Bernardo Kastrup - Affinity p.2

In the previous post, part 1, we saw that Neville Goddard and Bernardo Kastrup each arrived at the same foundational idea: what we take to be the physical world must actually be mental in nature. In this post we’ll examine how Bernardo’s system lends credence to yet another principle, really, the essential one in Neville’s thought; namely, that we are one with the universal source.

References:
Neville
Freedom for All (1942)
God Became Man (lecture 1969)
The Way (lecture, date unknown)

Bernardo Kastrup
Analytic Idealism - Online Course 

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Neville Goddard (1905-1972) offered a compelling explanation of the human condition and an intriguing and empowering path of self-discovery. Join your host Ed to explore from the ground up this most essential mystery: the human imagination.

Announcer: 00:02

Welcome to the Neville on Fire podcast. Neville Goddard was a twentieth century spiritual teacher who offered a profound message. Your creative imagination is the very source of reality. As we learn to use it properly, life becomes intelligible and rewarding. Join your host, Ed, to explore our most valuable asset, the human imagination.

Ed: 00:27

This is season two episode four, the second in a series that looks at the affinity between the thought of Bernardo Kastrup and that of Neville Goddard. Let's do a brief recap of part one. The idea was to establish that the universe is mental, psychological in nature, not material. So in the previous episode, we saw that Neville Goddard and Bernard Kastrup each arrived independently, some seventy years apart, at the same foundational idea, and that was that what we take to be the physical world must actually be mental in nature. It cannot have its own standalone physical existence independent of the human mind.

Ed: 01:13

But the motivation behind this investigation into Bernardo Kastrup's philosophy, which is called analytic idealism, is that I believe it will give a lot of confidence to the students of Neville Goddard. I mean, the people who are really interested in trying to internalize his worldview. So thanks to the work of Bernardo Kastrup we can see that the people who really want to entertain seriously the idea that the world is you pushed out, as Neville would say, the world is psyche, they really have, overwhelmingly, have the evidence on their side. And it's the rest of the world that is stuck in a superstition we call materialism. So in this episode, what we want to do is examine how Bernardo Kastrup's system of thought substantiates yet another principle in Neville's work.

Ed: 02:05

Really, it's the core principle, and that is that the creative source, God, and man are one. Now, if Neville were around today, what would he think of this sort of discussion or this sort of investigation? I don't think he would be against it because he did quote from, first of all, many poets, not just the Bible, but also poetic and literary sources. Also, would quote from scientific sources if he felt that it would substantiate his case just for the purpose of lending credence to the biblical account and helping to convince people. Something else that encourages me in this line of thought is that I don't think Neville was really doctrinal.

Ed: 02:48

Of course, he was deeply Christian, but at the same time, he wasn't rigidly orthodox and doctrinal. He would allow for individual variation in the experience of the mystery, and he would say things like, is nothing you could ever name or or fathom. So that even the word god is just a convention. It's just an artifact of of our language. What it denotes is something ineffable, something vast and beyond comprehension on this ordinary human level.

Ed: 03:19

So if we look at Bernardo Kastrup's work and it somehow reflects or supports the biblical view while using scientific language instead of archaic biblical language, then there's nothing wrong with that. Alright. So if our approach is sound, let's go ahead and examine this core tenet to Neville's thinking, the idea that God and man are one, and we'll take this through a series of stages. First of all, the realization of the awareness of being. Second, the identity of God and man.

Ed: 03:50

Third, the idea of many in one or one in many. And fourth, the separation of the many from the one. So in order to accomplish this, what I'll do is give a series of quotes as well as commentary. I'm gonna try to paint a picture here, and it's it's not an easy task. In fact, it's scarcely possible to summarize Neville's contention because it's experiential, and after all, it is the Christian mystery.

Ed: 04:16

But at least we can start in the realm of ideas. I think that's a legitimate thing to do. So I'm going to try to sketch the thesis as briefly as I can. The realization of awareness of being is really one and the same as what Neville calls the self definition of God given in scripture. So here's the quote.

Ed: 04:37

And God said unto Moses, I am that I am. And he said, thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I am hath sent me unto you. So regarding this quote, Neville makes the intuitive leap that I don't think anyone else has ever done that I've that I've ever read about. It's a psychological interpretation of the self definition of God. The declaration I am leads the alert reader straight back into his or her own awareness of self.

Ed: 05:10

So awareness of self is evoked in scripture, and not just in that reading, but in many other locations, as Neville points out. Now we can pursue the idea of the identity of God and man in a little more detail. It's clear that Neville did not equate merely the surface level of our being, as he called it. That is the narrow ego with the totality of the mind of God. That would be silly.

Ed: 05:34

Even so, a more nuanced story about the relationship between man and God does start by locating the divinity within the psyche of man. So consider these quotes from the Bible. Do you not realize that Christ Jesus is in you? That's from second Corinthians. Or the kingdom of God is within you.

Ed: 05:56

That's from Luke 17. Alright. So so far we have awareness of being equated with the creative source itself. The next idea is many in one. The word translated as God is Elohim.

Ed: 06:12

It is plural, yet the supreme commandment states that consciousness is one. Neville's instruction that man and God are identical reasserts this seeming paradox. So here's the way Neville explains it. He starts with a quote. Here, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord.

Ed: 06:32

Here, o man, made of the very substance of God, you and God are one and undivided. That's from freedom for all chapter one. So the divinity is one yet identical with fragmented humanity. That's the mystery. That's the paradox.

Ed: 06:48

God must be what we could call a compound unity. The last part of this explanation is separation of many from one. So stick with me because if you get this part, then you'll see much better how Bernardo Kastrup's information actually substantiates the whole thing. Nebel starts with a quote, which I think comes from the Eastern Orthodox Church. God became man so that man might become God.

Ed: 07:18

Now this in turn would make sense of the eighty second Psalm, which Neville says is a puzzle for biblical scholars. He points out that if we, human beings, are indeed the ones addressed in this passage in the eighty second Psalm, and we will die like men as it says, well, follows that at the time of being addressed, we were something other than men. Here's an excerpt from Neville's discussion. Quote, in the eighty second Psalm, we are the speaker speaking to ourselves saying, I say you are gods, sons of the most high, all of you. Nevertheless, you will die like men and fall as one man, oh princes.

Ed: 07:59

We are sons of the most high, and we and our creator are one. You and I actually became human that humanity might become spirit. Dying in order to become man, we have assumed man's entire nature in order to raise man to the level of love, that is to the level of God. So this is all from a lecture that Neville gave back in 1969 called God Became Man. Now in another lecture, Neville points out that the fall of the sons of God, in other words, separation from the source, induced a sort of amnesia.

Ed: 08:39

We took on a lower contracted state that we call human. Divinity became conditioned as man. And when we say man, of course, we mean generic man, man and woman. And so the result is that man does not remember his origin. He must go through life experience that is a series of states and struggle to awaken.

Ed: 09:01

Here's another quote from a lecture by Neville called The Way. You are the gods in the state that has fallen, not because you did anything that was wrong. It is for a purpose, a creative purpose, to expand beyond what we were prior to the fall. Here we fell into the limit of opacity and contraction called man of flesh and blood. You can't conceive of what you have shut out in coming here.

Ed: 09:29

We are all suffering from total amnesia. These are only states, states into which we have fallen in our sleep, for we actually fell into this world made up of infinite states. Alright. So the spiritual journey that I've just tried to summarize has the following elements. First, awareness of being.

Ed: 09:52

Second, realization of divine nature. Third, the paradox of many in one or one in many, that is the unity of consciousness but with a fragmentation of being. Then human being as initially in an exalted state as son of God, then in a lower state, that is the limit of contraction. And finally, the human being must go through a life of experience living in a world of infinite potential states. So when you consider all of those elements together, I'd like you to notice how in this allegory, everything is seamlessly psychological in nature.

Ed: 10:32

There's nothing material that's talked about. And all of the various roles that are mentioned, father, men, sons, god, etcetera, They're all simultaneously one or another aspect of the very same being. Well, if you've listened to Neville's lectures, you're probably already familiar with this picture of god and man. So we're in a position now to turn our attention to Bernardo Kastrup and see how his system of thought is strikingly parallel to it. Well, as Bernardo points out, a good metaphysical argument has to be parsimonious.

Ed: 11:07

It has to be brief and contain a minimum of assumptions or causal factors in order to be credible. So Bernardo, seeking the thing that has the most certitude, avoids the materialist error of taking the object of sense impressions as physical things unto themselves. That's actually a conceptual leap. So in other words, he avoided an unnecessary conceptual leap. He limits certitude to the mental event of perception itself.

Ed: 11:36

So in other words, if we perceive a rose and the redness, the color of that rose, the conscious experience of the redness of the rose is the only thing in which we can have absolute certainty. Notice that we haven't yet professed what the nature of the thing is. So I assume that Bernardo saw that the nature of the rose could not be physical, you know, following on the results of all the experimentation that we were talking about earlier. So he concluded that it must be mental. And I believe he says somewhere that there's really no evidence or intuition that suggests a third option.

Ed: 12:11

Okay. So again, observing the imperative of parsimony, Bernardo then found the notion of many consciousnesses to be too problematic, and therefore opted for the solution of one universal consciousness. That was the most elegant solution. And yet, the problem still persisted of how to account for the multitude of private personal consciousnesses possessed by humanity itself within the larger field. Bernardo sought the answer in the naturally occurring phenomenon of multiple personalities.

Ed: 12:47

So he saw that separate and discrete identities resided within a single individual psyche. This is something that has been studied, it's known, it's understood. So the result for Bernardo, just as in Neville's conception, was a universal consciousness that fragmented itself into individual units. So in this vast picture, there's nothing but mentation, and that agrees with the first principle that we looked at. And secondly, there's only one being despite a multitude of roles.

Ed: 13:22

So I don't think that Bernardo could have guessed the incredible explanatory power that his model really yields for those trying to make sense out of Neville's thought. So we'll go into that in detail in the next episode. So for now, let's just recap what we covered today. In part one, we started with the idea that it's useful to review analytic idealism of Bernardo Kastrup in order to shed light and better understand Neville's system. The first major idea is that the universe is mental in nature.

Ed: 13:55

In this episode, we went to the second principle that God and man are one. In order to build the case for that, we quoted a commentary from Neville, the realization of awareness of being, identity of God and man, many in one or one in many, and the separation of many from the one. Finally, we saw that Bernardo Kastrup's system of thought aligns very well with this. So in the next episode, we'll try to explore the consequences of adopting this worldview that is the two main principles that are held in common by Bernardo Kastrup and Neville Goddard.

Announcer: 14:32

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