This is season 2, episode 6, the Psychological View of Reality. 

Neville often quoted Blake: "All you behold, though it appears without, it is within in your imagination, of which this world of mortality is but a shadow."

Most people have a materialist view of the world when they see trees, grass, mountains, rivers, lakes and so on. And even further out, stars, planets and galaxies. These are thought to exist as they appear to us, independently of our own perception of them. In like manner, we consider the built environment of cities and towns to have their own separate reality. But to the school of thought we call idealist or visionary, which includes Neville and Bernardo Castrop, also Johann Gotlib Visiche, Douglas Fawcett and William Blake, the world without has another explanation.

To the visionary. All seeming outward things are mental constructs, a sort of psychological rendering. Nothing exists physically in and of itself on the outside, because what we call the physical and the outside are themselves mental constructs. Consistent with this view, physics reveals that the physical standalone world as such is not there. There is something there, but it's not physical. Similarly, our physical bodies are what Neville calls emanations. When you see another person, you have a mental experience of the psychic, not physical content, which we call seeing. If you catch the idea, you will have something of a shock when looking at another person because it's a direct encounter with meaning -- a direct encounter with the mental entity of that other person with no intermediary. Following Castrup, we should say it's having this encounter through a dissociative boundary. 

Now, does that mean that everything is illusion? It's not really accurate to say that everything that appears to the senses, as the saying goes, is illusion. It's a question of the nature of the thing that we are encountering. Neville's view is that the world out there is not material, sitting in physical space. It is our own mental representation, non spatial, showing us the human psyche which is in its hidden depths co equal with the mind of God. He explains in Power of Awareness, Chapter 2: 

"What appears to you as circumstances, conditions and even material objects are really only the products of your own consciousness. Nature, then, as a thing or complex of things external to your mind must be rejected." 

Everything in the life of man takes place in what Neville, following Blake, calls imagination and nowhere else. Man and his world are all imagination. Thus we have a complete picture of Man's world: all the outer and the inner is mental in nature. 

Let's look at a series of points that we covered in the last episode, consequences of adopting this view that the world is psychological in nature. 

So, the first one: perception is a very strange experience. It's not seeing something that exists in of itself in a physical sense. You're actually having a mental encounter, a mental meeting with the symbol itself, with meaning itself. 

The second thing is the feeling of I, you might notice, is no longer located in the head. It's somewhere... well, I can't say. We're perhaps closer to the solar plexus because the brain is not emanating consciousness. Consciousness includes the brain as part of its field of awareness. Actually, that reminds me of a passage In Search of the Miraculous by Ouspensky, where Gurdjieff asks the students to try to take note of where in the body they feel the sensation of "I". And Ouspensky remarks that he just couldn't get anywhere with this. He had to rely on other people to try to make sense out of this idea. And he didn't get any further explanation from G. But, curiously enough, here we are encountering the same thing. 

The third thing is that the time sense changes. If we visualize something, affirm something, and expect that to be a causal factor that will have an effect down the road. It's not quite correct. It's more to perceive that adopting the state of the wish fulfilled has an ordering principle or function that is outside of time. 

The fourth thing is that travel motion itself is changing in its character. It's, all mental in nature and does not involve a physical movement from one place to another. Just as you would see that when you woke up in the morning, the travels and the motions that you underwent in the dream state didn't really take you from A to B. You were stationary in the same place all the time. 

The fifth thing is, a refined feeling of oneself and I think a recaptured sense of, well, being that must result from the fact that we're now aligning ourselves with reality. 

And that leads us to conclude that we are spiritual beings undergoing an entirely spiritual experience. 

The seventh point is: well, the difficult thing to really grasp is that if you have a sensory experience, something as simple as feeling the smooth, flat surface of the top of your desk, those qualities that you perceive, the smoothness, the flatness, the texture, the temperature and so on... those are all qualities which do not reside in the physical object, but are the creation of your mind. They're real only in conscious experience. 

The eighth point is that we are living in a dream, a collective dream which implies a dreamer who is sleeping within us. 

And, the two final points that I made were that despite the fact that we draw on Bernardo Kastrup to help draw a picture of this universal mind which is fragmented into individual parts, I still adhere to Neville himself because he gives meaning to the whole thing. There's a meaningful unity between the mind of God and the mind of man, however imperfectly we perceive it. 

And this is where Neville really sets himself apart, again, from the other authors that I quote. Because he doesn't adhere to a conventional scientific view with regard to, for example, the origin of man. He doesn't subscribe to the theory of Darwinian evolution, that we all came from monkeys and all the rest of it. There's something ridiculous about that. And not only that, the evidence is not there. It has been refuted. So I'm siding with Neville on that. There's something more mysterious with regard to the nature [origin] of man, and scientific materialism does not give us the answers. And yet these other authors [who I often quote] are so focused on the psyche and the primacy of mind, they are still captured by this materialist, scientific viewpoint. 

Those are the 10 points that I had set out in the last episode. But really it's a topic that lends itself to endless exploration. 

If you check these show notes, you'll see a link that goes back to the blog piece that is associated with today's episode. There I show a diagram that I had created - a diagram of mind that is the individual mind in the context of universal mind. So what I'd like to do is just go through the elements of that diagram to sort of walk you through it. You'll see that the diagram is an attempt to show the unified picture of Neville's worldview with that of Bernardo Kastrup. So I do borrow one or two terms from Bernardo's Analytic Idealism. 

What you'll see first is that the individual mind is represented as a circle superimposed on a general background, which is universal mind. And then there are two other examples of people, the seeming other, that are also represented as circles. 

Within the circle of the individual mind, there's another familiar division between what we call the consciousness and the subconscious. The consciousness is what we colloquially call consciousness, but it's really more accurately referred to as the habitual waking state. True consciousness in the sense of, a gradually improving self awareness is the more accurate term. And that is also illustrated in the diagram. 

Now, there's a division between the consciousness and the subconscious. But that division is permeable, of course, it has to be, because otherwise we would not have the conscious experience of memories -- thinking about the dreams that we had last night and so on. Similarly, the boundary between the individual consciousness and the background universal mind is also permeable. Otherwise, we would not have the entry into our personal minds of archetypal images that come from a deeper background, dream images and visions that come from what you might call the collective unconscious or the universal mind. 

Now, the point that really is pertinent to today's episode is the illustration of perception or what I prefer to call a mental encounter. So I've got a tree illustrated, a mountain, a lake, other people. They are all residing outside the personal mind. And the personal consciousness has to view them through, as Kastrup would say, a dissociative boundary. 

Therefore, a tree is mentation coming from universal mind. But it appears to us the way it does because we are viewing it from our own personal perspective, through the dissociative boundary. What the tree is in and of itself, unto itself, we can't know. 

Similarly, if you look at a mountain, we have the impression that it is something physical. But actually, it's the mental encounter with this incredible symbol coming from universal mind. It takes on the shape and the form that it does by virtue of the fact that we're viewing it through our own filters, our own dissociative boundary. 

If this diagram is successful, it illustrates the two main themes that I've been focusing on for the past few episodes. And that is, first of all, that everything is mental experience. It's all mentation. Man is all imagination. That is, man is all psyche. That's the sum total of the universe and man's experience in it. And secondly, there is a dissociation between the individual consciousness and the universal mind of God. 

In the first instance, the concept of the entire universe being mentation has such extraordinary explanatory power, the anomalies of science start to make sense. Demonstrated psi phenomena, telekinesis, remote viewing, all of the extraordinary effects that people under hypnosis can demonstrate that defy the laws of physics... all of a sudden, all of this becomes perfectly comprehensible and explicable. 

In the second case, where we have the dissociation between man and God, between the individual consciousness and the greater universal consciousness... I don't think there could be a more apt description. It identifies us as God, which Neville wishes to do. It also shows how we don't experience the totality of God as the narrow ego. It also explains that we have the potential to have something greater awaken within us. 

Well, let's go over the points that we covered today. We started with the quote from Blake, whereby all that you behold, although it appears without it, is actually within. From there we discussed the materialist attitude and by contrast, the idealist attitude, which shows that everything in life is a mental construct. We then asked, according to that popular notion, is everything illusion? But no, it's not necessary to characterize things as unreal. It's rather a matter of recognizing the nature of the things that we encounter. 

Then we went over a series of points, that is, consequences that might arise as a result of embracing this whole worldview. We talked about perception; the feeling of "I"; the time sense; how to make sense of travel and physical motion; a newfound sense of well being; the experience of life as a collective dream; and how, in Neville's view, the life of man and God are meaningfully bound together. We are not limited by a rather sterile scientific rendering of the whole story. And finally, I directed your attention to the diagram that I created on the blog post, which shows in schematic form all of the concepts we've been discussing today.

Thank you for listening. Remember to check the show notes and subscribe to the Neville on Fire podcast.