Becky: Just to talk to you personally now, because I had seen your books, and I was stopped from reading them because of the word God in the title. My grandmother on one side was a Jehovah’s Witness and on the other side, my grandmother was a Catholic, so I was kind of squeezed in the middle. So I rejected anything "religious". But it was when my clients kept saying I was quoting Neale Donald Walsch, I picked up "Conversations with God" and I read it and it was like remembering everything I deep down already knew. Have people said that to you before?
Neale: Yes
Becky: I really feel that we know all of this or at least we’ve got this within us, and remembering it again and putting it all into practice. When I’m watching the news, and I’m feeling genuinely sad because it does feel that difficult, and I’m looking at it, it does look that bleak, and yet at the same time, because I’m remembering something, it’s like I know that it can be different, it’s like I know that it will be different, I know that it’s going to take every individual to realise that they’re not individual and every person to be able to change their way of thinking.
Neale: You are an individual, with respect. I want to just disagree a bit with your verbalization, because the great fear of humanity is that we will lose our individuality if we accept a unified theology, rather than a theology of separation. That’s what stops people from adopting that. Because the fear of losing our sense of ourselves, of who we really are and we don’t want to lose that, and in fact, we won’t. We won’t lose our individuality; we will always be an individual expression of the unification of what we call God and our united self, so we don't have to worry about losing our individuality. I don’t have to lose my individuality to experience my oneness with you and with all that is. I can maintain the individuated expression of all with integrity and honour the boundaries of that structure that I call me. I don’t have to somehow meld in and lose that sense of self in order to experience my oneness with you.
Becky: When you communicate as you have done in the books, when you are having conversations with higher aspects. Would you use the word God, is that the best way to put it? I just wondered how you differentiate between your own ego and the higher parts of your own mind.
Neale: Ego has got a bad name. I don’t really have difficulty, because my ego self, because I kind of love my ego self, it allows me to express and experience my individuated representation of all that is, in all of its glory and all of its wonder, so, I love myself, and I don’t have any problem with looking in the mirror and saying “God, you look great” and “Aren’t you intelligent” and “Aren’t you wonderful” and I give myself lots of pats and lots of hugs and lots of okays and lots of approval, so I don’t know that its about dampening one’s ego. Ego’s got a bad name. I think that ego’s run amok, ego that says "I’m wonderful, I’m glorious, I’m extraordinary, in fact I’m more extraordinary than you, I’m more glorious than you", that’s where we have the problem. So I suggest that in one of my books, that we eliminate the word better from the language of humanity, that we take out of the dictionary in all languages, that word no longer exists, and we eliminate the idea that one of us, or anything at all is better than any other thing, and suddenly with the elimination of betterness, the idea of superiority is the greater illusion. As soon as we eliminate the idea of superiority, not saying that we eliminate the idea of individuation or individuals other than you or being superior to you. So the idea of individualized expression does not have to disappear from humanity’s experience. So I may lost the thread of your question.
Becky: No that’s fine, I think that’s answered perfectly actually. It’s just the higher self and the ego, but not in terms of making something better than something else. I think we can wrap it there.
Neale: Really?
Becky: I think it’s been a long day, and it must be nearly 3.00pm. I could sit here and talk to you all day. Or sit here and listen all day, I could do both. I think the other thing that was funny was that when I first grabbed your book, the thing that kept me reading, was the mention of Robert A Heinlein’s book “Stranger in a Strange Land”. I loved that book. I certainly feel that I have managed to grok (term used in the book to describe understanding to the full) what you have said. Thank you ever so much. It has just been wonderful to talk to you.