THE theme of Book 1 is to convey that God keeps communicating with us all the time. The anthem illustrates this by citing his own experience when his son fell seriously ill and seeing him lie haplessly on the bed, he realised ?as I looked at my son that I could have lost him. Right then. Right there.? When the son replied that he was alright and started recovering that the author rushed upstairs to his bedroom and cried out in relief, ?Thank you, God. God; thank you for showing me the way. For giving me the strength.?
Then began his regular conversations with God that made him come to the conclusions some of which are given in his books. He says that life is meant to be experiential. There is enough in life that is observational and there is more than enough that is referential. This book seeks to be something different than that; it seeks to take the reader in his or her own experience. It suggests four ways in which one may interact with it: special questions, exercises, assignments, and experiments. In this way this guide book invites to do stuff, not just read stuff. The ?stuff? it invites you to do may be done alone or as a group with equal values.
Questions to jog the mind appear throughout the book in boxes. Special inquiries offer additional mental explorations to undertake while reading the main text. For instance, the main text says that any feeling is the language of the soul. Most of our adult lives are spent learning to trust our feelings. This is not surprising since most of our growing up years are spent learning to ignore them. Children are told that their feelings are not ?good?, that it is not ?good? to be angry and to show it or to feel jealous or scared or excited and so on. This is not ?good?, this is not good, this is not good. Here the author asks the question: ?Can you explain the difference between feeling and emotions??
The exercises in the book are processes that you undertake while reading a chapter or section. That is, you read a bit, do the exercise, read a bit more, do another exercise and so on. These exercises seek to bring the text alive in an experiential way.
The assignments or experiments are mini projects or ?lab work? which have to be completed after finishing a section or chapter. They are for those times between readings when you put the book down. There are 34 concepts around which the book revolves and these include:
- God is communicating with us all the time.
- Feeling is the language of the soul.
- Thought, word and deed are the three levels of creation.
- There are only two sponsoring thoughts: fear and love.
- In the absence of that which you are not, that which you are?is not.
- There is no such thing as ?Right? and ?Wrong?.
- What you fear, you attract.
- God is Life and the Stuff Life is.
- God needs nothing and therefore requires nothing from us.
- God talks to everyone.
- Human beings consist of three distinct energies.
- All you see in your world is the outcome of your idea about it.
- All conditions are temporary. Nothing stays the same and which way a thing changes depends on us.
- The purpose of the soul is evolution.
- You are who you think you are. You are your own thoughts about yourself, made manifest.
- Life is not a process of discovery; it is a process of creation.
- God commands no one.
- What you resist persists.
- Passion is not expectation, and expectation is not passion.
- Suffering is not necessary.
- You need no God.
- All relationships are holy.
- Your purpose in life is not to decide and to declare; it is to express and to experience who you really are?this is the purpose of all of life and that is evolution.
- Relationships work best when you always do what is best for you.
- You are a messenger.
- You are the truth.
- God'slove is unconditional.
- There is enough.
- You are a human being.
- To want something is to push it away from you.
- Your life is not about your body.
- Your health is your creation.
- You are part of the body of God.
- All of life is a conversation with God.
In other words, this book of the trilogy explores questions basic to the individual human experience and gently points the way to sanity. To quote Neale Donald Walsch, this book is an invitation ?to bring into existence a world in which more and more people have the opportunity to experience God'spresence and to understand the virtually unlimited opportunities of life on this planet.?
In his Book 2, the author points out that we are living in a different world today. Things are not the way they were years ago. The events of the past several years, including the rise and fall of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, the continuing and seemingly unending conflict between Israelis and Palestinians in the Middle East, the terrorist activities throughout the world and the 9/11 attacks in the United States, the military intervention in Iraq and its aftermath??make it clear that our species has reached the furthest edge of sustainable possibility. In short, ?we can'tkeep going on like this,? says the author. He is justified in saying that we can'tkeep creating our collective experience in a ?power over? rather than a ?power with? paradigm and ?we can'tkeep trying to solve the problems and end the conflicts which such a paradigm inevitably produces, using violence and killing as our chief means.? He asks painfully, hitting out at us, ?Why is it that after all these years?nay, after all these millennia?the human race has still not found the key to living together in peace and harmony??
So what he proposes is nothing less than a paradigm shift to change the political and spiritual constructs that human beings have manifested on this planet. He says, ?Now it is the time to reclaim yourself. Now is the time to see yourself again as who you really are, and thus, render yourself visible again. For, when you, and your true relationship with God, become visible, then we are indivisible. And nothing will ever divide us again.?
His is a true message to mankind torn asunder by certain powers that be.
Book 3, which is a continuation of what was begun in the Book 1 dealing with ?universal truths of the highest order, and the challenges and opportunities of the soul,? continues with the dialogue carried out in Book 2 and includes more about the nature of God, about love and fear, about who we are and who we may become and about the evolution of the human species that is about to take its place in the universal neighbourhood. He carries out a dialogue on the culture, philosophy and spirituality of highly evolved beings (some of whom the author calls ?aliens? or ETs?) in other realms of the universe, and how they have learned to view life, love and the pursuit of happiness.
The author is convinced that if we continue believing what most of the human race presently believes about God and about life, the human species would alter the course of its history in ?nightmarish ways, perhaps ultimately producing its own self-destruction.? He feels this is because our current beliefs about God and about life are not life-sustaining. That which is life-sustaining would automatically produce peace, joy and harmony.
This book is meant for persons who are disturbed in life and at what his happening in the world around them.
(Jaico Publishing House, 121 Mah
