at 4:20 in the morning, as abruptly as if someone had come into the room and flipped the
light switch. I sat up in bed, wondering what that was all about, when I felt an urgent pull to
get out of bed and back to the yellow legal pad.
Still wondering what was going on, and why, I stumbled around the house, found the pad,
and returned to my nesting place on the living room sofa. I began writing again—picking up
right where I had left off, asking questions and receiving answers.
I don’t think I know to this day what made me begin to write it all down, or save the stuff I’d
written. I guess I thought I was going to be keeping a journal, or a special little diary. I had no
idea that it would one day be published, let alone read from Tokyo to Toronto, San Francisco
to Săo Paulo.
It is true that at one point in the dialogue the voice said, “This will one day become a book.”
But I thought to myself, Yeah, you and a hundred other people are going to send your
middle-of-then-night mental meanderings to a publisher, who is going to say, “Of course!
Why, we’ll publish this AT ONCE. “And that first dialogue went on for a year—me being
awakened in the darkness at least three nights a week.
One of the questions I am most frequently asked is, When did I decide, when did I know, that
it was God I was talking to? During the first several weeks of the experience I didn’t know
what to think about what was happening. At first a part of me thought I was just talking to
myself. Then somewhere along the way I wondered if it couldn’t be my so-called “higher self”
I’d heard about from which I was drawing the answers to my questions. But finally, I had to let
go of my self-judgments and fear of ridicule and call it exactly what it seemed to be: a
conversation with God.
This occurred the night I heard the statement, “There is no such thing as the Ten
Commandments.”
Nearly half of what ultimately became book 1 had been written when this spectacular
assertion was made. I’d been exploring the question of the path to God, and which was the
“right” one. Do we earn our way to heaven by “being good,” I wanted to know, or are we free
to act as we wish without being punished by God?
“Which is it,” I asked, “traditional values, or make-it-up-as-you-go-along? Which is it? The
Ten Commandments or the Seven Steps to Enlightenment?”
When the reply was that the Ten Commandments don’t exist, I was flabbergasted. Even
more flabbergasting, though, was the explanation.
Oh, there had been ten statements all right, and they’d been given to Moses for sure, but
they were not “commandments.” They were, I was told, “commitments” made by God to the
human race; ways that we could know that we were on the path back to God.
This was unlike anything else in the dialogue to that point. This was breakthrough
information. Some of what I’d heard in the conversation up until that moment I knew I had
heard before, from other teachers or other sources, or perhaps read somewhere. But such
astonishing statements about the Ten Commandments I knew I’d never heard before.
Furthermore, these ideas violated everything I’d ever been taught, or thought, about the
subject.
Years later I received a letter from a theology professor at a major East Coast university
saying this was the most original new perspective on the Ten Commandments to be
published in three hundred years, and that while he wasn’t sure he agreed with CWG’S