Tomorrow's God: Our Greatest Spiritual Challenge - Hardcover

Walsch, Neale Donald

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0743456955 ISBN 13: 9780743456951

Publisher: Atria Books / Simon & Schuster, 2004

Synopsis

Furnishing an outline for a new form of spirituality, the best-selling author of Conversations with God creates a question-and-answer dialogue between the author and God in which he describes a new form of spirituality that will enhance each individual's life and discusses such topics as sex, relationships, politics, and other timely topics. 100,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

Neale Donald Walsch devotes his

time to sharing the messages of his books through writing, lecturing, and facilitating spiritual renewal retreats. The creator of the School of the New Spirituality and founder of The Group of 1000, a nonprofit organization supporting global spiritual awakening, he lives in Ashland, Oregon, and may be contacted through www.nealedonaldwalsch.com.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1: The Greatest Blasphemy

We need a new God.

I know.

No. I'm serious. We need a new God. The old God isn't working anymore.

The old one never worked.

Some people think it did.

They were not looking at the world around them.

They weren't?

Not honestly. Not comprehensively. They were seeing only what they wanted to see.

They were not seeing the cruelty and the fighting and the killing that was going on in God's name. They were not seeing the separation and the oppression and the fear and the utter dysfunction. Or, worse yet, they were seeing it and they played into it. They used it as a means of controlling the people.

In truth the old God, Yesterday's God, might have made individual lives work here and there -- perhaps even many of them -- but that God was never able to create a just society or a joyful, harmonious civilization, to say nothing of a peaceful world. And that God can't do that even today.

Even today, with all your powers of instant communication and total connection and advanced comprehension and increased awareness and sophisticated technology and marvelous miracles, you can't produce the simple, humble experience for which humanity has yearned from the beginning of time.

You can't produce peace.

I know.

You can't produce lasting joy.

I know.

And the God in whom you believe can't, either.

Why? Why? Why can't all the best efforts of humanity and all the help we've begged for, and received, from God, produce this result?

Because the God in whom you believe isn't real. The God in whom you believe is made up. It is a God you created out of thin air, having nothing to do with Ultimate Reality.

Well, there's a challenging thought. That's just about the greatest blasphemy.

All great truth begins as blasphemy.

The time to challenge your most sacred beliefs is at hand. If you don't challenge your beliefs soon, your beliefs are going to challenge you.

This book is meant to be challenging.

This book is meant to save the world.

Will it?

That's up to the world.

Why? Why isn't it up to you? If you're God, why isn't it up to you?

Because my function is not to save the world. My function is to create it.

And after you create it, you don't care what happens?

I care what happens as much as you do.

No, you don't. If you care what happens as much as we do, you won't let the world destroy itself.

You mean if I care what happens more than you do. If I care what happens as much as you do, I will let the world destroy itself, because that's exactly what you are doing.

Since I care only as much as you do, the world in which you live may very well be destroyed. At the very least, life as you now know it could be irrevocably altered. And if that's what happens, I will let it happen.

Why? Why won't you do something to stop it?

Because you won't.

We can't. You can. You're God. You can do what humans cannot.

Your statement is inaccurate. I can, and YOU can. But I will not, unless you do.

Why not? What kind of a God are you?

The best kind there is. The only kind there is. The kind who gives you free will, and who will never, ever interfere with that.

Not even to save us from ourselves?

If I saved you from yourselves, then you wouldn't BE "yourselves," but only a slave to me. You would not have free will. Your will would be free only until you did something that I did not want you to do. Then, I would stop the exercise of your free will and make you do what I want you to do.

Of course you would. If you were half the God that humans think you are, you would stop us from destroying ourselves. You would do what is best for us. You would make us do what is best for us.

By whose assessment, and by whose definition?

What?

"Best" by whose assessment, and "us" by whose definition?

By yours. By your assessment. By your definition. You would define what is meant by the term "us," you would decide what is "best" for us, and then you would make what is "best" happen for all of "us." We depend on you to do this. That's what God is for.

Really? Is that what you think?

Copyright © 2004 by Neale Donald Walsch

Introduction

This book contains the most exciting news of the past 100 years: Humanity is about to create a new form of spirituality on the earth.

Our civilization stands at the brink of its greatest adventure and its most extraordinary achievement. I want you to commit now to finding your place in that creation.

This book is a look at Tomorrow's God. It is about humanity's future -- but not some far-off distant vision. Rather, it includes a startling prediction for the next thirty years. It is about our near future, and the role that humans will play in creating it. It is about the role that you can play in creating it. It is about what will happen and how it will happen.

Like the other With God books, this text takes the form of a conversation with God, but it is not necessary to believe that I actually had such a conversation in order to benefit from it. All that is necessary is that you have an open mind -- and this book even tells you how to achieve that.

But now, fair warning. You will find information in this book that is not new to you. Very little here cannot be found, cumulatively, in the sacred writings of all the world's wisdom traditions. Very little has not already been spoken by all of humanity's master teachers. Very little, for that matter, has not appeared in my own previous writing.

What, then, would be the reason to read this book? I suggest that it is not that it contains wisdom that we have not been given, but that it repeats wisdom to which we have not been listening.

And the problem is, if we do not listen to this wisdom now, we may not have many more chances to have it repeated.

We are at the edge, you see. We have gone as far as we can go in the direction we have been taking. We need now to change course if we wish to preserve life as we know it on this planet.

Humanity cannot afford any more temper tantrums. We have found a way to pack the end of the world into a briefcase. We can seal the death of civilized society in a spore-filled envelope and simply mail it off. Talk about our fate being sealed...

We have trained ourselves to be able to fly airplanes into buildings, killing thousands of people, without flinching. We have talked ourselves into believing that preemptive strike -- shooting first and asking questions later -- is a perfectly acceptable means of conducting foreign policy.

We have decided that to have dominion over the earth means to destroy it -- and to pretend that we don't know we are doing it. We have concluded that altering the basic genetic structure of our food is the way to improve it. We have chosen to allow 20 percent of the world's people to receive 80 percent of the world's income, and to call this the good life.

We are, in short, confused. Yet there is a way out of this confusion, and you can play a role in taking us there. This book talks about your role. It says that the next thirty years will see a paradigm shift within humanity so positive, so upheaving, so reshaping, so utterly inside-outing, that it will alter the course of human history. And it invites you -- yes, you, the person now holding this book -- to join in this reinventing of humanity.

That is why this book has been written. It is an invitation directly from God to you.

Think about this.

Now think about how this book came into your hands. How did you come to hear about it? Or, if you never knew about it until just this minute, how did it attract your attention? What made you pick this up and start reading it? For that matter, what makes you keep reading it?

Do you think this is all happening by chance?

It is not. There is no such thing as "chance." The universe does nothing by accident. This book has come to you to tell you that you can change the course of human history.

You.

Not only the people who run governments or own corporations or lead movements or write books or are influential for some other reason. Not only those people.

You.

You can change the course of human history.

This is not an exaggeration. Please believe me. This is not an exaggeration.

This book calls you to that singular undertaking. It invites you now to internalize the wisdom of both ancient and contemporary masters found here; not merely to hear it again, but now to receive it, to take it in, to absorb it at the deepest level of your being, until it becomes the essence of who you are at the cellular level.

Life will be inviting you in the years immediately ahead to act and respond from this level of Deep Knowing. What you place there now in terms of the things you profoundly believe, and how far you spread the messages found here through the living of your life in a new way, will make all the difference in the world to the world.

Yet do not feel that you have to do all this by yourself. Perhaps the most uplifting and exciting part of the message that is brought to us in this book is that now, none of us have to "go it alone." We have teammates, and we can join them and call them to us, to rally around humanity's greatest cause: changing ourselves and changing our world.

I said earlier that you might not find much that is new in this book. I was wrong.

You might find...a New You.

And a way to create a New World.

Copyright © 2004 by Neale Donald Walsch

About this edition

• Publisher: Atria Books / Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0743456955
• ISBN 13: 9780743456951
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 406