I have been asked many, many times in the 20 years since the Conversations with God material came to light what I felt was the single most important message in the 3,000 pages of that dialogue. I have never had any difficulty answering that question. I am going to offer my answer here.

In my exchange with God I said that I was so tired—so very, very tired—of struggling with life, of stressing over how I was going to get through, how I was going to get by, how I was going to get on with it.

I had “paid my dues.” I had worked hard, obeyed the rules (well, most of them), been given a multiplicity of talents, but just couldn’t seem to “put it all together” in a way that worked. Always, always, always I was straining. Always I felt harried, tired, and unable to get done what I needed to get done—much less what I really wanted to do.

So I asked God, “What’s wrong with me? What am I doing wrong?”

And God said smilingly…(yes, I could hear the smile in God’s voice)…“Oh, sweet Neale, you’re not doing anything ‘wrong.’ But you do have an idea about Life that is making life so much more difficult than it has to be; than it was ever meant to be.”

“What—” I asked plaintively—“is this idea? What am I thinking that’s making things harder for me?

God’s reply: “You think that your life is about you.”

***

No surprise there. Of course I did. Who else was it about? “God helps those who help themselves,” I had heard a thousand times. “You have to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps,” I’d been told. “If it’s to be, it’s up to me,” I reminded myself often.

Now I’m being told that my life is not about me? Who, then, is it about?

“Your life is about everyone whose life you touch, and the way in which you touch it,” God said.

“You can understand this only if you are clear that you need nothing, require nothing, and need to demand nothing for yourself in order for you to be perfectly happy right here, right now.”

My mind immediately started going down the list of things I felt I needed to be happy. And when I looked at the list closely I realized that I didn’t really need any of those things. They were some things that I wanted; some things that I wished for, but there was nothing on the list I couldn’t do without. Indeed, I was doing without them right then and there. And I was alive, breathing, and able—if I chose to—to be perfectly content.

So, short of basic survival needs—air, water, food, clothing, shelter, etc.—there was nothing that I actually required in order to be happy.”

“You don’t even require that,” God said. “You only imagine you need that, because you imagine that you can only survive in your present form. But if you knew without a doubt that you will survive long past the usefulness of your present form, and if you are not so attached to existing in your present physical form that you cannot imagine being happy without it, you don’t require even those things.”

That, of course, was incontrovertibly true. So I asked myself an interesting question: Do I need to survive in my present form in order to be happy? If I thought I was going to survive in another form, in the Spiritual Realm, after I left my physical body, would I be unhappy to do so?

The answer came back a huge NO. I would be very happy to do so. So then, I thought…what was there to worry about? What did I need to be happy?

***

Still, setting aside even survival needs couldn’t be easy, could it? Isn’t our “survival instinct” the basic instinct of humanity?

“No,” God said to me. “You think that it is—most of you think that it is—and so most of you act as if it is. But the fundamental instinct of human beings is not survival, it is the impulse to express and experience Divinity.”

If the basic instinct was survival, I was told, “you would run away from the burning building, not into it to save the crying baby.”

At such moments, human beings don’t start analyzing the odds of surviving their next move. They just make the move. And later, when the newspaper reporters ask them what it’s like to be a hero, they say, “I’m not a hero. I did what anybody would do.”

And while it is arguable that maybe not everybody would do it, it’s a safe bet that most people would. And when we hear of a person who stood by and ignored another person calling out for help in any situation, we might well be tempted to ask, “Where is your humanity?” So we do equate Humanity with Divinity, instinctively, when the chips are down.

***

Mulling over all of this, I came to the conclusion that, when I got right down to it, I needed nothing in particular to be happy.

“But I can tell you,” God said, “what you can do to get what you wish for; to bring to you what you’d like to have, what you know you would really enjoy.”

“What,” I asked. “What can I do? Say my Affirmations? Draw my Treasure Map? Make a Wish List?”

“No,” God replied. “Your life is not about you. Your life is about everyone whose life you touch, and the way in which you touch it.”

“Oh, that’s right. I forgot.”

Then I was given to remember some of the other secrets of life. Secrets that go with this one, and undergird it. So now I offer to everyone this prescription for happy living:

Look at everyone around you, and look to see what they think that they need to be happy. Then give them this. Give them a portion of what you have of this.

That which you wish for yourself, Be The Source of in the life of another.

Something marvelous happens when you do this. “First, you realize that you have it to give. What you thought you did not have enough of, you suddenly discover that you have enough of to give away some. This is a powerful, powerful insight. It makes you aware of your own “havingness.”

Then, something else happens. At least, it did for me. And I’ve asked around, and it does for most people. What you give to another multiplies. You draw more of it to you in order to draw more of it through you. Your personal power to in manifest particular ways seems to increase—and I am told that this is because you have gotten a certain part of yourself out of the way.

For me, what got in my way was my own low self-esteem, or self-worth. It was preventing me from manifesting some of the things I wished I had in my life. I simply thought I didn’t deserve it. But I was very clear that the other person to whom I was giving it deserved it, and so I had no problem finding enough to give to them.

To my surprise, I found that this process goes on continuously. The more I give away, the more I have to give away. It is exactly like love.

Now I can’t guarantee that this will happen in your life, I can only tell you what’s happened in mine. But it’s certainly worth a try!

I am sure that this is why all the great spiritual masters have said, each in their own way: “Do unto others as you would have it done unto you.”

***

In the years since I was given this message I have come to realize that my life IS about “me,”  in the sense that, as CWG has told me over and over: There is only ONE of us. So what I do for another, I do for myself. And what I fail to do for another, I fail to do for myself. We are all One, and the New Age aphorism is true! “What goes around, comes around.” It can be no other way in a Universe where there is only One Single Being.

We are manifesting as individuations of The One…yet we are to God as a drop of water is to the Ocean. All things are One Thing. There is only One Thing, and all things are part of the One Thing there is. So in that huge, metaphysical sense, my life IS about Me! But it’s about Big Me, not Little Me. It is about Universal Self, not Local Self.

And Conversations with God has helped me put all those pieces together!

***

Yet here’s a final tip. You can’t give things away—money, love, time, or anything else—in order to get more of it for yourself. If you do that, you are as much as acknowledging that you do not now have enough. Your decision to give it away is your declaration that you DO have “enough” to share. WhatEVER you have, you always have enough to share. Even if it’s a dime, you can share a nickel and keep one for yourself. Whatever it might be, you always have enough. This is the statement you want to make to the Universe, and the Universe will always reflect that back to you, enlarged.