Waking Up In the Real World

The real world is the unification of both the inner and outer worlds. They must come together in a single, undivided experience. 

What is Neville On Fire?

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.

This is S02E12 Waking Up in the Real World. The theme I want to discuss today is living in the real world. I think this will be of interest if you really have a desire to take Neville seriously, to take him at his word and make a mental shift. I'm going to have to call to mind all the faith I can muster. That's the crucial ingredient of a profound belief.

Here's an introduction.

Please keep in mind two of Neville Goddard's core concepts which inform his interpretation of Christianity. The first is that human beings are one with God. The creative source itself, which we call God, dwells in the depths of the mind of the individual. From Neville's perspective, an individual must somehow discover the reality of God within oneself. And the first step is to learn awareness of being true self, remembering consciousness. So for information on that, see S01E01 and S02E07.

Dreams of a certain unmistakable quality can be a compelling channel of communication.

Neville's instruction is that God is to awaken -- to be clear, awaken as the person himself or herself -- for we do not lose our individuality.

The second core concept is that man's entire experience and the whole universe, following the Hermetic principle, are mental in nature. All is mentation. The result of adopting that view is that one need not be at the mercy of an external threatening world which impinges its effects upon oneself. That's a misconception.

Rather, the whole thing is reversed, whereby one accepts experience of the world as an unfailing mirror of one's own position. Those two foundational concepts, the unity of man and God and man, and the universe as all imagination, all psyche -- as opposed to a clumsy building block reality, as the materialists would have it. Those two core concepts I have presented and discussed in many aspects over the course of the past 40 podcast episodes.

Well, let's go now to our main topic, which is, as I mentioned, living in the real world. What is the real world? It is neither the invisible world of concepts, emotions, thoughts and intuitions, nor the visible physical environment. Whether natural or constructed, the real world is the unification of both the inner and outer worlds. They must come together in a single undivided experience. The division between inner and outer is a misconception it tends to evaporate, however, when you turn over in your mind and start to accept, even as a hypothetical approach, the precept that I mentioned, that all is mental.

Neville's Christianity, affirms the outer everyday life.

Christianity, in Neville's interpretation, is grounded in conscious experience, which tears down all the walls between the mental, the spiritual and the seeming physical. One implication of this fresh understanding of Christianity is that we cannot reject the mundane everyday life as something lesser or disdainful, which I think is, often implied in a lot of spiritual practice. So this is probably a cultural hangover from institutional Christianity, which conceived life as a veil of tears, merely a dull preparation for some remote afterlife.
The sane approach is to integrate inner drive with immediate reality, embrace the daily grind, use it and transform it. This is, after all, our main field of practice. This is our school.

Neville, in his writings and lectures, continually unifies the inner and the outer realms in one lived experience.

Psychological principles have universal application. In recent episodes we saw that out of this understanding emerges the most extraordinary principles ever conceived to guide the conduct of society. Secular life and spiritual life blend into one as arrangements in the world of Caesar conform to, for example, rule of law, human dignity, written constitutions, respect for private property. All of these rooted in natural heartfelt revelations within a self realized individual.

Neville's brilliant psychological interpretation of Christianity, as opposed to a literal reading, turns out to have a certain robust quality. It proves out in unexpected ways the focus of this lens, directed beyond the personal sphere to politics and economics, is revelatory.

Judeo Christian principles, the very attributes that enable successful governance, economics and organizations, are not formalistic and artificial, nor are they arbitrary. They are psychological in origin. They are grounded in the noble self concept of a self realized individual.

Well, all of this underscores the wisdom of a deliberate approach to living in the real world. The secular world is not alien to us, but takes on the aspect of our mental life, our heartfelt values and expectations in every detail. Therefore, it is better to forego cynicism. Despite the evidence that things may not be working out very well, circumstances seem impossible. It's better rather to have faith in the word of our own affirmations.

Recovering the pre-materialist mindset.

Another avenue to approach living in the real world is to recover the mindset that predates scientific materialism. It is scientific materialism that fractured our experience of reality, reducing it to mere mechanics and quantities. And while we can celebrate humanity's technological accomplishments like electricity, flight, nuclear energy, we must also recognize that every innovation of human ingenuity had already been solved by universal mind in the world of nature.

The conclusion I draw from that is that technological accomplishment does not preclude living a mindful life. In fact, it might be enhanced by it.

Consider the perspective of someone living in antiquity, unburdened by materialism, in harmony with divine consciousness. For such a person, the separation between the experience of meaning and, the object in the field of one's awareness was diminished. They blended into one thing. Everything was simultaneously meaningful and real. A horse, for example, didn't represent majesty, strength and nobility. It was those things.

Conscious living and the loss of meaning.

So why isn't our thinking naturally aligned with this worldview? The answer lies in the attribution of truth to sense based experience, measurement; in the development of analytical thinking and observation - as opposed to intuition and faith. The result was we began to quantify the world. Space became a measurement rather than the expression of levels or a system of values. The world, once experienced as aive and meaningful, became cold and dead and mechanical.

To live in the real world we must reverse this estrangement. The things encountered in the world are not separate from us, not dead and not material. They are immediate and alive with meaning.

Living in the creative fire of paradox.

Well, yet another way to live in reality consists in accepting the fire of paradox and ambiguity. Consider a series of contradictions. God, the creative source, is utterly beyond human comprehension. Yet we are that God.

The universal mind contains all. Consciousness is one and undivided. Yet we retain individual identity. Intuition and empathy should connect us with other people, whom Neville calls the seeming other, on some unseen level, more intensely than what we normally experience. Underneath appearances, we are one. Yet paradoxically, individuality is sharpened. Without it, there is no differentiation, no possibility of conscious experience.

Therefore we have this paradox that we have to abide, which is being an individual and yet participating in the collective.

Another seeming contradiction arises in the choice either to engage with or retreat from society. We are called on to use our gifts and talents to accomplish things. But the moment we act, the ego encounters resistance and difficulty and adversity. This is what is called second force or opposing force in the Fourth Way tradition.

Now, that might prompt us to withdraw entirely from the world, rejecting politics and economics and social structures as unworthy of a spiritual life. But as a permanent solutio, that withdrawal ultimately turns out to be unsatisfactory, because it's escapist.

Embracing the paradox.

The integral approach is to accept both modes alternately. To engage with and take a break from life that seems to be the best way to embrace life as a school. It lets you reconcile the world of internal attention with the necessities of outer reality.

I find that approach allows me to make something out of the creative tension that I can retain.

Living in the real world requires us to integrate these paradoxes. And when we do, things begin to fall into place. We learn to accept ourselves fully, not in, a passive sense or an indulgent sense, but accept ourselves in the service of reality.

To live in reality means to act with our whole being, intellectually, emotionally and spiritually, but without hanging on to the identification with any part of it. This non identification brings a kind of self acceptance that shifts the feeling of oneself, inviting relaxation and health as well as productivity.

Another paradox appears when we consider the relationship between individual imaginal activity and social conditions. If I imagine something beneficial for society, it seems, in a sort of materialist conception, that I am merely a drop in an ocean of competing imaginal acts. And yet I would say the individual mind can affect society in some unexplained way, just as surely as it can shape personal life.

Summary and conclusions.

If we are keen to find the living truth of Neville's philosophy, we must acknowledge God and find him within. We must break free from the clumsy materialist world. This mental action does not throw us into illusion, as it is so often expressed, but rather puts us in immediate contact with reality. The result is the whole spectacle, of mundane daily life is imbued with significance. It's no longer an exterior threatening force, but becomes something that we own, mirroring our own thoughts, even the most fleeting ones.

Even man-made things like the built environment, organizations and social arrangements take on a human quality and are governed by psychological laws. The adventure of life begins, as Neville said. Not only do we claim our creative imaginal power, but live at the center of the mystery in which we see ourselves as a paradox: privately individual, yet engaged and in touch with the universal. Living in the real world means a deliberate mental shift into an elegant, interconnected and meaningful reality.

In vivid conscious experience, the very feel and texture of life is subtly altered because now in him we live and move and have our being. This enormously increases confidence and faith. As Paul said, ‘if God is for us, who can be against us?’