The Power of Imagination: The Neville Goddard Treasury - Couverture souple

Neville

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0399173277 ISBN 13 : 9780399173271

Editeur : TarcherPerigee, 2015

A propos du livre

Extrait :

INTRODUCTION

Neville: A Portrait

by Israel Regardie

NEVILLE: A PORTRAIT*

By Israel Regardie

Near Broadway on 49th Street in New York City is the Old Actor’s Church. Should you go there on Wednesday, Friday or Sunday night of any week, either winter or summer, I can promise you more than a pleasant evening. It will be a highly instructive evening. You will hear Neville discourse on Truth. A young man, not more than 36 years of age, he is a dynamic, handsome and most charming personality. He has a winning smile—thoroughly and completely disarming. His presentation of truth is forceful and sincere. Charged with feeling, and reflecting his own integrity and purposefulness, he communicates himself readily from the pulpit.

Four to five hundred men and women flock to the Old Actor’s Church on each of these nights that he talks. How much of his evident popularity is due to his charm and how much to his dynamic orations, is not for me to say. Some, however, have hazarded an opinion. Some suspect it is the former. Nevertheless this judgment does not in the least detract from the value and worth of what he is impelled to teach. His method and content of teaching are entirely too good and provocative readily to appeal to so many and to such different varieties of people. However that may be, his readers and the listeners must be the judges. He does get a crowd—and he satisfies most of them.

Neville is not a native American. He comes from the Barbadoes, British West Indies, having been born in a planter’s family in the year 1905. Evidently he felt a cane-sugar plantation was no place for him. A wider sphere of action for imaginative flight and spiritual understanding were necessary to him. His spirit craved other than a small island off the mainland of the U. S. So at the age of 17 he came to this country to study Drama.

“A Man’s Faith Is His Fortune,” he wrote at a much later date—it was the title of a book of his. Evidently he had unbounded faith in himself to have set off youthfully on the unknown possibilities of a career in an unknown land. His confidence has stood him in good stead, since it has brought him through, to a position where he has become a public figure. No doubt there are greater heights of achievement and fame awaiting him in the future.

The year 1925 found him beginning his theatrical career at the Hippodrome, which not so long ago was torn down, removing from New York one of its old landmarks. The destruction of this building was also a milestone to Neville’s life. It coincided with his departure from the world of the theatre. He entered a totally different public life. Yet it was a life which at the same time bore certain resemblances to his old dramatic career—as we shall see.

He has had a wide and varied experience for a young man, this Neville. In 1925 he sailed for England with a dancing partner, and travelled widely in that country. It was there that he became openly interested in the study of the occult and mysticism.

Whilst in England, he met Arthur Begbie who introduced him to the world of psychical research, giving Neville his first taste of the spiritualistic seance. It left him, I should say, a little bit flat, but nonetheless, he knew afterwards, that he was definitely embarked upon a long journey. Of that he was sure, in spite of his dislike of the atmosphere and the procedure of the seance. Shortly after his return to America in 1926, to continue his theatrical career, his interest in mysticism became keener and keener, coinciding with a waning interest in the theatre.

I want to emphasize that Neville was a success in the dramatic world. He did not retire from the stage to metaphysics because he was a flop. Not at all. His salary from the theatre at times ran to $500 per week—a sum not usually earned by failures. This is important to know. It will help dispel the popular notion that only failures and “life-dyspeptics” go in for metaphysics.

It was around this time that he became associated with one of the several so-called Rosicrucian bodies. I should like to write at length on this subject of Rosicrucians and Rosicrucian organisations. However, I shall have to leave that for another occasion despite the fact that it is a fascinating subject for research, and a lovely topic for a disquisition on the foibles of human nature. Anyway, he not only became a member of this body and studied with it, but embarked upon a definite spiritual and moral discipline, imposing upon himself a regime of abstemious living, sexual continence, and a vegetarian diet. It was enough surely, to break a stronger person than him. From a husky strapping fellow of 176 pounds, he rapidly fell in weight to about 135 pounds. Not only was his efficiency impaired, but he became subject to fainting fits, and had long spells of weakness and languor. At the same time, probably because of the dietary and this irrational mode of life, and undoubtedly because of the neurological disturbances which would accompany such a procedure, a number of psychic experiences occurred to him, including involuntary astral projection and momentary clairvoyant glimpses.

His was a successful theatrical career. I repeat this and emphasise it. He had featured in six Broadway plays, and had travelled all over the country from one theatre to another, and his income ran into several thousand dollars per year. But because of his mystical predilections, and his declining interest in the theatre, he finally withdrew from the theatrical career that he had so laboriously struggled to build up. It became a closed episode of his life. Yet the experience of the theatre gave him something that enabled him in later years to succeed in his newly-chosen work. His personality and his teaching are both highly dramatic.

We are not to imagine that various events in a man’s life are out of relationship with one another. A Barbadoes plantation, dramatic school, theatre, professional dancing, and teaching metaphysics—while these seemingly point to a discrepancy in the continuous line of his life, that appearance is only due to our lack of insight. It is one of the characteristics of our age that we seek for superficial consistency, failing to realise that there may be deeper levels of reality, hidden from view, where the true line of continuity may be seen. A man’s life is in reality a continuum. Regardless of the number of breaks that may appear in the line of his life, a true continuity does exist. We must not imagine for one moment that growth and development persist anywhere in nature in a straight line. The process of growth involves the idea of a spiral, of an apparent occasional backward trend, of appearances and disappearances, of surges and retreats, of endeavors and new endeavors. The Hegelian dialectical concept may well be the true story behind all human endeavor. There is a forward movement succeeded by its utter negation. Hard upon this, however, there is a manifestation of an entirely new order. Such a cycle persists throughout the whole of nature, and man is certainly no exception to the world order. If we bear such a concept in mind, we will be enabled to understand far more readily the intelligent direction of our lives—and in particular, the work and life of Neville.

In this Rosicrucian body, Neville remained for many years as a student and probationer. But his was finer stuff than this. This cult with its narrow pseudo-occult-religious dogmatism, its lack of imagination and real spiritual achievement, left him cold within. For him there was really nothing there. Life initiated him into its mysteries far more successfully than this occult order. Gradually, he drifted away from it, finding his way, in response to an inner need, into the private sphere of an eccentric Ethiopian rabbi named Abdullah. Here he studied the Qabalah, a Jewish form of mysticism, and obtained illuminating insights into the books of the Bible. As he himself says in Your Faith Is Your Fortune, “The Bibles are psychological dramas representing the consciousness of man.” And again, “If man were less bound by orthodoxy and more intuitively observant, he could not fail to notice in the reading of the Bibles that the awareness of being, is revealed hundreds of times throughout this literature.” He developed an utterly new approach to the whole problem of man and his relationship with the pulsating world of spirit around him. Entirely satisfied for the first time, he became a devoted disciple of this giant Ethiopian rabbi. His imagination became tremendously stimulated, envisioning life in an entirely new way.

No longer was he confined to the sterile formalistic occult philosophy of this moribund Rosicrucian body. Now he conceived of God and man being entirely one. And it altered the whole course of his life. The core of man’s being was God—even though man in his blindness and ignorance did not know it. Outside of man there was nothing that man had not himself created. The entire world was a picture world, projected from within. The Ethiopian soon restored balance to his eager groping mind. Overboard went his fanatical vegetarianism, his continence, and his crankiness—and he became that rare anomaly, a human being. And he is very human this Neville, very human indeed. With the development of this phase of his personality, he was able to loosen his hold upon the hem of Abdullah’s skirt, to become a teacher in his own right.

It was in February 1938, then, that he commenced his very successful career in New York City. At first he met in a small room in a public building in New York, where dozens of petty little lecturers held their sway, nightly. Merely a handful of people attended his lectures at the beginning. But as his ability grew, and he gained confidence in talking and expounding, so his audiences grew. Now, as I mentioned above, you may go to the Old Actor’s Church three nights a week, and find a tremendous and enthusiastic audience. He has not yet achieved nation-wide fame, but no doubt this will come in time.

In his talks on metaphysics, he reveals the Bible as a psychological rather than as a historical document of the law governing the expression of life. He has a genius for interpretation, and unconsciously employs an exegetical technique that would surprise many a psychoanalyst and professional interpreter of dreams. For example, he takes Dumas’ novel, The Count of Monte Cristo, and interprets it as would a psychoanalyst a dream. His interpretation of the story reveals that Edmond Dantés is really Everyman, adrift on the stormy seas of life, trying to steer himself into some haven of security, and attempting to find a refuge against the storm. The old priest with his wisdom and understanding, whom Dantés discovers in the prison, really represents man’s awareness of being, that ancient unconditioned self, locked up since time began within the bosom of man. And at the end, after Dantés escapes in the sack intended for the body of the old priest—now dead, because Dantés possesses his insight—and finds the buried treasure, he is able fully to express himself, and impose his will upon the world. “Edmond Dantés becomes the Count of Monte Cristo. Man becomes Christ.”

In another place, he analyses the nature and character of the Apostles. He concludes that they represent the twelve qualities of mind which can be controlled and disciplined by man. When discussing the story of the disciples’ feet being washed by Jesus, he states that “the foot symbolises the understanding which must be washed of all human belief or conceptions of itself by the Lord.”

The story of Daniel, again, is the story of every man. Those lions that Daniel found in the den are the lions that beset our pathway through life, the problems of money, health, and relationships with other people. These beset all of us. Most of us, in the face of such predicaments, become so preoccupied with the problem, so brow-beaten by poverty, sickness, or marital difficulties, that we are unable to find a solution to them. The problem obsesses us. It fascinates us. Daniel decided to turn his back upon the lions, resorting to prayer. That is, he turned his gaze inwards, to his I AM consciousness, his real self which alone is capable of solving such problems. And so Neville concludes his exegesis by insisting that here too is our way out, and that what worked for Daniel, will work for us too.

I ought to mention at this juncture that during the course of his lecturing career, Neville has written and published a considerable number of pamphlets dealing with specific points of his system. Some of them explain his attitude towards particular themes and problems of the Bible. His applications of this theory extends to every phase of Biblical theme, from that of the world’s creation to the Crucifixion of Christ, from the meaning of circumcision to the significance of each one of Jesus’ twelve disciples. Latterly these essays have been gathered together and incorporated into a single volume entitled Your Faith Is Your Fortune. It is upon that volume that I have drawn extensively in order to present what I understand Neville to mean.

However, just as sometimes one feels that the psychoanalyst uses more ingenuity than insight in elaborating a meaning from an involved dream, so occasionally one feels that Neville is hard-pressed extracting psychological meaning from certain sections of the Bible. That is the difficulty in using, for the thin end of one’s psychological wedge, a book which is so crammed with heterogeneous and diverse stuff that is clearly not psychological. However, he presents in a simple and practical manner the advantage of realising the identity of man’s own consciousness with God. As he himself writes, “I AM the eternal Nothingness containing within my formless self the capacity to be all things. I AM that in which all my conceptions of myself live and move and have their being, and apart from which they are not.”

Neville’s choice of the phrase I AM to imply that underlying god-like essence in man, is dependent upon several reasons. The most obvious is the self-assumed name of God, which was given to Moses before that fateful visit to Pharaoh—I AM that I AM. This phrase is also repeated throughout Scripture in the same abstract sense.

But apart from this, Neville uses it because if we would define ourselves at all, we must use I AM before we can further qualify it in any way. Before I can say what I am, I must first have said I AM. Before I can assert that I am a man of such and such an age, of a certain race, residing in a certain country, of a certain profession and status, I must say I AM. Not that I am this or that, but that simply I AM. I can condition or formulate this limitless expanse of abstraction by enclosing it within the limitations of sex, age, race, country, profession, etc. But it still remains there, unconditioned, unformed and unlimited. So also is the basic self of man. It can express itself through a variety of masks, play an infinite number of parts, adopt a maximum of possible rôles. But it remains nevertheless, unconditioned and unformed—I AM.

In reality Neville is an atheist. It is conceivable that both he and his audiences would be shocked to learn of my conclusion. Yet he himself clearly and d...

Présentation de l'éditeur :

An anthology of the greatest writings of modern mystic, Neville Goddard, who has enthralled a new generation of readers with his simple but radical principle that your imagination is God.

This broad-ranging anthology assembles the greatest works of Neville Goddard, who, writing under the sole name Neville, became one of the most quietly seismic spiritual philosophers of the modern age.

From the late 1930s until his death in 1972, Neville promulgated one basic, extraordinary idea, which he restated with freshness and verve in more than ten books and hundreds of lectures: The human imagination is the Jesus Christ of Scripture, and the world around you is the out-picturing of your emotionalized thoughts.

Here is an unparalleled journey into the ideas and methods of a profoundly practical spiritual thinker whose vision of life can challenge your concept of what it means to be human.

This volume features a rare personal portrait of Neville by journalist and philosopher Israel Regardie.

Includes these classic works:

• Introduction: Neville: A Portrait by Israel Regardie (1947)
• Your Faith Is Your Fortune (1941)
• Freedom for All: A Practical Application of the Bible (1942)
• Feeling is the Secret (1944)
• Prayer: The Art of Believing (1945)
• The Search (1946)
• Out of this World: Thinking Fourth-Dimensionally (1949)
• The Power of Awareness (1952)
• Awakened Imagination (1954)
• Seedtime and Harvest: A Mystical View of the Scriptures (1956)
• The Law and the Promise (1961)

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: TarcherPerigee
• Date d'édition: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0399173277
• ISBN 13: 9780399173271
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 592