evolved in this lifetime. “God wouldn’t place before us a totally impossible task. So yes, of course, everyone has the ability and the opportunity to achieve the experience of a Highly Evolved Being.”
Some even have what Neale refers to as a “lightningbolt” experience; a singular moment in which everything suddenly becomes clear and your entire life changes. People like Eckhart Tolle and Byron Katie had such experiences, he says.
“But that doesn’t mean that their job is over. It means their job has just begun. Because when they begin to experience themselves as Highly Evolved Beings, then they have the whole universe, the whole cosmos as their next territory in which they can assist others in awakening.”
The most urgent crisis humanity faces: the idea of separation
When asked what he considered to be the most pressing, urgent matter that needs more attention in the world today, Neale answered without hesitation: “the idea that is held by most of the world’s eight billion people today: that we are separate.”
The largest number of people on the earth embrace the idea of separation: we are separate from God; we are separate in a sense from life; we are separate from each other; and in many ways we allow ourselves to even feel separate from ourselves.
The idea of separation is the biggest crisis facing humanity today, because it produces all the other crises.
– Neale Donald Walsch
“I was told that the world’s problems would go away overnight if we simply embrace the truth: that all things are one.”
There is no separation between us. And the time has come for humanity to wake up from that illusion. “I’m not separate from you, I’m not separate from the trees outside, I’m not separate from the Earth, not separate from the Galaxy, not from the Cosmos, and not from God.”
An awakened species knows that there is only one thing and that all things are part of the one thing there is.
If we all began treating other people as if we were not separate, if corporations, religious leaders, and politicians began treating other people that way, all other crises humanity faces would disappear.
Neale foresees that in the upcoming ten years we will finally grow up and stop acting like children. “We will stop behaving with each other like little children who don’t know how to get along, who don’t know how to play fair, who still think that strength is power over, and that power over someone else is the only way to succeed in life.”
Neale predicts that humanity will release its idea that violence is the only way to resolve our differences. “And that’ll be the first step toward the creation of a new human community.”
We’re going to use our information technologies to place ideas in the world that can change the human experience for the better forever.
“All the armies of the world cannot stop an idea whose time has come. I think that the idea of who we are, an individuation of divinity, is an idea whose time has come. And I think that in the next 10 years, humanity will well emerge from its adolescence and take the first big step towards its own adulthood.”
If we taught our children in all the world’s schools that separation is an illusion and doesn’t exist, the world would change in one generation.
– Neale Donald Walsch
Join humanity’s awakening
Neale Donald Walsch reminds you that the illusion of separation is the root of humanity’s struggles. But imagine what could happen if you recognized unity in your daily actions—in your relationships, workplaces, communities, and even within yourself.
It’s time to wake up to your deeper potential, and Mindvalley can help you get there. Join now to access free previews of transformative programs, daily meditations, and a global community that’s evolving together. You’ll also be among the first to know about events and new insights that shape humanity’s next chapter. Your awakening—and our collective transformation—starts here.
