[edited for clarity]
This is the beginning of season two of Neville on Fire podcast and it's all about the ideas and principles of Neville Goddard. Season one consisted of 30 episodes and was an experiment in self teaching.

My main motive: I wanted to see if I could better establish Neville's worldview within myself. And this podcast experiment, I think it's proved to be worthwhile because looking back, I would say that self teaching can actually work.

1. Now when you're on a path that is meant to be life changing, making a record both of the ideas, the framework of ideas that you're working with, and the associated efforts and results, it accomplishes a few things. It self defines the practitioner. So you become much more clearly defined in your thinking to yourself. It prevents drifting, you stop non productive activity. And finally, it enables learning. The end result of that is to set up some kind of a counter force to the cognitive static - all of the confusion of life - and the decay or loss of memory that everyone goes through.

So let's go through a series of points, specific points that I think I learned on this journey of doing the first season. 

2. The first thing is that it's necessary to overcome doubt, self doubt. Eric Maisel, who writes on creativity, pointed this out. He said that in any creative act the writer or the artist faces negative inner voices. These voices of criticism insist that you're ego inflated and so on. What we ordinarily experience is simple self doubt. A healthy measure of self doubt just indicates a capacity to self regulate, to have some modesty. But that shouldn't go too far because as Neville points out, we do not sufficiently value ourselves.

3. Now another self imposed limitation is that we have no credibility. Gurdjieff, for example, lamented that anyone whose rent is paid three months in advance writes a book. Ok, a rather sarcastic remark, but the other side of that coin is the fact that those who know something valuable in a given field are often not very good at articulating the valuable thing that they know! So for example, it takes an Ouspensky [a master at verbal recall and written exposition] to make someone like Gurdjieff known to the vast world. 

4. So you finally come to the realization that all learning is really self teaching. You've got to teach yourself in whatever context it happens to be. It gets to the point where if you're good at self teaching, you understand that you have to engage with the master, the guru, with clever questions, saying in effect, “I know that you know something that I don't know. But I can see that you actually don't know how to communicate your knowledge to other people. So this is how we're going to do it. I'm going to ask you these critical questions...” And that's how you start to teach yourself. Now you could actually address yourself in the same way, on the theory that, deep down within the depths, you have the answers.

5. The next point I want to talk about is refinement. So no matter how we self teach, no matter what method we end up using, it's constantly a question of discernment of what the truth of the matter is. And as a result of that, discarding what has less value. Now Ezra Pound was good on this. He insisted that there should be a continual culling of material, whether it's to say that only a few lines in a poem are really necessary, [or a few strokes of the painter's brush]. Similarly, only a few books on a shelf are really necessary. Those are the ones that should be kept. Neville, for example, kept only two books, as his constant companions. This principle of continually sifting and refining is a good guide.

6. Now this leads me to my next point, which is that self teaching, in my experience, requires making a record of quality. So we've all heard that keeping a journal or a diary for example, is beneficial. That in itself is much better than letting significant ideas and their influence, which may be found only once in a lifetime, to fall through our fingers like sand. You've got to recapture these things that are life changing and keep reaffirming them, because if you don't, it's almost guaranteed that you are going to lose them. 

Apart from the idea of a diary or a journal, probably what is heard less often is the idea that creating, an audio or video series or a book or a poem or a painting, some sort of creative work aimed primarily at oneself  -  that has utility. The benefit of that, apart from satisfying our narcissistic tendencies (!)  is to make a finished product that is worthy of communication to oneself [at a later date] or to another person. 

So we can all have heaps of disorganized notes sitting in the closet or in the desk drawer. These things collect dust. Then again, if we dig them out and reread them, well, I find that they only have an ephemeral effect. By contrast, a carefully conceived record of your own best formulations serves your own development and amounts to a personal method. 

This loss of valuable ideas just shows quite clearly that the mere passage of time does not confer wisdom. They [monks] used to sequester themselves from society in monastic organizations to shut out distractions, and so they relied on the monastic institution to keep them on track. But we're not doing that. We're involving ourselves in life. The risk we run in taking part in life is that the constant onslaught of varied experience crowds out the ideas that you once thought to be priceless. No, you've got to fight to retain them.

7. So this kind of leads back to points that [Maurice] Nicoll made in his writings, saying that life in its meaningful aspect doesn't really go from the past to the present of the future. That's sort of a secondary consideration. The real movement of life is a continual rising and falling in the quality of your state. And this is especially true, well, probably true for all kinds of learning, but it's especially true when it comes to life changing ideas. Neville's ideas, not ordinary ideas, have a specific quality to them which is rare, but they have to be engaged with to be effective. So this learning, in a grand sense that I'm talking about, is not a guaranteed linear process. It can easily go downward or stagnate.

8. Well, the next point is that we might fall into the trap of thinking that it's not the right time or it's not going to be good enough. This method that I'm talking about, of making a record, applies at any age, and now is the accepted time. Let's not fall into the trap of imagining that increased age means deterioration. Now, at the same time, the mere passage of time does not confer wisdom. In some cases maybe the old people bring on a cognitive deterioration by simply succumbing to the hypnotic refrain that seniors must be senile! And we just have that notion ingrained and we don't bother to counteract it with engagement with the active mind, as opposed to the passive mind. So what I propose, by contrast to stereotypes, is that we all try to simply increase in our cognitive function, increase in our consciousness.

9. Well, let's take one more example of something that was brought home to me a little more deeply, by virtue of having used this method of self teaching. One idea that we've been discussing quite a lot is that there is no independently existing external world. No matter how often we repeat that idea, it just seems impossible to wrap your mind around it: there is no external world that is independently existing in a physical sense at all. No, I would say that most people, even on a spiritual path, continue to perpetuate this false dichotomy between the worldly, outward things, the material things, and that which is inward and “spiritual”. No, the whole thing is all one. And that's something that I'm starting to realize better and better. 

That's the thing with Neville's ideas. You have to engage with them and contemplate them and give them some time - and give them some faith. Invest in them a certain degree of belief or faith. That's the only way that they're going to start to open up and reveal their secrets to you.

So I can give you an example of what happened to me that brought home the idea. I was working on a project, a music project, which was actually years in the making. A lot of effort, a lot of time went into this. A certain incident occurred a few weeks back where the whole bottom seemed to drop out and destroy the whole thing. And at first I started to react and then I thought, “Wait a minute, I'm just going to cut this short and follow Neville's advice”,  which is, do not lift a finger. Don't do anything, don't take any action on the outside. So I did just that, and I simply started to rely on my own internal resources, in faith, even though I could see no way of this thing turning around. The very same day I got word from someone that the whole thing was going to be fixed. And this just came out of the blue, completely unexpected. 

So we start to understand that this notion that the world is simply ourselves pushed out has a degree of reality that we just don't suspect. This can start to happen on any scale. You look at worldly events, political events, things in the news and so on and start to discern some sort of a strange parallel between your own individual experience and what's happening on the outside on a mass scale.

There we've got the problem of trying to understand this difficult concept when the whole scale of experience could be collapsed from society right down to the individual. This challenge of understanding that the seeming external world is a reflection of our own psyche is scarcely a problem that we're going to be able to solve with the logical mind. It's going to require insight - revelation - because, well, first of all, others, according to Neville, have lives of their own. At the same time, they are the “seeming other”, in his words, "dead images into whom we breathe life". And yet, it's all one mind, one consciousness - but it's fragmented. And then apparently, people do not lose their individualization, they don't lose their individualized quality, even though we all eventually revert to one source. 

You know, some ideas that seem ridiculous on the surface we will reject out of hand and intuitively; just viscerally we’ll will throw them away and not regret it. But not this idea. This idea has a certain quality in it so that, somehow, you suspect that it actually might be the right solution to life. It is the right view of things. And the more you give it a chance and the more you contemplate it carefully, what happens is, the more you start to become convinced how ridiculous and absurd the materialist explanations actually are. Those are the explanations that seem, upon reflection, to be absolutely stupid and block headed. 

If ends run true to origin, and the origin is consciousness, then everything that develops from that must be conscious in its nature... must be consciousness itself. 

That's just one example of the sort of thing that you start to delve into and focus on with the assistance of a self teaching method.

Well, let's review the points that we covered today. The theme of this podcast episode is that self teaching actually works. 

1. The act of creating a record of quality is a way to produce a counter force, that is to counteract the cognitive static and distraction that life imposes, which keeps us from preserving and learning life-changing ideas. 
2. The first internal barrier to overcome is self doubt. 
3. The fear of being a non expert is the next internal barrier. 
4. How to be self teaching using critical questioning. 
5. Self teaching involves continual discernment and refinement. 
6. Reiteration of the idea: Creating a record of quality is what preserves for us life-changing ideas,  which we may only encounter once in a lifetime.
7. The real movement of life is not in time from the past to the present of the future, but rather in the quality of the state in the moment. 
8. Let's discard the fallacies with regard to age and suggest rather that all ages should endeavor to improve their cognitive function. 
9. The notion that the world is a reflection of our own mind is an example of the sort of idea that you could only retain, contemplate and review carefully with the assistance of a self teaching method.

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