Divine Instincts, An Interview with Neale Donald Walsch
By Ruth Carson
Neale Donald Walsch is author of Conversations with God and the recently published The Only Thing That Matters. Ruth Carson finds out more about love, God and what really matters.
How has your dialogue with God helped you in your own relationships?
It’s helped me to understand the nature of love and how to experience it and how to express it. I understand that love is a simple process by which we see ourselves in another. When we look across the room or across the street or across the world, all you are seeing is another part of ourselves and another aspect of ourselves. I believe that love is unconditional and if I believe that God’s love is unconditional, then it is my opportunity and my invitation from life to love others unconditionally as well. That is, to love others as I hope that God loves me, to pass on God’s love to everyone whose life I touch. So I’ve learnt that love understands all and blesses all and relieves every one of the need for forgiveness from me or from God and that in fact love is really all there is.
What advice would you give to people looking for love?
Simply walk through your life as the grandest, romantic partner that anyone could ever have and how to do that will be made known to you in every moment with everyone whose life you touch. If you walk through the airport and you see a person who is looking a little upset about something, walk up to him and say, “I’m sorry I don’t mean to be intrusive but you look a bit worried. Is there any way at all that I might help be able to help you?” If you see a lady walking down the street, and she seems to be having difficulty meeting whatever challenge the moment is presenting, say to her “Hello I’m sorry if I’m out of line, I don’t mean to be, please tell me if I am but it feels as if I might be able to assist you in some way. Is there something I might do for you?” If you say to your friend/lover/someone who you know a little better, “Do you know that I love you completely, without you needing to give me anything or do anything for me, I just totally get who you are, just the way you are, right now”. If you say these things to everyone you meet, everyone whose life you touch, something very interesting will happen, people will fall in love with you, right and left, all over the place, everyone will fall in love with you.
With adverse or challenging relationships what would you advise?
Conversations with God tells us nobody does anything inappropriate given their model of the world. All we have to do then is understand their model of the world, it is really quite simple. I would try to follow the injunction of The Bible. Judge not and neither condemn. Raise not your fist to the darkness and curse the darkness not but be light onto the darkness.
Often people don’t react this way, why?
Not everybody does because most people believe in the illusion of separation. That is they imagine themselves to be separate, from everybody and everything else.
The illusion of separation creates a second illusion, the need to survive. The survival instinct is not the basic instinct of humanity; divinity is the basic instinct of humanity. The expression of divinity is our highest and most fundamental instinct.
But the problem with humanity is that unless we are faced with such extraordinary human circumstances we rarely react that way. We generally react in the way that we think we have to, given the idea that we think we are separate from everybody else and given the notion that our chief requirement is to survive.
How do you connect with this basic instinct of divinity?
By listening to the urging and the calling of the soul which can never be not heard. It is always heard and can never be mistaken as it always speaks to us of the highest love, and the grandest joy, the greatest freedom and the largest aspect of who we really are.
This is not done by thinking about it. You know when a person runs into a burning building to save someone, there is no thinking involved. You simply sidestep the mind. You have to be literally out of your mind. You simply listen to the instinctive, instructive message of the soul which tells you inevitably and invariably in every moment of now what divinity would do.
And for you what is the only thing that matters?
The only thing that matters is, whether we are expressing divinity at the highest level at this moment that our present understanding will allow. Life offers us an opportunity to completely express the divinity that we are in every single golden moment of now. If we express divinity, our life will always work out, our life will always be a blessed and wonderful and joyful experience no matter what is happening, whether we are rich or poor, healthy or ill, young or old, or whatever situation or circumstance we find ourselves in.
The exterior conditions and elements of our life will have virtually no effect on us. That’s exactly what Nelson Mandela did. He lived in a jail cell for 26 years, yet his external environment, the place in which he found himself, was irrelevant to him.
He chose to express divinity even in jail, the result of which was his jailers came to love him. They asked him for advice. He became a spiritual and philosophical counsellor to everyone who worked in that jail. When he was released, they wept because they felt they had lost their best friend.
That’s what happens when an ordinary person decides that the only thing that matters is completion of the experience and the expression of divinity itself at the highest level that the present moment and our current understanding will allow.
That’s all Jesus did, that’s all the Buddha did, that’s all that Mother Teresa did and that’s all that Nelson Mandela did and that is all that we are invited to do.
Neale and his wife, Em Claire travel the world, sharing the messages of Conversations with God. Neale will be appearing at I Can Do It! in Glasgow and in London this October.
