The Life Practiced

Neville said in Mental Diets that to hear as though you heard is to create. That is what God did to create the heavens and the earth: "And God SAID . . ." God does not have a mouth, of course; we imagined that we HEARD: "and there was (became) . . ."  I believe the structure behind this is the ineffable Source imagining the e'had (the multitude of the one God--us!) imagining Creation imagining that what it desires is real.

Is real. Living and practicing the Life is believing that the state desired exists, and the getting to it simply was. Again, that the experience of getting to the state desired WAS experienced, whatever it was; and whatever it was is of no concern now, for the state desired is held.

When Neville expressed his desire to go to Barbados, Abdullah told him, "You are IN Barbados." Neville was not going to Barbados; he was not experiencing the trip; Nevile was there. Abdullah told Neville to imagine walking the island's balmy dirt roads and lying in his bed in his father's house at night as though he were, while "physically" he was suffering the Great Depression in New York in November. Physical does not count for beans. "You cannot discuss how you are going to get to Barbados when you are already there!" Neville learned to be in Barbados and imagine New York and its autumn thousands of miles to the northwest. God took care of his getting there. THAT is living the life, practicing the life.

If you are a laborer and want to be a foreman, you would imagine being the foreman. Do not imagine being promoted! Imagine having been promoted. Do not imagine the getting to the experience you want, THAT experience you imagine as having been passed. THAT experience is God's to work out--does not matter a hill of beans to you: You are IN the experience you desired. But the getting there, that experience which was God's and did not matter a hill of beans to you, is sacred. THAT is YHWH--the action of His becoming. "When it works, you have found Him, and your own, wonderful, human imagination IS Him!"

For it to work, desire the end. There is a reason the Garden is at the beginning of Genesis. It is the end of the Plan of God, the fulfillment of the Promise. We are being reconciled in the end to the intention of the beginning. Desire that state. Think every good thing about God. How we get there is his doing. Abandon the getting to -- imagine being there past the experience of getting there. "You are IN Paradise," Abdullah says to you. This is our practice. And everything we need to imagine while awaiting the state desired, make an investment.