This is season two, episode five. It's the third in a series to compare the thought of Bernardo Kastrup with that of Neville Goddard, with the aim of trying to get some confirmation and substantiation of Neville's arguments from the world of science and contemporary philosophy.

So what we'll do is a recap of parts one and two, and then consider the consequences of adopting this entirely new worldview. Now, in part one, Neville's contention was that the principle stated in the Hermetica, first century esoteric literature is actually correct. And it coincides with what he found in Christian scripture. We live in a universe that is nothing but mentation. The mind of God is complete. There is nothing but the mind of God, and for man nothing exists except through conscious experience. As a result, the idea of nature as a "complex of things external to the mind of man must be rejected" (Neville, Power of Awareness). 

Well, if you've ever tried to really consider this seriously, to internalize this information and live by it, you probably didn't consider it something that you would bring up at a family dinner or a business meeting. In fact, you probably thought that, well, it's quite a marginal view. You're on the fringes of society until we discover what Bernardo Kastrup says. Then all of a sudden we discover we have some justification. 

Bernardo takes the results of experimentation done over a period of decades and dares to admit the conclusion that they really point to, and that is that standalone materiality does not exist. He didn't arrive at that conclusion through some convoluted process. On the contrary, he actually removed complication from the materialist argument and made fewer assumptions. 

He points out in so many words that we deceived ourselves because we were not really careful in our thinking. We took the conscious experience of inexplicable qualities, something like the redness of the rose or the sweetness of a strawberry, to somehow be cobbled together from material which, according to the very same body of reasoning, has no qualities. So the whole thing is completely nonsensical. 

The these elusive qualities cannot be material. They must be mental events. And since they are irreducible, they don't rest on anything, acknowledging them becomes the foundation of a legitimate philosophical argument -- in other words, the point where there's an absolute minimum of assumptions. And although Neville uses different terminology, he starts from exactly the same premise. 

Well, in part two we consider Neville's most audacious and blasphemous precept, I.e. that man and God are one. Now we would think that we certainly couldn't find corroboration for something like that in the modern scientific world, or is it possible that we could...? Consider Bernardo's argument as it continues (and here I'm reconstituting it as I understand it):

Okay, all is mind, all is mentation. But the notion of billions of separate consciousnesses held by multitudes of people - there's no way to make sense of that as you try to build a system. So he proposed, as a hypothesis, that which the 1rst century mystics, whether they were Hermetic or Christian, had already declared as a given. And that is that there is one and only one universal field of consciousness. This corresponds clearly enough to the idea of God, although Bernardo does not use the term "God" because it lies outside the scientific lexicon. 

Well, the formulation of one universal mind still left an obvious problem, and that is: how to account for the billions of seemingly separate instances of consciousness distributed among the human population? Bernardo remained committed to that which is empirically consistent, parsimonious and logically coherent, in order to build an argument that would be acceptable and have credibility. Now, the naturally occurring phenomenon of multiple personalities (dissociative identity disorder or multiple personality disorder as it used to be called), demonstrates how it is indeed possible for one mind to be comprised of more than one identity. And when you compare the situation of a personality that has dissociated alters with the description that Neville gives
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of the relationship between man and God, the parallels are striking. The individual experiences amnesia, forgetfulness, there's blindness, there's a misunderstanding as to the nature of reality. 

So we have strong grounds for concluding that Neville's vision of the division between Man and God -- the fall of a multiplicity (and yet it's all one consciousness) into the form of the human being; and at the same time the parallel explanation of Bernardo Kastrup whereby universal consciousness has dissociated itself into a series of alters, which are individual human beings... this all hangs together as a consistent picture. 

So that concludes our brief recap of parts one and two in this three-part series. What I want to do to complete today's episode is to sketch out a few of the consequences that arise from embracing this worldview, which is so revolutionary. 

It really overturns everything in our thinking, and while it's not naturally intuitive, and it does take work to accept new ideas, once that is done, it starts to give you a much clearer sense of reality and of our own nature and identity. In other words, the explanatory power of this new worldview really is much greater than [that of] the superstition of materialism that we've been living in. 

Well, the first consequence is an astonishing realization of the nature of sensory experience. What is brought home to you is that seeing something is an experience in consciousness. It's a direct perception of meaning, because that's what objects are. They are expressions of meaning, as seen, as Bernardo would say, through a dissociative boundary, in other words, from our own individual, perspective. 

But they are not physical. It's something that is presented by the universal mind to our own individual mind. You might remember Neville saying in one lecture that there's nothing but God. Now we discover exactly what he meant. When you behold a tree or a mountain or a river, some natural object, you're not looking at a material thing that is somehow imbued with the mind of God or something that is material that is, mixed up with the mind of God. No, you are beholding mentation itself. 

So as we take some time to ponder this new world and our place in it, we start to get a feeling that the location of the sense of I is really no longer in the head. Consciousness does not proceed out of the brain. On the contrary, it is the brain that is something that is a feature of our own individual consciousness. 

Another aspect of this is to consider that your time sense is changing. We think naturally that the order of causation goes from the past to the present to the future. But when we follow Nevill's instruction to appropriate the state of the wish fulfilled, we realize that it's actually an ordering power that that state has. It's not causation going forward in time. It's an ordering power that operates outside time. 

Well, how is it that we can, escape time? By remembering that time and space are nothing but mental constructs. The explanatory power that this has is huge. Now we can understand all of Neville's stories about how he appropriates the state. He brings the state to him. He doesn't travel anywhere physically. He simply goes in his mind and then goes across a bridge of incident and so on. There's nothing in travel that involves physical motion. All physical motion is simply a me mental movement from one place to the next to the next. Everything is mental in character. 

You might think that, that is nonsensical. But here's what is really silly and nonsensical. It's that somehow a bunch of dust got together and accreted into a planet, and then produced life forms and then that resulted in consciousness. That is the whacked out version of reality that we have from materialism. 

It is actually a subtler, more elegant, refined notion of reality -- to embrace this whole idea that everything is mental, spiritual in nature. And the result of that, I'm sure you'll notice, is it changes the feeling of yourself, quite literally the sensory feeling of yourself, a feeling of relaxation and well being that you had not experienced before. And why
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does this happen? It's because your concept of yourself and the world has completely shifted. You are now aligned with reality. 

So notice in that popular corruption of this esoteric idea that we're trying to live by: we are [supposedly] spiritual beings that are undergoing a physical existence. No, what Neville is trying to get across is that we are spiritual beings immersed in an entirely spiritual experience.

So I've got to remember that when I'm, let's say, running my hand across the top of my desk and feeling its bulk, the smoothness, the texture, the temperature, the flatness... all of these qualities are gifts from God. They are mental experience. They do not reside in some independent physical object exterior to my mind. That is the whole point. 

Well, one other aspect of this worldview that I believe Neville and Bernardo hold in common is that human life is a dream. We are living in a dream. But who is the dreamer? The dreamer must be the deeper universal consciousness that everyone has in the depths of their being. And what we conceive ourselves to be and the lives that we're going through are nothing but a sort of artificiality. 

Now, that should not convey the sense that everything is an illusion and everything is meaningless. No, quite the opposite. We are brought face to face with meaning itself. There is a purpose, there is meaning, and we're dealing with it directly, day to day. It's just that the nature of it did not come from a random physical material process. No, it came from a purpose that was mindfully conceived. 

So I don't think it's necessary to continue to try to draw a parallel between the systems of Bernardo Castro and Neville Goddard. I really do appreciate Bernardo's exposition and how that helped us to bring sense to the idea that the world is mental in nature and that there is a universal consciousness from which we are dissociated. 

But there is a reason, after all, why this is the Neville on Fire podcast. In Neville's conception there is a purpose in the mind of God, and man and God are meaningfully bound together. Neville also is much more open to the consequences of this worldview and is not so bound by scientific orthodoxy. So, for example, Neville rejects the whole idea of Darwinian evolution. And I do think Neville's view is much more compelling, especially after having read James Perloff "Tornado in a Junkyard", which is a complete refutation of Darwinian evolution. 

So in today's episode we reviewed part one and part two of the exploration of Bernardo Kastrup's Analytic Idealism and how it sheds light on the system of Neville Goddard. And today we explored some of the consequences of adopting that worldview. 

I hope this has been helpful, and has opened up the whole concept of Neville's worldview for you, and conveyed just how real and how vital it actually is. To effect self change is extraordinarily difficult. And yet this is what we must do. This is the purpose of the whole thing. So we've got to fight to maintain our high ideals, to put them into practice. And we've got to be willing to carefully contemplate these ideas that come to us through esoteric underground streams -- from people who have actually understood, experienced and are trying to convey to us what human life is all about.

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