| Neale Donald Walsch | |
|---|---|
| Born | September 10, 1943 Milwaukee, Wisconsin, United States |
| Nationality | American |
| Occupation | Author |
| Known for | Conversations with God |
Neale Donald Walsch (b. September 10, 1943), is an American author of the series Conversations with God. The nine books in the complete series are Conversations With God (books 1-3), Friendship with God, Communion with God, Conversations With God for Teens, The New Revelations, Tomorrow's God, and Home with God: In a Life That Never Ends.
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Walsch was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on September 10, 1943, and brought up as a Roman Catholic by a family who encouraged his quest for spiritual truth. He informally studied comparative theology for many years. He says his books are not channelled, but rather that they are inspired by God and that they can help a person relate to Him from a modern perspective. The God in his books, for example, says that "there is nothing you have to do." Walsch believes in a panentheistic God, who tries to communicate Himself as being unselfish. Walsch's vision is an expansion and unification of all present theologies to render them more relevant to our present day and time. He created Humanity's Team as a spiritual movement whose purpose is to communicate and implement his New Spirituality beliefs, particularly that we are all one with God and one with life, in a shared global state of being.[1] This state can be achieved, Walsch argues, by the act of helping other people: "The fastest way to apply anything in your life is to help others to apply it... The fastest way to use any wisdom that resides in your soul is to help someone else... Because we are all one.".[2] Walsch has nine children, the youngest of whom is named Dylan Freechild.
Before writing the Conversations With God series Walsch worked variously as a radio station program director, newspaper managing editor, and in marketing and public relations. In the early 1990s he suffered a series of crushing blows — a fire that destroyed all of his belongings, the break-up of his marriage, a car accident that left him with a broken neck. Once recovered but alone and unemployed, Walsch was forced to live in a tent in Jackson Hot Springs, just outside Ashland, Oregon, collecting and recycling aluminium cans in order to eat. At the time, Walsch thought his life had come to an end. Despondent, Walsch began his writings after working his way out of homelessness and following a stint as a radio talk show host.[3]
In 2003, the film Indigo, written by Neale Donald Walsch and James Twyman and directed by Stephen Simon was released. It chronicled the fictional story of the redemption of a grandfather, played by Walsch, through his granddaughter, who is an indigo child.
Conversations With God: The Movie opened in U.S. theaters Friday, October 27, 2006 and in Canada, November 10. The film was released on DVD February 27, 2007.[4]
Walsch was accused of plagiarism for a six-paragraph entry in one of the daily postings on his blog during 2008, this one during the Christmas season, when he published an item titled "Upside down, or right side up?" on Beliefnet.com.[5][6] Walsch's entry purported to tell the tale of a miraculous appearance of the words "Christ Was Love" during the rehearsal of his son's school Christmas pageant; but his article was almost identical to an article published 10 years previously by Candy Chand in a spiritual magazine Clarity and spread over the internet in places like the Heartwarmers website, down to the name of the son mentioned in both articles, Nicholas - as both authors have a son named Nicholas.[5][7] Walsch publicly apologized, saying that he must have erroneously internalized the story as his own over the years, a claim the original author said she doesn't believe.[5] The article was subsequently pulled from Beliefnet.com, and Walsch voluntarily withdrew from the roster of authors because of his error.[5] Walsch explained that he found the anecdote in old computer files from years earlier, saw his son's name in the copy and was fully convinced that the history had really happened to him and that he had just forgotten it, but "remembered" when he saw the anecdote in his file. He cited it as a classic case of false memory, and said he had been repeating the anecdote as his own in many speeches over the years, adding that he was "chagrined and astonished that my mind could play such a trick on me".[5]
There is also the issue that Walsch was reportedly told by God in Conversations with God Book 1 that he would write only 3 books. His teaching didn't stop there, in that Walsch later wrote subsequent books using the same voice of God that revealed itself to him in the first books.