PROLOGUE

by Neale Donald Walsch,
international bestselling author of the
Conversations with God series

It can be no coincidence … no coincidence … that I received an electronic copy of the manuscript you are now reading when I did. It was forwarded to me by my literary agent in the US, who received a request from Watkins Publishing in London to send it on to me, to see if I might be willing to write an afterword.

Nor was it happenstance that, noticing the topic, I felt the urge to download the manuscript immediately, which I did … and that I dived into the reading of it at once … and that I read it in four sittings over two days … and that by sheer coincidence just as I was finishing this remarkable book by Penny and Kelly, the firm’s copy of my own book arrived. I could not miss the connection of it appearing in my hands at the very moment that my reading nine words from Penny and Kelly’s book had been vibrating in my centre. What nine words am I talking about?

“… like-minded souls would collaborate to change the world.”

Because I wanted the publishers to know that I related on a very personal level to the contents of this book, I sent along the narrative below. I thought I might refer to it briefly in the afterword I had been asked to contribute, but Penny and Kelly suggested that the entire account be added, word-for-word, to the book itself. I was happy for it to be included, because I agree with the authors that more and more of us need to share publicly what we have experienced in our most sacred spiritual encounters. Only by such mounting personal testimony will what once was seen as “paranormal” come to be understood, at last, to be a window into the actual nature of things, and – most importantly – the true nature of God.

I don’t know whether an out-of-body experience and an NDE are cousins or twins, but I do feel that in many ways I “died” to who I was, coming “back to life” as a new version of myself following an extraordinary occurrence in my life nearly 30 years ago. Here is my memory of it …

On the evening of 8 January 1980 my wife and I had been arguing. It was one of those silly arguments that many couples often have. I can’t even remember what it was about. I’m sure it was absolutely nothing of consequence. What I do remember is what happened next. It’s something I will never forget.

Stomping out of the TV room on the lower floor of our split-level house, I left my wife in the middle of our heated discussion, dismissing her with a wave of my hand and disappearing into the master bedroom with a slam of the door.

I threw myself on the bed in utter frustration and then, staring at the ceiling, began to cry. My God, I thought, why can’t we just get along? What does it take for people to just get along? How can the world be expected to live in peace if people can’t even do it in their own home?

I was overwhelmed with deep sadness. It wasn’t just the spat with my wife, but the whole of my life that was weighing on me as I was lying there. I remember thinking, How can people who say they love each other separate themselves emotionally so completely at times like that?

It was a moment of complete and total surrender to the question – and then to the realization that I had no answer; that I just didn’t understand life. I just didn’t understand it.

I turned my head into the pillow and whimpered, “Please, God, help me. I don’t want life to be like this. And I don’t want to be like this … a man who argues over nothing. Help me. Help me …”

I suddenly felt utterly exhausted. As I lay fully clothed on the bed – though it was barely eight at night – I watched myself falling into a deep sleep. Somehow I sensed that it was going to be the deepest sleep of my life. I think I even said that to myself. I remember hearing myself telling myself in my mind: This is … going to be … the … deepest … sleep … of … your … life.

And I was gone.

But not for long. Abruptly, I was awakened by a shocking sensation of being lifted off the bed. I felt like I had been swooped up. The feeling was … well here’s how I’ve described it since then. Imagine there’s a fly on a table. Now imagine that I had a vacuum cleaner hose and that I was able to get it down on top of that fly and then said, “Okay, turn it on!”, and someone turned it on. Now imagine how that fly would feel as it was being sucked up by that vacuum cleaner … going backward, just being sucked up backward. That’s exactly how I felt. I felt like I had been sucked up, my whole body, my whole beingness, and I was hovering near the ceiling.

I looked down and saw my body lying on the bed below. It looked weird, inert, as if it was made out of clay. And I remember thinking, Is that me? My God, have I died?

And in that moment I had a powerful and unforgettable direct experience. It was not an intellectualization, it was a direct experience of: Oh, my gosh, I’m not that. “That” is over there, and “I” am over here.

So I began pondering, anxiously: Who is the “I” that’s looking at what I thought I was? And I looked at this form on the bed once more and studied it. How strange, I thought. How strange that I once imagined I was that.

I continued to wonder, now even more anxiously: Well, then, who is doing the looking? Who am I?

I glanced down to where I expected to find the rest of my body. You know, the way you’d look down at your shoes. I wasn’t looking at my body on the bed, I was looking down from my waist to my toes. But … there was no “me”. There was … nothing. I was just … consciousness. I felt as though I was just a pair of eyes, floating alone near the ceiling.

I don’t know how else to describe it. I don’t even know what I was looking out of. I wasn’t looking out of physical eyes. It felt like just consciousness looking outward. I had no body, no nothing. And I remember now really worrying: Who am I? What’s going on?

With that, I was turned around by some invisible force and I shot out of that room like lightning. Immediately I found myself in a dark place that seemed like – I know this sounds incredibly predictable, but it did seem like – a tunnel, and then I felt myself being pushed or pulled through that passage at insane speed. There was no feeling of fear during any of this, just a sensation of incredible speed.

Soon, up ahead, I spotted a tiny speck of light, and it was this light toward which I now knew I was racing. The speck grew bigger and bigger, until I felt myself sort of pop out of the tunnel and shoot into the light itself.

Now things got really interesting, because I was in the light, and yet I also seemed to be outside of the light, looking at it. I remember (with deep feeling that still comes over me) that it was almost impossible to look at, because it was so beautiful.

I don’t know how to explain how a light can be beautiful, because a light is a light, yes? Except that this light was beautiful. Perhaps it had to do with the way it felt. I don’t know. I just know that its beauty was something I was almost unable to behold. It felt too big, too glorious, too warm and loving, too all-encompassingly wonderful for a human consciousness to experience. I felt small … embarrassed.

I remember wishing that I could just cover myself, hide myself. I felt like saying, No, no, not me. Don’t look at me. I’m not worthy of being in this light. I’m not worthy of seeing this. With all that I have done, with all the black marks on my soul, with all the times I’ve hurt others and failed myself … I’m not worthy. And I shivered with tears. Why had I not done better? Why had I made the lower choice so many times? I was deeply sorry. More regretful than I can ever remember being.

Then, as shame began to overwhelm me, I felt myself being filled with an energy that I can’t describe. Whenever I search for words, there don’t seem to be any that fit.

As I think about it now, I want to say that it was as if the rays of that light just reached into me – as if it had arms. But it didn’t. I mean, there was no physical being there. But the light just enveloped me and reached into me and opened me, gently pulling my arms apart and causing me to feel … I’m going to say, embraced, even though there was no other physical being there.

The emotion I was experiencing was one of what I would later call being totally forgiven. Yet in that self-same moment I knew at the depth of my being that what was occurring went past simple forgiveness. It was a feeling that does not have words … but let me try to put words to it anyway. It was a feeling of knowing that “forgiveness” wasn’t even necessary.

It was a knowing that I was in the space of such love that forgiveness or “pardon” didn’t even enter the picture; it wasn’t part of the reality. There is no “forgiveness” folded into total acceptance and unlimited love, absolute safety and complete protection, utter serenity and resounding tranquillity. The emotion is one that I can only describe as a profound loss of loneliness.

I was being given peace – true peace, total peace, the peace of knowing that I was not on my own, that there was nothing to worry about, that all was well and everything was perfect. Then it seemed almost as though some giant finger was ever so gently tilting my head upward with a touch on my chin. And I felt (not “heard”, but “felt”) these words melt into my heart …

You are perfect. You are beautiful, beyond description. I love you without condition. You are my Divine Creation, in whom I am well pleased.

I felt totally … accepted, just the way I was. I felt cradled, embraced, the light surrounding me now, floating me softly in its centre. I was one with It now, inside of It somehow. All sadness left me. Even regret disappeared. I felt healed. Not in the sense of having been “forgiven”, but in the sense of having been “made whole”. And I remember my soul filling with gratitude and my heart bursting with love.

Suddenly I was consumed with an intellectual awareness of exactly what I had been feeling. It was as if my mind had abruptly processed what my entire being had been – how shall I put this? – absorbing: that I will never be forgiven for anything that I do. No matter how sad I am about any action or decision, no matter how regretful, I will not be forgiven. Because forgiveness is not necessary.

I knew then that I was a child of God, an offspring of the Divine, and that I cannot hurt or damage the Divine in any way, for the Divine is utterly undamageable, unhurtable. I will be accepted, always, in the heart and home of God, allowed to grow through what I will label my errors, allowed to become more and more of Who I Really Am by the process I engage. Like a child working with her multiplication tables, or an adult acquiring a brand new language, my “mistakes” will be seen as steps toward mastery.

The impact of that revelation was enormous, because it was not simply some concept or theory, it was something that I was experiencing – I was knowing it experientially – right then and there.

Immediately upon embracing this awareness, I found myself in another reality, swiftly surrounded by a million, nay, a hundred million, tiny … particles of energy is the only way I can describe them. They were everywhere. In front of me, to the left of me, behind me, to the right of me. They seemed to me like tiny malleable cells, or soft globules, each with their own distinct shape.

And the colours! Oh, my, the colours were strikingly, astonishingly, breathtakingly beautiful. The bluest blues and the greenest greens and the reddest reds I had ever seen. And that’s saying a lot for me, because I have a severe colour deficiency. So for me, this was a spectacular sight.

Now these cells were vibrating in front of me and all around me, forming a shimmering blanket of beauty. I sensed that what I was seeing was the Essence of All Life. It was life in its sub-sub-submolecular form. In its smallest particles. At its basis. At its root.

And now here is something fascinating that I witnessed: as I watched these cells of magnificent colour dance and shimmer before me, I noticed that they were changing. They seemed to be swallowed into themselves, and to re-emerge in a different shape and colour. And as they changed shapes and colours, the cells all around them changed shapes and colours, too, in order to accommodate and complement them.

And the cells around those cells did the same, as did the cells around those cells, and so on, on and on … and I realized that the whole thing was one constantly changing, always adapting, ever-interconnected jigsaw puzzle. A pulsating, vibrating mosaic of pure energy.

The more I looked at all of this, the more my being overflowed with a desire to touch these unspeakably beautiful particles, to become one with them. I wanted to merge. I wanted to melt into them. I don’t know why. It was an inner desire, felt at the root of me.

I tried to move forward, to get closer, but with each move I made, the mosaic backed away. I thought I would “sneak up” on it, fake a move forward and then, suddenly, dart to one side. It didn’t work. I could not fool the matrix. It seemed to anticipate all my moves. I just couldn’t get closer, and I began to weep. The sadness of this denial was more than I thought I could bear.

Then the sadness disappeared, abruptly, as a gentle, sweet voice said:

Do you not see that you
cannot get any closer to this
than you could move your eyes closer to your nose?
You can see the end of your nose,
but you can’t get closer to it. Consider why.

And then I realized that I could not get closer to the energy because I was the energy! When I moved, it moved. Of course. I was already merged! I realized that I was one with all of it.

And the voice said:

Behold, now, the beauty of you.

I knew in that moment: Oh my, there’s no separation of anything from anything. What was I thinking? How could I not have known this?

As with the previous revelations, the impact of this was enormous, because it was not simply a concept or theory, it was something that I was experiencing, right then and there.

Once again, as soon as I understood it, I was removed from that reality. It seemed that as soon as I came to a complete comprehension of something through the complete experience of it, I was being moved on. It was almost as if I was going through some sort of curriculum. Except it didn’t feel that I was learning something, so much as remembering.

Now I found myself facing an enormous book. It looked as big as the biggest book I had ever seen. No, twice as big. Three times as big. It looked as big as one hundred volumes or directories of some kind, glued together. And on each page – on each page – was enough tiny type to fill one thousand encyclopedias.

As I stood before this mountainous volume, the voice I “heard” when I was embraced by the light (a thought that I “felt” would be a more accurate description) came back to me yet again. It said in the gentlest way:

Okay, Neale, okay.
You have searched your whole life
for answers. You’ve looked
and looked, and your search has been real.
It has been pure and sincere.
It has been an honest quest for truth.
So here.
Here are the answers.

With that, the book flew open and its pages flipped past me as if fanned by some gigantic thumb, or blown by some holy and powerful breath. Quickly they flew past, the whole document exposed, page by page, within a nanosecond. And yet, I was able to read and absorb every word on every page.

And then I knew. I knew everything there ever was to know, is now to know, and ever will be to know. I understood the cosmology of the universe and the secret of all of life.

The impact of that revelation was enormous, because it was not simply a concept or theory; it was something that I was experiencing, right then and there.

That was my fourth awareness.

First, I remembered that I am not my body. Second, that I am totally loved and absolutely perfect just as I am. Third, that I am one with everything. And fourth, that everything is really simple.

And I remember saying, as the book’s final page fanned past and the heavy back cover closed …

Of course.

How simple.

How elegantly simple.

And just as I experienced the fullness of that knowing, I found myself back on the bed, having been once again swiftly shifted from the latest awareness.

Now I felt so heavy, so dense. I remember barely being able to move my head a tiny bit to one side. I managed to open my eyes. (It wasn’t easy. My eyelids were so heavy. I remember being shocked at the effort it took just to open my eyes.) And I could not lift my hand. I was shocked that it was so heavy, I could not lift it. For a moment I thought I was paralysed, that I’d suffered a stroke and had lost mobility. I used all the willpower I had to move even one finger – to prove to myself that I was okay.

I figured then that I’d been dreaming. But in the next moment I realized what must be true. I’d been in a different dimension, I’d visited another plane of existence, and I had just returned to physicality. And I realized then how dense and heavy physicality is. And I remember marvelling at how different it was where I’d just come from. I was so free, so light, so utterly – what’s the word here? – unencumbered.

When I realized that I was back in my human form I let myself just lie there for a while. Then I thought, “Well, surely it must be morning.” I glanced at the clock and saw that I had fallen asleep only about two hours earlier. And I remember thinking: Am I being played with here? Is somebody kidding me? You could have told me that I was in a coma for a month and I would have believed you.

Then I thought, I’ve got to write this down. I struggled to reach over – you can’t imagine the effort it took for me to just reach over for the pen on the nightstand. And as I started to grasp it, my voice came to me again and said:

That is not necessary.
Your truth will never be forgotten.
It can be neither proven nor disproven.
It simply is.

Then the voice said, with soft and quiet finality, two words that I never will forget:

Nothing matters.

Now I lay there pondering. Nothing matters? How can that be? Nothing matters?

And I looked at that message in terms of the little spat I’d indulged myself in with my wife. What was I thinking? What was so important that I had to make such an issue over it, that we would have words about it; that it would be so bad, I’d stomp out of the room and slam the door on her? What?

I mean, I just felt so … inelegant. Inept. So emotionally, so spiritually … evolutionarily … awkward.

But at the same moment I was recriminating against myself, I looked at myself with the wisdom of some Part of Me that was seeing me from afar, and thought: Given the illusion you’ve been living, it’s totally understandable.

With that … with that sense of release … I fell back to sleep. And this time, I slept through the night.

I remember waking the next morning feeling more refreshed than I had ever felt in my entire life – before or since. And I just floated off into the bathroom to get into the shower.

As I turned on the water I experienced everything in slow motion, as if I was in an altered state of consciousness from taking some kind of drug. I saw the water coming out of the shower head one drop at a time.

Then I looked at the tiles in the shower stall, and I saw the wall in its sub-molecular form. I saw it as a pattern of energy, and I realized then that everything was 90 per cent space and 10 per cent matter.

I knew then that even space was physical – made up of elements of energy vibrating and moving so fast that they can’t be seen. Even the air is energy. Even “space” is an energy field. It is the “whispiest” energy of the universe. The thinnest, lightest – I don’t know how else to describe it – the least solid, the most permeable essence of all. So permeable is this field that heavier, denser energy particles can pass right through it – like rays of sunlight passing through a cloud, to use a simplistic example.

As I looked closely at the shower stall wall, I realized that nothing is what we call “solid”, but that energy moves so quickly from here to there that it creates the appearance of solidity.

Now I’m in the shower stall watching this effect in the wall. I could see where the heavier matter was located in the field of lighter energy at any particular moment. And I could see the same thing in my hand. I could then see how I could position my hand to place its denser energy particles where the denser energy of the wall was not.

In this way, like the sunlight streaming through a cloud, I put my hand right through the wall. I shocked myself with my ability to do this. I said, “Will you look at that.” Very simple, I thought. What a simple trick. I’ve got to tell everybody about this. It’s pretty easy. You just go like this. And I did it again! I put my hand right into the wall! Then I pulled it back out, smiled, and went on with my shower, marvelling at it all, pinning it all together in my mind.

While I was thinking, I tried to remember what I had read in that huge book. I had come back into physicality knowing everything, having it all explained in ways that even my limited human mind could understand. And now I wanted to remember what I had come to know. But standing in the shower stall, I couldn’t remember a single thing. I could remember that I had the experience of knowing, but I couldn’t remember what I knew!

So I started to weep again, and I cried out in my mind: Why can’t I remember? I want to remember! I want to tell everybody! Why can’t I remember what I read in that book?! Come on!

I was mad at my mind for not being able to bring it all back. So I just stood in the shower stall, tears streaming down my face. And I thought bitterly: what good is it to show this to me if I’m unable to retain it? And the voice said to me very softly:

You are not to know.
Simply know that you know.

Then I received a series of impressions that I can only interpret verbally, but they weren’t given to me verbally. They were impressions. And the biggest impression was this: if you were to be given all of this now, and have all of it placed in your finite mind, it would be like trying to soak up the ocean with a sponge. You would burn every connector in your brain. Because you can’t put the Infinite into a finite container. It’s like plugging too many appliances into a single outlet. Sorry. Overload. Fuse blown. Circuit breaker tripped.

So, the voice said: “Just know that when you need to know anything in particular, you can access it. You can reach into the Akashic Records, the Eternality, the All of It. You, and everyone else, can access all the wisdom, all the understanding, all the truth, all the awareness, all the insight you need when you need it, by inviting your mind to go to the level of Soul, which will then reach into the Allness of Everything and bring back a particular piece of information as it serves you to have it. And you will know it clearly when you see it. There will be no problem of recognition.”

So I finished my shower and stepped out and reached for a towel, when another amazing thing occurred. My awareness was in such a state that I could feel the thread count of that towel.

I dressed myself, combed my hair, and kind of floated to the kitchen on the second level. Then my wife, God bless her, God rest her Soul (she has since celebrated her Continuation Day), looked at me and smiled, as if we hadn’t had any fight at all the night before. It was a brand-new day and she saw the look on my face.

“What happened to you?” she said. “You look ten years younger.” And I shared with her what I just shared here. People at work that day noticed the same thing, and said the same thing. At least one person offered, “Wow, must have gotten a lot of sleep last night. You actually look younger.”

When my wife asked, “Well, how do you feel?”, I told her that I felt like I had just been dropped off on a street corner somewhere … on a busy thoroughfare in the universe. I really felt like somebody had just let me out of a car. The car drove on and there I was, left standing there. There goes God’s car, I thought. Bye, God. Thanks. Cool ride. But now here I am in this world again, dropped off in the middle of nowhere, with no map, no directions, not a thought about how to get from there to anywhere.

I remembered being told that I would know whatever I needed to know at any given moment – but that wasn’t enough to make me feel safe. I wanted a road map. If I’m going on this journey, I want a map.

How do I negotiate life? How do I go through my day-to-day? How do I even get through this breakfast with my wife, much less get any work done today? How do I do anything meaningful or worthwhile, if nothing matters?

As I thought deeply about this later, I received another impression: “It is precisely because nothing matters that you can get through this life. Since nothing matters intrinsically, in and of itself, you get to decide what matters to you. And by the choices and decisions you make do you form and shape Who You Choose To Be. Is this not the greatest gift?”

Very shortly after that I got back into this world. I had been operating with part of me still hanging out in another dimension. Then I pulled out of it completely and got back into the so-called “real” world. I had my attaché case and my snappy blue sport coat with the grey slacks, and I was making decisions and taking phone calls and pushing paper around and doing, doing, doing.

I was back in my power place. And that went on until my whole life came crashing down. It was as if God was saying, “Okay, you didn’t get it the other way, so how about this? How about you have a car accident and break your neck, but don’t die and, instead, lose everything you think you’re working for? How about you lose your house, your car, every penny you’ve got, lose your marriage, lose access to your children? How about you sitting in a homeless park – not for a week or a month, but for a year – and come to your senses?”

So I had everything taken from me. Everything. I had two pairs of jeans, two shirts, a pair of shoes, three pairs of socks and a knapsack. That’s it. Not even a dollar to get through the day. Nothing. I was reduced to asking people if they could please help me with some spare change.

It was after I finally healed enough to find a job I could do, and worked my way back into a little cottage behind someone’s house, that I had my Conversations with God experience. I realize now that this was my road back to some semblance of that place I had visited on 8 January 1980.

I created a way for me to access a level of connection with the Divine, which we can all access. My lasting hope is that God’s blessings will be experienced by every living person through being shared with every living person by every living person. That is why I share my out-of-body experience so publicly, and that’s why I have shared my conversations with God with the world.