An interesting and much appreciated e-mail I decided to respond to here:

To: imagicworldview@aol.com
Sent: Sun, May 31, 2020 1:52 pm
Subject: Neville Goddard

Hi Dan,

I have read your profile and blog. I find them interesting.

I am struggling with understanding and believing Neville Goddard.

I do believe to a certain degree but as u stated in your profile the bible has been been edited, misinterpreted, etc.

How can we really believe Neville's own interpretations are accurate? This whole manifesting makes my head spin as LOA might be real to a certain extent, but what about God's universal laws which are also part of the laws?

Is Neville's teaching demonic, as one of your reader said, no, but in one of Neville's lectures he talks about a woman who change a friend by just imagining her in a better place. That's great but people could also use this to change the state of a persons life for the worst..Just think if we really had the power to really do this.

This is luciferian belief..The occult of hidden knowledge and like you said not a red heifer devil but believing we have the power to do this as humans.

While I would love to believe in manifesting I seriously think it might have its limits.

Thanks, L.
______________________________

Dear L.,

Thank you for reading my blog with interest and an open mind, and for writing to express your feelings and concerns. These show a lot of maturity. I think a lot of people struggle with Neville's teachings because they see them as something to try to do. I, I think like he, observe them as the way things simply are. That is, we can observe that if we think in certain ways, certain things happen. Neville has simply pointed these ways out and suggested that we can control them. I am not sure this is luciferianism. There seems to be a lot of conditions which suggest what practice, opinion, or attitude is good or bad. Love and unity appear to be good and facilitating of improvement; self-serving and independence appear to be impediments to progress. This is just the way the world we observe is.

That the Bible has been corrupted, edited, and misinterpreted is its own witness. For hundreds of years the Jews kept track of the changes they made in the margins of their scrolls. We (modern scholars) still have the lists of the changes made, which incidentally were not included in our modern Bible translations. We also have evidence of when certain ideas came into Christianity and Judaism and from where they came and why. These things are not hidden, we just have to know where to look.

The Bible itself, though, expresses only one very narrow focus: we are Its (the Ineffable's) becoming. This is expressed in so many different ways and on so many different levels that it has been virtually impossible for all the errors and editings to mask the Truth: kind of like trying to hide the earth with a paintbrush--you can always still see it.

Yes, certainly there are limits. We are God because we are of God, but the limit is the God we are of. This is Its becoming into Its manifestation: it is Its nature in the formative channel. If It is beneficent, our beneficence works, and our "evil" (which by the way means immaturity, counter-current) doesn't. I think that is why witchcraft is rebellion and comes back upon the evil doer.

I promote, as it were, Neville's teachings because they greatly reflect the truth of the way the world truly is, and that is a PERSON. New Thought and LOA people always categorize Neville as being in their camp, but he hardly was. They all believe in an impersonal force we can control. Neville believed in a Person we are the manifestation of, and of whole-hearted submission to that Person. "There is NO 'New Thought'!" he insisted. "There is only the fulfillment of the Word. THAT is our destiny." For the Word (Aramaic: Milta) is the Divine Person we are becoming as we learn to submit to Him. We are to be pockets of Him, channels of His spiritual power into these spheres. That is not taking things upon ourselves, but un-ing ourselves unto Him for His objectives to flow through us, because we are One. That's my philosophy, anyway.

One last thing before I go: Seeing God and what He is doing, we must teach. How can we face Him when we pass if we do not?

Thanks for writing, L.

Dan Steele