The interesting thought that ''98% of the world''s people are spending 98% of their time on things that don''t matter'' opens the latest book from seven-time New York Times bestselling author Neale Donald Walsch, who says with gentleness that this is the reason so many lives are filled with sadness and turmoil, and that the world itself seems continually on the brink of calamity.

This circumstance, Walsch says, is nobody''s fault. We simply haven''t been told or taught what does matter - or, if that question has been answered for us, the answers we''ve been given have not been accurate.

Yet now, the author declares, the human race is receiving an invitation from Life Itself, in the form of a palpable energy shift in 2012 and beyond, to address the question directly - and people everywhere can feel it. Some sense this shift much in the way they can sense, in the sleepy hours of the morning, that it is time to wake up. Others experience frustration at how things are going right now, but they also feel a muted excitement stirring deep within, a restless readiness to respond to a soft but persistent inner voice that has lately been saying: it doesn''t have to be this way.

Walsch says that this inner voice is correct. One''s life does not have to be a series of worrisome and challenging crises involving finances or relationship or health or family, and neither does the world at large have to be a container of constant calamity surrounding its governance and ecology and culture. In his latest book, The Only Thing That Matters, he offers a formula, elegant in its simplicity, that will immediately uplift the life of anyone who embraces it - and that could change the World Entire.