 Hello and welcome to Dare to Dream, this is Debbie Dashinger and today's show features Neil Donald Walsh. And we're going to be discussing his insights, his new book plus his vision for a spiritually connected world. Dare to Dream with Debbie Dashinger has won three talk radio positive awards, won the C.O.V. award for best radio and podcast show, WELP Magazine named Dare to Dream one of the top 20 best podcasts to listen to this year and its high ranking underself improvement in Apple podcasts. Just a couple of months, it'll be 17 years I've been doing this show and I love showing up here every week for me is a masterclass. Thank you guys for all your comments. I truly read them all and I must express how much it means to me to have you on this journey. Couldn't do this alone. This show is sponsored by Dr. Dane here in Access Consciousness. They do energy work out into the world. If you would like to become a facilitator or take a class, go to Dr. Dane here h-e-e-r .com. I'm Debbie Dashinger, I'm a media visibility specialist, specifically I help you with books and with interviews. I am a book writing coach and I take you from the inception of your book to the completion of your book. So independently, I've got a company that takes authors books to a guaranteed international bestselling status and I do all the heavy lifting for the author. And finally, I show you how to be interviewed on radio and podcasts and get massive results since the folks who come to this show are all spiritual messengers with a beautiful message. You came here at this time at this very auspicious time to shine your light and sing your song. Let me show you how to become way more visible. I've got a gift for you, all the how to's and so you can start being interviewed on media right away. It's at Debbie Dashinger.com slash gift. It's D-e-b-b-i-d-a-c-h-i-n-g-e-r.com slash gift. My guest today is Neil Donald Walsh who has written 40 books on contemporary spirituality and its practical application in everyday life, including nine books in the Conversations with God series seven of which made the New York Times bestseller list book one remained on the New York Times bestseller list for 134 weeks. His titles have been translated into 37 languages and have been read by millions of people, including me around the world. Neil's latest book is God Talk, Experiences of Humanities Connections with a Higher Power. If you'd like to learn more about him, go to NeilDonaldWalsh.com. And with that, I welcome Neil to the Dare to Dream show. It's so great to have you. Welcome. Thank you, Debbie. It's lovely to be here with you. I'm shocked to know, however, that you have been doing this program since you were four years old. I know. I started, I was a prodigy, but I started on radio when there was a thing called radio and there was not a thing called podcast. And then a couple of years into doing that, this strange word podcasting came along and I thought, you know, everybody's making fun of that, but I'm going to throw my hat in that ring too. Boy, am I glad I did. So here we are today podcasting my mainstream. Do you know that I did talk radio 25 years ago as well? Yeah. I actually have a question about that, but tell me, tell me, what kind of talk radio did you do? I had a nationally syndicated talk radio show on what was then known as the talk radio network. And I was nationally syndicated. We did it three hours a day, Monday through Friday, on whatever it wasn't a topic driven show. It was a wide open mic and people would call in and talk about whatever they wanted to talk about. I would, of course, you know, have something to say myself when I opened each show, whatever was politically, you know, alive in those moments or whatever was happening, we'd talk about the news and so forth, but then we'd open the mics and people would just jump on and talk about it. I spent, I started my career, I mean, in the working world in broadcasting when I was 19 years old. So we're talking about many, many years ago, way before podcasts for sure. And I wound up doing radio broadcasting for 30 years. Well, your life is the epitome of a hero's journey, right? I teach book writing and yours is it. We start one place, you have catastrophes occur, you start making some headway backslide, a little bit of headway backslide. So for you, before you even wrote conversations with God, Neil, you worked as a radio station manager, a newspaper managing editor, marketing PR, and then in the early 1990s, you had a series of very difficult blows. You had a fire that destroyed your belongings. You had a breakup of your marriage, a car accident that left you with a broken neck. It's like a lot for any human. And then you were alone, you were unemployed, you lived in a tent, and you were collecting and recycling aluminum cans just to eat. So let's start there since you brought up the radio and your beginnings. Tell me about the profundity of that time for you. Well, you know, what was interesting is that I have to admit that life has been very good to me in spite of the difficult moments that you've described. I've never had to do anything in my life that I didn't like to do. I love broadcasting. I love newspaper work. You know, I did a enormous amount of theater and I wanted getting paid to do live dinner theater and earning money doing that. Like acting, singing? Yeah, acting and singing, yes. I did a show called I Do, I Do for three years on stage. Wow. I did Henry Higgins in a traveling production of The Music Man. And so and I did the direction, I did directing as well. So I, you know, and I loved every single thing I've done in my life. I've simply adored all that I did. And I can't think of a time except maybe maybe one year and a half when I was selling radio time. I'll never do it again. I'll never sell anything again. But for the rest of my life from the beginning, I've just had a wonderful stream of events that people call a career. But I never thought of it as work. None of it was work. It was all joyful. You know, honestly, I have to tell you a story when I first started in radio. I was 19 years old and I was doing I was a disc jockey. In those days, there were actually things called disc jockeys. And we would introduce music and be out of the air, you know. And but I couldn't believe my fortune in getting a job that paid me to do this. And the owner of the station, he would either come out and give everybody their checks once a week and pay day. You know, on Fridays, he'd give everybody their checks. He said to me one week, why do you always turn your back and put your hand behind your back to take your check from me? And I said, you know, Mr. Rivers, I can't look you in the face and take money for what I do. It's too much fun. I mean, how difficult is it to sit there? 20 after four o'clock, 45 degrees outside, KYJC, live music. And you pay me to do this. So he said, son, I like your attitude. You're going to go far. You must have gotten employee of the year after that. I wasn't trying to butter him up. I just really I was really being serious. I just I couldn't believe it. So all of my life, I have received wonderful, wonderful recompense for doing things that I love to do. And it's true, like all people, I read into a series of challenges and difficulties and didn't wind up living on the sidewalk on the street for a year of my life, not for a couple of bad weeks or a tough month or two, but for a solid year, because I had been hit by what I call the triple whammy. And you mentioned some of those things, the loss of my relationship, the loss of my job, the corporation I was working for, that owned a series of radio stations needed to downsize. And I was let go now because I wasn't doing a good job. And my boss loved what I was doing on the air. He said, but I was a recent hire. So I had no seniority last in first out when there was downsizing. So I lost my job. Now, I'm out of a relationship and out of a job in the same 10 day period. And then I get hit by a car and had that accident you're talking about as I'm traveling to another job interview. I'm sure I'm going to be hired because I've got all the qualifications. But I get slaughtered in this car accident. An older gentleman made a left turn in front of my car and smashed into the driver's side of the car. So, you know, my car was not this was not of what you'd call a fender bender. This was my car was totaled. And as you said, I broke my neck and it wasn't a hairline fracture. I still remember the wording because it was so dramatic on the report. I had suffered a three quarter inch avulsion fracture of the seven cervical vertebrae posteriorly. That's a break in your neck large enough to put a pencil through. And when I awoke from the anesthesia, of course, they rushed me to the hospital. The doctor was hovering over my table and he said to me. You realize it's your miracle, don't you? He said nine out of 10 people who come in here with a break in their neck like that. Do not survive. If they don't die on the spot because of spinal cord complications. But somehow you managed to not break any of the nerve endings in the spinal cord. He said, not only that, those who do survive, the few who do survive such a terrible accident and injury, wind up paralyzed from the neck down. You have suffered neither consequence. He leaned over the table and looked at my face and he said. So what are you going to do with the rest of your life? Did he really say that? Yes. Oh, my goodness, because I'm sitting here listening to you and thinking when something happens like that and then out of all this, you have this kind of physical miracle. It seems to me that everything is colliding on purpose to stop you, to give you a pause in life so you can. I mean, that's a bottom. It sounds like from what I recall from your earlier books, you hit an even lower bottom at some point. And that's when you just started writing. There was nothing else you knew how to do, but wake up in the middle of the night and just start saying to God, like, what is happening? What kind of life is this? Do you feel like all of those calamities occurred on purpose that somehow your soul agreed to that? No, I don't think that we come here with a freemade plan. I don't believe in predestination conversations. What God told me, there's no such thing as predestination because if there was predestination, then free will would be a contradiction. So there's no predestination. So I don't believe that I had a plan or an idea or a schematic or some kind of a scenario that I was following at the soul level. But I do think that I came here with an agenda. I do I do believe that the soul had an agenda for me, but not an agenda that involved events, an agenda that involved states of being. That is, I believe that each of our souls come here to the physical realm to express and experience certain aspects of divinity so that we might know them experientially and not just from a standpoint of knowledge in the spiritual realm, in my understanding. We can know who we are, but we can't experience who we are because there's nothing else except that all there is in heaven, in the spiritual realm, is pure love, joy, happiness, timelessness, it's always pure love here and now. But if I want to experience myself, I have to place myself into a realm where there is something other than what I am. Otherwise, I can't know what it's like to be what I am. I was in God gave me a very simple example. God said, let's just use a metaphor. Let's just pretend that you that you're the light. This is a metaphor, you know, we're not getting into it, whether it's true or not. But let's say that you're the light. Well, I got to tell you something, you're like a candle in the sun. Everyone, you know, you are the light and the candle is there in the sun and the sun would not be the sun without your candle. Nay, it would be the sun, less one candle and that would not be the sun at all. But you can't experience yourself as the light when you are amidst nothing but the light. Therefore, you will place yourself into an environment where there is darkness. Then you can express yourself as the light. Therefore, Neil, raise not your fist to heaven. And curse the darkness, not. But be a light unto the darkness that you might know who you really are. And that all those whose lives you touch might know who they really are as well. So I don't think that I came here with a plan with regard to certain events, but I do think I came here with an agenda to experience certain aspects of divinity. I believe that all of us are individuations of divinity and that we use lifetime after lifetime after lifetime, multiple endless reincarnations in order to experience all the aspects of who we are. Our compassion, our understanding, our patience, our joy, our happiness, our humor, our wisdom, our clarity, our forgiveness, every aspect of divinity. And we use an entire lifetime to experience those aspects. And how we do that depends on the events that occur that are co-created collaboratively by the lot of us. Beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. I'm curious about love in your life because you wrote a lot about love. You asked God a lot of questions about love throughout your books and series. What has love meant? What have you learned or what wisdom have you gained about relationships and love? Well, you know, Debbie, I'm sorry to say that in the earlier part of my life, until I really, until I reached my mid-sixties, I thought love was a transactional experience. You know, transactional. It's a transaction. It's like a trade deal. Like nations have trade deals with other nations. So I entered relationships as a trade. You know, I'll give you this, you give me that. I'll provide you when you feel you need or want or desire from me and you provide me what I feel I need or want or desire from you. It's a transact. But if you stop trading me, what it is I expect to receive from you, the deal is over. And so I came to experience life as an interesting expression of a form of love that I really saw as transactional. And you know what was interesting? I thought that's how God loved us. I thought that God says, you know, I love you if you have to obey, you have to do what I need. You have to worship me. You have to be grateful for me. You have to obey my commands. But if you do all those things, you can receive my love. On the other hand, if you don't do those things, not only will you not receive my love, I will judge you. I will condemn you and I will punish you with everlasting damnation. So I thought, oh, God's love is transactional, too. And only when I had my experience of conversations with God did my understanding of love, which was the genesis of your question. That's where you began this question, the understanding of love change. I realized that love was not what I thought it was. So I wrote a book just a couple of years ago called The God Solution, which, by the way, I offer free to anybody who writes me an email and asks me to send them an upload. I will upload my author's manuscript of it and at no cost whatsoever. No kind. And in The God Solution, I explained that the world's problems I call the book The God Solution because, to me, it's the solution of the world's problems. The world's problems would be dissolved virtually instantly if we simply redefined our understanding of God. What if we decided that God could be defined? You know what's interesting? There are 4,223 religions on the face of the earth being practiced right now. I didn't make that number up. You can Google that. Just type into the Google search engine how many religions are there on earth and you'll discover that there are more than 4,000 religions on earth, not from the beginning of time, but being practiced right now. But what's interesting is that of those 4,000 religions, very few of them, if any, can agree on a single statement that's true about God. Everybody has their own particular story, their own particular version of God. And we call their version religions. And so we have 4,000 religions and 4,000 versions. And in The God Solution I have said, what if we could come up with a single statement upon which all religions of the world could agree? Can't we even find a way to define God that religions agree on? Universally? Unanimously? So I offer a two-word description of God. Pure love. Now Debbie, when I make that statement in front of an audience, somebody in the back of the room inevitably stands up and says, oh, Mr. Walsh, come on, come on. You've been listening to you for 20 minutes for you to tell us that your big revelation is that God is love. Everybody knows that. Even the world's religions that have dogmatic differences agree on that, that God is love. Nobody disagrees about that. And I have to say to my friend in the back of the room, wait a minute, relax, I didn't say that, that's not what I said. I said, God is pure love. Now my friend will say, okay, what's the difference? The difference is that pure love needs, expects, requires, and demands nothing in return. Debbie, we can't even love the person on the pillow next to us that way. Much less can we believe in a God who loves us that way. But if we believed that that was true about God, then we would have to abandon our notion that God is judgmental, condemning, and punishing. And that would remove our justification for being judgmental, condemning, and punishing with each other, because our religions teach us to act as the divine acts with us. And so, since we believe that God acts that way with us, hey, what's good enough for God is good enough for us. So we act with each other in the same way. That is, we judge each other, we condemn each other, and we punish each other when the other person does not do what we require, need, or demand. And we're seeing that scenario play out throughout human history and in far too many places in the world on this very day. You will either do what I demand, or I will judge, condemn, and punish you. I may even help you. And you have been in this marriage that you're in now, and with everything you've learned, and it sounds like a major shift came, because if you speak of God as pure love and your understanding that what you used to do that was transactional actually wasn't love, how do you operate now? How is it different? Well, of course, it was love. You say actually it wasn't love, it was love, but it was love of myself. See, if I love you, or if I say that I love you because what I think I can get from you in return, then I'm simply loving myself through you. But you're right, to use your exact words a minute ago, a big shift did occur, and in life as we all know, shift happens. So, we understand that total change of one's point of view about life, about self, about another, and yes, about God, can occur. The shift for me in my present marriage is that I decided to need, require, expect, demand, even hope for nothing in particular in return for the love that I give. When I look at my wife now, we've been together 16 years, when I look at my wife now and I say, I love you sweetheart, I love you with all my heart, she knows there are no strings attached, she knows that I love her when she's good, when she's not so good, when she's there, when she's not there, when she's showing up as I love her to show up, when she's not. She knows that I love her simply because of who she is, not what I can get from her. She knows that because she's told me that. Yeah, I think this is what everybody hungers for. Of course it is, of course it is. Just my being is enough, my breath, the cells that form who I am, however that manifests out into the world, to be accepted, to be enough, enough to be loved, appreciated, all of that, and to be told so through words and actions, I think the world in humanity, if they all received this at the level you're talking about, would be massively healed, massively healed. Changed overnight and again to get back to where we were a minute ago, the beginning of that is to believe in a God who loves us that way, but because we cannot imagine a God who loves us so grandly and so unconditionally, we can't allow ourselves to embrace such a behavior either. But when we decide that God loves us without condition, without a need for anything in return, then we can begin to adopt that as the quintessential behavior, as the way to be divine, and we can bring that into our interpersonal relationships, not just with our significant other, but with all family members, and with all our friends and neighbors, and ultimately with everyone whose life we touch. Yeah, wow, beautiful. Your new book called God Talk Experiences of Humanities Connections with a Higher Power starts out by saying, don't look now, but God is talking to you. In fact, God is never not talking to you. God invites you to be present to life and the experience of your talks with God. Is this what it is like for you, Neil, that on a daily basis you know you are being heard, you know that God is constantly communicating with you, and you are always being invited to be present to that and to all of life? Yes, that is how it is for me, and I want to say that God's communications come to me as they come to everybody. All of us are having conversations with God all the time. You know, when I ask God in my first conversation, why me? Why would you choose me to have this dialogue with? And God said to me, oh, sweetheart, sweetheart, don't go there, don't get bigheaded about it, such as you I'm talking to. I talk to everybody all the time. The question is not to whom does God talk? The question is who listens? And so to answer your question about my daily interaction with the divine, God's communications come to me in a hundred different ways across a thousand moments in all of my lifetimes. It could be words that I hear in my head. It could be the lyrics of the next song I hear on the radio. It could be the chance utterance of a couple that I happen to overhear talking in a coffee shop. It could be any one of a thousand ways, a feeling that simply comes over to me, a vision, an idea, a visualization that just appears to me out of nowhere for no apparent reason or a simple incident, like walking down the street in major city and coming across a man sitting on the sidewalk, leaning up against a building with a basket in front of him and a little cardboard sign that says, anything helps. And we get to decide in that moment as we walk toward that man, who am I in relationship to this experience? Who am I and who do I choose to be? We either walk by and ignore the guy completely or maybe if we're feeling a little bit charitable, we might reach in our pocket and throw a quarter or a couple of half dollars in his basket, some loose change we have in our pocket. Or maybe if we decide that we are a grand person indeed, we open our handbag or open our wallet and pull out a 20 or a 50 or a 100 and drop it into the basket. Say here, pal. Yeah. And we don't do it to impress him. We do it to remind ourselves of who we really are. Yeah. I wait till I feel a nudge to be very honest. I, living in Los Angeles, I experience it a lot. We have a pretty serious homeless situation here. And I will sometimes get this absolutely divine nudge when I see somebody often on the side of a freeway, when you're exiting a freeway to a street. And I just know I need to give enough that it feels right to me that I know I'm going to affect something positive in somebody's life. That feels really important to me. And so I guess I wait for those God nudges, if you will. I love how you expressed, how am I showing up in this moment? Because that can be answered in a flash. That can be this quick. And then you know exactly what to do, what action to take or nonaction. For me, the nudge is that the guy standing there at all. That's the nudge. You pull up to that exit to get off the ramp and get into the city streets. And there he is, standing there with his hand out. And that's the nudge. I make sure that I always have folding money in the little compartment between the two front seats of my car. I always make sure I never leave the house without folding money in that little compartment. And when I approach one of those, drive up to one of those guys at the intersection or at that turnoff, roll that window down, hand him a 10 or a 20. Again, not try to impress anybody. Choosing to demonstrate to myself who I really am, not just with the dispersal of income, but every aspect of divinity that I can access, my compassion, my patience, my understanding, my awareness. You tell a really great story in the book that you just wrote of a time when you were interviewed and you were asked a question about God and you took this pause and then this five-word statement unexpectedly came through. Can you tell us about the situation and how this came about? Yes, I was doing an interview with Matt Lauer on The Today's Show. Matt was kind. He was a good interviewer, but he was a little bit, I don't want to say cynical, but not quite totally good or ready to believe everything that I accept me on face value. So he was a little standoffish. And then at one point in the interview he said, well, Neil, you claim to be talking to God. We have about 30 seconds left before the interview is over. What's God's message to the world? And I thought to myself, you stinker. I've been broadcasting long enough to know. You didn't have to wait until you have 30 seconds left to ask me the most important question of the entire interview. What's God's message to the world? With 30 seconds, pressure. He said, could you put it in a single paragraph? And I thought, okay, what am I going to say to this guy? And then it came to me. I got it. I got the answer. And I said, Matt, I don't need a paragraph. I can put it into five words. So Matt Lauer turns to the camera. I recall the moment vividly, looks into the camera. Ladies and gentlemen, the man who claims to be talking to God now brings us God's message to the world in five words. Neil, I thought, you son of a God, you think you've set me up to fail? So I looked in the camera and I said, God's message to the world in five words? You've got me all wrong. Matt didn't know where to go with that. He thought I was going to say something, you know, like, love everybody if you can, or be kind to whatever, you know, that's some platitude. He never expected me to say what I said. He had nowhere to go with it. He said, very interesting. I said, isn't it? And since we have about 23 seconds of those 30 seconds left, let me say that if I'm wrong, if I am wrong about that statement, then there's nothing further to discuss. The conversation is over. But if the statement is true that God is telling humanity you've got me all wrong, Matt, the conversation has just begun and you'd better leave people more than 30 seconds. That's when Matt Lauer realized, oh, okay. Wow, what a position. So riffing off of that, since you have traveled the entire world doing what you do, what have you seen globally with humanity? What is the pattern of what people really hunger for with God and what they could potentially have, all the things they hunger for, if they were to understand what? What don't we understand but we're hungering for? Well, what we don't understand is who we are. Most people never even asked themselves that question in a lifetime. I invite people to write on their bathroom mirror. So it's the first thing they see in the morning. Get a little black felt tip and write in the upper corner of your bathroom mirror the following four questions. Who am I? Where am I? Why am I where I am? What do I intend to do about that? And then answer the questions every morning when you see them on the bathroom mirror. Every time you see yourself in that mirror, ask those four questions. Those are questions that people rarely, if ever, ask themselves in a lifetime. And so the year and four, the year and four is an experience that something inside of them know. They're more than they're being. Most people understand that they are larger than they're experiencing themselves as, but they don't know how to get from where they are to where they want to be, because they're not clear about who they are. Most people think of themselves as this. I'm my body or my mind or maybe both. I'm of my body and my mind. I'm a sentient being in the universe. But what I was told in conversations with God is Neil, that's not who you are. Those are just pieces of equipment. It's just tools that are being used by who you are. Who you are is a spiritual being. You are a spiritual entity using your body and your mind in order to express and to experience through the demonstration thereof your true identity. When we use life in that way, when we see that each moment of life brings us an opportunity to demonstrate our true identity, then we suddenly experience that for which we have been yearning from the beginning of our journey. Can you give an example? So if someone were to write those four questions on their bathroom mirror, they wake up and they look at that. Talk us through that. Give us an example of a response to each of those four questions. Question number one, who am I? I'm a spiritual entity. I'm not my body and I'm not my mind. These are just pieces of equipment, as I just said. So who I am. Who am I? I'm a spiritual entity. Question number two, where am I? I'm in the realm of the physical. There are three realms in the kingdom of God, the realm of the physical, the realm of the spiritual, and the realm of pure being, which is a combination of both. I am right now in the realm of the physical, which is the entire cosmos, the universe. And I'm in that place in the universe called earth, and I'm in this particular location, whatever city I'm in, wherever I am. This is where I am right now. Question number three, why am I where I am? Because it's the only place where there's a contextual field. The physical realm is the only place in which a contextual field exists that allows me to experience and to express who I really am, as I explained earlier. There is nothing in their spiritual realm except pure love, always, here and now. But if I want to know myself as pure love, unless something other than pure love exists, I can't experience or express it. So I've created the spiritual experience inside of the physical realm. Why am I where I am so that I can know who I really am and so that I can demonstrate my true identity in the context of that which I am not? What do I intend to do about that? Question number four, watch me. How I move through this day and the moments of this day is my answer to that question. Wow. Throwing down the gauntlet. I like that. That's quite beautiful. Is that what you just described? Is that different than your six step process that you talk about to deepen our conversations, our relationship with God? Well, that process is simply an approach that I have found useful in my own life. And so it's an entirely different piece of information. I use the process to give people a roadmap, how they can get from where they are and where they want to be in their interaction with the divine. The six steps for a briefly are possibility, worthiness, willingness, wakefulness, acceptance, and discernment. We have to agree that it's possible to even have a conversation with God, that there even is a God. We have to be worthy. We have to think that, okay, maybe God does talk to people, but he wouldn't talk to me. Maybe he talks to the Pope or the Archbishop of Canterbury or the Chief of Le Mans or the Hannah Rabbi, but not me. So unless we embrace our own worthiness, we're not going to have that communication. Then we have to move into willingness. We have to be willing to move in a way that's contrary to the cultural bias. The cultural bias tells us, come on. People don't have conversations with God. Our religions even, even our religions tell us that if you think you're having a conversation with God and that God is talking through you, you're committing blasphemy. You're committing heresy. You're committing apostasy. In certain countries of the world, that level of apostasy can wind up in your own death. So we must be willing to have the courage to say, I'm sorry, I'm experiencing that God is talking directly to me. Then the step number four, wakefulness. Once we are worthy and willing, we have to be awake. We have to be not oblivious to the messages that we're receiving, which could come to us, as I mentioned earlier, in a hundred different ways across a thousand different moments, fragrances in the air, a vision that comes to us out of no place, the chance utterance of a friend that we just happened by non-coincidence to run into on the street. So stay awake. Step number four is wakefulness. Don't fall asleep at the wheel. Step number five, acceptance. Do not reject when you get the message. Do not call it, it's just a sheer coincidence. It's serendipity, or it's my imagination. It's my imagination. Accept the message that you're receiving. Don't disown it and reject it or minimize it and do nothing about it. And finally, step number six, discernment. Learn to discern the difference between messages from the divine and messages that come to us in many different ways, from the internet, from people from books we've read, from movies we're seeing, from television shows we're watching, from many different sources. Don't get into that habit of saying everything that's going on. There are some people who say, it's a message. It's a message. I reached into my pocket the other day to get my car keys out and a $20 bill happened to fall out of my pocket. It's a message. I was supposed to drop $20 bills on the corner everywhere that I go. So discernment, to know the difference between messages from the divine and information that's coming to us in a thousand different ways. And by the way, these days with the internet, we are inundated with more messages than we would have received 20 years ago. But these days, we're just being bombarded with the information. So where's the information that's coming from God? How do we know the difference? God's messages are always, how can I say it, sending us three feelings. Freedom, joy, and love. If the message you're receiving does not feel like freedom, joy, and love, look carefully at where it came from. I love that. Because your book emphasizes that we have to be clear that the only plausible valid messages that God would send us, and this is a quote from your book, is God's messages are always in our best interest, always carry positive loving energy, and would never ask us to harm anyone. That's a true God message. They would never ask us to harm anyone in any way, not just physically, but even verbally, emotionally harm them. And rejection, by the way, is a form of harm. I'm really getting a bit bored with politics in the United States, where we have people who are running for the highest office in the land telling us that those who oppose their point of view are unworthy to even be walking the streets and generating not unity in our midst, but division. I'm right and you're wrong. Everything I say, by the way, everything I say is right, and anyone who disagrees with anything I say is wrong. Look how the person actually believes that. Yeah, it's amazing that we've gotten to this place. There's so little belief in government for people anymore, certainly in this country, I think also in a lot of countries. As you're saying this, I read something recently about forgiveness, and because forgiveness, there are so many platitudes out there that at one point, we're actually very powerful to hear, but then they get repeated and they lose their potency, such as the drinking, the poison situation. But I read something and I thought, wow, this one lands for me. And I'm somebody who I'm incredibly patient and I have just a wide margin for most people, not everybody, but for most people. And then I've got that place where somebody can overstep and do something really crappy. I mean, kind of devastating trauma crappy. And it happens very rarely, but I know once that occurs, especially if there's no ownership of the situation, it becomes difficult for me. So that's something I've been looking at, right, doing some healing around. And so here's what I read and I'd love you to weigh in on this. And it was this quote that said, forgive others, not because they deserve forgiveness, but because you deserve peace. I thought, Mic Drop, that makes sense to me. I do deserve peace around whatever happened. So what is your feeling on forgiveness and how have you been guided to release some of that in your life? Forgiveness is the least enlightened emotional reaction that any person could offer another. God will never forgive us for anything. Why? Because God understands how it could have come to pass that we would think or say or do what we believed, said or did. That doesn't mean that God condones it. It doesn't mean that God approves of it, but it does mean that God understands it. And write this on your bathroom mirror. Understanding replaces forgiveness in the mind of the master. The Pope was driving through Rome a few years ago. He's no longer with us in physical form, but Pope John the 23rd, he was shot six times by an assailant. All six bullets hit him. The guy didn't miss. He was only a few feet away. The Pope miraculously survived a six-shot bullet wound. Of course, they grabbed the guy and threw him in jail for life for attempting to assassinate the Pope. The Pope went to his jail cell after he healed from his injuries. And this is a matter of history, but I'm not making this up. It was covered widely by the media because the Pope doesn't go anywhere where the media follows him. So they were listening through the bars of the cell, and the Pope sat down, said something very interesting to the man who tried to kill him. Do you know what he said? I do not. He said, he'd nobody portrayed a few spiritual sons to a man. He gave the man his people blessing. Then he said to the man, can you help me with something? The guy said, yeah. He said, help me understand why you did what you did. And the guy told him, said, well, I'll be happy to tell you. I think that your institution, the institution that you're the head of, your religion has done more to damage my people on this planet than any other single institution known to man. And the Pope said, I see. I don't agree with your solution. I can't condone the action you took. And I hope that you and no one else ever repeats anything like it. But I do understand how you could feel that way and how you could have done what you did, given how you feel. The Pope and the man became pen pals, Debbie. They wrote letters back and forth from the jail cell to the Vatican for seven years. At the end of seven years of correspondence, the Pope asked the civil authorities in Rome. I'm not making this up. This is a matter of history. The Pope asked the civil authorities to release the man to grant him a pardon. He was sentenced to life in prison. He was given a full pardon at the request of the Pope, who said he's served seven years. He's paid his due. He's set him free. And the civil authorities granted him his freedom because the Pope was very clear. Understanding replaces forgiveness in the mind of the master. So that's true about ourselves as well. We need not to forgive ourselves because forgiveness is an arrogant statement of spiritual superiority. Understanding is the humble statement of one who clearly sees how a person could do, think, or say what occurred. Absolutely powerful. Thank you for that. It reminds me of a time I was at a workshop and we broke off into groups. And I don't recall what the conversation was, but I know one of the subjects in our little subgroup was about anger. And I had expressed, this is quite some time ago, but I had expressed I'd been through a very difficult breakup of a long-term relationship. And my partner had done some very difficult things during that time to me. And the woman who was leading that subgroup pulled me aside afterwards and said, you know, I work in prisons from time to time. And one of the things we do, if people are amenable to this, we will pull together the prisoner and the person who was, let's say, violated against or their family if they're no longer here. And we will put them together to have a conversation of understanding. So each one is fully heard. And these dialogues create, first of all, for the prisoner who may be living with a lot of guilt and difficulty getting over whatever they perpetrated, they get a tremendous healing by experiencing and hearing the other party. The other party gets to experience the prisoner who they have put a label on and have complete separation with. And sometimes it's not just once, they'll get together several times until there is completion, a real healing on both ends. And she said, you know, Debbie, you can do this yourself. You can get a friend you really trust and sit down and do a dialogue and have this person become your ex-boyfriend. And you get to say everything you needed to say, but never got to say, allow this person to assume the persona of your boyfriend and speak back and keep going. And I had a really great friend at the time who was so kind and said, I volunteer, I will do this with you. And it was such a pivotal moment for me to be able to be heard, to be understood, to say everything that I had been cut off previously to saying, and then to listen to the other side of things. And I couldn't believe how this friend of mine could tap into the energy of my ex to express back to me. It felt so real. And I wish I could tell you it was quick. It wasn't. It was hours that we did this and were committed to this process. And it was a huge turning point for me in moving on with my life, huge in the healing that it gave me. And so I really appreciate what you're talking about and the clarity of no forgiveness, no such thing, that it's truly about us taking the time to understand one another. An amazing story about the Pope. That's about as deep as you can get for something to happen and to still keep your heart open to connecting with and understanding another being. When your two-year-old grandchild spills the milk at the birthday party and destroys the table, it's now all full of milk. And grandpa says to the two-year-old, it's okay sweetheart, grandpa forgives you. No, no grandfather does that. Grandpa understands that forgiveness is not part of the equation. Not only does the grandfather not forgive the child, the grandfather actually comforts the child in the moment of her dismay. Even as God comforts us in the moment of our dismay, we find ourselves doing something, thinking something or saying something that we know is not a true representation of who we really are. Not only does God not forgive us, God comforts us. And at the end of our life, God says, come home, come home, welcome home. I believe I need to hear this. And I thank you for everything you're sharing. Neil, can you tell me about your legacy and your future work, reflecting on how much impact your career has had? What legacy do you hope to leave behind? Well, it's not about me. It's about the messages. I don't have a legacy that I hope to leave behind. But it is my hope that the messages of conversations with God will live forever. And I'm told that they will. The books have been selling now for 30 years. They've sold, not bragging, just saying, multi-millions of copies, many millions of copies, not one or two, but 15 or 20 million copies in 37 languages globally. And that's not going to stop. When I'm long gone, in fact, probably after I die, at least for the first few years after I die, the books will become a hot item because I'm no longer here. I'm not looking for a personal legacy for me. And I tell everyone wherever I go, when I open a talk someplace, I say, hi, my name is Neil. And I'm not my book. Don't confuse the two. What do we need to know about that? How are you different than your book? And who is Neil? How am I different from my book? Live with me for a week and you'll find out. I don't operate or function at the level of clarity, wisdom, or mastery that the book articulates. But I'll give myself this much. Am I doing better now than I was 30 years ago? Yes, I will say that I'm doing better. I found a path. I find the understand of what in the world I'm doing here and how I can make it work better than it did before. So I'm on my way and I've got lifetime after lifetime after lifetime to reach my ultimate destination, which is the full expression of who I really am. Do you still sing? May I ask? Do you still sing, Neil? Sure, I do. What kind of songs? What kind of music? Mostly show music, because I'm from a rich theatrical background. So one of my favorite songs is the song I do, I do from the musical play I do. And I love to do, I've performed in public, the song Trouble in River City. Either you're closing your eyes to a situation you do not wish to acknowledge or you're not aware of the caliber of disaster indicated by the presence of a pool table in your community. We've got a couple of my friends right here I say trouble right here in River City. Don't tap me, I'll do the whole thing. Oh my god, I am such a Broadway nerd too. Whoa, we could go back and forth, especially old Broadway tunes because I came up in the world as an actress and a singer. That's what I did the majority of my life till I got into radio. And so, yes, that still holds a huge place in my heart. Thank you for even that snippet. You know that wonderful lyric line sometimes in the evening when you do not see I study the small things you do constantly. I memorize moments that I'm fond of my cup, run it over with love. I've sung that song to my wife more than once. My cup run it over. Yes, thank you. What are you next, dare to dream, Neil? This is dare to dream. What are your future dreams and goals? I'll be leaving here soon. I'm 80 years old, I could be gone tomorrow. So my dream is that I could use whatever time I have left here in this particular physical body in a way that could more fully demonstrate my understanding of who I really am and my understanding of who you it is all other people really are. That would be my goal. That would be my dream. Thank you so much for being on the show today and all you shared. I really appreciate you. I appreciate you as well. Those are very kind things to say to me. How nice of you to have invited me to share these moments with you. Thank you so much. Everybody, Neil Donald Walsh, you can get his new book. You can also follow up in the work he's doing right now and he's still doing zooms, which go out all over the world. Go to his website for more. That's NeilDonaldWalsh.com and I end today's show with this quote from one of Neil Donald Walsh's books and here's the quote, God, I have said to all of humanity unto you I will send my messengers and among you they will walk not only one, but many, not only in ancient times, but through all the ages, bringing you the knowing of the truth of your being and they will say to you, listen, listen to this invitation. There is another way. There is another way to experience God. There is another way to live life. Your differences do not have to create divisions. Your contrasts do not have to produce conflicts. Thanks for joining us today. Subscribe to this number one transformation conversation, Dare to Dream with Debbie Dashinger. Please leave a comment and share. If you're listening to us on podcast and want to see the animation, both of us go to youtube.com slash Debbie Dashinger or on Spotify. You can also find the video next week on the show will be the amazing John P. Milton. He is a meditation and Qigong instructor, author and environmentalist. And John P. Milton is the founder of Sacred Passage and The Way of Nature, John pioneered vision questing in contemporary western culture in the 1940s. Thank you for joining us today on the show.