Inside the cover flap of one of the top five books now on the New York Times non-fiction bestseller list, you will find this challenging proposition:

"Suppose you could ask God the most puzzling questions about existence — questions about love and faith, life and death, good and evil. Suppose God provided clear, understandable answers. It happened to Neale Donald Walsch. It can happen to you."

A former print journalist and radio talk-show host, Walsch is now the celebrated author of Conversations With God: An Uncommon Dialogue, Book I, (Putnam) which has sold over 460,000 copies. Not unremarkably, this publishing phenomenon has gone relatively unnoticed in the mainstream press. In a recent telephone interview, Walsch said that while he speaks and leads workshops all over the country, he does so primarily at the invitation of small groups and churches. It is fitting, then, that Walsch will make his first appearance in Dallas as the honored guest of The Eclectic Viewpoint, at the Unity Church of Dallas.

Walsch is no stranger to the New Thought traditions of the Unity Church, having formerly worked on the staff of San Diego-based metaphysical teacher and author Terry Cole Whitaker, as well as the staff of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross (author of On Death and Dying). By his own account, however, he never expected to be publishing the hundreds of pages of yellow legal pad paper on which he had, beginning in 1992, written down spontaneous, unexpected answers to the most pressing questions in his life.

"At 49 I realized my life was a mess," he says. "My relationships weren't working. My health wasn't good. I got fired from my job. I woke up one night just angry, really frustrated, and began writing an angry letter to God, asking what was going on. Why can't I get it right? How can I make my life work?"

At a certain point in writing that letter, his hand stopped, as though suspended above the page. Amazed, Walsch read as his hand wrote, "Do you really want an answer to these questions, or are you just venting?"

He rejoined that he was "sure as hell" that he wanted answers, to which the pen responded by asking if he'd like to be "sure as heaven" about the things he believed he knew. With that simple exchange, Walsch found himself intrigued, and increasingly summoned to take up pad and pen. "This experience of contact was not something I could call forth," he said from his hotel room in Seattle. "How it has been for me is that on occasion I would wake up at 1:00 am or perhaps 4:30 am, with the feeling that I had just suddenly come out of a sound sleep, eyes wide open and unable to return to sleep. It was a feeling like getting a knock on the door."

While Walsch says his actual experience of writing was characterized by a feeling of inner peace without any unusual physical sensation, the process of dealing with the information he was receiving was not an easy one.

"At first I thought I was having a conversation with my own mind," he said. "When I realized the thoughts in the book were higher than those I was accustomed to having in my way of life, I had an overwhelming feeling that these thoughts came from a higher source."

The only "appointments" he kept with God, Walsch said, were on two consecutive Easter mornings, at God's specific request. While there is a long, international tradition of literature derived from "automatic writing" with purported extraterrestrials or spiritual masters, the voice behind the pen that wrote Conversations With God unabashedly describes itself as the deity — with incisive wit, winning charm, and very specific declarations about issues still contended by orthodox religions of all faith traditions.

Walsch's God, for example, is blunt about reincarnation; it's a fact, and we have the opportunity to evolve into higher lives as fast as we like. He is surprisingly traditional, though, on certain points of Christian doctrine; the resurrection of Jesus, he affirms, is also a fact, and the nature of the Godhead is a functional Trinity.

Yet behind all of the messages which Walsch transcribed in the wee hours of the morning runs the thread of the continuing theme — this is a God of infinite love, always speaking to us in a thousand ways.

There is not a whole lot about the human condition that Walsch doesn't ask God in this, Book 1 of a trilogy that Walsch will shepherd into print. (Book 2 will be out this May, he says.) From extraterrestrials to the apocalyptic concerns about an impending end of time, Walsch touches it all. At the core of Walsch's inquiries, however, lies a very pragmatic questioning. If we do create our personal realities, as God insists we do, then how do we utilize this knowledge to live with joy, health and abundance, rather than in fear, suffering and lack? How do we stay in touch with God?

Join Neale Donald Walsch for answers to these questions and what is sure to be one of The Eclectic Viewpoint's most memorable and thought-provoking presentations.
— Ed Conroy