Writing Your Way to Success

Can we write our way to success? Maybe, if we read what we write and believe it. I have listened to the hundred-plus Neville Goddard audio lectures dozens of times and read his hundreds of transcribed lectures and his books, and I cannot recall ever hearing him mention writing down what it is that you want. R. H. Jarrett in It Works (1926: DeVorss publications), on the other hand, insists on writing down on paper the things and conditions you really want.

Writing down the things you want makes perfect sense. Just like speech, writing and reading are operations of the imagination. The imagination thinks about and perhaps visualizes what is being written (or read), and your words--God's words--are in the imagination before the fingers do their stuff.

It seems odd to me, though, that Jarrett only mentions making a list of the things you want in order of their importance. It seems more natural to me to write down the life you want as a script. Rather than reviewing and rewriting and thinking about the things on your list, you would review and rewrite and think about the things in your script.

Many people know that 14 years before the Titanic sank in 1912, virtually the same ship (in description)--named the Titan--sank from hitting an iceberg in a novel called Futility. Of course you wouldn't want your life to go this way (I use the example only for the purpose of illustration), but the parallels between the two make one wonder about causation by imagination. Who doesn't marvel that countless method actors and actresses fall in love and marry, if only for awhile, their counterparts in romantic movies and plays? Of course they do--for they have they "lived" their imagination with their co-star for weeks and perhaps for months. What we imagine becomes real "naturally."

Hasn't your life been going "naturally" according to your own mental script until now? Maybe you could write out a still better script than the one you have been following. Say you wanted to be a writer in the entertainment industry. Neville asks: What would it be like if it were true? What would it FEEL like if it were true? In a state akin to sleep, yet still in control of your mental faculties, imagine the THRILL of your desired writer's life being true. Imagine your own personal RELIEF of its being actual.

Imagine the scenes you create in your script as though they were, in fact, real history. Do not see them as you would watch a movie from a distance, but from see and feel and hear from YOUR perspective IN the scenes. Be there and think FROM there as though it were your present: "They liked my script for the pilot. 'Can you come up with ideas for ten episodes?' I submitted ten outlines--relations, interactions, reactions. They loved them. Now I am producing, working with the director in selecting a cast. Meetings are productive. They gave me an office in the main building--desk, chairs, table, lamps, cabinet--'For as long as you are here, you need to be here.'"

Fill in the details of the experience of really being there and imagine it vividly over and over again. . . until you are there in your mental experience. Let that experience become your reality.

You could write yourself a writer, a surfer, a race car driver or an accountant. Write yourself as a leader, a father or mother, a parent of children busy in school. Script for yourself a job, a position, or a career. Imagine it as reality. See, feel and hear it; feel the things in front of you with your hands, smell the smells you would smell.

Write down the life you have lived, the life you would be in, and read it and re-read it over and over again as though it were. Believe it, review and re-write it as need be as it changes over time. And in as much as today's life does not match it, forgive today's history and revise your memory of today, remembering instead what you wanted to have happened.

Say that as a writer in the entertainment industry, you submitted a script and expected a reply from studio, and no reply came. Write the reply you wanted to receive in your mind, and read it as though it WERE the reply you received. Hold your imagined letter in your imagined hands--actually feeling and reading it--over and over and over again, until the act takes on all the "tones of reality."

I believe this works because our imagining is the imagining of the ineffable, Most High God--Him of whom we say, "He is" (because we cannot say a single thing more about Him, except that He has become us; i.e., He has become our imaginations, thus rendering ourselves and the universe WE have created His "portrait"--His Image). That which is imagining in us is His intelligent Power, "Life," and that Life is the Life-giver: He makes the things we imagine (that He imagines by us) become manifest.

Let me restate here what I believe is the Gospel of the Scriptures: In Exodus chapter three, Moses discovered that the Ineffable is becoming ("Jethro") via OUR imagining--that actually "our" imagining is His imagining. Hence, what we imagine becomes by the Ineffable, and our salvation for all things comes this way, by "Jesus Christ," who is the Ineffable inasmuch as we can perceive Him. This puts our salvation--the provision for our every need--in the hands of our imagining. "Repent, and believe the Gospel." If we believe that we receive what we ask, we shall have.

Give Him a script to work with, and work with it yourself with your believing confidence in Him. After all, you are Him, and the only way to DO it . . . is to DO it.