Changing the Past to Right the Future: My take on Neville Goddard's doctrine of healing

Please see http://imagicworldview.blogspot.com/2017/06/revise-past-jairus-daughter-and-sarahs.html

I'm not quite done with this, but I am so excited about the idea I have to share what I have:

Can I lift you up?

My mom died, I think prematurely, because I didn't know how to pray. I know she and her friends prayed earnestly, but they didn't really know how to pray either. This was and is the fruit of the politics and superstitions of the organized church.

When I was saved in 1975 and Jesus Christ spoke to me audibly, I was inspired to find out what he had said to other men. Well, I sure got side-tracked by the politics and superstitions of the organized church, by my own carnality, and by my own stupidity. But Mom's death has prodded me to prevail in learning how to pray. Not just how to pray, but to do it.

Thank God for skeptics. Seriously. They are a grace from God that reminds us, if we will listen, that we are stupid and wrong. I have allowed myself to disprove whatever I have been taught, and have thought, and to wrestle through to the truth. I learned what I needed to learn from the church (and it really is worthwhile to get, and I do appreciate the education the church affords -- I only wish they knew what they are teaching) and have moved on.

I can only say that I am getting closer to the truth. Some of the "meat" of the Bible is tough. I don't mean bad tough; I mean rich, deep, nutritious ideas that take some chewing to digest. It takes time to unstupid.

Which brings me to Neville Goddard. I don't want to come across as a mindless groupie, a fan of Neville's or a follower in a cult of personality, but I do want you to consider his theology. It is Advaitic, true to the Old Testament inspiration. What is "Advaitic?" It is just that there is no division between God and man or, for that matter, anything else. Everything is one, from the Big Guy to the quantum particle, photon -- whatever.

Advaita is Sanskrit for No-Division - "not one, and not two" - and THAT is what the Bible is saying.

God is a structure from a higher architect. "God" is a verb. It is the higher architect's action. It moved. It is thinking, dreaming. God is Its dream. They are one, not two. And we are parts of that structure. One, not two. It is a perspective of ultimate reality, and if God is "wholly other" than anything else, we are on his side with the higher architect!

So, why don't we, why can't we God? We can. We don't because we are stupid with the ignorance we took upon ourselves -- Godding involves relearning what we put off to become humans. We Godded before, we just need to remember how. We are God-who-forgot-how-to-God. Hence, the Bible and learning how to pray, how to DO it.

Now, Neville is one who learned how to read the Bible. It is psychological, a biography of God-as-man and man remembering that he is God. It isn't historical as a record of sequential events, it is a collection of vignettes - about you and I - stacked upon one another -- visions of God.

My interest, again, is healing. I didn't want Mom to die. Miss her terribly. So much to make up to her. I'll get to that later. I don't believe in death anymore, by the way, and that has a lot to do with the below.

I mentioned that the action of the higher architect is a structure we are part of. I guess you might call it Time. We see one point of time at a time, but it is all there -- the past, present and future. Godding has to do with making changes in it. That isn't just a possibility, it is our job! We are to redeem the time, for it is evil (Ephesians 5:16). Redeem means to buy. How are we, spiritual action, going to buy time? Spiritual elbow grease!!! We go and take it. Which, "oh yeah," brings me to Neville Goddard, who taught how go and take it, how to redeem time from its evil.

This is one of the most interesting things I have ever read:

From The Law and the Promise,

Man and his past are one continuous structure. This structure contains all of the facts which have been conserved and still operate below the threshold of his surface mind. For him it is merely history. For him it seems unalterable—a dead and firmly fixed past. But for itself, it is living—it is part of the living age. He cannot leave behind him the mistakes of the past, for nothing disappears. Everything that has been is still in existence. The past still exists, and it gives—and still gives—its results. Man must go back in memory, seek for and destroy the causes of evil, however far back they lie. This going into the past and replaying a scene of the past in imagination as it ought to have been played the first time, I call revision—and revision results in repeal.

Changing your life means changing the past. The causes of any present evil are the unrevised scenes of the past. The past and the present form the whole structure of man; they are carrying all of its contents with it. Any alteration of content will result in an alteration in the present and future.

I'm writing in blue here. For the present and the past are both but imagination. If we can remember the past in our imagination, does it not then exist?  Our present moment is but a read-out of our accumulated past. The past advances to become the future, which is breaking forth as the present.

Okay, the present is the sum, then, of the past, and the past is still existent as imagination, accessible through memory.  If so, then we can go back to the past in memory and change it.  It is only imagination anyway.  We revise it in dream until it becomes real, and remember the "new and improved" revised past.

The past that now advances into the future and breaks forth as our present is different. A new, corrected time exists, and the bad isn't there anymore. We are healed. Einstein had nothing on this.

I personally have had instantaneous, miraculous healings occur to me. I have seen others and have heard and read of hundreds of other instantaneous, miraculous healings. They happen almost as a lark, unemotional and sometimes in response to some flippant remark -- certainly not as something laboriously conjured in the imagination. They, I suggest, are Jethro, provisions given by God to flag himself, "HEY!! I AM HERE!" Attention getters.

When you stop and look at the flags, you see the structure, the weave of relationships within that ultimately link up into one, an ultimate imagination. The higher architect is the Ultimate Imaginer we cannot imagine (talk about irony!), but we are, nevertheless, It. The dream is Its emanation, expansion by action from Itself, to God (Spirit), to Heaven (Mind), and to Earth (Physicality), the ultimate limits of opacity and obtuseness. It is all one.

Well, the Jethro-flags have got our attention, we see the structure, the structure is real, and it functions for the Imaginer. We come to the point where we realize that just knowing about all of it doesn't do squat for us, even though we are branches of the Imaginer.

We have to do it ourselves. "Edumacation" is good up to a point, but now comes the faith of doing it as LIVING branches of the action. Engagement. Our mental hands have to grapple with memories and images, "hearing" things we want to have heard as though they were actually said (and we hear them!), "touching" things created in our imagination, "reading" letters and signs and reports as though they were part of the accumulated past, more real in the imagination than the physical present -- all to bring forth a son. The Son. "I have acquired a man from YHWH."

All this is practice. Familiarization. "Pop" showing off a bit and training us. We are the Carpenter's sons and daughters learning how to plane and hammer. "All of this, all of this can be yours. Just give me what I want, and nobody gets hurt." (Thanks, Bono.)

"Oh, let your strong imagination turn the great wheel backward, until Troy unburn." "All life is, throughout the ages nothing but the continuing solution of a continuous synthetic problem." —H. G. Wells

An example from The Law and the Promise:

The buried past usually lies deeper than our surface mind can plumb. But fortunately, for this lady, she remembered and proved that the "made" past can also be "unmade" through revision:

"For thirty-nine years I had suffered from a weak back. The pain would increase and decrease but would never leave completely. The condition had progressed to the point where I used medical treatment almost constantly; the doctor would put the hip right for the moment but the pain simply would not go away. One night I heard you speak of revision and wondered to myself if a condition of almost forty years could be revised. I had remembered that at the age of three or four years I had fallen backward from a very high swing and had been quite ill at that time because of a serious hip injury. From that time on I had never been completely free from pain and had paid many a dollar to alleviate the condition, to no avail.

"This year during the month of August the pain had become more intense and one night I decided to test myself and attempt to revise that 'ancient' accident which had been the cause of so much distress in pain and costly medical fees most of my adult life. Many nights passed before I could 'feel' myself back to the age of childhood play. But I succeeded. One night I actually 'felt' myself on that swing feeling the rush of wind as the swing rose higher and higher. As the swing slowed down, I jumped forward landing solidly and easily on my feet. In the imaginal action I ran to my mother and insisted that she come watch what I could do. I did it again, jumping down from the swing and landing safely on my two feet. I repeated this imaginal act over and over until I fell asleep in the doing of it.

"Within two days the pain in my back and hip began to recede and within two months

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pain no longer existed for me. A condition that had plagued me for more than thirty-nine years, that had cost a small fortune in attempted cure—was no more. . ." L.H.

It is to the pruning shears of revision that we owe our prime fruit. Man and his past are one continuous structure. This structure contains all of the past which has been conserved and still operates below the threshold of his senses to influence the present and the future of his life. The whole is carrying all of its contents with it; any alteration of content will result in an alteration in the present and the future. The first act of correction or cure is always "Revise." If the past can be recreated into the present, so can the revised past. And thus the Revised Past appears within the very heart of her present life; not Fate but a revised past brought her good fortune.

Make results and accomplishment the crucial test of true imagination and your confidence in the power of imagination to create reality will grow gradually from your experiments with revision confronted by experience. Only by this process of experiment can you realize the potential power of your awakened and controlled imagination.

"How much do you owe my master?" He said, "A hundred measures of oil." And he said to him, "Take your bill, and sit down quickly and write fifty!" This parable of the unjust steward urges us to mentally falsify the facts of life, to alter a theme already in being. By means of such imaginative falsehoods a man "acquires friends." As each day falls, mentally revise the facts of life and make them conform to events well worthy of recall; tomorrow will take up the altered pattern and go forward until at length it is realized on the heights of attainment.

The reader will find it worthwhile to follow these clues—imaginal construction of scenes implying the wish fulfilled, and imaginative participation in these scenes until tones of reality are reached. We are dealing with the secret of imagining, in which man is seen awakening into a world completely subject to his imaginative power.

Man can understand recurrence of events well enough (the building of a world from images supplied by memory)—things remaining as they are. This gives him a sense of security in the stability of things. However, the presence within him of a power which awakens and becomes what it wills, radically changing its form, its environment and the circumstances of life, inspires in him a feeling of insecurity, a dreadful fear of the future. Now, "it is high time to awake out of sleep" and put an end to all the unlovely creations of sleeping Man. Revise each day. "Let your strong imagination turn the great wheel backward until Troy unburn."

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WOW!!  She persevered -- "Many nights passed before I could 'feel' myself back to the age of childhood play. But I succeeded. One night I actually 'felt' myself on that swing feeling the rush of wind as the swing rose higher and higher. As the swing slowed down, I jumped forward landing solidly and easily on my feet. In the imaginal action I ran to my mother and insisted that she come watch what I could do. I did it again, jumping down from the swing and landing safely on my two feet. I repeated this imaginal act over and over until I fell asleep in the doing of it." It took many nights of trying, but she finally got it.

WOW WOW!!!

From Neville's lecture, Awakened Imagination, 1954:

This past May in New York City, there sat a lady who had been coming for years and I made a simple observation that people must become doers of the word and not mere hearers only. For if a man only hears it and never applies what he hears, he will never really prove or disprove what he has heard; and then I told the story of a lady who had only heard me three or four times and how she transformed the life of another, and this lady, hearing what one who came only three times and this miracle took place in her life, she went home determined that she would really apply what she had heard over the years, and this is what she did:

Two years before, after a violent quarrel, she was ordered out of her son's home by her daughter-in-law. Her son said "Mother, you need no proof from me that I love you: it's obvious: I think I have proven that every  day of my life, but if that is Mary's decision, and I regret it, it must be my decision, for I love Mary and we live in the same house and it is our house: it is our little family, and I am sorry she feels this way about it, but you know these little things that culminate in an explosion as took place today. If that is her decision, it is mine".

That was two years ago. She went home and she realized that night after night for over two years she had allowed the sun to descend upon her wrath. She thought of this wonderful family that she loved and felt herself ostracized from it, expelled from the home of her son. She did nothing about revising it and yet I had been talking revision to my New York audience for the past year. This is what she did now. She knew the morning's mail brought nothing. This was a Wednesday night.

There had been no correspondence in two years. She had sent her grandson at least a dozen gifts in the two years. Not one was ever acknowledged. She knew they had been received for she had insured many of them; so she sat down that night and mentally wrote herself two letters -- one from her daughter-in-law, expressing a great kindness for her, saying that she had been missed in the home and asking her when she was coming to see them; then she wrote one from her grandson in which he said "Grandmother, I love you". Then came a little expression of thanks for the last birthday present, which was In April, and then came a feeling of sadness rather because he hadn't seen her and begging her to come and see him soon.

These two short notes she memorized and then, as she was about to sleep, she took her imaginary hands and held these letters and she read them mentally to herself until they woke in her the feeling of joy because she had heard from her family; that she was wanted once more. She read these letters over and over feeling the joy that was hers because she had received them and fell asleep in her project. For seven nights this lady read these two letters. On the morning of the eighth day she received the letter -- on the inside there were two letters, one from her grandson and one from her daughter-in-law. These letters were identical with the letters she had mentally written to herself seven days before.

Where was the estrangement? Where was the conflict? Where was the source of the displeasure that was like a running sore over two years? When man's eye is opened he realizes all that he beholds, though it appears without, it is within--within one's own imagination, of which this world of mortality is but a shadow.