Books We Recommend: Conversations with God — Joy, Truth and Love

There are certain books I recommend because they give you information, and then there are books I recommend because they challenge the way you see yourself and the world around you. Conversations with God by Neale Donald Walsch is one of those books for me.

You do not have to agree with every idea in it for the book to have value. What I appreciate most about it is that it asks you to question some of the beliefs and assumptions you may have carried for years about God, life, choice, truth, love, and what it means to be a creator in your own life. It invites you to look inward instead of constantly searching outside yourself for answers.

That is one of the reasons I recommend it. It makes you think.

There are a lot of ideas from Conversations with God that have stayed with me, but three in particular have become part of the way I look at people, creativity, coaching, acting, and my own life:

The highest thought is always that thought which contains joy.

The clearest thought is always that thought which contains truth.

The grandest thought is always that thought which contains love.

I reference these three thoughts all the time because the longer I live with them, the more I see them as a structure for how we create our lives.

When people are struggling, we tend to get trapped in the lowest part of the experience. Fear takes over. Anger takes over. We make assumptions. We create stories. We become attached to how something is supposed to turn out. Before long, we are no longer responding to what is actually happening. We are responding to everything we have built around it.

These three ideas give me a way back.

The highest thought contains joy. That does not mean pretending everything is good or forcing yourself to be happy when life is difficult. Joy, to me, is much deeper than that. It is looking for the part of the experience where life is still available to you. Where is the possibility? Where is the choice? What can I create from here instead of simply reacting to what has happened?

Then there is truth.

The clearest thought contains truth, and this is something I talk about constantly in acting. Powerful acting is truthful acting. You can have technique, training, preparation and all the tools in the world, but if I don't believe you, none of it matters. The actor has to become truthful inside the experience.

I think life works the same way.

Truth asks us to stop performing. It asks us to become honest about what is actually happening, what we are feeling, what we want and what part we are playing in the situation. Sometimes truth is uncomfortable because it requires us to have conversations we would rather avoid or admit things about ourselves we would rather not see.

But truth gives us somewhere real to create from.

That is also where our values begin to show up. If I say honesty matters to me, am I being honest? If authenticity matters, am I actually being authentic? If integrity matters, are my choices aligned with what I say I believe?

Truth brings clarity, and clarity gives us choice.

Then there is love.

The grandest thought contains love.

I don't think love always looks soft. Sometimes love is compassion and understanding. Sometimes it is forgiveness. Sometimes it is a boundary. Sometimes it is telling somebody the truth. Sometimes it is allowing another person to make a choice you would never make for them.

Love asks something bigger from us than fear does.

And when I put all three of these ideas together, they become something much larger for me.

Joy. Truth. Love.

They become a way of asking, From what place am I creating right now?

One of my biggest takeaways from Conversations with God is the idea that we are creators. My interpretation of that is that we are extensions of God, constantly creating through the choices we make, the conversations we have, the work we produce, the relationships we build and the way we move through the world.

The question is not whether we are creating.

We are creating all the time.

The question is what are we creating from?

When I find myself caught in fear, frustration, resentment or uncertainty, these three thoughts give me somewhere else to look.

Where is the joy?

What is the truth?

What would love have me create here?

I don't always have the answer immediately. Sometimes getting there takes work. But I have found that those questions usually move me toward a more powerful place.

And maybe that is why these three lines have stayed with me for so long. They are simple, but there is a tremendous amount of life inside of them.

The highest thought contains joy.

The clearest thought contains truth.

The grandest thought contains love.

Those are three pretty powerful places from which to create a life.