The One and the Many: Eternal Return
This extraordinary book is the ninth and final instalment in the Conversations with God series. Many readers will be familiar with earlier volumes and their message of remembering the true Self. In this volume, the central topic is the relationship between life and death. The book both recapitulates and extends material from previous volumes. The overall thesis is encapsulated in 18 so-called remembrances, which are epigrammatic statements summing up surrounding themes. Examples include: birth and death of the same thing, there is no such thing as the end of evolution, you cannot change Ultimate Reality, but you can change your experience of it. For those readers unfamiliar with the format, the book is a dialogue between the author and ‘God’. The question of the identity of God is left open for the reader to decide, but the main criterion of authenticity for me is the depth of insight conveyed. In that respect, this is undoubtedly a profound book.

At the recent Mystics and Scientists conference, there was much discussion about paradoxical logic. The following statement expresses this precisely: ÔI have said that in the truest sense you’re not on a journey. You already are where you want to go. But since you do not know this, your experience is that you ARE on a journey. So, you must make the journey to find out that the journey is not necessary. You must embark on a path to find out that the path begins and ends right where you are. It is not possible in a relatively short review to capture the full scope of the themes conveyed in the book, so some representative examples will need to suffice.

Perspective creates perception.
It follows from this that perception creates experience. This leads to the injunction: ‘see God in everyone and everything, and see everything is perfect.’ A further implication is that ‘because you do not remember who you are, you do not treat others as who they are.

Your journey is not an endless SEARCH for God, it is an endless EXPERIENCE of God.
This follows from the proposition that the physical world is designed to provide us with a context within which we can experience outwardly what we know inwardly. As Plotinus put it, ‘remembering is for those who have forgotten.’ Or here: ‘life is a process by which the soul turns knowing into experiencing, and when what you have known and experienced becomes a felt reality, that process is complete.’ Realisation of who you are as an expression of divine being leads to the end of the sense of separation from the Source. Another surprising statement for the modern understanding is that birth is the disintegration and death an integration. Walsch explains this as birth representing the division into three parts, body, mind and spirit, or, correspondingly, subconscious, conscious and superconscious. Birth, the re-entry into physical life, entails a dense existence producing a loss of the full identity that has been established. Ontologically and epistemologically, this represents a fall from unity into separation, which is necessary in order to have an experience of being a ‘part’. Death is the passageway between the physical world and the spiritual realm and back again. Hence birth is a form of death and death a form of birth. At death, body, mind and spirit become one, as do thought, word and deed, and past, present and future.

As one can also understand from contemporary accounts of near death experience, death is ‘an energy shift that produces enormous fluctuations in the rate and frequency of the vibration of your being, propelling you back and forth between what you would call physical and spiritual life’ (note the perspective of reincarnation here). The same applies to birth. Walsch suggests that birth and death are moments of creation manifest as energy attenuations: ‘are the biggest acts of creation because these are the moments in the Eternal Life Cycle when Essential Energy transmutes itself to produce specific manifestations in the spiritual realm (at death) or in the physical realm (at birth).’ The energy of death is said to ‘propel you into the Core of Your Being into your next reality.’

It is here that the author’s reflections on time become really interesting. In order to convey the idea that there is both a linear sequence and that everything is happening at once, he invents the word ‘sequentaneous’. In terms of identity, this means that ‘you are experiencing your Self as the Multitudinous Individuality’, an expression reminiscent of Ramana Maharshi. Time is defined as ‘not something that passes, something that you pass through, as you would pass through a room.’ He continues: Time IS. It is in that ‘time marches on’, but time, in fact, marches nowhere. It is you who march on, you who ‘move through time’, you who create the illusion of ‘time passing’ as you pass through the Only Moment There Is. Further on: ‘time is something that you notice sequentially. While it exists simultaneously in all spaces. Space and Time are sequentaneous.’

This is extraordinarily advanced philosophy, which is further explained by means of an image of an apple. The apple is Time and the inside is Space. Moreover, as an ‘atom’ of the apple, you find yourself moving through your Self; from the outside to the core, where the identity is re-established at death. And the core issue is: Who Am I? The mystical experience answers this question, but the experience cannot be retranslated into a dualistic concept. Walsch explains this as a rhythm oscillating between spiritual knowing and physical experiencing: ‘to the Oneness you return, and from the Oneness you emerge, over and over again, eternally and forever.’ The One expresses itself as the Many and the Many seek to know and be the One in a movement to and from ‘the Core of Your Being.’

Another theme is hope, defined as a statement of one’s highest desire.

Hope is thought, made Divine.
Hope is the doorway to belief, belief is the doorway to knowing, knowing is the doorway to creation, and creation is the doorway to experience. Experience is the doorway to expression, expression is the doorway to becoming, becoming as the activity of all Life and the only function of God. . What you hope, you will eventually believe, what you believe, you will eventually know, what you know, you will eventually create, what you create, you will eventually experience, what you experience, you will eventually express, what you express, you will eventually become. This is the formula for all of life. It is as simple as that. Simple perhaps, but a brilliant aphoristic expression.

There is much more about the creative nature of life and the timing of death and the stages we pass through. Each reader will filter the message through their own understanding. There is also a good deal of practical guidance and insight, for instance that words are the language of the mind and feelings are the language of the soul. The degree to which we tune in to our feelings may enhance our capacity to communicate with others and pick up subtle cues around us. I should also mention that there are a number of moving stories in the text, which are used to illustrate the point being made. If we come back to the phrase ‘perspective creates perception (and experience)’ then we can come to realise that living from a perception of oneness is quite different from living from a perception of separation. But it is easy to forget this and lapse back into separation. Then we just need to remember again (and again!) who we are and who others are as a manifestation of Oneness and treat them accordingly. This is a remarkable spiritual tract for our times.