Blasphemy! Heresy! Who does this man think he is, claiming to speak directly to God?! Jesus did it, Muhammad did it, the Jewish prophets did it, but none of their Gods had the sardonic wit or raw verve of Prophet Walsch's God. Neale Donald Walsch isn't claiming to be the Messiah of a new religion, just a frustrated man who sat down one day with pen in his hand and some tough questions in his heart. As he wrote his questions to God, he realized that God was answering them... directly... through Walsch's pen. The result, far from the apocalyptic predictions or cultic eccentricities you might expect, turns out to be matter-fact, in-your-face wisdom on how to get by in life while remaining true to yourself and your spirituality.
Nearly everyone is familiar with holograms — three-dimensional images projected into space with the aid of a laser. Two of the world's most eminent thinkers believe that the universe itself may be a giant hologram, quite literally a kind of image or construct created, at least in part, by the human mind. University of London physicist David Bohm, a protégé of Einstein and one of the world's most respected quantum physicists, and Stanford neurophysiologist Karl Pribram, an architect of our modern understanding of the brain, have developed a remarkable new way of looking at the universe. Their theory explains not only many of the unsolved puzzles of physics but also such mysterious occurrences as telepathy, out-of-body and near-death experiences, "lucid" dreams, and even religious and mystical experiences such as feelings of cosmic unity and miraculous healings.
Idea: an armchair in the shape of an avocado...
Symbols that DALL·E generates:
Let’s start here. The soul — your soul — knows all there is to know all the time. There’s nothing hidden to it, nothing unknown. Yet knowing is not enough. The soul seeks to experience.
You can know yourself to be generous, but unless you do something which displays generosity, you have nothing but a concept. You can know yourself to be kind, but unless you do someone a kindness, you have nothing but an idea about yourself.
It is your soul’s only desire to turn its grandest concept about itself into its greatest experience. Until concept becomes experience, all there is is speculation. I have been speculating about Myself for a long time. Longer than you and I could collectively remember. Longer than the age of this universe times the age of the universe. You see, then, how young is — how new is — My experience of Myself!
You’ve lost me again. Your experience of Yourself?
Yes. Let me explain it to you this way:
In the beginning, that which Is is all there was, and there was nothing else. Yet All That Is could not know itself — because All That Is is all there was, and there was nothing else. And so, All That Is… was not. For in the absence of something else, All That Is, is not.
This is the great Is/Not Is to which mystics have referred from the beginning of time.
Now All That Is knew it was all there was — but this was not enough, for it could only know its utter magnificence conceptually, not experientially. Yet the experience of itself is that for which it longed, for it wanted to know what it felt like to be so magnificent. Still, this was impossible, because the very term “magnificent” is a relative term. All That Is could not know what it felt like to be magnificent unless that which is not showed up. In the absence of that which is not, that which IS, is not.
Do you understand this?
I think so. Keep going.
Alright. The one thing that All That Is knew is that there was nothing else. And so It could, and would, never know Itself from a reference point outside of Itself. Such a point did not exist. Only one reference point existed, and that was the single place within.[...]
Still, the All of Everything chose to know Itself experientially.
This energy — this pure, unseen, unheard, unobserved, and therefore unknown-by-anyone-else energy — chose to experience Itself as the utter magnificence It was. In order to do this, It realized It would have to use a reference point within.
It reasoned, quite correctly, that any portion of Itself would necessarily have to be less than the whole, and that if It thus simply divided Itself into portions, each portion, being less than the whole, could look back on the rest of Itself and see magnificence.
And so All That Is divided Itself — becoming, in one glorious moment, that which is this, and that which is that. For the first time, this and that existed, quite apart from each other. And still, both existed simultaneously. As did all that was neither.
Thus, three elements suddenly existed: that which is here. That which is there. And that which is neither here nor there — but which must exist for here and there to exist.
Now in creating that which is “here” and that which is “there,” God made it possible for God to know Itself. In the moment of this great explosion from within, God created relativity — the greatest gift God ever gave to Itself. Thus, relationship is the greatest gift God ever gave to you.
From the No-Thing thus sprang the Everything — a spiritual event entirely consistent, incidentally, with what your scientists call The Big Bang theory. As the elements of all raced forth, time was created, for a thing was first here, then it was there — and the period it took to get from here to there was measurable. [...]
A true understanding of time allows you to live much more peacefully within your reality of relativity, where time is experienced as a movement, a flow, rather than a constant.
It is you who are moving, not time. Time has no movement. There is only One Moment. [...]
You say it takes 365 “days” to make a year. Yet what is a “day”? You’ve decided — quite arbitrarily, I might add — that a “day” is the “time” it takes your [Spaceship Earth] to make one complete revolution on its axis.
How do you know it’s made such a spin? (You can’t feel it moving!) You’ve chosen a reference point in the heavens — the Sun. You say it takes a full “day” for the portion of the Spaceship you are on to face the Sun, turn away from the Sun, then face the Sun again.
You’ve divided this “day” into 24 “hours” — again quite arbitrarily. You could just as easily have said “10” or “73”!
Then you divided each “hour” into “minutes.” You said each hourly unit contained 60 smaller units, called “minutes” — and that each of those contained 60 tiny units, called “seconds.”
One day you noticed that the Earth was not only spinning, it was also flying! You saw that it was moving through space around the sun.
You carefully calculated that it took 365 revolutions of the Earth for the Earth itself to revolve around the sun. This number of Earth spins you called a “year.”
Things got kind of messy when you decided that you wanted to divide up a “year” into units smaller than a “year” but larger than a “day.”
You created the “week” and the “month,” and you managed to get the same number of months in every year, but not the same number of days in every month.
You couldn’t find a way to divide an odd number of days (365) by an even number of months (12), so you just decided that some months contained more days than others!
You felt you had to stay with twelve as the yearly sub-divider because that was the number of Lunar Cycles you observed your moon moving through during a “year.” In order to reconcile these three spatial events — revolutions around the sun, spins of the Earth on its axis, and moon cycles — you simply adjusted the number of “days” in each “month.”
Even this device didn’t solve all the problems because your earlier inventions kept creating a “build up” of “time” which you didn’t know what to do with. So you also decided that every so often one year would have to have a whole day more! You called this a Leap Year, and joked about it, but you actually live by such a construction — and then you call My explanation of time “unbelievable”!
You’ve just as arbitrarily created “decades” and “centuries” (based, interestingly, on 10′s, not 12′s) to further measure the passage of “time” — but all along what you’ve really been doing is merely devising a way to measure movements through space.
Thus we see that it is not time which “passes,” but objects which pass through, and move around in, a static field which you call space. “Time” is simply your way of counting movements!
In rendering the universe as a divided version of Itself, God produced, from pure energy, all that now exists — both seen and unseen. In other words, not only was the physical universe thus created, but the metaphysical universe as well. The part of God which forms the second half of the Am/Not Am equation also exploded into an infinite number of units smaller than the whole. These energy units you would call spirits. In some of your religious mythologies it is stated that “God the Father” had many spirit children. This parallel to the human experiences of life multiplying Itself seems to be the only way the masses could be made to hold in reality the idea of the sudden appearance — the sudden existence — of countless spirits in the “Kingdom of Heaven.”
In this instance, your mythical tales and stories are not so far from ultimate reality — for the endless spirits comprising the totality of Me are, in a cosmic sense, My offspring.
My divine purpose in dividing Me was to create sufficient parts of Me so that I could know Myself experientially. There is only one way for the Creator to know Itself experientially as the Creator, and that is to create. And so I gave to each of the countless parts of Me (to all of My spirit children) the same power to create which I have as the whole.
This is what your religions mean when they say that you were created in the “image and likeness of God.” This doesn’t mean, as some have suggested, that our physical bodies look alike (although God can adopt whatever physical form God chooses for a particular purpose). It does mean that our essence is the same. We are composed of the same stuff. We ARE the “same stuff”! With all the same properties and abilities — including the ability to create physical reality out of thin air. [...]
I tell you this: There is no coincidence, and nothing happens “by accident.” Each event and adventure is called to your Self by your Self in order that you might create and experience Who You Really Are.
The key point here is that at every level, the same variational, surprise-reducing dynamics must be in play to supply Markov blankets for the level above.
Similarly, [Bohm] believes that dividing the universe up into living and nonliving things also has no meaning. Animate and inanimate matter are inseparably interwoven, and life, too, is enfolded throughout the totality of the universe. [...]
The idea that consciousness and life (and indeed all things) are ensembles enfolded throughout the universe has an equally dazzling flip side. Just as every portion of a hologram contains the image of the whole, every portion of the universe enfolds the whole. [...] Every cell in our body enfolds the entire cosmos. So does every leaf, every raindrop, and every dust mote, which gives new meaning to William Blake’s famous poem:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
Indeed, Bohm believes that our almost universal tendency to fragment the world and ignore the dynamic interconnectedness of all things is responsible for many of our problems, not only in science but in our lives and our society as well. For instance, we believe we can extract the valuable parts of the earth without affecting the whole. We believe it is possible to treat parts of our body and not be concerned with the whole. We believe we can deal with various problems in our society, such as crime, poverty, and drug addiction, without addressing the problems in our society as a whole, and so on. In his writings Bohm argues passionately that our current way of fragmenting the world into parts not only doesn't work, but may even lead to our extinction.
There is no time but this time. There is no moment but this moment. "Now" is all there is.
What about "yesterday" and "tomorrow"?
Figments of your imagination. Constructions of your mind. Nonexistent in Ultimate Reality.
Everything that ever happened, is happening, and ever will happen, is happening right now
I don't understand.
And you can't. Not completely. But you can begin to. And a beginning grasp is all that is needed here.
So... just listen.
"Time" is not a continuum. It is an element of relativity that exists vertically, not horizontally.
Don't think of it as a "left to right" thing — a so-called time line that runs from birth to death for each individual, and from some finite point to some finite point for the universe.
"Time" is an "up and down" thing! Think of it as a spindle, representing the Eternal Moment of Now.
Now picture leafs of paper on the spindle, one atop the other. These are the elements of time. Each element separate and distinct, yet each existing simultaneously with the other. All the paper on the spindle at once! As much as there will ever be — as much as there ever was...
[...]
All of it happened. All of it has already happened.
Every possibility exists as fact, as completed events.
How can that be? I still don't understand how that can be.
I am going to put this in terms to which you can better relate. See if this helps. Have you ever watched children use a CD-ROM to play a computerized video game?
Yes.
Have you ever asked yourself how the computer knows how to respond to every move the child makes with the joystick?
Yes, actually, I have wondered that.
It's all on the disc. The computer knows how to respond to every move the child makes because every possible move has already been placed on the disc, along with its appropriate response.
That's spooky. Almost surreal.
What, that every ending, and every twist and turn producing that ending, is already programmed on the disc? There's nothing "spooky" about it. It's just technology. And if you think the technology of video games is something, wait 'til you see the technology of the universe!
Think of the Cosmic Wheel as that CD-ROM. All the endings already exist. The universe is just waiting to see which one you choose this time. And when the game is over, whether you win, lose, or draw, the universe will say, "Want to play again?"
Your computer disc doesn't care whether you win or not, and you can't "hurt its feelings". It just offers you a chance to play again. All the endings already exist, and which ending you experience depends on the choices you make. [...]
[So] celebrate! Celebrate life! Celebrate Self! Celebrate God!
Celebrate! Play the game.
None of this is really "real", is it?
No. You are living an illusion. This is a big magic show. And you are pretending that you don't know the tricks — even though you are the magician.
It is important to remember this, otherwise you will make everything very real.
But what I see, feel, smell, touch, does seem very real. If that isn't "reality," what is?
Keep in mind that what you are looking at, you are not really "seeing."
Your brain is not the source of your intelligence. It is simply a data processor. It takes in data through receptors called your senses. It interprets this energy in formation according to its previous data on the subject. It tells you what it perceives, not what really is. Based on these perceptions, you think you know the truth about something, when, actually, you do not know half of it. In reality, you are creating the truth that you know.
Including this entire dialogue with You.
Most assuredly.
I'm afraid that will only give fuel to those who are saying, "He's not talking to God. He's making it all up."
Tell them gently that they might try thinking "outside the box." They are thinking "either/or." They might try thinking "both/and."
You cannot comprehend God if you are thinking inside your current values, concepts, and understandings. If you wish to comprehend God, you must be willing to accept that you currently have limited data, rather than asserting that you know all there is to know on the subject.
I draw your attention to the words of Werner Erhard, who declared that true clarity can come only when someone is willing to notice:
There is something I do not know, the knowing of which could change everything.
It is just possible that you are both "talking to God" and "making it all up."
Indeed, here is the grandest truth: You are making everything up.
Life is The Process by which everything is being created. [...]
God is a process.
God is not a person, place or thing. God is exactly what you have always thought — but not understood.
Again?
You have always thought that God is the Supreme Being.
Yes.
And you have been right about that. I am exactly that. A BEING. Notice that "being" is not a thing, it is a process.
I am the Supreme Being. That is, the Supreme, comma, being.
I am not the result of a process; I am The Process Itself. I am the Creator, and I am The Process by which I am created.
Everything you see in the heavens and the earth is Me, being created.
I leaned back against the wall and sunk to the floor, my face in my hands. I was in my room in Phuket, Thailand. It was November 2018. I was 27 years old.
I'd been training at a Muay Thai camp for the past few months, occasionally spending weekends at my Uncle's place. He and his wife lived by the water, a short fifteen-minute drive away.
How did I end up sparring at a Muay Thai camp in Phuket, you ask? Well, that's a funny story...