Communication — Part One
"Now," I continued, "I want to tie this idea together with another passage from the very beginning of Conversations With God…"
So let’s enter the dialogue with a question I had been asking for a very long time: How does God talk, and to whom? When I asked this question, here’s the answer I received:
I talk to everyone. All the time. The question is not to whom do I talk, but who listens?
Intrigued, I asked God to expand on this subject. Here’s what God said:
First, let’s exchange the word talk with the word communicate. It’s a much better word, a much fuller more accurate one. When we try to speak to each other — Me to you, you to Me, we are immediately constricted by the unbelievable limitation of words. For this reason, I do not communicate by words alone. In fact, rarely do I do so. My most common form of communication is through feeling.
Feeling is the language of the soul.
If you want to know what’s true for you about something, look to how you’re feeling about it.
Feelings are sometimes difficult to discover — and often even more difficult to acknowledge. Yet hidden in your deepest feelings is your highest truth.
The trick is to get to those feelings. I will show you how. Again. If you wish.
I told God that I did wish, but that right now I wished even more for a complete and full answer to my first question. Here’s what God said:
I also communicate with thought. Thought and feelings are not the same, although they can occur at the same time. In communicating with thought, I often use images and pictures. For this reason, thoughts are more effective than mere words as tools of communication.
In addition to feelings and thoughts, I also use the vehicle of experience as a grand communicator.
And finally, when feelings and thoughts and experience all fail, I use words. Words are really the least effective communicator. They are most open to misinterpretation, most often misunderstood.
And why is that? It is because of what words are. Words are merely utterances: noises that stand for feelings, thoughts, and experience. They are symbols. Signs. Insignias. They are not Truth. They are not the real thing.
Words may help you understand something. Experience allows you to know. Yet there are some things you cannot experience. So I have given you other tools of knowing. And these are called feelings. And so too, thoughts.
Now the supreme irony here is that you have all placed so much importance on the Word of God, and so little on the experience. In fact, you place so little value on experience that when what you experience of God differs from what you’ve heard of God, you automatically discard the experience and own the words, when it should be just the other way around.
Your experience and your feelings about a thing represent what you factually and intuitively know about that thing. Words can only seek to symbolize what you know, and can often confuse what you know.
These, then, are the tools with which I communicate, yet they are not the methods, for not all feelings, not all thoughts, not all experience, and not all words are from Me.
Many words have been uttered by others, in My name. Many thoughts and many feelings have been sponsored by causes not of My direct creation. Many experiences result from these.
The challenge is one of discernment. The difficulty is knowing the difference between messages from God and data from other sources. Discrimination is a simple matter with the application of a basic rule:
Mine is always your Highest Thought, your Clearest Word, your Grandest Feeling. Anything less is from another source.
Now the task of differentiation becomes easy, for it should not be difficult even for the beginning student to identify the Highest, the Clearest, and the Grandest.
Yet will I give you these guidelines:
The Highest Thought is always that thought which contains joy. The Clearest Words are those words which contain truth. The Grandest Feeling is that feeling which you call love.
Joy, truth, love.
These three are interchangeable, and one always leads to the other. It matters not in which order they are placed.
Having with these guidelines determined which messages are Mine and which have come from another source, the only question remaining is whether My messages will be heeded.
Most of My messages are not. Some, because they seem too good to be true. Others, because they seem too difficult to follow. Many, because they are simply misunderstood. Most, because they are not received.
My most powerful messenger is experience, and even this you ignore. Especially this you ignore.
Your world would not be in its present condition were you to have simply listened to your experience. The result of your not listening to your experience is that you keep re-living it, over and over again. For My purpose will not be thwarted, nor My will be ignored. You will get the message. Sooner or later. I will not force you to, however. I will never coerce you. For I have given you a free will — the power to do as you choose — and I will never take that away from you, ever.
And so I will continue sending you the same messages over and over again, throughout the millennia and to whatever corner of the universe you occupy. Endlessly will I send you My messages, until you have received them and held them close, calling them your own.
My messages will come in a hundred forms, at a thousand moments, across a million years. You cannot miss them if you truly listen. You cannot ignore them once truly heard. Thus will our communication begin in earnest. For in the past you have only talked to Me, praying to Me, interceding with Me, beseeching Me. Yet now can I talk back to you, even as I am doing here.
How can I know this communication is from God? How do I know this is not my own imagination?
What would be the difference? Do you not see that I could just as easily work through your imagination as anything else? I will bring you the exact right thoughts, words or feelings, at any given moment, suited precisely to the purpose at hand, using one device, or several.
You will know these words are from Me because you, of your own accord, have never spoken so clearly. Had you already spoken so clearly on these questions, you would not be asking them.
To whom does God communicate? Are there special people? Are there special times?
All people are special, and all moments are golden. There is no person and there is no time one more special than another. Many people choose to believe that God communicates in special ways and only with special people. This removes the mass of the people from responsibility for hearing My message, much less receiving it (which is another matter), and allows them to take someone else’s word for everything. You don’t have to listen to Me, for you’ve already decided that others have heard from Me on every subject, and you have them to listen to.
By listening to what other people think they heard Me say, you don’t have to think at all.
This is the biggest reason for most people turning from My messages on a personal level. If you acknowledge that you are receiving My messages directly, then you are responsible for interpreting them. It is far safer and much easier to accept the interpretation of others (even others who have lived 2,000 years ago) than seek to interpret the message you may very well be receiving in this moment now.
Yet I invite you to a new form of communication with God. A two-way communication. In truth, it is you who have invited Me. For I have come to you, in this form, right now, in answer to your call.
Why do some people, take Christ, for example, seem to hear more of Your communication than others?
Because some people are willing to actually listen. They are willing to hear, and they are willing to remain open to the communication even when it seems scary, or crazy, or downright wrong.
We should listen to God even when what’s being said seems wrong?
Especially when it seems wrong. If you think you are right about everything, who needs to talk with God?
Go ahead and act on all that you know. But notice that you’ve all been doing that since time began. And look at what shape the world is in. Clearly, you’ve missed something. Obviously, there is something you don’t understand. That which you do understand must seem right to you, because “right” is a term you use to designate something with which you agree. What you’ve missed will, therefore, appear at first to be “wrong.”
The only way to move forward on this is to ask yourself, “What would happen if everything I thought was ‘wrong’ was actually ‘right’?” Every great scientist knows about this. When what a scientist does is not working, a scientist sets aside all of the assumptions and starts over. All great discoveries have been made from a willingness, and ability, to not be right. And that’s what’s needed here.
You cannot know God until you’ve stopped telling yourself that you already know God. You cannot hear God until you stop thinking that you’ve already heard God.
I cannot tell you My Truth until you stop telling Me yours.
But my truth about God comes from You.
Who said so?
Others.
What others?
Leaders. Ministers. Rabbis. Priests. Books. The Bible, for heaven’s sake!
Those are not authoritative sources.
They aren’t?
No.
Then what is?
Listen to your feelings. Listen to your Highest Thoughts. Listen to your experience. Whenever any one of these differ from what you’ve been told by your teachers, or read in your books, forget the words. Words are the least reliable purveyor of Truth.
There is so much I want to say to You, so much I want to ask. I don’t know where to begin.
For instance, why is it that You do not reveal Yourself? If there really is a God, and You are It, why do You not reveal Yourself in a way we can all understand?
I have done so, over and over. I am doing so again right now.
No. I mean by a method of revelation that is incontrovertible; that cannot be denied.
Such as?
Such as appearing right now before my eyes.
I am doing so right now.
Where?
Everywhere you look.
No, I mean in an incontrovertible way. In a way no man could deny.
What way would that be? In what form or shape would you have Me appear?
In the form or shape that you actually have.
That would be impossible, for I have no form or shape you understand. I could adopt a form or shape that you could understand, but then everyone would assume that what they have seen is the one and only form and shape of God, rather than a form or shape of God — one of many.
People believe I am what they see Me as, rather than what they do not see. But I am the Great Unseen, not what I cause Myself to be in any particular moment. In a sense, I am what I am not. It is from the am-notness that I come, and to it I always return.
Yet when I come in one particular form or another — a form in which I think people can understand Me — people assign Me that form forevermore. And should I come in any other form, to any other people, the first say I did not appear to the second, because I did not look to the second as I did to the first, nor say the same things — so how could it have been Me? You see, then, it matters not in what form or in what manner I reveal Myself — whatever manner I choose and whatever form I take, none will be incontrovertible.
Neale Donald Walsch