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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.
[edited for clarity]
Episode 23: The Imagination is Therapeutic
In a previous episode, I was talking about investigative reporter John Rappoport and how he had made available a series of interviews that he conducted with a hypnotherapist whom he considered to be one of the most progressive therapists that he had ever met. Now, this man did not publish, and remains anonymous, but the whole story is relevant to our subject, because it has to do with the therapeutic effect of the imagination.
So instead of using a Freudian interpretation and technique with his patients, which was the norm, this hypnotherapist invited the client to improvise, to extemporize on any given topic that might arise, and then to elaborate descriptions -- in certain cases, descriptions of what should be the ideal picture. He did not concern himself with throwing the client into deeper and deeper states of what you would call a hypnotic trance. He rejected the use of the word trance, probably because it's so ill defined anyway.
So we can learn from that. We can enter into what Neville calls controlled reverie, using the power of the word to elaborate the picture of what should be. And as he progressed in this experimental technique with clients, he found that, Lo and behold, their original complaints were disintegrating. They were just fading away. So no more neurosis, no more physical ailment, no more stress. And so the crucial lesson that we take from that is that the deliberate, conscious exercise of the imagination is indeed healing. It's therapeutic. So in this episode, let's use that revelation as a point of departure.
1. Well, the first connection that I can think of is going back to Nicoll, the British psychologist, when Nicoll broke from Jung and went to study with Gurdjieff. There was one occasion, and I read about this in his biography where Gurdjieff was conducting his school. Now, the work consisted in a lot of physical labor, and a lot of people didn't know what they were doing. They didn't understand the connection between their own psychological development and all of this backbreaking physical labor that they were supposed to do. Evidently, Nicoll had some idea of what he was doing. Gurdjieff was instructing him about consciousness, about self remembering, having awareness of being, and he emphasized the point: consciousness is healing in its effect.
Nicoll wrote in his commentary later on that the effect of consciousness, of self remembering, is beneficial to every cell simultaneously in the body.
3. Neville Goddard himself would have advocated for the use of the imagination in healing and did so specifically with regard to what he called “revision”. In other words, to remake an event that had already occurred, whether in the recent past or in the far past, to effect a healing of the body.
Testimonials will attest to this fact, that people were actually able to reverse the effect of some accident or other and heal themselves by this deliberate use of the imagination.
4. In another connection, Neville talks about the quote from Isaiah, “My word shall not return onto me void.” It will actually have a physical effect.
So if we put together what we've got so far, we have the use of awareness as a healing, coupled with the deliberate description of the ideal state, and the magical, creative effect of words, as well as the revision of memory into a different event that would have been the preferred picture. All of these combine to point to the idea that the imagination is therapeutic.
5. The difficulty becomes, why is it that we don't use this already? I think the reason is we don't have a “midpoint”, we don't have the balance. There are two activities. There's receiving information (hearing, listening) and then there's talking (expressing information). So the pendulum swing that I want to describe, it goes from the relatively unconscious and automatic to the conscious and deliberate.
6. If you think of receiving information at the unconscious end of the spectrum, you're simply receiving everything without any filter. So you take in all the propaganda, the edicts, and the mandates of the various institutions, which, as we have learned, are by and large corrupt -- as well as taking in all of the small talk, and perhaps even taking some of that to heart in a detrimental way.
7. And in the area of expression or talking, there could be a negative element. This is what I find in self observation, when you catch yourself so often saying something and wishing a split second later that you had not said that thing. Why? Because we're taking to heart the idea that “my word shall not return unto me void”. We're not convinced that it's harmless or inconsequential. We're kind of concerned that we're creating bad things for ourselves.
8. In the speaking and the talking, well, how much of it can be said to be deliberately creative in the sense of extemporized, just like a jazz musician would do on a theme? I would say that our talking as a creative act is almost nonexistent; it's sorely lacking. And that is why we don't understand; we don't have this notion of creative talking as a staple in our understanding of how life should be conducted.
9. Now just think about everything in popular culture that perpetuates this thing that I'm talking about, everything that we see and read and hear in popular media, so transparently programmed and propagandistic so-called entertainment. Also we have the interactive forms, where you're simply doing what someone called electronic grunting, that is, you're trying to express yourself in 140 characters. Eventually, a good part of your interactive communication is degraded and trivialized, with the simultaneous similar action upon your mind.
10. The use of communications technology is, of course, extraordinarily practical. And we should have it, but we should not have all the concomitant effect destroying our intellects, destroying our capacity to understand abstract concepts and express them.
11. You've got to take your study of ideas, your thoughts about what constitutes the worthwhile thing, the good thing, and somehow reformulate it or express it to be relevant for yourself. Now that expression could come in many forms.
12. Well, let's take the example of Jung. He had his retreat by the lake in Kusnacht. And so, in these famous stories he would receive big blocks of stone, and work on these things and create with a hammer and chisel -- or do paintings and drawings and things like that, just in a spontaneous, free flowing manner, but with a definite therapeutic psychological intent.
13. It has to do with instead of so much incoming information, you need to get it back out there and express it. This is particularly true with dream analysis. You can read about dreams, you can try to find compendiums of dream symbols and even remember your dreams. And yet if you don't do the opposite “vector”, as I put it, that is, expressing the thing back out into the objective world (in other words, just making a written record of the dream) then you won't get the whole experience -- you won't understand the dream. Once you express the dream in written (or other) form, you've given it objectivity; you've given it a directly observable form, and then you can start to work with it, it starts to make sense.
14. So in this discussion so far, trying to summarize these disparate threads, they all can be brought together in a common theme: the deliberate, mindful use of the faculties of reception, as well as of the faculties of expression.
The result of that is an activity that is sorely lacking in our usual way of being. But in practice it can have healing and therapeutic effects. In receiving information, be selective and use that discipline of the mind that Neville talks about; moreover, engage in creative talking.
Awareness of being (self consciousness) -- that in itself is healing. Imagining a past event that was injurious and to revise it -- that is healing. To sit in a relaxed state and enter into a verbal description of the ideal -- that is healing. To remember a dream and give it objective form by verbalizing it, and then sort out what the message is -- that is healing.
15. In times gone by, people used to write diaries and I think they were very therapeutic. They fulfilled this whole function of trying to “reverse the vector” of information flow, and produce something objective -- even if those diaries were never published. The diarists helped themselves, and so by extension helped other people.
16. So, back to the clients of the hypnotherapist: what they discovered in this whole process is that people are self healing, if they're just given the chance. They have to do it themselves, and they have to do it mindfully.
One aspect of that exercise is the question: what stupid narrative have I unthinkingly accepted and lived by -- whether that be something of a political or social nature, or of a personal nature?
The second aspect is the creative one. It's not enough to simply throw off the old. You have to create if you want to complete the process and achieve what you actually do want. And this seems to be the most difficult!
Now why is it that the least popular exercise in public school is public speaking? Why is it that people are terrified in their adult lives of getting up in front of a crowd and addressing them, especially without a script? Because we don't have practice in this art of oration, of speech making. And the speech making that does go on is often so controlled by people behind the scenes that the person is not a thinking entity. He's just a mouthpiece.
17. When you watch old films of these famous orators in the political scene, the great dictators, it seems evil. You've got one man standing up in front of a regimented crowd of thousands, speaking forcefully and authoritatively -- and everyone is in rapt attention. Now what redeems that scenario is to take it psychologically. The thing that is noble and worthwhile is to have a single authoritative voice in oneself.
18. Well, I'm back in the office now, but let's stay on this topic for a second. Does Neville give any advice with respect to the ability to speak authoritatively, from a central position within oneself, and have that be a creative force? Yes. You probably remember the lecture that has to do with the phrase “I remember when”.
It was one of his students who took this advice (which Neville had gotten himself through dream). It is: to use the phrase “I remember when” to create.
In the dream, Neville eventually “becomes” the central figure -- the grandfather -- who is standing on an empty lot, nothing there. Yet, using what Neville calls “vivid description”, he builds up a picture that is so complete, so detailed of the structure that he wants to build there. And the grandfather is saying, “I remember when this did not exist.”The whole thing is being built up in his mind, in his imagination, for the benefit of his family and even for future generations.
So that's a great example of how you can engage with the creative faculty by using verbal expression.
19. Well, I started out by saying that in previous episodes (E16 and E20) I had talked about the investigative reporter John Rappoport, and the fact that he had conducted interviews with this anonymous hypnotherapist. He calls him Jack True. That's the pseudonym. I think that the theme that they inspire is one of the most important in the whole series that I'm producing, that the imagination has a therapeutic, healing quality.
Now I want to give you the words that Rappaport uses to introduce his interviews with Jack True. He says: “I've written hundreds of articles that attempt to stimulate the imagination. I've had to take into account the resistance...” -- that is, the resistance that seems to be present in the minds of his audience. He says, “The word will has pretty much been removed from the modern vocabulary.”
He goes on to say that “To live through and by imagination is a choice, taken or not taken, in freedom.”
And then I'll finish today's episode with the words from this interviewee, the hypnotherapist himself. He says:
“A person pretends on some level that all this business about imagination doesn't mean much at all, but actually it's very big. The trance that he's in is all about not using his imagination. That's how he says no. He falls asleep. He walks around, but he's asleep. He's asleep in a particular way. He's asleep when it comes to the imagination, which means he's asleep when it comes to the core of his existence.”
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