Neale Donald Walsch: Ten Human Illusions

Yet God will give us back our everlasting life if we never again break His rules. God’s love is unconditional, it is only God’s rewards which are not. God loves us even as He condemns us to everlasting damnation. It hurts Him more than it hurts us, because He really wants us to return home, but He can’t do anything about it if we misbehave. The choice is ours.

The trick is, therefore, to not misbehave. We need to live a good life. We must strive to do so. In order to do so, we have to know the truth about God, and we cannot avoid offending Him, if we do not know right from wrong. So we have to know the truth about that. The truth is simple to understand and easy to know. All we have to do is listen to the prophets, teachers, sages, and the source and founder of our religion. If there is more than one religion and, therefore, more than one source and founder, then we have to make sure to pick the right one. Picking the wrong one could result in us being a loser. When we pick the right one, we are superior, we are better than our peers, because we have the truth on our side.

This state of being ‘better’ allows us to claim most of the prizes in the contest without actually contesting them. We get to declare ourselves the winners before the competition begins. It is out of this awareness that we give ourselves all the advantages, and write our ‘Rules of Life’ in such a way that certain others find it nearly impossible to win the really big prizes. We do not do this out of meanness but simply in order to ensure that victory is ours – as rightly it should be, since it is those of our religion, of our nationality, of our race, of our gender, of our political persuasion who know the truth, and therefore deserve to be winners. Because we deserve to win, we have a right to threaten others, to fight with them, even to kill them if necessary, in order to produce this result.

There must be another way to live, another thing that God has in mind, another larger truth, but if there is, we don’t know it. In fact, it is not clear whether we are even supposed to know it. It is possible that we are not supposed to even try to know it, much less to truly know and understand God. To try is presumptuous, and to declare that you have actually done so is blasphemous.

God is the Unknown Knower, the Unmoved Mover, the Great Unknown. Therefore, we cannot know the truth that we are required to know in order to meet the conditions that we are required to meet in order to receive the love that we are required to receive in order to avoid the condemnation that we are seeking to avoid in order to have the everlasting life that we had before any of this started. Our ignorance is unfortunate, but should not be problematic. All we need do is take what we think we do know – our cultural story – on faith, and proceed accordingly. This we have tried to do, each according to his or her own beliefs, and thus we have produced the life that we are now living, and the reality on Earth that we are creating.”

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