A Reply to Anne Regarding Why Neville Goddard's Imagining Creates Reality is "Heretical"

Regarding my comment, "we do not put faith our faith, but in God's faith:

I was referring to statements made by people who believe that man's spirit is separate from God's spirit, whose doctrinal deficiencies I was listing.

Neville held, correctly, I believe, that God became man and that man is God. It is God's faith that we put our faith in, recognizing that we ourselves are God. It is “in God” we rest.

Neville also recognized that when these who do not realize Christ is in them pray, and it works, it is because they nevertheless ARE God and Christ IS in them anyway (Christ does not move from one place to another, but awareness increases).

Prayed for increase is jethro. This bugged the heck (zipporah) out of Moses. Eventually those who put faith in their own separate-from-God faith will come to Moses' conclusion: "I become this increase by intense, focused, creative desire" (Exodus 3: 14, as I read it).

Neville was quite right: our faith is in ourselves . . . as long as we understand that we ourselves are God. But the illusion of separateness will remain due to our occluded level of awareness. This is the challenge of God we must overcome--our level of awareness is not one with God's, but we are not two. 

This is advaita and is what Paul is alludes to in Second Corinthians 13:

"He whom is not strengthened in you, except he who [nevertheless] is formidable in you. . . . Your soul will be fortified, if you hold fast in him though faith. Your soul will be healed, or did you not realize that he, Eashoa the Messiah is in you? And if not, you are deficient" (verses 3 and 5, Victor Alexander translation).

Paul was saying that just as Christ (as an illustration) was "crucified" to ignorance and weakness and was resurrected by his God power, Paul and his crew likewise were crucified to ignorance and weakness and now lived with Christ by the same God power which was in them . . . and that same God power was in his listeners! If they held fast in Christ through faith, their soul would be healed--they would become aware of it, and if not, they were deficient in awareness and remained in the ignorance. Christ, of course, was there and is here either way--we just have the option of waking up or remaining weak through our stupidity).

Heresy hunters and many erstwhile preachers still believe that Jesus Christ, the Father and the Holy Spirit are three separate entities--both separate from each other as "God-persons" and separate from the spirit nature of man. They believe that the "oneness" of the Godhead is a three God committee, that these spirit persons are "one" in agreement and their shared nature as spirit only.

Yeah, I know--beyond belief, but Christians read thing backwards.

Some preachers even say, and the heresy hunters are right in slamming them for saying it (and here I listed in Why Neville Goddard's Imagining Creates Reality is "Heretical"); that . . .

a) because we are "sons of God," our spirits are baby-gods growing up to become separate, on-our-own gods;

b) it is the by the power of our separate, human minds' god-dom that manifestation occurs;

c) by the power of our own human-god decree (he is the Word, so we are Word) we can command(!) things to happen;

d) we need to put our faith in our (separate-from-the-Father) human-spirit's faith.

This is not what Neville was talking about. These are manifestations of ignorance and are NOT said in saying that we are the very consciousness, power and wisdom of God which became man. We do not become gods--we already ARE God. Nor are we becoming "as" God in the sense we will be equal to but separate from God. We ARE the Father, the Big Kahuna himself, because he became us and THERE CANNOT BE TWO GODS. It is emanation, not multiplication.

Why can't the church just accept what the Bible clearly states? The church can not allow themselves to accept it because they have misread a devil into Genesis chapter 3. (That they even have Adam and Eve as historical humans is already pretty remarkable, as they are emanations of God's creative power in us.) They have locked themselves into a false premise.

The church believes an adversary deceived Eve into eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil by the lies "your eyes shall be opened, and you shall become as God, knowing good and evil," and that this precipitated the fall of mankind into the slavery of sin and death. For them, anything that smacks of "you shall become as God" has to be of the Devil!

Oddly, they were not lies the "adversary" spoke. I read the same text without a devil and have no problem seeing Jesus Christ precipitating the conscience of man. Conscience! Man wants nothing to do with it--he is "naked" and loves it because he has no shame. Does not want any. "Of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil thou shalt not eat," . . . because thou are not willing to! How many of us have "been there; done that"? Sounds almost autobiographical.

God can't make much progress with a man or woman who has no conscience, so Christ, the Shining One, appears to our desires and indicates, "there is so much more." And yes, man does "fall," bowing his knee to his merciful savior--Christ in him. Then the journey of learning the glorious God within him begins.

God's faith is our faith--we just have to figure out how to erase the illusion of separation. By imagining we plant living seed in our imaginations (which are God), then release it to God (who is us) to bring forth. We are not one with God, but we are not two, either. This is advaita, and like they say, it is complicated.

In God's spirit becoming man, man is in a new world and forgets whence he came and what he was. He acts independently not remembering God. Christ, our connection with God, keeps calling through the afflictions we create of ourselves because we are God.  This dance is the "enmity" and the bruising of head and heel between Eve and Christ. No adversary is necessary--our ignorance from forgetting through the flip from God to man's consciousness is enough.

The church presumes Satan from the language and context, but he is unnecessary--this is all the mechanics of our becoming. We are our own adversaries. The Hebrew word for serpent, by the way, is nachash: to hiss, to mutter; but it is related to an allied Chaldean word meaning copper, brass; i.e., "to be bright," because snakes, which hiss, shine brightly in the desert sun. See Strong's Hebrew dictionary 5075 and 5074 and search Bullinger, the Companion Bible appendix 19.

Is there "no God outside of ourselves" because we are imagining everything that is outside of ourselves; or is it that God is ALSO everything outside of ourselves, thus the universe subject to our imaginations? I think it is both: our spirits' individual potter's wheels within the larger potter's wheel, as Ezekiel described--the world really is, and isn't.

Paul, in Thessalonians, expected Jesus to descend in the clouds at any moment. Many clouds and a lot of thought later, by the time he wrote Ephesians he had figured out the device of Jewish Apocalyptics (he had been led to believe that they were outward and literal) and realized that it all happens within the spirit of man (it is inward and figurative).

I'll give this to William M. Branham: he said the church's view of the trinity was heresy, and it is. There is only one God--one one--the ineffable Most High God. We all are illustrations emanating from It. The world is an image of the Ineffable, but we have to look at the whole thing. I maintain an imagic worldview.

And while we are on the subject (advaita), I do not now believe in demons even though I have dealt with them and cast them out in the past. They are real, and nothing. This is a fascinating facet of God to look at--there is nothing in the world but God, and he is all imagination. He speaks to us in illustrations.

For example, Jethro, I believe, was not a man but the illustration of  jutting-over-the-brim excessively abundant increase. The illustration spoke to Moses. Jesus Christ, an illustration, has spoken to me and has appeared and spoken to countless others, even though he never was quite as the illustration is. We ourselves are illustrations too, and we speak. God speaks.

Demons? What are they except illustrations of the doubt, confusion and ignorance we incurred when we, Jesus Christ, gave up our awareness of being God and, crucifying ourselves by imagining ourselves to be humans, took on this death? Yet these illustrations (of doubt--demons) can talk! They act and seem to have dimension, just as the separate-from-us Jesus does. What is really talking? Is it not God, our imagination, speaking to us as the illustration?