This is an extraordinary book. I say that as someone who has had very little to do with writing it. All I did, really, was “show up,” ask a few questions, then take dictation.
That is all I have done since 1992, when this conversation with God began. It was in that year that, deeply depressed, I called out in anguish: What does it take to make life work? And what have I done to deserve a life of such continuing struggle?
I wrote these questions out on a yellow legal pad, in an an-gry letter to God. To my shock and surprise, God answered. The reply came in the form of words whispered in my mind by a Voiceless Voice. I was fortunate enough to have written those words down.
I have done so now for over six years. And since I was told that this private dialogue would one day become a book, I sent the first batch of those words to a publisher late in 1994. They were on store shelves seven months later. At this writing that book has been on the New York Times bestseller list for 91 weeks.
The second installment in the dialogue became a bestseller as well, also making the Times list for multiple months. And now, here is the third and final portion of this extraordinary conversation.
This book took four years to write. It did not come easily. The gaps between the moments of inspiration were enormous, more than once stretching across half-a-year canyons. The words in the first book were dictated over the course of one year. The second book came through in just a little over that much time. But this final segment has had to be written with me in the public spotlight. Everywhere I’ve gone since 1996 all I’ve heard has been, “When’s Book 3 coming out?”, “Where’s Book 3?”, “When can we expect Book 3?”
You can imagine what this did to me, and what impact this had on the process of bringing it through. I might as well have been making love on the pitcher’s mound in Yankee Stadium.
Actually, that act would have afforded me more privacy. In the writing of Book 3, every time I picked up a pen I felt I had five million people watching, waiting, hanging on every word.
All of this is not to congratulate myself on completing this work, but rather, to simply explain why it has taken so long. My moments of mental, spiritual, and physical solitude have been, over these most recent years, very few and far between.
I began this book in the spring of 1994, and all of the early narrative was written in that time period. It then leaps across many months, ultimately jumping forward a full year, and fi-nally culminating with closing chapters written in the spring and summer of 1998.
On this much you can depend: this book was not forced out, by any means. The inspiration either came cleanly, or I simply put the pen down and refused to write—in one case for well over 14 months. I was determined to produce no book at all, if it was to be a choice between that and a book I had to produce because I said I would. While this made my publisher a bit nerv-ous, it went a long way toward giving me confidence in what was coming through, however long it was taking. I present it now, with confidence, to you. This book sums up the teachings in the first two installments of this trilogy. It then carries them forward to their logical, and breathtaking, conclusion.
If you’ve read the Foreword to either of the first two install-ments, you know that in each case I was a little bit apprehensive. Scared, actually, of what the response to those writings might be. I am not scared now. I have no fear whatsoever about Book 3. I know that it will touch many of those who read it with its insight and its truth, its warmth and its love.
I believe this to be sacred spiritual material. I see now that this is true of the entire trilogy, and that these books will be read and studied for decades, even for generations. Perhaps, for centuries. Because, taken together, the trilogy covers an amazing range of topics, from how to make relationships work to the nature of ultimate reality and the cosmology of the uni-verse, and includes observations on life, death, romance, mar-riage, sex, parenting, health, education, economics, politics, spirituality and religion, life work and right livelihood, physics, time, social mores and customs, the process of creation, our re-lationship with God, ecology, crime and punishment, life in
highly evolved societies of the cosmos, right and wrong, cul-tural myths and cultural ethics, the soul, soul partners, the na-ture of genuine love, and the way to glorious expression of the part of ourselves that knows Divinity as our natural heritage.
My prayer is that you will receive benefit from this work. Blessed be.
Neale Donald Walsch
September, 1998