Joseph George Caldwell - On Neale Donald Walsch, Conversations with God, and the New Revelations

ON NEALE DONALD WALSCH,CONVERSATIONS WITH GOD, AND THE NEW REVELATIONS

Joseph George Caldwell

Copyright 2014 Joseph GeorgeCaldwell

Published by Joseph George Caldwell atSmashwords

2014 Edition, Revised September 19,2014

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On Neale Donald Walsch, Conversations with God,and the New Revelations

In his book, The New Revelations, NealeDonald Walsch asserts his belief that the current world crisis maybe solved only by spiritual means. I have a similar, but notidentical belief: I believe that the world crisis can be andwill be solved by spiritual means, but I would not go so faras to state that it may be solved only by spiritual means.Walsch and I also differ in our views concerning the nature of thecrisis. The purpose of this article is to compare Walschs views inthis matter to my own. The reason why this comparison isinteresting is that Walsch arrived at his position and views in away quite different from the way that I arrived at mine byrevelation, in contrast to reason, and yet some of theconclusions are similar. (This article was first published on 12April 2003.)

Those of you who have read Can AmericaSurvive? and my other writings on the subject of the presentand future state of the world (posted at Internet website http://www.foundationwebsite.org )know that I have always believed, and stated that I believed, thatthe solution to the crisis facing the world today (environmentaldestruction and mass species extinction caused by humanoverpopulation) will be spiritual in nature. In my early writings,I used the term religious more than spiritual, and I did notdistinguish very much between religion and spirituality. Today, Ido distinguish to a greater degree between the two terms, and I ammore careful to use the more appropriate term, depending on thecontext.

I started writing Can America Survive?in 1993 or 1994, when I was working in Malawi, and I finished it,after long delays and two complete rewrites, in 1998. In 2000, mywife and I were vacationing in South Africa Cape Town, the winecountry, and the Garden Route. Near the end of our vacation, werented a cottage near Cape Town and then a friends cottage on theIndian Ocean in the village of Plettenberg Bay. It was there, inthose two cottages, that I wrote up a theology relating tooverpopulation and planetary management (the Church ofNature).

While on vacation, my wife enjoys shopping, andthere are quite a few interesting shops in Plettenberg Bay. Ialmost always accompany her when she shops in resorts that wevisit, and at one point we were in a shop owned and operated by aretired businessman and his wife. He had previously owned a majorSouth African store chain I no longer remember the name soldit, and retired to Plett Bay. While my wife looked at clothes, theman and I engaged in conversation. I told him of my interests andbeliefs, and he told me that he had recently read a veryinteresting series of books that he was sure that I would enjoy. Icopied down the authors name and the title of the books NealeDonald Walsch and Conversations with God, Books 1-3. (Thepublication dates for these three volumes are 1995, 1997 and 1998.I later learned that the author, Neale Donald Walsch, early in hiscareer, was a radio produced in Duncan, South Carolina. Duncan is asuburb of Spartanburg, South Carolina, where I attended highschool, and now live.)

Now, I had never heard of the author or thebooks, but the storeowner seemed so enthusiastic about them that,after leaving his shop, I walked up the street to a local bookstoreand purchased them. I did find them interesting, but they weresimilar to other New Age / New Spirituality material that I hadread, and they certainly did not change my point of view relativeto religion or spirituality, or anything else. They ended upsomewhere on one of my bookshelves in Clearwater, Florida, and thatis the last that I thought of either Neale Donald Walsch or hisConversations with God.

Until about a month ago. Each morning, I checkthe SynEarth Community of Minds website ( http://solutions.synearth.net )to read the interesting articles that Dr. Timothy Wilken poststhere. On February 14, he posted a short article about E. O.Wilson, the author of Sociobiology. Now, I had purchasedthat book when it first came out, and I am interested in Wilsonsviews, and so I happened to print out the article. I usually do notdo this, since the SynEarth articles are long and the printer thatI have with me here at my home in Lusaka is a small inkjet printerthat is stressed just to handle e-mails. I read the article, andat the end of it was another article, Humanitys Team, by NealeDonald Walsch. Now, I read a lot of books, and I buy a lot ofbooks, and the name did not ring a bell, even though I had readthree of his books a few years ago. Nevertheless, I skimmed thefirst few paragraphs of the article, and I was interested to notethat the author set forth the view that the worlds current seriousproblems would not be solved by economic or political or militarymeans, but by spiritual means. Since Walschs view was similar insome respects to my own, I made a mental note of the authors name,but, once again, that was that. At the time, I did not bother toread the entire article.

About a month ago, my wife left for a one-monthvisit with her daughters in Arizona. It was a spur-of-the-momenttrip. We had just returned from a five-week vacation in SouthAmerica, and neither of us was thinking in terms of another longairplane trip this soon. But one of her daughters was changing jobsand had some free time, and so it was an excellent time to go. Itwas a Thursday morning that we discussed this her daughter hade-mailed us the day before that she had accepted the new job andmy wife was on the airplane to the US the next Monday morning(March 3, 2003).

Well, I did not have any personal projectsunder way at the time, so that following Saturday I visited theManda Hill Shopping Mall to check out the bookstores for readingmaterial (Lusaka, Zambia, has just one shopping mall, and it hasthe towns two book stores). And there I saw, in the personaldevelopment section, a book by you guessed it Neale DonaldWalsch. Now it was not one of the Conversations of God(CWG) titles (Books 1-3) that I had read earlier; itwas a new title, The New Revelations: A Conversation withGod, written in 2002. I purchased it, and read it thatweekend.

Early the following week, I was in a healthsalon that sold New Age books, and I was surprised to see Books 2and 3 of the CWG series. I purchased them and reread themover the next couple of days. I noted from the Introduction tothese copies that the CWG books have sold incredibly well millions of copies, translation into 24 languages, and many monthson bestseller lists. (In case you are wondering how I can be soout-of-touch as to not be aware of CWGs best-seller status,I shall mention that I have worked and lived overseas inthird-world countries for much of the past ten years. I am not upon best-seller lists, and have little access to large bookstores orlibraries. In Lilongwe, there was no bookstore. In Gaborone, one.In Lusaka, where I now live, there are two.)

As I mentioned, the purpose to this article isto relate Walschs views on the current world crisis to my own. Iam doing this because I find it rather interesting that, althoughthe methodologies employed to arrive at these views are quitedifferent, some of the views are quite similar. Walschs approachis revelatory. He sits and waits (sometimes for years) forinspiration, and when he gets a thought, he writes it down. Myapproach is to use reason and logic and systems engineering. I am ascientist (a mathematical statistician, to be exact) and a systemsand software engineer. My approach to solving a problem either aclients problem or a personal problem is to make observations,describe and analyze the problem, develop a mathematical model ofthe situation (a simplified representation showing major entitiesand relationships, to assist understanding), synthesize alternativesolutions, compare them, and select the solution that seems bestoverall. As you can see, these two approaches are quite different,yet they have reached conclusions that are in some respectssimilar. To me, this is interesting, and that is why I decided towrite this article.