Neville says, Imagination is the gateway of reality. As one reads this book, which one can finish in a day, this idea of using one's imagination in the basis of reality is constantly honed into the reader. Neville clarifies his concepts with actual stories of people manifesting what they imagined. Neville's concepts are steeped in quotes from the Bible, not over done at all, which further illustrate and help the reader to grasp the concepts. The abundant life that Christ promised us is ours to experience now, but not until we have the sense of Christ as our imagination can we experience it.
Contents
Chapter 1 — WHO
IS YOUR IMAGINATION?
Chapter 2 — SEALED INSTRUCTIONS
Chapter 3 — HIGHWAYS
OF THE INNER WORLD
Chapter 4 — THE
PRUNING SHEARS OF REVISION
Chapter 5 — THE
COIN OF HEAVEN
Chapter 6 — IT
IS WITHIN
Chapter 7 — CREATION
IS FINISHED
Chapter 8 — THE
APPLE OF GOD'S EYE
CHAPTER
1
WHO IS YOUR IMAGINATION?
I identify
the central figure of the Gospels with human imagination, the power
which
makes the forgiveness of sins, the achievement of our goals,
inevitable.
"All
things were made by him; and without him was not anything made
that was
made." —John 1:3
There is only
one thing in the world, Imagination, and all our deformations of it.
"He
is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with
grief." —Isaiah
53:3
Imagination
is the very gateway of reality. "Man," said Blake, "is either
the ark of God or a phantom of the earth and of the water."
"Naturally he is only a natural organ subject to Sense." "The
Eternal Body of Man is The Imagination: that is God himself, The
Divine Body: Jesus: we are his
Members."
I know of
no greater and truer definition of the Imagination than that of
Blake. By
imagination we have the power to be anything we desire to be. Through
imagination we disarm and transform the violence of the world. Our most intimate
as well as
our most casual relationships become imaginative as we awaken to "the
mystery hid from the ages," that Christ in us is our imagination.
We then
realize that only as we live by imagination can we truly be said to
live at
all.
I want
this book to be the simplest, clearest, frankest work I have the power
to make
it, that I may encourage you to function imaginatively, that you may
open your
"Immortal Eyes inwards into the Worlds of Thought," where you
behold
every desire of your heart as ripe grain "white already to harvest."
"I am
come that they might have life, and that they might have it more
abundantly." —John 10:10
The
abundant life that Christ promised us is ours to experience now, but
not
until we have the sense of Christ as our imagination can we
experience
it.
"The
mystery hid from the ages . . . Christ in you, the hope of glory."
—Colossians
1:26
is your
imagination. This is the mystery which I am ever striving to realize
more
keenly myself and to urge upon others.
Imagination
is our redeemer, "the Lord from Heaven" born of man but not begotten
of man.
Every man
is Mary and birth to Christ must give. If the story of the immaculate
conception and birth of Christ appears irrational to
man, it is only because it is misread as
biography, history and cosmology, and the modern explorers of the
imagination
do not help by calling it the unconscious or subconscious mind.
Imagination's
birth and growth is the gradual transition from a God of tradition to a
God of
experience. If the birth of Christ in man seems slow, it is only
because man is
unwilling to let go the comfortable but false anchorage of tradition.
When imagination is discovered
as the first principle of religion,
the stone of literal understanding will have felt the rod of Moses and,
like
the rock of Zin, issue forth the water of psychological meaning to
quench the
thirst of humanity; and all who take the proffered cup and live a life
according to this truth, will transform the water of psychological
meaning into
the wine of forgiveness. Then, like the good Samaritan, they will pour
it on
the wounds of all.
The Son of God is not to be
found in history nor in any external
form. He can only be found as the imagination of him in whom His
presence
becomes manifest.
"O
would thy heart but be a manger for His birth! God would once more
become a
child on earth."
Man is the
garden in which this only begotten Son of God sleeps. He awakens this
Son by
lifting his imagination up to heaven and clothing men in godlike
stature. We
must go on imagining better than the best we know.
Man in the
moment of his awakening to the imaginative life must meet the test of
Sonship.
"Father,
reveal Thy Son in me" and "It pleased God to reveal His Son in me."
—Galatians 1:16
The supreme test of Sonship is
the forgiveness of sin. The test
that your imagination is Christ Jesus, the Son of God, is your
ability to
forgive sin. Sin means missing one's mark in life, falling short of
one's
ideal, failing to achieve one's aim. Forgiveness means identification
of man
with his ideal or aim in life. This is the work of awakened
imagination, the
supreme work, for it tests man's ability to enter into and partake of
the
nature of his opposite.
"Let
the weak man say, I am strong." —Joel 3:10
Reasonably
this is impossible. Only awakened imagination can enter into and
partake of the
nature of its opposite.
This
conception of Christ Jesus as human imagination raises these
fundamental
questions. Is imagination a power sufficient, not merely to enable me
to assume
that I am strong, but is it also of itself capable of executing the
idea?
Suppose that I desire to be in some other place or situation. Could I,
by
imagining myself into such a state and place, bring about their
physical
realization? Suppose I could not afford the journey and suppose my
present
social and financial status oppose the idea that I want to realize.
Would
imagination be sufficient of itself to incarnate these desires? Does
imagination
comprehend reason? By reason I mean deductions from the observations of
the
senses. Does it recognize the external world of facts? In the
practical way of
every-day life is imagination a complete guide to behaviour? Suppose I
am
capable of acting with continuous imagination, that is, suppose I am
capable
of sustaining the feeling of my wish fulfilled, will my assumption
harden into fact?
And, if it does harden into fact, shall I on reflection find that my
actions
through the period of incubation have been reasonable? Is my
imagination a
power sufficient, not merely to assume the feeling of the wish
fulfilled, but
is it also of itself capable of incarnating the idea? After assuming
that I am
already what I want to be, must I continually guide myself by
reasonable ideas
and actions in order to bring about the fulfillment of my assumption?
Experience
has convinced me that an assumption, though false, if persisted in will
harden
into fact, that continuous imagination is sufficient for all things and
all my
reasonable plans and actions will never make up for my lack of
continuous
imagination.
Is it not
true that the teachings of the Gospels can only be received in terms of
faith
and that the Son of God is constantly looking for signs of faith
in people,
that is, faith in their own imagination? Is not the promise
"Believe
that ye receive and ye shall receive."
—Mark 11:24
the same
as "Imagine that you are and you shall be"? Was it not an imaginary
state in which Moses
"Endured,
as seeing him who is invisible"? —Hebrews 11:27
Was it not
by the power of his own imagination that he endured?
Truth
depends upon the intensity of the imagination not upon external facts.
Facts
are the fruit bearing witness of the use or misuse of the imagination.
Man
becomes what he imagines. He has a self-determined history. Imagination
is the
way, the truth, the life revealed. We cannot get hold of truth
with the
logical mind. Where the natural man of sense sees a bud, imagination
sees a
rose fullblown. Truth cannot be encompassed by facts. As we awaken
to the
imaginative life we discover that to imagine a thing is so makes it so,
that a
true judgment need not conform to the external reality to which it
relates.
The
imaginative man does not deny the reality of the sensuous outer world of
Becoming, but he
knows that it is the inner world of continuous Imagination that is the
force by
which the sensuous outer world of Becoming is brought to pass. He sees
the
outer world and all its happenings as projections of the inner world of
Imagination. To him everything is a manifestation of the mental
activity
which goes on in man's imagination without the sensuous reasonable man
being
aware of it. But he realizes that every man must become conscious of
this inner
activity and see the relationship between the inner causal world of
imagination
and the sensuous outer world of effects.
It is a marvelous thing to find
that you can imagine yourself into
the state of your fulfilled desire and escape from the jails which
ignorance
built.
The Real
Man is a Magnificent Imagination.
It is this self that
must be awakened.
"Awake
thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee
light." —Ephesians
5.14
The moment
man discovers that his imagination is Christ he accomplishes acts
which on
this level can only be called miraculous. But until man has the sense
of
Christ as his imagination. . .
"You
did not choose me, I have chosen you"
—John 15:16
he will
see everything in pure objectivity without any subjective relationship.
Not
realizing that all that he encounters is part of himself, he rebels at
the
thought that he has chosen the conditions of his life, that they are
related by
affinity to his own mental activity. Man must firmly come to believe
that
reality lies within him and not without.
Although others have bodies, a
life of their own, their reality is
rooted in you, ends in you, as yours ends in God.
SEALED INSTRUCTIONS
"The
first power that meets us at the threshold of the soul's domain is the
power of
imagination." —Dr. Franz Hartmann
I was
first made conscious of the power, nature and redemptive function of
imagination
through the teachings of my friend Abdullah; and through subsequent
experiences
I learned that Jesus was a symbol of the coming of imagination to man,
that the
test of His birth in man was the individual's ability to forgive sin;
that is,
his ability to identify himself or another with his aim in life.
Without
the identification of man with his aim the forgiveness of sin is an
impossibility,
and only the Son of God can forgive sin. Therefore man's ability to
identify
himself with his aim, though reason and his senses deny it, is proof of
the
birth of Christ in him. To passively surrender to appearances and bow
before
the evidence of facts is to confess that Christ is not yet born in you.
Although this teaching shocked
and repelled me at first, — for I
was a convinced and earnest Christian, and did not then know that
Christianity
could not be inherited by the mere accident of birth but must be
consciously
adopted as a way of life, — it stole later on, through visions,
mystical
revelations and practical experiences, into my understanding and found
its
interpretation in a deeper mood. But I must confess that it is a trying
time
when those things are shaken which one has always taken for granted.
"Seest
thou these great buildings? There shall not be left one stone upon
another
that shall not be thrown down." —Mark 13:2
Not one
stone of literal understanding will be left after one drinks the water
of
psychological meaning. All that has been built up by natural religion
is cast
into the flames of mental fire. Yet, what better way is there to
understand
Christ Jesus than to identify the central character of the Gospels with
human
imagination — knowing
that every time you exercise your imagination lovingly on behalf of
another you
are literally mediating God to man and thereby feeding and clothing
Christ
Jesus, and that whenever you imagine evil against another you are
literally
beating and crucifying Christ Jesus? Every imagination of man is
either the
cup of cold water or the sponge of vinegar to the parched lips of
Christ.
"Let
none of you imagine evil in your hearts against his neighbor"
warned the prophet Zechariah.
When man heeds this advice he will
awake from the imposed sleep of Adam into the full consciousness of the
Son of
God. He is in the world and the world is made by him and the world
knows him
not: Human Imagination.
I asked
myself many times "If my imagination is Christ Jesus and all things are
possible to Christ Jesus, are all things possible to me?"
Through
experience I have come to know that when I identify myself with my aim
in life,
then Christ is awake in me.
Christ is
sufficient for all things.
"I
lay down my life that I might take it again. No man taketh it from me
but I lay
it down of myself." —John 10:18
What a
comfort it is to know that all that I experience is the result of my
own
standard of beliefs; that I am the center of my own web of
circumstances and
that as I change so must my outer world!
The world
presents different appearances according as our states of
consciousness
differ. What we see when we are identified with a state
cannot be seen when we are no longer
fused with it. By state is meant all that man believes and consents to
as true.
No idea presented to the mind can realize itself unless the mind
accepts it. It
depends on the acceptance, the state with which we are identified,
how things
present themselves. In the fusion of imagination and states is to be
found the
shaping of the world as it seems. The world is a revelation of the
states with
which imagination is fused. It is the state from which we
think that
determines the objective world in which we live. The rich man, the poor
man,
the good man, the thief, are what they are by virtue of the states from
which
they view the world. On the distinction between these states depends
the
distinction between the worlds of these men. Individually so
different is
this same world. It is not the actions and behavior of the good man
that should
be matched but his point of view. Outer reforms are useless if the
inner state
is not changed. Success is gained not by imitating the outer actions of
the
successful but by right inner actions and inner talking.
If we
detach ourselves from a state, and we may at any moment, the conditions
and circumstances
to which that union gave being vanish.
It was in
the fall of 1933 in New York City that I approached Abdullah with a
problem. He
asked me one simple question, "What do you want?" I told him that
I
would like to spend the winter in Barbados, but that I was broke. I
literally
did not have a nickel.
"If
you will imagine yourself to be in Barbados," said he,
"thinking and viewing the world from that state of
consciousness
instead of thinking of Barbados, you will spend the
winter there. You must
not concern yourself with the ways and means of getting there, for the
state of
consciousness of already being in Barbados, if occupied by your
imagination, will
devise the means best suited to realize itself."
Man lives
by committing himself to invisible states, by fusing his imagination
with what
he knows to be other than himself, and in this union he
experiences the
results of that fusion. No one can lose what he has save by detachment
from the
state where the things experienced have their natural life.
"You
must imagine yourself right into the state of your fulfilled desire,"
Abdullah told me, "and fall asleep viewing the world from Barbados."
The world
which we describe from observation must be as we describe it relative
to
ourselves. Our imagination connects us with the state desired. But we
must use
imagination masterfully, not as an onlooker thinking of the end, but
as a
partaker thinking from the end. We must actually be there
in
imagination. If we do this, our subjective experience will be realized
objectively.
"This
is not mere fancy," said he, "but a truth you can prove by
experience."
His appeal
to enter into the wish fulfilled was the secret of
thinking from the
end. Every state is already there as "mere possibility" as long as
you think of it, but is overpoweringly real when you think from
it.
Thinking from the end is the way of Christ.
I began
right there and then fixing my thoughts beyond the limits of sense,
beyond
that aspect to which my present state gave being, towards the feeling
of already
being in Barbados and viewing the world from that
standpoint.
He
emphasized the importance of the state from which man views
the world as
he falls asleep. All prophets claim that the voice of God is chiefly
heard by
man in dreams.
"In a
dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falleth upon men, in
slumberings upon the bed; then he openeth the ears of men, and sealeth
their instruction.
—Job 33:15:16
That night
and for several nights thereafter I fell asleep in the assumption
that I was
in my father's house in Barbados.
Within a month I received a letter
from my brother saying
that he had a strong desire to have the family together at Christmas
and asking
me to use the enclosed steamship ticket for Barbados. I sailed two
days after
I received my brother's letter and spent a wonderful winter in Barbados.
This
experience has convinced me that man can be anything he pleases if he
will make
the conception habitual and think from the end. It has also
shown me
that I can no longer excuse myself by placing the blame on the world of
external things — that my good and my evil have no dependency
except from
myself — that it depends on the state from which I view the
world how
things present themselves.
Man who is
free in his choice acts from conceptions which he freely, though not
always
wisely, chooses. All conceivable states are awaiting our choice and
occupancy,
but no amount of rationalizing will of itself yield us the state of
consciousness
which is the only thing worth having.
The imaginative
image is the only thing to seek.
The
ultimate purpose of imagination is to create in us "the spirit of
Jesus," which is continual forgiveness of sin, continual
identification
of man with his ideal. Only by identifying ourselves with our aim can
we
forgive ourselves for having missed it. All else is labor in vain.
On this
path, to whatever place or state we convey our imagination to that
place or
state we will gravitate physically also.
"In
my Father's house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have
told you.
I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for
you, I
will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am
there ye may be
also." —John
14:2
By
sleeping in my father's house in my imagination as though I slept there
in the
flesh, I fused my imagination with that state and was compelled to
experience
that state in the flesh also.
So vivid
was this state to me I could have been seen in my father's house had
any
sensitive entered the room where in imagination I was sleeping. A man
can be
seen where in imagination he is, for a man must be where his
imagination is,
for his imagination is himself. This I know from experience for I have
been
seen by a few to whom I desired to be seen, when physically I was
hundreds of
miles away.
I, by the
intensity of my imagination and feeling, imagining and feeling
myself to be in Barbados instead of merely thinking of
Barbados, had
spanned the
vast Atlantic to influence my brother into desiring my presence to
complete the
family circle at Christmas. Thinking from the end, from the
feeling of
my wish fulfilled, was the source of everything that happened as outer
cause,
such as my brother's impulse to send me a steamship ticket; and it
was also the
cause of everything that appeared as results.
In
"Ideas of Good and Evil" (Page 35) W. B. Yeats having described a
few experiences similar to this experience of mine writes:
"If
all who have described events like this have not dreamed, we should
rewrite our
histories, for all men, certainly all imaginative men, must be forever
casting
forth enchantments, glamour, illusions; and all men, especially
tranquil men
who have no powerful egotistic life, must be continually passing under
their
power."
Determined
imagination, thinking from the end, is the beginning of all
miracles.
I would
like to give you an immense belief in miracles, but a miracle is only
the name
given by those who have no knowledge of the power and function of
imagination
to the works of imagination. Imagining oneself into the feeling of the
wish
fulfilled is the means by which a new state is entered. This gives the
state
the quality of is-ness. Hermes tells us:
"That
which is, is manifested; that which has been or shall be, is
unmanifested, but not dead; for Soul, the eternal activity of God,
animates all
things."
The future
must become the present in the imagination of the one who would wisely
and
consciously create circumstances. We must translate vision into
Being,
thinking of into thinking from, Imagination must
center itself
in some state and view the world from that state. Thinking from
the
end is an intense perception of the world of fulfilled desire.
Thinking from the state desired is creative living.
Ignorance of this
ability to think from the end is bondage. It is the root of
all bondage with which
man is bound.
To passively surrender to the evidence of the senses
under-estimates the
capacities of the Inner Self. Once man accepts thinking from the
end as
a creative principle in which he can cooperate, then he is
redeemed from the
absurdity of ever attempting to achieve his objective by merely
thinking of it.
Construct
all ends according to the pattern of fulfilled desire.
The whole
of life is just the appeasement of hunger, and the infinite states
of
consciousness from which a man can view the world are purely a means of
satisfying that hunger. The principle upon which each state is
organized is
some form of hunger to lift the passion for self-gratification to
ever higher
and higher levels of experience. Desire is the mainspring of the mental
machinery. It is a blessed thing. It is a right and natural craving
which has a
state of consciousness as its right and natural satisfaction.
"But
one thing I do, forgetting the things which are behind, and stretching
forward to the
things which are before, I press on toward the goal." —Philippians, 3:13
It is
necessary to have an aim in life. Without an aim we drift. "What
wantest
thou of me?" is the implied question asked most often by the central
figure of the Gospels. In defining your aim you must want it.
"As
the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee,
O
God." —Psalms
42:1
It is lack
of this passionate direction life that makes man fail of
accomplishment.
The spanning
of the bridge between desire — thinking of— and satisfaction —
thinking from
— is all-important. We must move mentally from thinking of the
end
to thinking from the end. This, reason could never do. By its
nature it
is restricted to the evidence of the senses; but imagination,
having no such
limitation, can. Desire exists to be gratified in the activity of
imagination.
Through imagination man escapes from the limitation of the senses
and the
bondage of reason.
There is
no stopping the man who can think from the end. Nothing can
stop him. He
creates the means and grows his way out of limitation into ever greater
and
greater mansions of the Lord. It does not matter what
he has been or what he is. All that matters
is 'what does he want'? He knows that the world is a manifestation
of the
mental activity which goes on within himself, so he strives to
determine and
control the ends from which he thinks. In his imagination he
dwells in
the end, confident that he shall dwell there in the flesh also. He puts
his
whole trust in the feeling of the wish fulfilled and lives by
committing
himself to that state, for the art of fortune is to tempt him so to do.
Like
the man at the pool of Bethesda, he is ready for the moving of the
waters of
imagination. Knowing that every desire is ripe grain to him who knows
how to
think from the end, he is indifferent to mere reasonable
probability
and confident that through continuous imagination
his assumptions will harden into fact.
But how to
persuade men everywhere that thinking from the end is the only
living,
how to foster it in every activity of man, how to reveal it as the
plenitude of
life and not the compensation of the disappointed: that is the problem.
Life is a
controllable thing. You can experience what you please once you
realize that
you are His Son, and that you are what you are by virtue of the state
of
consciousness from which you think and view the world.
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