A voice in the wildernessSTEPS 4-TO-7 IN HAVING YOUR OWNCONVERSATION WITH GOD

I have been on an extended road trip to Barcelona and to Lisbon, where, in each city, I offered spiritual renewal retreats based on the messages in Conversations with God. So my apologies for not having been here in this space for a bit. I do want to continue — and conclude — the series of articles that I started here some weeks ago, on Seven Steps to Having Your Own Conversation with God.

Please allow me to pick up here where we left off with the last entry.

The fourth stepin having your own Conversation with God is a commitment to wakefulness; an agreement with yourself topay attention to God.

God is all around us, and we are not paying attention.

We may be willing. We may have gone past Step Three. But we are not awake. We are not paying attention.

Often that is because we are looking too hard for what is right in front of our face. We are listening so earnestly that we miss the sound.

God is talking to us in a thousand different ways, across a million moments. But we must pay cultivate what I call Attentive Inattention…or the Unexpected Expectation, or “active passivity.”

This is when you listen by not listening. It is when you look by not looking.

It is when you open your mind’s ear and your mind’s eye to nothing at all, expecting nothing at all, searching for nothing at all, wishing for nothing at all, striving for nothing at all, just “being with” No Thing/Everything.

This is exactly what I do when I am writing. It is exactly how I have produced 27 books.

This Attentive Inattention turns every moment into a meditation. Just let life go by, but watch it out of the “corner of your eye.”

God’s conversations will “sneak up on you.” The lyrics of the next song you hear on the overhead speakers in the food store. The article that jumps off the cover of a two-year-old magazine at the hair salon. The chance utterance of a friend you just happen to meet on the street. The words on the billboard around the next corner.

…or…a fleeting thought that crosses your mind, seemingly out of nowhere.

“Nowhere”…that’s an interesting word. Slice it in half and it comes out to NOW HERE.

God is always NOW HERE.

So I call Step Four: Wakefulness. Don’t sleep walk through life. Stay awake. Watch what’s going on—without looking for something in particular.

Like right now. What do you think is happening right now?

The fifth step is acceptance…or, if you please, non-denial.

We need to call our conversations with God exactly what they are when they occur.

Once we start by setting aside that kind of special time, and begin walking through Life in wakefulness, we will be aware that we are receiving communications from the Divine all the time.

What will happen is that we will suddenly notice them. We will become aware that Life informs Life about life through the process of Life Itself. And we will become a conscious part of that process.

Still, if we’re not careful, we’ll call this something else. We’ll give it a different label or different name for fear of …read more
Source: Neale Donald Walsch