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Portrait of Neale Donald Walsch (detail), author of 'conversations with God' (left). Drawn by © Natalie Dekel, 2010.

Neale Donald Walsch, author of ‘Coversations with God’. Drawn from photograph by © Natalie Dekel.

Gil: If we look at the level of the soul who chooses pain or violence – can the soul know what pain means to the physical body? Can it understand what it is like to be in pain?

Neale: I think the soul understands everything. The soul understands every aspect of the human experience. It does not feel pain but it knows what pain is about. Just as if you would watch a movie and see something violent on the movie screen. You don’t feel pain, obviously; you’re watching a picture, but you know about it. You understand it, and you know what it must feel like. So there is no soul that doesn’t know what it feels like to be human in every aspect; the joy, the pain, the sorrow, the sadness, the happiness, the celebration. All souls understand what everything feels like even though they don’t feel it themselves any more than you feel it when you watch a movie.

So, the soul ‘understands’ but does not feel it. Isn’t that a problem?

No; because the soul’s understanding is much deeper than the understanding of human beings. The human journey is one of getting to a place where you understand what the soul understands in the way that the soul understands it… That’s the process that we call evolution. The soul understands full well every aspect of human life; not from a distant, apathetic, insensitive position but just the opposite – from a very present, totally involved completely aware place in our lives.

Can a soul travel to different places and then come back to the same physical body?

I believe so. I believe that the soul can leave – it can and does leave the physical body lying inert as it were, somewhere; on a bed or on the ground or wherever the body is lying. You see, I think that it’s important to understand that the soul is far more facile; that it is far more capable of certain things than we give it credit for. For instance, it can divide itself. Or to put it another way, part of the soul – let’s use human mathematical terms – 90% of the soul can leave the body and visit other places and go to other realms even, and travel to other dimensions. This still leaving 10% (to use human mathematical formulas) portion of itself behind, sufficient to continue energizing through sleep the human body.

See, we tend to think in simplistic terms. We think, ‘Oh my gosh, if the soul leaves then there’s the body sitting there with nothing! It’s just a soulless body.’ Human beings tend to think in simplistic terms. It’s either black or it’s white. It’s either there or it’s not there. Human beings tend to think in very primitive terms. In fact, the universe is not that primitive. The universe is quite complex and quite sophisticated.

Therefore, when you asked the question ‘is it possible for the soul to leave the body and travel elsewhere’, the answer is yes. But the real question you want to ask is: ‘is it possible for a soul to leave a body and still be with the body?’ The answer is yes as well.

Tree of Life - photo by © Gil Dekel

It is possible for a soul to leave a body and still remain within the body. (Photo: ‘Tree of Life’ – by © Gil Dekel)

Could the soul ‘visit’ the consciousness of other living forms? Not the consciousness of human beings, rather the consciousness of other forms of beings?

It can meld with and join with but not without the invitation and the agreement of those other living forms. No aspect of life can have anything done to it that it does not choose. Therefore, there are no such things as victims. There are no villains in the world. So is it possible for a soul to meld with another soul? Yes, but not without the other soul’s complete permission, total awareness and absolute acceptance and understanding.

This is free will.

Yes. Nothing can happen to any individual soul, any ‘individuation’ of divinity, that it does not agree with and allow. Each individuation of divinity has the same level of free will as divinity itself – as God himself.

We all have free will, and everything that is happening to us is happening in a way that demonstrates our agreement with it. It couldn’t occur in our life if we didn’t agree with it.

At a certain time the mind becomes large enough in its awareness to understand the perspective of the soul. But the objective of the human mind, which has not grown to that place, is to in fact grow, to expand its consciousness so that it achieves the awareness of the soul.

In the limited perspective of the minds of most people, we cannot understand why certain things are happening to us and it looks as if we deny our free will. The absence of free will is an illusion. Nothing can occur in human life with which the soul does not agree and allow and permit, and even if it’s on a co-creative level, create. So when I agree with everything that’s occurring, the opposition energy would mix with the energy of the experience I’m having and we make it even more profound. When we oppose something we empower it. As ‘Conversations with God’ said: if you resist, it persists. Only what you look at and see in its ultimate reality disappears. That is, it ceases to have its illusory form of power.

So I’ve learned in my life that what’s going on is going on because I agree with it. Then the only question is, why would I agree with it? And the answer is always – to evolve; to bring me some remembrance; to expand my awareness about yet one more thing in the eternally complex and incredibly sophisticated experience that we call life itself.

Why did I agree to such a thing as that which is happening now? Because it is through this experience that I will evolve to the next level; the next level of expression of who I really am. That’s my intention and purpose in being alive in the human body. For that very reason I find it very peace-producing to agree with whatever is happening.

That doesn’t mean I don’t seek to change it. But the fastest way to change something is to agree with it, not to oppose it. What you oppose opposes you. What you resist persists. Only what you agree with can you change because when you agree with it, you give yourself an awareness that it’s through your power that it was created to begin with. Then you become powerful once again. Otherwise, you will think you’re powerless. But if you understand that you created it to begin with and co-created it with those around you, then you find yourself once again in the driver’s seat. You find yourself once again in a place of power. You say, ‘Oh! That which I created, I can un-create’ and that’s an entirely different place of mind. But if you think that you cannot un-create it because it was created by someone else and you are the victim, you’ll remain victimized forever…

How do you apply this theory in daily life? When I try to do something and it does not work once… does not work twice… deep inside I may know it’s my ‘Angel’ telling me: ‘It is you creating this situation.’ But how do you agree with this? It does not work when I want it to work… How can I agree with it not working?

[Laughs…] By noticing that it doesn’t work, and by noticing that you are creating it not working. By simply sitting down and contemplating, ‘Why am I creating this? I see it not working.’ So, I’m telling myself that it will work another way… There’s another way that it was intended to be. I’m telling myself that maybe my highest evolutionary progress is not along this path. Maybe I should look at why I’m insisting that I want something that’s not working this way. Human life gives us opportunity to explore our own desires. Why do I want this when it’s not working?

Like you, all of us listen to our better angels and we finally say, ‘Okay, I get it. This is not supposed to be because it’s not to the highest benefit of my evolution right now so I’m going to let this go.’ We say, ‘Let go and let God.’

New Forest pony – by © Rob Smith

“Human life gives us opportunity to explore our own desires.” (Photo: ‘New Forest pony’ – by © Rob Smith)

I say in the book ‘Happier than God’, “Do not oppose – compose.” That is, when things oppose you, compose yourself. When I say ‘compose yourself’ I really mean in the full sense of the word to compose yourself. Not just to become peaceful but to compose like a person composes music. Re-create yourself anew, and create a new composition, like a musical composer would. That’s what a composer does. He sits down and writes a new melody.

So when something opposes me, I don’t oppose it, I compose myself. That is, I create myself anew in another version that is not in opposition to what is occurring. I allow myself to embrace what is occurring as perfect, and then to explore, what is it that I want to experience of myself, right here, right now?

I would not pretend with you that this is easy. I’m a human being like everybody else. When things oppose me, I sometimes get frustrated. I become angry and I lose touch with all that I’ve just said to you [laughs…] Not usually for very long. After a little while, after I get my negative emotions out, I usually go for a walk, sit quietly or just take a deep breath. I can usually get back to a higher awareness. I have to move out of my reptilian brain, past and through my mammalian brain back up to my human brain. It’s a process of raising my consciousness from the reptilian reaction which is simply a coded response, a cellular memory, to my mammalian reaction which involves the unfettered expression of emotion, to the human reaction. The human reaction allows me to be circumspect and to reflect upon my use of emotion and who I choose to be in relationship to what’s occurring outside of me.

So a snake will have a reptilian reaction. You can’t make a snake angry… Reptiles don’t get angry. They don’t get happy, either. They just are – they simply are, and their responses are entirely encoded in their cellular memory. On the other hand, mammals can become angry. Trust me on this; you don’t want to make a lion angry. So a mammal can become angry but mammals don’t reflect upon themselves. A lion doesn’t roar then sit back and wonder if he over-reacted… ‘I wonder, was that roar too big for me for the moment? Do you think I over-reacted?’ A lion doesn’t say to himself, ‘I wonder what the other lions will think?’

But human beings have the ability to react, to reflect upon themselves. And if that human being is at a level of mastery, they can reflect upon themselves before they act; before they say anything, before they indulge their emotional response. They therefore in that way can control their emotions. They can far more powerfully produce the outcomes, the experiences and the manifestations in their life that they consciously choose, rather than unconsciously produce…

My Spirit Guide told me something very confusing about anger… He said that when we are angry and we cry out loud, we actually raise the vibrations, and in that way we ‘reach’ the spiritual realm and the Angels much quicker. It’s basically a shortcut to get attention, like a baby – when he cries, he gets immediate attention from his parents…

Anger is one of the five natural emotions. Your Spirit Guide is absolutely right. It’s the suppression of anger or the misdirection of anger that we’re talking about that produces negative outcomes. Anger which is simply the uprising of fundamental basic emotion is very powerful and can produce wonderful outcomes. It clears out the energy field. But we have to be very careful how we use anger because anger is a powerful emotion and can produce outcomes that we don’t intend.

Anger is like fire. It can be powerful and change our lives for the better or if we’re not careful with how we use it, it can burn everything down.

What about the drama of life? It is an illusion, yet it becomes true to us.

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19 Sep 2010.

Text © Gil Dekel and Neale Donald Walsch. Images © Natalie and Gil Dekel.
Interview conducted over the phone on 30 Aug 2010. Neale in based in the USA. Gil is based in The UK. Neale Donald Walsch website.