The Problem With Neville Goddard's Restoration As A Twenty Something: A Belated Real Reply To Marek

A question regarding Neville Goddard's teaching on restoration came to mind: What about recollections of one's childhood? I googled "Neville Goddard on restoration," and came upon my own reply to Marek, who had asked me about the same back in 2016:

Neville Goddard's Riddle: How Are We Restored as Twenty-year-olds?

Reading what I had written, I realized I had not answered Marek's question, not really, which was to make sense out of what Neville had said. Well, I didn't have an answer at that time. Neville's doctrine of restoration has serious problems with it. In short, it doesn't make any sense in this world--it can't work. Neville's teaching is that we, the spiritual inner man within these physical bodies, being eternal elements of God's imagination, when this body we inhabit dies, we shed it as a garment and are restored as the inner man of another physical, young adult in a similar world to continue like experiences. This is something we have been doing for unnumbered ages, living and dying and being restored each time--as we have up to now--until we graduate to a higher non-physical experience. Neville's students understandably had problems with the mechanics of this process. Here are some of the questions asked during those lectures, courtesy of Mr. Twenty Twenty:

Rare Neville Goddard – Neville Goddard Answers Questions 1970 – Part 2, Posted on January 13, 2017, by Mr Twenty Twenty

And here are some quotes from Neville's lecture "Salvation History" 02-12-1968:

The Bible is an incredible story of how God became man that man could become God. The history of God contains eternity, which has neither beginning nor end; therefore, salvation history is forever taking place. God's will must be being done absolutely and continuously, because it is eternal.

As you walk in time, human history is yours; as you are born and die, restored to life you die, only to be restored and die again. Human history goes on forever, until salvation history invades time and becomes the individual's autobiography. And if the history of the Lord Jesus Christ becomes your history, are you not the Lord?

This is a world of time, where all things begin and end. Although death appears to be, there is none. Those who remain experience their death, but to themselves they do not die. Instead, they are restored to life in a young body with nothing missing. There they will get older and eventually die, to be instantly restored - again unaccountably new - in a terrestrial world like this one, to go on and on and on. That's restoration; but the birth from above is something entirely different. That occurs when infinite God gives himself to the individual. He does it by inserting his story of salvation into time, possessing the individual, then unfolding himself from within, fulfilling salvation history.

When the history of salvation invades you, individually, you will awaken from a long, long sleep to find yourself being born from above. The symbol of your birth as that of a little child wrapped in swaddling clothes will be there, as well as the witnesses. Even then it seems incredible, as you hold the child in your arms - just as scripture states a child was placed in the arms of one called Mary. And if the child is a symbol of the savior, who is the Lord God Jehovah; are you not your own savior?

Coming down to earth, God invades the world of time and lifts you out of time into eternity. Then you will return for a little while, where your glory is hidden by the garment you wear. You will tell your experiences to those who will listen, until that moment in time when you depart never to return again.

No one should gloat about this, as everyone will rise as the same being. There is only God redeeming Himself into the one body, one Spirit, one Lord, one God and Father of all; and you will know that you are He!

All things begin and end in time, but there is no beginning or ending in eternity. It just is! The history of Salvation was not composed by God. It was always so. It was His plan to be inserted into time and redeem humanity!

(End of quotes from "Salvation History")
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Okay, back to Marek's question!

I did not see a way Neville's process of restoration could work in this world. How could we all be restored as adults without childhoods? Then I remembered a recent comment which complained that Neville's views were based on solipsism, the belief that only one's self exists or is knowable. Well, maybe that commenter has a point. Neville verily insisted that everything is the self pushed out. We change the cubic reality of the display by changing the assumption of the inner man. You think you are here, and you are, but if you think you are there, you are. We pass through states of physical reality, but they are not real except for their purpose, which is to generate us to Godhood. Yes, that is the Hindu doctrine of maya, "illusion."

So the childhood we recollect and the present we see are both imagined illusions. All concreteness is the Divine Intelligence imagining itself to be matter to facilitate the physical necessity of the illusion. As far as I know, none of y'all are real--my mind is here alone, never moving--and I exist only as a point of imagination. What then? Fulfill the purpose: do the destiny. If we are here, there is God. Mentally, and thus physically, honor and obey Him. Do good. Help. Intervene. Give that water. Teach your children well. Have faith. Do everything in love. Believe. One thing I love about Victor Alexander's translations from the Aramaic is God saying that those who do acts of love "mercy Me." And that if you mercy Him--He being the inner man of another person--you are His relative. Granted, that other person might not even exist except for his or her purpose, to give you HIM--God--to honor and love.

Well, I have really enjoyed talking to myself tonight. And if you are reading this, maybe you wrote it. OMG, we're all talking to ourselves. Myself. I wonder if Chuck Stockdale would agree.