Belief, Revision, and Neville Goddard

Hi Steven, since you are taking questions/ideas for your blog, I have a few related to Neville:

How do you feel about Neville’s constant mention that “anything is possible to anyone”? I know he relies on the bible quote “all things are possible to those who believe” but I really get the sense that he does believe ANYTHING is possible.

Neville also talks about helping others by imagining them to be whatever you’d like them to be. For example, he talks a lot about him (and his followers) helping other people get better jobs, etc just by imagining that happening.

What is your opinion of Neville’s philosophy of “revision”? Actually revising your day and imagining outcomes that didn’t actually happen but how you wanted them to happen. Any scientific or anecdotal evidence in your experience?

Thanks Steven, hope all is well with you.

~ Jeff

Hi Jeff, it’s great to hear from you again, and thank you for your questions.

If there’s one thing that sums up Neville Goddard, it’s the word ‘conviction’. Neville had a massive sense of who he was, and what he was capable of, and because of his inner strength and acceptance of his own power, his mental assumptions turned into physical facts.

It wasn’t always this way of course. When he was first starting out on the path to imaginal enlightenment, he didn’t really believe in the teachings of his friend, Abdullah. Recall the story of Neville wanting to leave New York for Barbados. Abdullah was adamant that Neville was already home, but for Neville, this way of looking at reality was alien and even slightly ridiculous.

Still, this one defining moment of manifesting (seeing his wish to be in Barbados actually come true) became the cornerstone of Neville’s belief in the idea that imagining shapes reality – and as Neville continued to experiment with and test the theory, so his confidence in himself and the process grew and grew.

You could say that it’s your level of inner confidence that is the key. Neville would of course be a perfect example. You could swap the word ‘belief’ for any number of perhaps more applicable and fitting words or phrases – and confidence would be number one on such a list. You could also add single-minded, blinkered, or even stubborn.

What all of these inner traits have in common is an underlying sense of determined focus coupled with an ability to ignore what’s going on in outer reality – but most important of all is whether you can accept that whatever it is you wish to desire can actually be experienced by you.

Neville believed that his imagination was all-powerful. He even had the Bible to back up his belief – not to mention numerous instances of turning imaginal fiction into actual physical fact. Neville believed that anything was possible to him, and therefore, anything was possible to anyone else – but with one important caveat; you had to believe that whatever you asked for had in fact been granted, and would actually come true.

If I were to tell you that you are going to win the lottery this week, would you believe me? Tell yourself the same thing. Can you believe it? Now tell yourself that you will yawn at some point today.

Which of the statements is more believable to you? Can you feel the difference? That difference in belief is the difference between manifesting the life of your dreams and living a life of yawning mediocrity.

If you look at the collected stories that Neville offered in order to illustrate the power of the imaginal act, most of the cases involved relatively acceptable events – a few thousand dollars here, an ideal five bedroom house there, a trip across the sea for this person, love and companionship for that person.

All of the many instances of imaginal manifestation are acceptable within the framework of the life of the individual in question. All of the elements that went into manifesting the imaginal act were already present and believable within the context of the life experience of the individual.

The manifestation of an imaginal act is down to how acceptable it is to you – how believable it is to you that you will become a millionaire, find fame, or connect with the lover of your dreams.

If you see a reality of unlimited possibility and numerous ways in which your imaginal goals can be achieved, then you stand more of a chance of experiencing those goals than you would if you looked at life as being full of restrictions and only one or two paths open to you.

Many people want to become a millionaire, and they see winning the lottery as the only way to achieve that goal – but how many of those people can actually accept that they will be the ‘lucky one’ who wins the jackpot?

Cynthia Stafford did it, and I dare say that a few others have as well. The question is, what allowed Cynthia Stafford to win the lottery when millions of others have failed?

The answer is a willingness to put it all on the line, a willingness to assume something that isn’t yet true. The ability to build confidence using the imagination instead of turning to outer physical reality for validation and proof.

Many of the people that Neville helped over the years were instructed in a simple way to use their imagination. In most cases, these people were desperate. They had given up on ‘real life’ and were willing to try anything to get them out of a tough spot.

Their imagination was freed from the shackles of acceptable views of reality and suddenly, they were being shown a version of reality where anything was possible. All you had to do was pretend.

Could it be that in order to master the powers of imagination, you must be desperate? You must lose your faith in the outer world to the point of turning within? If there are no other options open to you in your outer reality, is this the point when all you have left is a wish, a hope, a dream, or a prayer?

I’m pretty sure that Neville didn’t believe that ‘anything’ was possible. After all, we all operate and exist in a reality of restriction and certain rules (no turning yourself into a dinosaur, for instance). Did Neville believe that anything was possible as long as it obeyed the laws of our physical reality? I think he did – but again, the biggest hurdle to the process is how far you are willing to go in order to accept this idea to be true. How desperate are you? How disillusioned are you with the ‘real world’?

As for helping other people by holding imaginal images or conversations with them as they would be were they a success in life, there are two parts to this idea.

The first is what we’ve been talking about – acceptance of the process. It would seem that as long as you can accept that the process works, it will work regardless of what your intended subject thinks. Again, consider Abdullah’s insistence that Neville was in Barbados, even though Neville had trouble accepting the idea.

The second part concerns the resonant and coherent systems of influence we generate. These fields of influence reach out and connect with similar fields of influence, and it’s through these connections that subliminal suggestions are implanted in the minds of others and ourselves.

If a man has no job, and wishes to be a success – and you envision him as a successful man with a great a job – your field of influence may cause any number of scenarios to unfold.

You could cause the man to recognise some hidden talent that secures him a job. Your field of influence might cause the man to break the law, shocking him into straightening himself out – an act that leads to some opportunity to help others in similar situations which in turn leads to a job.

Your imaginal act might even reach out to a third party who just happens to be looking to fill a vacancy with someone who is a perfect match to the person you are trying to help.

Incidentally, you might want to try this way of helping others on yourself. Step away from yourself and see that person as someone separate from you, another person. See him or her as a success. You might be surprised with the results.

Finally, we come to the idea of mentally revising your day in order to change an aspect of your moment of ‘now’.

Any effects you might enjoy from such an exercise will be felt either psychologically or physically. For instance, if you feel embarrassed about some experience from your past, reframing the event over and over, presenting it in a new way, will rewrite the old memory with a new one.

This can have any number of positive effects – from a boost in confidence or self-esteem, to viewing a past experience in a new light and gaining a sense of inner empowerment from something that used to make you feel weak.

Physical effects can also occur via a form of mental healing. For instance, there is the story of a man who was in constant pain due to a childhood accident (falling from a swing). The man used revision to recreate the scene of the accident and erase the moment from his memory (instead of falling from the swing, the man imagined himself walking away from the swing safely, unharmed, and happy).

The result of this imaginal revision was that the pain the man was feeling in his present disappeared. Did the revision repair the damage created by the old wound, or did the imaginal revision simply act as a placebo upon the biological system, thus ‘blocking’ the sensation of pain?

My money would be on the latter.

Although, having said that, there have been some remarkable cases in which women have fallen pregnant when it was previously ‘proven’ that such a thing would have been an impossibility for them. You can also look at cases where a victim of a car accident has been left paralysed from the neck down, only to later regain a full range of motion in the arms and legs, in spite of being told by a doctor that he or she would never walk again.

As far as mentally rewriting actual history, well, this would be a version of mental time travel, and while I don’t ever rule anything out, I would have to say that an imaginal revision of how Hitler came to power (perhaps imagining a world where he had never been born) would have no effect on outer physical reality whatsoever.

You may not be able to rewrite the pages of your history (or anyone else’s for that matter) but you can certainly change what past events mean to you.

The only creative control that any of us have is over our moment of ‘now’. You can choose what to experience next, but you can’t ever choose again what you have previously already chosen to experience (either through conscious or subconscious choice).

Your future is there for the taking. At least, it is if you can accept that it is.

Tagged: belief, coherence, Cynthia Stafford, healing, imagination, influence, manifesting, metaphysical, Metaphysics, Neville, Neville Goddard, reality, resonance, revision, thought creation, winning the lottery

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