Neale: Yes, although sporadically, the communications do continue. The process is quite simple. First, it must be absolutely quiet because I can't do this work with anything or anyone distracting me, even in the slightest way. So generally, these communications occur at 4:00 in the morning, when there is no sound of any kind. It's not channeling or automatic writing, but more like taking dictation. What it feels like is someone is whispering into my right ear. There is a voice inside my head, a voiceless voice saying things to me, and I write down what's being said, literally one sentence at a time. It's as if I were listening to a voice that doesn't have a voice.

Neale: The feeling is always a physical warmth, and a kind of joy that makes me want to cry. I find myself often moved to tears by what is being written in front of me. Sometimes, I just sit on the couch and write the words down and cry because the beauty of the thoughts and how exquisitely they are being expressed. It's 5:00 in the morning, and there's no one around, mind you. I feel like I'm being embraced in the kindest, gentlest way one could even hope to imagine. There is a sense of being surrounded by goodness and love. It's similar to the feeling that I used to feel when I was in my mother's arms when I was seven and I would get a scrape or bruise. She would put her arms around me, and I would know instantly all was right with the world, and I was in the safest place that existed on this planet.

Neale: Yes, it's a feeling of oneness. The feeling is indescribable and words are impotent and puny in the face of the actual experience. Anyone who has had this kind of experience, in meditation or in a moment of divine samadhi where they have felt one with all of it, knows there are no words to describe the feeling.

Neale: One way is to sit and be absolutely still and quiet, and go to a wonderful secret place. I don't necessarily mean sit in meditation, but be somewhere absolutely quiet. Devote some of your time each day and every week to communion with all that is. Have a paper and pencil ready because if you are in that place of divine communion, and you write any question at all, you will be given the answer almost at once. While communicating with all that is, in this way, many people have experienced exactly what I have experienced and have written about. I don't consider the experiences I have had to be unusual at all. The only unusual thing is I wrapped it up, and sent it to a publisher.

Neale: The first step is to go to love, and then to move out of worry, despair and any negative emotions you may have. Move into knowing everything is going to be perfectly all right. I was reading a book by Emmet Fox, who writes about a woman who came to him in despair over the conditions prevailing in her life. He described how he asked this woman, "Do you believe in God?" She said, "Yes, I do." He said to her, "Then here is your prescription. What I want you to do is go home, and for the next two days I want you to completely ignore these problems you have so eloquently described to me. I want you to forget about them altogether and let the worst that is going to happen, just happen. Act as if the problems do not exist. Concentrate instead, for the next forty-eight hours, on just loving the light and moving into a space of communion mentally and spiritually with the God of your understanding. Commune with God and fall back in love with God. Call forth the God force within you and embrace that experience and the feeling of God inside of you. Do this for an hour in the morning, an hour in the afternoon and an hour at night, whatever it takes. Don't give a moment's notice to your problems, but rather concentrate on God and do some loving things for others."

This woman did that for two days and came back, of course predictably, and said all of her problems had been magically solved. As Warner Erhard said, "Life will work out in the process of life itself, if you will just get out of the way."

Neale: To open up your own personal channel of communication with God is to literally forget about everything else in your mind. You have to step out and be out of your mind and away from that thinking place. Once you are out of your mind, then you will be able to move to a place of clarity and hear and commune with the mind of God.

Neale: The reason people don't know what is good for them is because most people don't know what they are trying to do. As my book explains, before you can even begin to discern what's good for you, it's necessary to be very specific as to what you're up to; that is to say, what are you trying to do, in any particular moment, with regard to any particular thing? What is your purpose? What is your intention? This is important because your life proceeds out of your intention. What is your soul up to? Most people don't think of life in those parameters, and they see the experiences and encounters in life as individual episodes about which they have to make choices and decisions. Rather, life is a continual flow of events, streaming in from the universal stream of consciousness in such a way that it exactly matches our own stream of consciousness. From my observation, many of us don't even begin to understand, much less experience, that relationship. The process of discernment starts long before the communication is received. It begins with a movement to absolute clarity about what you are attempting to do, be, and have.

Neale: Yes. I'm reminded of the story of the man who drove up to the fellow on the street corner, and rolled down his window in his car, and asked, "Could you give me directions." The man on the corner said, "Of course, where do you want to go?" The gentleman in the car said, "I don't know." The man on the corner said, "Well, I'll tell you what, when you decide where it is you want to go, I tell you how to get there." It's exactly that way when you try to discern which messages are giving you the so called "right answer." Right and best are relative terms, relative to what we see ourselves as being up to.

Neale: Exactly, there are no answers outside of yourself. The only answers that exist with any value are the answers found inside. Most people have been taught not to trust those inner answers because in many cases they don't conform with the answers the outside world is giving us, or suggesting we ought to be receiving. Indeed, it is a rare person who can overcome those outer pressures from the world at large, and the society in which one lives, and become one's own authority. It's important to allow the God experience within each of us.

Neale: For the first part of my young adult life, my intention was to be successful as a young man in the world of work, to make a decent salary, to find a good woman, marry and have children, and to have my house in the suburbs; all those things my mother and father told me ought to be on my agenda. In fact, my life proceeded out of those intentions, and I did all of those things. I was making a good living, and by the time I was thirty-four, I had my children and wife, and a house in the country on five acres with the ponies in the backyard. I had acquired and achieved all of that, but then I realized I had experienced very little satisfaction from all of it. I was feeling empty and unfulfilled. I changed my intention about life. I was in my late thirties and decided my intention in life had nothing to do with the acquiring of material things, but rather it was now my intention to experience the evolution of my own soul and to grow spiritually. I wanted to come to know the highest truths of life and to express those truths in action, through myself. I wanted to become the grandest version of the greatest idea I ever held about who I am in regards to my relationship with God.

Neale: Yes, I set my intention, and it was a conscious choice. At that time, somebody offered me another job. I didn't have to listen to my inner voice for more than five seconds before I knew whether or not I wanted to take the job because I measured it against my intention. It was very clear even though the job had a wonderful salary and so forth, it wasn't in alignment with my intention. I passed that job by, which allowed me to move into something else that was in much greater alignment with my intention, all within six months time. What happens when you set your intention clearly, is all of life then contrives to produce the perfect circumstances with which to meet your intentions.

Neale: Almost immediately, as a result of setting my intention, people began falling away. In other words, if your driving to south, you don't head out on a northern route to get there. I had decided to go to south and all of the "norths" in my life disappeared. The people whose energies did not support what I had chosen moved out of my life, not because they were bad people, but simply because they were not in alignment with my new intention. I changed a several personal habits as well. I discontinued my intake of alcohol within a matter of weeks. I began greatly reducing my intake of red meat, and within a few years I had stopped eating red meat completely. I stopped smoking almost at once. Stopping smoking was most dramatic for me. After 23 years, I picked up a cigarette one day and didn't know why I was doing it. Smoking was no longer in alignment with what I had intended to experience of myself.

Neale: It was a breakthrough point as if I were reborn. Enlightenment is nothing more than clearly deciding at long last, what you are trying to do.

Neale: It was very moving for me, and exciting and astonishing. As often as I have read "Conversations With God", and I read from it almost daily, I never quite had the same experience as I had when I heard someone reading it back to me. In particular, it was very different when I had somebody reading it back to me out loud with such consummate interpretive skills as the actor, Ed Asner and actress, Ellen Burstyn, the talent we had involved in this project. When you take someone who deeply understands the emotional and philosophical implications of a sentence, and translates that understanding into the spoken word, your own words come alive for you as an author in a way they could never come alive even in your own mind's ear. I can recall certain paragraphs being read and thinking, that's really incredible stuff, and being impressed all over again with the majesty and clarity contained in the book. Frankly, I was surprised. I said to myself, "My God, I wrote that." But, I didn't write that, I merely took dictation. "Conversations With God" was written by someone else. Those words came to me, and I simply transcribed them.

Neale: Ed and I were in the studio together, and Ellen was in New York with a satellite hookup. It was eighteen hours of recording over two days. John Hunt produced the book on tape, and I was impressed with the process, and deeply thankful to both Ed and Ellen, not only for the depth of their talent, but also their willingness to tackle a piece of copy both as controversial and meaningful as this book. They approached it with openness and clarity, with self-effacing willingness to dive into the material and search for what was there. It's exciting to be in a creative project with people at that level of professionalism; people who create for a living. People in the creative and performing arts are at the vanguard of what we are speaking about. They are the people who have dared to publicly create and to hold up to the public their own creations for the public's rejection or acceptance. That's a high level of courage. They are at the cutting edge of the whole process of human evolution. Most sociologists and anthropologists agree that if you want to know where a society is heading, look to the society's artisans. It's the artists and the creators who will always be cutting that swath through the jungle and saying, "This way, it's over here." I respect and honor the courage of people who create in full view.

Neale: Michael Mish has created an original score for the production. He read the book and became one with it immediately. The music was an effortless creation for him. It is used judiciously like salt and pepper on a fine meal, but what music is there, is exquisite. The soundtrack is used just enough to create a nuance, a mood, an opportunity for the mind to rest, ever so briefly, between important thoughts and to have a respite. I think John Hunt's great skill as a producer was envisioning the whole program and project. He held the vision, and then caused all of the disparate elements to come together in a way that reflects the beauty of his original creative thought. That is the genius of a producer. Everyone was tapping in at different levels and working together to create the whole.