0:00 Hello, everyone. It's good to have you here. Thank you so much. I'm honored to be here to present two of the finest spiritual teachers of our time, Neale Donald Walsch and Thomas W. Campbell. Neale is a New York Times bestselling author who has written over 40 books on contemporary spirituality and its practical application in everyday life. He published Conversations with God in 1995, and it was a worldwide sensation. So congratulations, Neale, on this 30th anniversary. Thank you. Oh, yes, of course. He wrote many subsequent volumes of Conversations with God. His books have been translated into 37 languages.
0:46 Neale received much positive feedback and gratitude from around the world for his books because from the comments, God became personal to people. What a wonderful gift to the world. Tom's My Big TOE Trilogy is an all-encompassing scientific theory of everything. It's a model of reality that represents a big-picture perspective that unites the objective and subjective worlds of mind and matter, physics and metaphysics, normal and paranormal, secular and religious, that leads to both a better, more comprehensive physics and a more peaceful, giving and loving approach to life. Published in 2003, My Big TOE changed countless lives
1:31 by putting everything in a cohesive, logically derived big picture. My Big TOE is available in German, French, Portuguese and Spanish with several other languages currently in the works. Now, through the centuries, messages for humanity have never stopped. All you need to do is remember them, remember who you are, and seek answers in your own unique way. Neale and Tom hope to help you do just that by sharing their experiences, insights, and experiments in consciousness. But more importantly, by highlighting their communication methods with that one aware, intelligent, consciousness being many call God. Both Tom and Neale questioned the beliefs and culture they grew up with.
2:19 Neale has said that we advance in our understanding in everything but theology. He has studied several religions and felt there needed to be more answers. His passion for understanding was so great that he received answers in his own unique way, directly from God. Tom, at a very young age, was extremely intuitive, yet in his early teen years, he leaned towards atheism and questioned everything. As a physicist, he wanted answers to questions. How does this reality work? There was not much culture could offer at that time. The answers must be found elsewhere. In his quest for these answers, while studying for his PhD in physics, he was reunited with meditation and exploring consciousness,
3:07 which led him to unexpectedly discover and show evidence for God's existence. Now you both have strong insights and theories regarding our purpose here on this earth. I would like to start with a wonderful insight and use of literature Neale wrote in a blog post in 2016. Neale, we share a love of Shakespeare. He was a metaphysician of the first rank, you wrote. I so agree. I always felt Shakespeare's insights into human nature were fueled not only by his keen observations and intricate details of local country life and court life, but that they were enhanced by intuition, perhaps nudged by a higher power.
3:53 And this is evident to me in some manner in everything he wrote. You titled your blog, Once More Unto the Breach, Dear Friends, Once More, from Shakespeare's Henry V, where you referenced the daily struggles of life. What is the point, you stated, suggesting, what is our purpose here? You've also said in your books that this spiritual journey takes courage. It's for the brave, not the timid. This is also true from Tom's MBT viewpoint, because in his theory, it is the individual's responsibility to improve the quality of their consciousness. Whether the readers were familiar with the reference to Henry V's speech or not, this quote must have inspired and helped others understand there is so much more potential
4:41 for our lives when you remember who you really are and all you need do is have courage to take up arms against this sea of daily troubles. I have here your slightly abbreviated, ever so minimally modified version of Henry V's speech meant to rouse his soldier's courage at Agincourt. Your goal in using this quote was to inspire those who are challenged in everyday modern life. Would you kindly read it for us? I've passed it on to you just a few minutes ago, so I thank you. And could you comment on solving the struggles of life and your philosophy of purpose here? I'd be happy to. Thank you for the request.
5:28 Here is the quotation to which you refer. "Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more. "In peace, there's nothing so becomes a man as modest stillness and humility. "But when the blast of life's struggles blows in our ears, then imitate the action of the tiger. "Now set the teeth and stretch the nostril wide. "Hold hard the breath. "Bend up every spirit to its full height. On, on, you noblest one. Show us here the mettle of your "pasture. Let us swear that you are worth your breeding, for there is none of you so mean and
6:20 "base that hath not noble luster in your eyes. I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips, "straining upon the start. "The game is afoot. "Follow your spirit!" Thank you, Neale. Beautifully read. Wow, that was very, very good. Please comment on how you use this and how you receive feedback from it and what you find our purpose to be here. And Tom, follow Neale's comments when he's through with your scientific view of purpose through your My Big TOE theory. I guess I would begin by saying that,
7:07 of course, I asked God when I had my conversation with God, what is this all about? Why are we here? What's the point of it all? I'd like to just digress for one second, if I might, Donna, and say that all of us are having conversations with God all the time. I don't want people to think for one minute that I imagine myself to be the guy who talks to God. Wouldn't it be great if everybody could do it, but only I can do it. Or I'm one of the few, maybe the Pope, perhaps, you know, who knows, the Archbishop of Canterbury, maybe the chief ulama, the head rabbi, whoever. Actually, I'm told in my experience of conversations with God, that all of us are having conversations with God all the time.
8:03 We're simply calling them something else to avoid being ridiculed or made fun of. So we don't walk around saying, yeah, I talked to God this morning and here's what he said to me. We call our conversations with God by other names, you know, women's intuition or a psychic hit, or I had an epiphany or a brilliant idea struck me while I was standing in the shower or whatever, you know, whatever words we can use that allow us to get away with expressing what has been given to us and brought through us, which happens to all of us. Every single person I've talked to in the past 30 years, has shared with me moments in their life when they feel that they too were inspired.
8:55 I guess the difference between me and some of the other folks is that I actually took notes. I actually wrote down what I was hearing, and that was my training as a reporter. You know, Donna, I spent years of my life in the news business. First, I was a radio station, a news director, and I was out there gathering news and taking notes and reporting on what I was observing, what I was witnessing. Then, and after about eight years of doing that, I wound up being a print media reporter, starting off as a beat reporter for a local newspaper in Maryland, and then ultimately becoming the managing editor of a weekly newspaper. My point being is
9:43 that I spent a huge portion of my life, not a couple of weeks or a couple of months, but about 25 or 30 years in the reporting business. So it was really natural for me to write down whatever I was hearing, especially if I thought it was important for me to remember. So I took notes on everything that I was hearing in my mind. Then I heard, see, I wasn't trying to write a book, by the way. I wasn't taking these notes in order to produce a book. I was taking these notes simply to have a personal record of what I was, I want to use the word, receiving, what I was receiving in this process. But Donna, interestingly enough, as part of the process, I was told this,
10:32 Neale, you will make of this one day a book, and it will be accessed by many people. And you know what I thought, Donna? I thought, yeah, now I got you. Now I got you. Because if this is my imagination, that's not going to happen. No publisher is going to put out a book because a guy claims to be talking to God. It's not going to happen. So I actually sent Xerox copies of my handwritten notes to a couple of publishing companies. I didn't send it off to 15 or 20 publishers, but I sent it off, I think, to two or three publishers. and just to see what would happen because I was daring God, show me.
11:19 You said it's going to be, one day become a book that's accessible, accessed by many people. We'll see about that. Well, you know what? I got a call two and a half or so weeks later and this man says, Mr. Walsch, I'm with Hampton Roads Publishing Company. We want to publish your book. I said, you're kidding me. Really? And he said, no, really. He said, you know, it's a great work of fiction. We think it'll find many readers. And I said, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute. You're not publishing it as a book of fiction. And the guy on the other end of the phone said, Mr. Walsch, are you trying to tell me that you think this really happened to you?
12:06 We thought it was a great fictional account, a fictional story of a guy who has an argument with God. I said, excuse me, this is my lived experience. You will not publish it as a work of fiction. He said, well, okay, okay, don't get upset. We'll put it out as a nonfiction book, but you're not going to find 500 readers because, you know, people aren't going to rush to the store to buy a book because some guy up in Oregon claims to be talking to God. It's not going to happen. You'll be lucky if you find 500 readers, but we find it interesting enough, we'll put the book out as a nonfiction item. And he was right. That publisher was absolutely correct. The book did not find 500 readers.
12:52 It found 5 million. In 37 languages. Published all over the world. In Russia. In China. in Turkey, in Yugoslavia, in Romania, all over the world. I'm not bragging about it, I'm just saying what happened. So then I said, okay, okay, God, I get it. I get it. This is really occurring. This is really what's happening. In the meantime, the process continued, and I began getting calls from the major publishers in New York. The first book, as I mentioned, was published by a very small publishing house. They put out maybe four or five titles a year.
13:40 Just a small little publishing house on the East Coast of the United States. But then they turned around and sold the book to a major publishing house, Putnam, the Putnam folks in New York. And I started getting calls from many New York publishers asking me, you know, do you have any sisters like that at home? and I said well you know the process has continued if you're interested in more of this material the process continues in my life and the folks at Putnam said send us whatever you have so I did I continued to send them my notes. I wound up typing them out for them for easier reading. The first
14:25 set that I sent to Hampton Roads was actually my handwritten notes in a Xerox copy, but then I began to type out my notes, and I sent them to Putnam, and they put out what turned into Conversations with God books two and three. And since then, the process has continued. Again, I know this sounds like a big boast. I'm not bragging. I'm just telling you what happened. And ultimately, nine dialogue books were produced, covering roughly 3,000 pages of back and forth, questions and answers, questions and answers, questions and answers about every topic I could conceive of. You know, parenting, right livelihood, diets, exercise,
15:16 human sexuality, relationships. You know, every topic I could imagine that I had a question on, of course, like most people, I had a lot of questions. And, you know, when you've got God on the other line, on the other end of the phone, you know, so to speak, you start asking every question you ever had. You know, including, of course, what's the point of this? What in heaven's name, literally what in heaven's name, is the point of this? what am I supposed to be doing here and importantly what happens when I leave I want all the answers give me all the answers so God said okay
16:02 take this stuff down and I did and that as I mentioned a minute ago produced those 3,000 pages covering nine books he knew what he was doing a good reporter that you are You would take down all the notes. She said to me, because I said, why me? Why did you choose me? And she said, well, it's not just you. As I mentioned earlier, I talk to all people all the time. But one of the reasons that you were chosen as part of this process to make it so public is because you understood. You understood how to do a good job of reporting.
16:47 and we knew we could depend on you to not only take good notes, but to turn it into something that was readable for the average person. Of course, I didn't change. This is what's interesting. Talk about turning it into something that's readable, and then I'll finally shut up because if you're not careful, I'll take up the entire program. I'll end my little diatribe here by saying that I didn't change a single word of what I was given in this dialogue. You know, what I experienced as the voice of God speaking to me was very clear, and I didn't change one single word. Even though some of it included statements that contradicted,
17:38 directly violated everything I've been taught in my life about God, about heaven, what happens after we die, who we are. I mean, I had a whole background of information on these kinds of questions. It's not like I didn't have any previous experience asking questions like this. I was born and raised in the Roman Catholic faith, and my parents sent me to a Roman Catholic elementary school, so I was filled with Catholic doctrine about all of this. And virtually every other statement that I was receiving in this conversation directly contradicted, if not outwardly violated, what I was told in my Catholic elementary school.
18:25 So, of course, to give you a couple of quick examples, and then I will shut up, but the most amazing example was God said to me, Neale, there's no such thing as right and wrong. There's no such thing as hell. there's no such person as the devil or Satan. You made all that stuff up. It's simply not part of ultimate reality. I do not condemn, I do not punish anyone. My love for you is unconditional and requires nothing in return. Our relationship is not transactional. You do this for me and I'll do this for you. No, it's not a transaction.
19:10 I know that you think, Neale, in your life, that love should be a transaction. That's why you've had one failed marriage after another, because you haven't understood that love is not a transaction. It's an outward giving, expecting, requiring, and demanding nothing in return. And that's, Neale, how I love you. And so I said, okay, fair enough. it's the kind of God I always wanted to believe in but I couldn't believe in it because my faith would not allow me to believe in that kind of a God my faith told me that God was judgmental condemning and punishing so I wrote
19:56 what I was told and it gets the attention of one or two folks around the world. What was your most startling revelation as far as our purpose here? That it had nothing to do with anything that I was doing. It had nothing to do with my job, my career, my parenting, my relationship interactions, my sexuality. It had nothing to do with what I was doing in my life. It had everything to do was what I was being. And God said to me, Neale, that's why you're called human beings. You're not called human doings. You think that you're a human doing, but you're a human being. And every moment
20:47 of your life is an opportunity to complete the agenda of your soul. So I said to God, okay, what's the agenda? Help me out here. And she said, Neale, it's really quite simple. your agenda is to use your experience in the realm of the physical, which is a contextual field where everything exists, including what you are and what you are not. And because what you are not also exists in your contextual field, you can then know what you are, not just mentally, not just conceptually, but experientially.
21:34 So the agenda of your soul is to experience through the demonstration thereof your true identity. And I said to God, and what would that be exactly? And he said, Neale, you are an individuation of divinity. You get to decide from moment to moment what you choose your identity to be. That's what life is about. You get to make your choice and make your decision. Then you get to experience that. But I have one thing to say to you, Neale. Listen to me carefully. Your life has nothing to do with you.
22:19 It's not about you. It's about everyone whose life you touch and the way in which you touch it. But when you realize that, when you live into that, You experience that in a universal sense, your life is about you for an elegant reason. Neale, there's only one of us in the room. There's nobody else here. All things are one thing. There is only one thing in existence, and all things are part of the one thing there is. But you've been denying the part of me which you are. You've been denying it all of your life, as have most of your fellow human beings.
23:07 So, Neale, stop it. Stop denying who you really are. Oh, Neale, you have so much in common with a physicist and a Theory of Everything. Tom, what would your comments be on what Neale has told you? Neale is a very beautiful speaker. I've enjoyed every word of it. Well said, well said. And it matches word for word identically with the conclusions that I came to. There's not a piece of what Neale said that isn't exactly what I've been saying.
23:55 But we come to it from very opposite directions. That's good. because we need lots of different viewpoints and lots of different directions because there's lots of different people. Some of them will pick up on one thing and some it takes another. We would like to connect with all of them. Yeah, but my, as Neale talked, I was kind of ticking off the points. Yep yep yep check. And even some of the words were the same, an Individuated Unit of Consciousness, I say. To me, the Larger Consciousness System is God. So it's all consciousness. Consciousness is the same as soul or spirit.
24:40 And I started, well, I started when I was very young and had entities come to me and take me out of body and show me a bit around the world of consciousness. and that lasted for a year or so. And then they buttoned up my entry into the non-physical and said, Tom, we don't want you to grow up too weird. We have plans for you and you need to grow up like a normal kid. So I didn't like being shut out, but by that time I was able to go out of body on my own and do the things I wanted to do. And they put me in a training course, training me to
25:29 work and function within the non-physical realm of consciousness. Now, I say non-physical, you know, consciousness is what is, that's what's fundamental. It's actually the non-physical world of the physical. But that's a little confusing, so we'll get to that later. But then I kind of let that go. You know, I'd always had non-physical mentors, or as I would learn later to call them guides, that I could count on. When I really got to a point that I didn't understand the direction of forward, which way was forward and which way was backward, I could talk to them. And I always got a very good and very useful answer, so I trusted them implicitly.
26:17 And as it turned out, these guides that I was talking to were the same individuals who had gotten me out of body. Same individuals who I ended up talking with later. They've been part of my world for a long time. Started around six, seven years old and still there now. I'm going on 81. So it's been a long association with these non-physical friends of mine. Anyway, then I ran into a little course on transcendental meditation when I was in graduate school. And it promised that you could get by with less sleep if you learned to meditate.
27:03 And I was working a big Van de Graaff accelerator trying to do nuclear physics research. And getting by with less sleep was a real important thing to me at that time. And when that machine was running, you kept taking data, even if it means you stayed up a couple of days in a row. Because it didn't always run. And when it broke, well, then all the research stopped until it got fixed again. So I was meditating one day and just casually was thinking about the software that I had written and why it had bombed. In those days, there was no easy way to find out why your software bombed, except run it again and make a lot of print statements so you know about where it happened. Those were the bad old days of punch cards.
27:50 And I could find the cards. I was shown the cards that had errors on them, even if it was a key punch error. In other words, the hole in the card was a tenth of a millimeter too far to the right or left. So that opened my mind again in the last stages of my research and working on my PhD. And I realized that there was another whole part of reality that I knew existed, and it was in the realm of consciousness. And it was important. And you could do things with it. You could debug your software with it and lots of other things I suspected. So as a physicist, what I do is model reality. That's what physics does.
28:36 Now I found out when I was almost out of school that there was a whole lot more to reality than I'd ever imagined. In another three or four or five months after that, I was introduced to Bob Monroe. Bob Monroe has just built a lab for studying consciousness. I started going out to Bob's and started learning again how to go out of body, and it was a very easy learn this time. And for the next seven and a half to eight years, I spent 15 to 20 hours a week with Bob Monroe, learning about the larger consciousness system, doing research, change a variable, and see how that affected your ability to remote view or heal.
29:23 Because we did all, we practiced all the evidential things that you could do with your mind, like healing and remote viewing, mind-to-mind connection, you know, talking to dead people, talking to other entities that had never been here in a body. Just, anyway, exploring, going to other reality frames other than this one. So I spent all that time doing that, and I did research for the next 33 years until I thought I understood consciousness, and then I wrote the trilogy. And it's about a thousand pages. I also never started to write a book. Neale's story sounds a lot like mine, just put in a totally different context. I thought I was just write down what it is that I thought reality was about and consciousness was
30:13 about. And my first go at it was eight and a half pages. And I thought I was done. And I handed it to people and they looked at it and they rolled their eyes and said, this doesn't make any sense. So I added some to it so it would make more sense and added some to it. Then I pass it out to other people and say, "What do you think?" and they say, "Well, I just don't get this part and what about this other part?" So I'd add more to it and add more to it. And eventually, you do that for about five years and I ended up with so much stuff it wasn't possibly gonna fit in a single book, so I rearranged it into three books and put it out as "My Big TOE". Now at that time, I knew that consciousness was fundamental. That was clear.
31:01 And I had learned, you know, we talk about conversations with God and that the Larger Consciousness System is God. I hadn't gotten to that point quite yet. But it was interesting that as I grew up, as I did these paranormal things, my reality grew. And as your reality grows and your understanding grows, you find that you are a tiny little speck in a very large system, though a highly valued speck. And yes, indeed, you are part of that consciousness system. You're a piece of it. We are all one. And then as I progressed, now this was in the earlier stages out into when I was still with Monroe, I had this, as a
31:49 physicist, I had this idea that if you can't measure it, it either doesn't exist or if it does, it isn't important. And of course that got left and then I was just kind of agnostic and then I realized that all the things that I had learned while out of body and studying consciousness were all the things that religion had been saying for the last 2,000 years. And I had to laugh at myself, finally coming to the point that, hey, all those guys I made fun of, they were right. And the things they said, they were fundamentally correct too. Now, all the dogma, no. But all the basic fundamental ideas of God is love,
32:35 We're here to care about each other, to work together, to cooperate, to care, to have empathy for, to love. And indeed, that statement that I think it was Paul wrote in one of the letters to the Corinthians, he said, God is love. And there it was. That is the summary in three words of what I learned about the Larger Consciousness System. But as I put this system together, I had to do it logically because I'm a scientist and that's what I have to do. So I took all my knowledge in consciousness, knew that consciousness was fundamental,
33:20 knew all about how the paranormal things worked, And I understood the mechanism by which this consciousness system evolved. I could start with a single cell of consciousness that I had defined consciousness as "awareness with a choice". It's a very simple definition, but it has a lot of logical implications. And from that simple thing of an awareness that can realize you're going to be one of two states, you know, a one or a zero or a A or a B, whatever, I was able to derive the nature of this Larger Consciousness System, the nature of us, who we were, how we got to be here, the nature of our reality, what was this physical universe and how did it come about? And in the process of understanding
34:11 all of that, of course, I found out who we were, why we were here, what we were supposed to do. And of course it's exactly the same as what Neale just told us a little while ago, although, his speech was much more eloquent than mine. We come to the same conclusions and the same understanding about the nature of reality. And as I went through this process, I realized that my ego was falling away. My understanding was deepening. I was more caring about others. I stopped trying to control my life. I stopped trying to control others. I realized that If I were able to actually have my way and control things, all I would do is screw everything up.
34:57 It wouldn't have been any help at all. It would have been something less than what would happen if you just let things unfold. If you just love, you take what happens and you try your best to make low entropy choices. And that can translate as choices that are love-based. You make love-based choices, and then you let things just go. And your only requirement is to do your best to be love. And again, it's nothing to do with behavior. It's about being. You can act kind all you like, but it doesn't win you any points. You have to be kind in order to evolve.
35:42 You're consciousness. Consciousness evolves toward becoming love. And the opposite of love is fear. And ego and beliefs are a subset of fear. Fear creates the ego and beliefs. So you get rid of all your beliefs. You just be, take responsibility for everything. No, George doesn't make you angry by what he said, you have to take responsibility for being angry, your choice to be angry. So you take responsibility and you live your life one choice at a time, trying to be love. That is lowering the entropy or being positive and helpful to not only the system, God, but
36:29 also to everyone else. So you have to lower that entropy for yourself and for the system all at the same time. And we're here having experience, as Neale said, we're here to experience in this virtual reality, which is created or we should say rendered by the Larger Consciousness System, which is God. So who are we? We're pieces of consciousness, pieces of consciousness, playing human avatars. And we're just a piece of that Larger Consciousness System. And my model says why those pieces had to be created. It even explains this transition that Neale mentioned between the Old Testament,
37:15 where you have an angry and jealous God, to the New Testament, where God is love, and you turn the other cheek, and you do unto others as you have them do unto you. It explains how that transition happened, why it happened. So the advantage in coming to it from the direction that I came to it is that the model that I came up with, and it's a model of metaphors, the model I came up with, model of consciousness, model of reality, It answers all of the paradoxes, both in science and in theology and in metaphysics.
38:00 So all these things that we didn't understand before, like why, when you dig down to the very bottom of reality, you don't find particles, you find probability. And my model says, why you HAVE to find probability. And a big puzzle in physics was, what does it mean that the probability wave collapses to a particle? That doesn't make any sense. A probability wave is a piece of mathematics. How does a piece of mathematics collapse to a physical particle? Well, it doesn't. That's not what happens at all. But my model gives an explanation for what actually does happen and why probability is there. It tells why the speed of light is a constant and why that constant speed of light actually changes in the eighth or ninth decimal
38:48 place. It has like four or five times that we've been able to measure it accurately enough and why it does that. And a lot of other things, a lot of other paradoxes. And it produces a science of the subjective world as well as the science of an objective world. So it's a better physics, a more general physics. And I expect in another five to ten years, physicists will adopt this as a better, more general physics. And that to me is very important because the fundamental concept that is part of our culture, it's not that people are taught this, they just grow up knowing that it's true, and that is that reality is physical, it's this physical
39:35 world. That's it. That's our reality. And with a belief in a physical world as being fundamental, there's an ethic that comes along with that. In a physical world, the stuff is out there. It's just your environment. You can grab as much of it as you can defend, hold it, sell it to others, rent it, you can do whatever you want with it, because it's just there for people to grab and control and sell and make profit on. So that boils down to an ethic of control, power, force. You have to be able to control what's out there. You have to do that with power and with force.
40:21 So if you grab a part of the resources and say, these are mine. Now, if you want some of those, I'll sell them to you. Well, that takes not only control, but power and force. And look at our world today, and you'll see that this ethic of control power force is what's at the root of all of our dysfunction. Well, that ethic comes with a belief in a material reality. So people look at this control power force structure, and they say, well, you know, the people who are smart and rich and they're on top and others are down at the bottom and 5% of the people own 95% of the resources and they look at that and they say, well, that's just natural. That's just the way the world is. The strong and the mighty and the lucky and the smart end up on
41:09 top and everybody else ends up on the bottom and it's a natural way of things. It is not a natural way of things that is very dysfunctional. The world is not based in a physical world. This is a world based in consciousness. It's a world based in mind, and from Neale's viewpoint, it's a world based in God, based in understanding spirituality, understanding soul. Soul, spirit, and consciousness are all the same thing. It's that thing that animates us as humans, that thing inside that makes all our choices. So, what are we here for? We're here to make choices. And by the quality of those choices,
41:57 we evolve or de-evolve the quality of our consciousness. And we're part of the Larger Consciousness System strategy to evolve itself, because it's still evolving. It's not a done thing. Evolution is always open-ended. It has evolved and we are still in that process. So we make choices, everyday choices, thousands of them. And if these choices are based on love and caring, not just for yourself, not just for the larger system, but for everything, the larger system, yourself and everybody else that you influence or that you connect with, you optimize that love, that lowering of entropy. That's why we're here.
42:45 So it kind of ends up with a lot of the same conclusions. It is more on a science track and a philosophical track. But I have found out one of the things I have learned on this adventure that I was on is that the Larger Consciousness System, of course, wants us to succeed. As we lower our entropy, its entropy is lower too because we're part of it. Now, it has then a good reason, a good motive for trying to help us succeed. It wants us to succeed. And when it finds somebody like Neale, who has the right kind of skills and the right kind of attitude and the right kind of open-mindedness, then it uses that person to help get its message
43:34 across. And it does this in many, many ways. People are selected, picked. Sometimes it's one of those dark nights of the soul, you know, where they go out into the field and say, help me, I'm at the end of my rope. And, you know, I can't go on living this way. And then suddenly they'll get a bigger picture, and they'll see that all that trouble that they have and all that misery has been created by themselves and their own attitude and their own beliefs and their own ego, their own fear. And they grow up and sometimes then the larger conscious system stays with them and turns them into teachers, spiritual teachers, because they've been there at that bottom and they
44:22 understand how you get there. You get there through fear, through making poor choices. Instead of saying, how can I help? What can I do? You say, what's in it for me? And that's the wrong thing. What's in it for me takes you to de-evolution, not evolution. And it does a lot of other things too. Lots of people who get started on a spiritual path, it's because they have some sort of experience that is unexplainable, some sort of experience that they know is real, that happened to them. That's not in question, but it's unexplainable. So they go to the internet and say, does anybody else ever had their dead mother, you know,
45:09 call them on the phone 10 days later? And they find out that, yeah, that's happened quite a few times, and they start opening up their mind, and they become what I call seekers. And these seekers read and think and meditate and learn. And that is a kind of a wave that's happening now. We are seeing a big, big interest in consciousness these days. When I published my books, there was me and maybe two other people in the universe that thought us being a piece of consciousness was a good idea and that this was a virtual reality and understanding consciousness in terms of being the children of God, the subsets of the Larger Consciousness System.
45:55 But now that's not the case. Now, you know, I published a physics paper in a peer-reviewed physics journal, And it was all about trying to help understand the simulation hypothesis. So this idea that we live in a simulation is a part of physics now. There's a lot of physicists who see that as an answer, but they just don't know how or why. They can't wrap their head around it because their experiments have told them conclusively that this reality is information-based. It's not matter-based. You can't get the right answer if you compute answers that are matter-based. Only information-based works. So they know it, but they don't know what to do with that.
46:42 But they are willing to explore that idea that this is a virtual reality. They haven't yet hit on something that works for them. Because all of the virtual reality theories start with some other physical place creating this virtual reality, like a physical place, and that's not the way it works. We're a creation of God, a creation of the Larger Consciousness System, so we can have experience, so we can make better choices based on love. That's why we're here. So it's been a long path for me over many, many years. I started down this path when I was in my middle 20s in graduate school. And now I'm 80, almost 81, and I'm still chugging on down the path, learning new things. You know, as I go,
47:32 there's always more to learn and more to become and more to be. But it's been a wonderful journey. I've met a lot of very wonderful people, and we are coming to a time in the history of the human race where we have an opportunity to take a big step forward. I mean, the human beings have been here roughly around 200,000 years. And in that 200,000 years, our evolution toward becoming love has been very, very slow. But it has picked up over the last 500 years or so. And we've made more progress in the last 500 years than we had in the whole 195,000 years before that. And we've made more progress in the last hundred years than we had in probably the 300 years before that. So it's
48:24 accelerating. And now we get to a point where we are becoming a human family. A disaster someplace a hundred years ago, or even 50, 60 years ago, was no big thing to all the people that live someplace else. It's like, well, I never even heard of that place. So 500,000 people died, not my problem. We were all separate. We were not connected. And we've had bubbles of enlightenment everywhere. 2,500 years ago, the Buddha said that this reality was Maya, was illusion. And I agree with him completely. And so have many other deep thinkers come to that same conclusion. Okay. But now,
49:13 if that earthquake or tidal wave happens, everybody in the world knows about it the next 24 hours. Everyone can look into the eyes of that child that lost everything. So now we just have to grow up to that situation and own it. And we are in a period of quickening. Over the next two or three decades, we will either make good choices and we will end up letting go of materialism and we will embrace instead an ethic of love, of caring, of sharing, of cooperation, of compassion.
49:58 That will be the ethic that goes with consciousness is fundamental. That's the ethic that naturally goes with consciousness is fundamental. So we have an opportunity to go there in just a few decades. And I think this ball will have to be started rolling by the physicists, because as you've heard, Donna, I call the physicists the high priests of Western culture, because the high priests are the people who tell everybody else what to believe. Now the physicists are in that role. They tell everybody else what's the nature of reality. That's their job. And when the high priests realize that this is a virtual reality and that it's computed in consciousness and that consciousness for all practical purposes has all the
50:45 same attributes as God, then that's going to be a big sea state change. Suddenly these ideas will go from in the margins where they are relegated to now and where religion has always been in the margins, well maybe not always, maybe back in the 1500s, they were dominant, but current history, they've been in the margins. Anyway, we will jump from the margins into the mainstream, and it won't take very long, because people who live a life based on love, prosper. They find that everything they need falls right at their feet as they need it, and that life is good, and that they are happy and fulfilled, and it doesn't matter whether they're rich or poor. They find that life isn't about rich and poor. Life is not about stuff. It's about
51:35 quality of consciousness, the quality of your choices. It's about the love that you express every day in hundreds of tiny ways. So that is a very important thing. We have this choice as humans. Now, if we make poor choices and we make choices toward fear, then we may put this possibility off for another century. Who knows how long it'll take us to turn around and go back the other direction. But I know for sure we will get there because though evolution is slow, very, very slow because you have to change who you are. It's about being. It's not about action. It's not about doing. It's about being. And to change yourself is a hard thing. So it's very, very slow to evolve
52:22 consciousness, but evolution is also relentless. So even if it backs up, sooner or later it'll turn around and go forward again, and we will eventually get there to this world that is based on love. It's just a matter of how long is it going to take us. We've got an opportunity to shorten that. In the next couple of decades, the choices that we make will make a difference, whether we fall to the dystopia or to the utopia based on the quality of our choices. So that's why I think we're seeing a big resurgence in interest in consciousness, in the paranormal, and in spirituality. That resurgence was hungry for Neale's book.
53:08 When he wrote that book and they said, oh, nobody will read it, you'll only get 500 people, who will read it. No, it didn't understand that now is the resurgence. This is the time that we have to grow up. And Neale and his book is part of making that happen, helping people see the bigger picture. My work is helping people see the bigger picture. And a thousand other people's work is helping people see the bigger picture. And all of us together are trying to help get to this really turning point, this crucial point that's coming, that we have to make choices. Now, if we miss it, well, we'll get a chance to do it again. And if we miss that, we'll keep doing it until we get there. But now is the first opportunity of humanity to take some big steps forward.
53:56 So the system is kind of going all out to help do that. We're in this quickening toward an opportunity to make good choices. And the system would prefer that we make good choices and make this opportunity into one where we grow up as a species, as Homo Sapiens. We grow up and realize it's not about the physical world. It's about spirit. It's about God. It's about helping other people. And to boot, they get a better, more general physics that answers all kinds of problems. So that's kind of where I'm coming from and how I got to the exact same place that Neale Donald Walsch got to. It's so interesting, Tom.
54:41 Yeah, we have the same kind of the same idea of what's going on here. Just totally different ways of getting there. And we both are basically working the same problem. How to get more and more people to realize that love is the answer. That's what we have to become. and the more people we can get to understand that then the more quickly this evolution will take place and all of us can live in that kind of a world. I love that your conclusion is "love is the answer", that's a wonderful conclusion from a physicist who's been working 50 years simultaneously with physics and consciousness exploration that that is your final conclusion: "love is the answer".
55:32 You discovered that love and diversity is the nature of our reality and the nature of all alternate realities you've visited. So in your model, diversity is the key to learning and evolving towards love, which is, of course, low entropy in your science terms. And your proposal that in a few decades, control, power and force will give way to a more loving, caring, cooperative paradigm. That's a strong possibility. Yeah, I think it is with everything that everyone is contributing. So Neale, what are your thoughts on the nature of reality, on love, diversity, and other realities Tom has visited?
56:18 Have you visited other realms of consciousness and other realities? And if so, what did that experience teach you? Everything that Tom just said. How fabulous. Yeah, I wrote a book called Tomorrow's God, which talks about the next 30 years of humanity's experience as I anticipate it. Let me back up just here in a second and say that I agree with Tom. You know, I put it in one sentence. There's more going on here than meets the eye. Or as Bill said, I thought Bill put it perfectly when he wrote a line in one of his plays.
57:07 The line was, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." That's one of Tom's favorite. I think he's put that in his book. Also, there's Plato and his analogy of the cave. The real world isn't the world that we see. The real world is behind the world we see, the creator and the sustainer of the world we see. The shadows on the wall are just the physical reality that we think is the reality we live in, but it is not. And those people were called the idealists. They thought that something more fundamental than the physical world existed and was the source of the physical world.
57:53 And that goes a long way back to Plato. And then, of course, Buddha had the same idea even earlier. Now, you both teach communicating with God. That's a good thing, having a conversation. But you also mention, be best friends with God. I think that's a wonderful message, especially coming from some of your comments on your books, that God is more personal to them now. What would you say would be your best advice for how you communicate with God, Neale? First of all, we have to believe that it's possible. So we have to embrace as a possibility that there is such an entity, if you please, that I call God.
58:47 And number one, and number two, that we are actually able to communicate with God, that a conversation with God is in fact normal, not an exception. So that's the first piece of advice I would give. Then I would say, go to the second step in having a conversation with God, which is embracing your own worthiness. Now, even people who agree that there is a God, that God does talk to human beings, they might think that, yeah, fair enough, as I mentioned in my remarks earlier, God maybe talks to the Archbishop of Canterbury or the chief ulama, or the head rabbi, or the pope, maybe, but not to the first baseman for the New York Yankees.
59:34 I mean, come on. And not to some weird guy up in Oregon, Neale Donald Walsch. I mean, give me a break. So we have to embrace our worthiness, that all of us are worthy to be spoken to by God, or to receive the kind of information from life itself. Life is a process that explains life to life through the process of life itself. In my experience, it's just a question of opening your eyes, watching what's happening, looking deeply to see what could be made of it and why it's happening. And by the way, there is no reason why it's happening. Here's the great secret in my life. For the earliest part of my life, I looked for the secret.
1:00:21 Why is such and such happening? Why is this happening? Why is that happening? Finally, I asked God a few questions about that. I said, God, you know, why is such and such a thing happening? God would say, you tell me. And I said, no, no, no, you don't understand. You're supposed to be telling me. And God said, no, no, no, you don't understand. You're supposed to be telling me. And I said, "Wait, God, you're making me crazy. You're the one who's creating this all." God said to me, "Neale, you're the one who's creating this all. I get that you think I'm creating this all, but in fact, you're the one, you and the billions of other sentient beings in the cosmos, not just those of you who are living on this particular place called the earth,
1:01:11 but you are creating this all. And I don't have any preference in the matter.", which blew me away. I remember in my earlier remarks, I talked about how God said things that were such a contradiction with regard to what I was taught as a child. And when God said to me, Neale, sweetheart, I have no preference in the matter. I have a desire, but not something that I require. God said to me, Neale, never require what you desire. And I learned that. You know, Donna, we're all adults here, so I'm going to use an adult example.
1:01:56 I learned that when I began to have sexual experiences with the lady of my loving choice, I learned that if I went to her with an attitude of something that I require, the game is over before I begin. But if I went to her with something that I desire, But not necessarily that I require. The game has just begun. And we're talking here about S-E-X, which God said to me, "Neale, it's not just about what you consider to be sex. S-E-X is about "Synergistic Energy eXchange".
1:02:45 It's about how you interact with each other. And so I learned that the second step was to be worthy of what I desire, but never to have it be something I require. A third step in having our own communication with God, in my experience, has been willingness. You know, we go from possibility to worthiness to willingness. And I bring up willingness, Donna, because we have to be willing to struggle against, to move against, to become what I call idea heroes. Idea heroes are people who share and live into ideas that they hold about the world that very few people agree with at the present time.
1:03:38 that only a minority of people currently agree with some of those ideas. So you have to be an idea hero. Like, you know, to use a simple example, Galileo was a wonderful idea hero. He said in 1603 or 1623, somewhere in there, he said, you know what? The earth revolves around the sun. And, of course, the church said, excuse me, we're going to condemn you. And they put him under house arrest for the rest of his life. Because the church at that time taught that the sun revolved around the earth. Because the earth was supposed to be God's greatest creation and its inhabitants, the human beings, were supposed to be the highest, most evolved entities in the universe. So the church found that what Galileo was saying was a direct violation of its teaching.
1:04:28 And so they put him under house arrest for the rest of his life. And they said they would release him if he simply rejected and denounced and stepped away from his teaching. Galileo said, sorry, sorry. The earth revolves around the sun. Now, it only took the Catholic Church 365 years to acknowledge that it was wrong and Galileo was right. But Galileo was just one of many idea heroes who have stepped forward and said, you know what? There's another way. There's a better way to do these many things.
1:05:16 Gloria Steinem, a great idea hero. She actually had the nerve to say that if you don't have a penis, it's okay to make the same amount of money as those who do have one. If you're doing the same work at the same quality, women should be paid the same amount as men. But when she first brought up the idea, it was, are you kidding me? Because there wasn't a corporation in the world that was paying its top executives the same amount of money, whether they were male or female. Now it's de rigueur. And there have been other people, of course, you know, obviously, you know, Martin Luther King Jr. And many other people who have stepped forward as idea heroes, saying things, daring to say, in 1963.
1:06:10 I have a dream. That all men are created equal. So you know what? Idea heroes is what I hear Tom talking about. He didn't use that particular phrase, but he's talking about people who are now stepping forward and embracing, announcing, declaring, defining, living into, demonstrating certain ideas that the largest number of people are not yet quite embracing, but WILL be. I believe, I joined Tom in this belief. I believe within the next 25 or 30 years, they in fact will be embracing these ideas, even though currently they're the opposite of what our culture is telling us.
1:07:00 So step three in having your own conversation with God is to embrace a willingness to step into the living of an idea that currently the largest number of people disagree with you. If you say that people talk to God every day, they'll look at you like you're out of your mind, unless there are people like Tom who will look at you and say, of course you are. I told you that 50 years ago. By the way, Tom and I are almost the same age. Yeah, I'm 81, and I'm going to turn 82 in about two weeks. My 82nd birthday is in a couple of weeks. So I'm Tom's elder, so I expect the amount of respect that elders are due.
1:07:51 I'm just a little, a couple of years behind you, but not much. I would like to bring up another subject, and it's something that's important in Tom's theory, and also something that you might relate to. You mentioned in your books that you know Dr. Brian Weiss. I wonder if his work inspired you to pursue your past lives. Tom's MBT theory firmly relies on life experience packets, is what he calls reincarnation, as a necessary element to evolution. What would you like your roles to be if you were living another lifetime? What professions might you choose? And what is your awareness of past lives?
1:08:39 And have you experienced anything as that? Well, I can't say, even though I know Brian, I can't say that his writings opened the door for me to my past life experience. They simply confirmed for me that I wasn't out of my mind. I wasn't crazy. So, you know, I'm certain that I would have the same experience when I read Tom's writing. I would say, oh, so I'm not crazy after all. Because here's a scientifically based explanation of what I'm experiencing, which is largely what I would call a spiritually based explanation. He's done a wonderful job of bringing both worlds together. My first experience of past lives was not through Brian,
1:09:27 but frankly, through my own movement through life, stuff would happen. To give you one example, I'm in Copenhagen one day with my blessed, darling life partner, a wonderful wife. I'm there to give a lecture and to do a retreat. So, you know, it's during the day. My lecture is that evening. So we're kind of like walking through Copenhagen. And I said to her, sweetheart, if we turn left at the next corner, about two blocks down the right-hand side, it's going to be the most beautiful example of architecture you're ever going to want to see. A two and a half or three-story building with pillars in the front.
1:10:15 She said, well, let's go. Let's take a look. So we turned left and walked down the street. And sure enough, two blocks down, there was the building. And she looked at me. And she said, how did you know? Have you been here before? I said, not in this lifetime. But I have been here before in a previous lifetime. I promise you, I can tell you things about this place that I have no way of knowing if I was limiting myself to what I have experienced in this particular incarnation. Before that time, let me share with you one little kind of romantic little story since I happened to bring up my wonderful life partner.
1:11:04 When she first walked into the room, I didn't know her. My son, actually, was a friend of hers and brought her to a family gathering. He said, do you mind if I bring a friend? I said, no, of course not. So he brought this lady into the room. She came into the room. It was family night at our house. My children were there. I have nine children. So they were all there. And we were having a family night. he brings this lady and as soon as she walked into the room, I went, here we go again. Oh my God, here we go again. We've done this dance before. And she told me later, not in that exact moment, but a few weeks later, she said we got to know
1:11:55 each other a little bit better and ultimately we started dating and we dated for about a week actually we had dinner one night and went to the theater the next night we just enjoyed each other's company for a very short time a week or maybe it was 10 days not more than that seven or 10 days and in that little 10-day period she said to me i knew the minute i laid eyes on you that I've known you from before. But I didn't want to say anything like that because it would sound, I think some people would think that, you know, oh, you know, what kind of a come on statement is that? I've known you from a previous lifetime. But in fact, we both realized that we had spent previous lives together.
1:12:41 Now, as we're driving down the road in the car talking about this, she looked at me and she said, we knew each other, I want to say intimately, to be adult about it, but we knew each other in an intimate way for about a week. We were only really close to each other for about seven or eight days. But she's in the passenger seat of the car, and she looks at me, and she said, I think we should be married . . . again. And I looked at her, and I said, you don't want to say that to me twice. She said, no, I'm serious. We have the same philosophies. We love the same food. We like the same music. We have the same ideas about life. We even love the same little
1:13:26 recreational activities. We're both going to the theater. We love the theater. We're compatible in certain other intimate ways. Why wouldn't we be married? Why should we? What are we playing around with this for? And I just reached across the front seat of the car, shook her hand, and I said, done. we both wear the same ring we both have the same ring on our finger it has one word engraved out of silver on the ring O-T-H-E-R I put the ring on her finger and I said you're my other she put the ring on my finger and said you're my other
1:14:14 there is really no other there's only one of us. Oh how lovely. I know it's it's oh my gosh you know that's what we're talking about that's what Tom is talking about when he talks about love being the answer and when we can give in to that you know and not question it and not worry about it and not think you know should I be moving this fast should I be getting married to a person who just-- we've only been close to each other for a week we just--I mean, come on what are you talking about? But we got on an airplane two days later and flew to Las Vegas where you can get a wedding license in in a half hour with no waiting period went to a wedding chapel came out as
1:15:01 man and wife that was 17 years ago 17 blessed years because we found the God solution. I wrote a book called "The God Solution" in which I said, you know what? people have been trying to define God for the past several million years I can give you a two-word definition of God it's called The God Solution here's the two-word definition: God is, in two words pure love And when I say that to an audience, somebody in the back of the room inevitably stands up and says, Oh, Neale, come on. We've been listening to you for 20 minutes for you to tell us that God is love.
1:15:46 I say, wait a minute, that's not what I said. I didn't say God is love. I said God is pure love. And my friend in the back of the room will say, all right, what's the difference? You say to him, my friend, the difference is that pure love needs, expects, requires, and demands. Nothing in return. We can't even love the person on the pillow next to us that way. And when you can turn to the person on the pillow next to you and say, I need, require, demand, and expect nothing in return. I don't love you because of what you can give me.
1:16:33 I love you because of what I see over there. Whether I get any of it or not, I simply love you. I'm not loving me through you. I love you because of who you are. And you get to do that. You get to be who you are. or not as you wish, every day of your life, as Bill said. I mean, he put it perfectly. "To be or not to be. That is the question. Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to rise up against the sea of troubles, and by opposing to end them,
1:17:18 to die, to sleep, And to sleep, to say we end the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to. 'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep, to sleep, perchance to dream. Aye, there's the rub. For in that sleep of death what dreams may come?" And the answer to that question is in a book called "Home with God in a Life That Never Ends". the final of the nine books in the Conversations with God series. Thank you for letting me go on and on and on. Beautiful. Anytime you want to quote Shakespeare, I'm in.
1:18:06 That's been lovely. I like your quotes. Good by me. Listen, I took a course in college in Shakespeare, and I think we had this book that was about that thick of all the writings that Shakespeare had ever done, and it was on real thin paper. So I don't know how many thousand pages it was, but that was one of my favorite courses in college.
…
