a conversation with Neale Donald Walsch
"If people really knew what happened after the moment of one's death, they'd throw parties. They'd have huge celebrations," Walsch said. "The next expression of life outside the body is one of enormous freedom. Freedom from whatever the pains — physical or psychological — we've been experiencing in this body. It's a return to the essential essence of who we really are." Walsch is the author of The New York Times best-selling Conversations with God series. The first book in the series resided on The New York Times bestseller list for over 91 weeks, and has sold over 3.5 million copies to date. The others have had similar success. All are based on Walsch's dialogue-on-paper with a higher being that he dubbed "God." It all started during his life's lowest point in 1992 at the ages of 49 and 50. His relationship and his health had been failing at the time. He had hit rock bottom after breaking his neck in a car accident and ending up on the streets as a homeless person. From a place of deep anger one early morning, he woke up at 4:20 and began writing out his questions to God on the legal pad resting on his coffee table. To his surprise, God answered through his own mind. He knew it wasn't his mind playing tricks when answers began to flow through him that he had never dreamed of. And he knew that it was God because it became clear, following three weeks of dictation, that there is no separation between God and All That Is. "The experience of listening to the water rushing down a stream, the chance utterance of a friend down the street, the lyric line to the next song, it's all conversations with God," said Walsch, a quiet, highly intelligent, and thoughtful man. During his dictations, which continued for many years following the initial flow of answers, many of Walsch's questions centered on the meaning of death and the nature of the afterlife, and book three of the series is heavily focused on these subjects. Ironically, just a week before the writing of this story, one of Walsch's three ex-wives passed away. Walsch had maintained a cordial friendship with her, and had just met with her a few months before her death in Miami, where she lived, and had communicated with her frequently throughout the preceding months. Even though she was no longer his wife, Walsch was deeply impacted by her passing. He acknowledged sadness at no longer having her in his life, but also happiness in knowing that her soul would continue on. "When you've had an extremely powerful relationship over a period of years, [the other person’s] death does impact you enormously," said Walsch. "I'm happy for her, though. I didn't have a moment of regret for her, because I know where she is. I have a sense of what's going on with her soul, and the essence of what she is experiencing." According to book three in Walsch's series, we leave the body and our consciousness when we die, but we do not truly die; the soul continues to be. For some people, this creates a period of confusion, because it feels to them as if they're still very much alive, and they don't understand why everyone in the realm they have just left feels that they are dead. As in near-death experiences, people see their own bodies when they die. "If the soul ... wonders, 'Gee, why is my body not moving?' it will find itself right there, hovering right over the body, watching the stillness curiously," said God in book three. "If someone enters the room, and the soul thinks, 'Who is that?' — immediately the soul is in front of, or next to, that person. Thus, in a very short time, the soul learns that it can go anywhere — with the speed of its thought." Not only can the soul go anywhere, but it's also able to exist simultaneously in different locations without difficulty or confusion. Then it can "rejoin" itself by refocusing. In essence, the soul creates what it thinks instantaneously when it is in spirit form. This is no different in the physical realm, excepting that there is a delay between the creation of the thought and its manifestation. Following death, we then move into a process of life review, said Walsch in the interview. We experience each moment of our life from beginning to end, and every thought, word, or action that came through us of our own initiative. We experience this review, however, from the perspective of those that were affected by what it was we thought, said, or did. With this process, God is able to learn more about itself. In many ways, life before death is a microcosmic view of reality, while life after death presents a macrocosmic view of it. "It's rather like watching a movie from the point of view of all the other characters on the screen," said Walsch, "so we get to know through that mystical experience, known as Karma Loca in Eastern teachings, how we impacted other beings." Finally, God said in book three that in the time after your "death," you may choose to have every question you ever had answered — and open yourself to new questions you never dreamed existed. You may experience oneness with All That Is, or you may be reincarnated. You are in control. "Do you choose to return to your most recent body?" asked God. "Do you choose to experience life again in human form, but of another kind? Do you choose to remain where you are in the 'spirit' world? ... Do you choose to 'lose your identity' altogether and now become part of Oneness?" With such a freedom, it is easy to see why Walsch says people would celebrate immediately if they knew and believed God's words. "I celebrated when my former wife died, because she had been in fact very ill, and I knew that she had been released from all of that suffering," said Walsch. "Funerals don't have to be sad things. Katharine Graham's [former publisher of The Washington Post] in Washington, D.C. last week was a wonderful experience, because it was humorous and as lighthearted as it was poignant. It was a wonderful celebration of her life." Asked "What would you like to experience in the next life if you had the choice?" Walsch paused for a moment, as if asked the question for the first time. "I'd like to return as a person who is more helpful to others, more graceful to others, and more gentle with others," he said. "Surely you can't be any more helpful than you have been in this lifetime?" "No," he replied. "If you lived the life that I lived, you could see many, many thousands of moments that were less than helpful. In my next lifetime, I would like to come back as a person who actually lived the teachings in Conversations with God, rather than wrote them." Walsch will be giving a lecture called "Dying with God: From Fear to Empowerment," Thursday, September 20 at the Reed College Kaul Auditorium ($35). A private reception and lecture will also be held ($100). For tickets, call (503) 221-9556. Proceeds benefit Compassion in Dying (http://www.compassionindying.org/), a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving healthcare and expanding choice at the end of life. |
Death is to life as night is to day. Without death, there would be no passion to life, and thus life as we define it would not exist. Still, by and large, we choose to ignore death, pretending in most cases that it's not there. According to Neale Donald Walsch, however, it need not be cause for despair.