You Stuck Your Hand Into A Spider Hole And Got Bit: On The Monster In Neville Goddard's "The Secret Of Imagining"

"There is a dark hole with webs in it. If you stick your hand into it, you get bit by a spider. Then you have its venom in you, and you have to live with its effects. If you do not want to have the effects of a spider bite, DO NOT STICK YOUR HAND INTO A SPIDER HOLE!!" Such advice God may have given Adam.

Movies, novels--"entertainment"--are awash with this stuff: unintended and inescapable consequences. "Don't do the crime if you can't do the time." Why is the theme so common? It's nature's way of telling you something's wrong. LISTEN UP.

A spider hole: you have the opportunity to do something you shouldn't do. You do it, it goes south, and you can't extricate yourself from it. IT NOW IS YOUR LIFE. Shouted from the rooftops. This is the Hebrew word hayah: it is what you have become.

Wisdom is a precious child in Proverbs chapter 8: "I (wisdom) was happy with His (God's) entire universe, and I would be glorified through humanity, because the children do listen to me; blessed are they who guard my ways. They hear my instructions and become wise, and they are not lost. Blessed are the human beings who listen to me, and are vigilant at my gates everyday, and those who guard the thresholds of my doors, because my outpourings are the issuance*/issuings of [eternal] Life, and they are the will of Maryah (YHWH). And those who sin against themselves are ejected and all those who hate me are the lovers of death" (Proverbs 8:31-36 Alexander, parentheses mine). This child is the "eternity" God put into the heart of every son of man (Ecclesiastes 3:11).

Neville, like Adam, stuck his hand down the spider hole of selfish imagination (see "The Secret of Imagining," page 8 of 12 in the pdf). He saw the monstrous creature of evil it created in him. Neville says he pummeled it until he realized, "Hey, Wait a minute. This is me, "the complete embodiment of every misused moment of my life." He had created and fed the monster HIS LIFE WAS as its venom worked. Neville realized that the monster had no other father than HIM. He had given it birth by his own misuse of the power God had given to him. ONLY. NEVILLE. WAS. AT. FAULT. Neville repented and devoted himself to redeem the monster he had created by sticking his hand down the spider hole. The Tree of Life is also the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and we all have been sidetracked and misled by the knowledge of good and evil--this world--to ignore the Tree of Life it is of in that world (which we are also of).

When the light bulb went on and Neville devoted himself to redeem the monster he in his ignorance had created, it dissolved. Poof! Gone. "Oh," Neville realized. "My combat of Good and Evil in his world produced that monster. There is another combat, between Truth and Error, in the Tree of Life. 'As above, so below.' Let me now confront Error in the Tree of Life as I confronted Evil in the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil." His false concept of God--Poof! No more God outside himself*. No god of gold. No idols to trust. Just the One--the Imagination of the ineffable Most High: "That is Me."

Got bit in another spider hole? You have got to watch out--there are a lot of them! Same out: you are to blame! Project God's beauty, love, and goodness. The heresy of the world is that God is separate.
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*All is of the Divine Imagination, and what we (Divine Imagination) experience "outside" of ourselves is projected from and of our individual imaginations and actualized by the Divine Imagination. It is not that we or you or I are God; it's that God is All, and All is God.