In this episode of the Get Loved Up Podcast, Koya Webb talks to Neale Donald Walsch, book author, screenwriter, and public speaker. After suffering a series of blows to his life in the early 1990s Neale found himself homeless and barely scraping together to survive. In his anger, he started calling out to God, initially in anger, through writing. These series of notes would become the nucleus for his bestselling book Conversations with God. Neale talks about the idea of pure love, and why God should be viewed as a God of pure love. He gives powerful insight on why our contemporary idea of God might be wrong, and how changing it could solve a lot of humanity’s greatest ills today.
Neale Donald Walsch has written 39 books on contemporary spirituality and its practical application in everyday life. Seven of the nine books in his Conversations with God series have made the New York Times Bestseller list, with Book One remaining on that list for 134 weeks. His titles have been translated into 37 languages.
He is the creator of CWG Connect (www.CWGConnect.com), a global online platform connecting people who wish to more deeply explore the messages in the CWG body of work. His latest book is The God Solution, published in Dec. 2020. He may be reached at NealeDonaldWalsch.com
HIGHLIGHTS
04:26 - Formative years of spirituality and break up with organized religion
11:55 - Meeting an accident and living off the streets
15:09 - The Making of Conversations with God
26:00 - What it means to be an 'Idea Hero'
30:21 - What if we changed our idea of God?
38:21 - Desire and need are two different things
48:41 - All life is energy
53:10 - Fear is an expression of love
1:05:15 - Give and you shall receive even more
1:14:10 - God is talking to people all the time, but who's listening?
QUOTES
10:09 - Neale: "I thought, let me see if I understand this correctly. God is so judgmental and so needy and so condemning and so punishing, that he's gonna punish a 9-year old boy with hellfire and brimstone for the rest of eternity because I didn't go to church last Sunday? Even at 9, I was trying to put that together. And as I grew older, I realized, when I got to 13, 14, 15,, that can't be the way it is."
16:17 - Neale: "I started calling out to God in my mind. What does it take to make life work? I saw a yellow legal pad on the table in front of me, so I started writing it out: What does it take to make life work? What do you want from me? I'm not that bad of a person, now what is it that I'm supposed to be doing here? I remember thinking, somebody tell me the rules. I'll play. I promise, I'll play. Just give me the damn rulebook. Tell me how the game goes. And once you give me the rules, don't change the rules every other week."
29:55 - Neale: "An example of an idea hero is a person who says, actually our idea of God is inaccurate. God does not judge anybody. God does not condemn anybody. And God does not punish anybody. Now a statement like that violates the doctrine of all the world's religions. Virtually very religion on Earth says God is judgmental, punishing and condemning and will condemn you if you don't obey the rules that God has set up."
32:28 - Neale: "Pure love needs, expects, requests, and demands nothing in return. Humans don't know how to love each other that way. We can't even love the person to be the dearest person in our life. The person across the pillow, the person we're sleeping with. We can't even imagine loving that person much less anybody else without needing or expecting or requiring or demanding something in return. We can't even imagine a God who would do that. We can't even imagine the supreme being having the ability to do that. So we've created a theology that says no no no, God loves us. but because he loves us so much, he has to assert rules that we have to obey and if we don't obey them, life we have to go to the mass in Sunday, like we can't be gay we have to be straight, we can't be involved in a same-sex marriage, we have to obey the ten commandments, we have to belong to the right religion. We can't be Jewish, we can't be Muslim, we can't be Hindu."
34:08 - Neale: "The sad part about that, Koye, is that people base their behaviors using God as their model. They assume that God is the highest entity of the universe, so if we were to emulate God, use God as our model then you can't do any better than that. So we feel that it's okay for us to be judgmental, condemning and punishing with others because after all, that's how God loves us. So why shouldn't we act that way with others. Now if we change our mind about God, we could be changing the model that we are using on which to base our own behavior as human beings.
37:22 - Neale: "The beginning of pure love is the realization that we need nothing in particular from another person in order to love them. And we can say to the other person, I love you, no matter what."
38:38 - Neale: "Not needing does not mean you have to abandon the cycle of giving and receiving. The two are not the same thing. Desire and need are two different things."
53:49 - Neale: "If I didn't love my life, I wouldn't fear losing it. If I didn't love you, I wouldn't fear losing you. If I didn't love my cellphone, I wouldn't be afraid that somebody might steal it if I leave it lying on the table in a restaurant. The only reason that I fear anything, is because I love something."
1:05:39 "Whatever you want more of in your life, be the source of it in the life of another."
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