The law and the promise E-Book

Neville Goddard

• Herausgeber: ALEMAR S.A.S.
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

The purpose of the first portion of this book is to show, through actual true stories, how imagining creates reality. You do not command things to appear by your words or loud affirmations. Such vain repetition is more often than not confirmation of the opposite. Decreeing is ever done in consciousness. Every man is conscious of being that which he has decreed himself to be.

Can man decree a thing and have it come to pass? Most decidedly he can! Man has always decreed that which has appeared in his world and is today decreeing that which is appearing in his world and shall continue to do so as long as man is conscious of being man. Not one thing has ever appeared in man's world but what man decreed that it should. This you may deny, but try as you will you cannot disprove it, for this decreeing is based upon a changeless principle.

 

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Chapter 1. The Law: Imagining Creates Reality

Chapter 2. Dwell Therein

Chapter 3. Turn The Wheel Backward

Chapter 4. There Is No Fiction

Chapter 5. Subtle Threads

Chapter 6. Visionary Fancy

Chapter 7. Moods

Chapter 8. Through The Looking Glass

Chapter 9. Enter Into

Chapter 10. Things Which Do Not Appear

Chapter 11. The Potter

Chapter 12. Attitudes

Chapter 13. All Trivia

Chapter 14. The Creative Moment

Chapter 15. The Promise: Four Mystical Experiences

The law and the promise

neville goddard

Chapter 1. The Law: Imagining Creates Reality

"Man is all Imagination. God is Man and exists in us and we in Him... The Eternal Body of Man is the Imagination, that is, God, Himself" - Blake

The purpose of the first portion of this book is to show, through actual true stories, how imagining creates reality. Science progresses by way of hypotheses tentatively tested and afterwards accepted or rejected according to the facts of experience. The claim that imagining creates reality needs no more consideration than is allowed by science. It proves itself in performance.

The world in which we live is a world of imagination. In fact, life itself is an activity of imagining; "For Blake", wrote Professor Morrison of the University of St. Andrews, "the world originates in a divine activity identical with what we know ourselves as the activity of imagination", his task being "to open the immortal eyes of man inward into the worlds of thought, into eternity, ever expanding in the bosom of God, the Human Imagination."

Nothing appears or continues in being by a power of its own. Events happen because comparatively stable imaginal activities created them, and they continue in being only as long as they receive such support. "The secret of imagining", writes Douglas Fawcett, "is the greatest of all problems to the solution of which the mystic aspires. Supreme power, supreme wisdom, supreme delight lie in the far-off solution of this mystery."

When man solves the mystery of imagining, he will have discovered the secret of causation, and that is: Imagining creates reality. Therefore, the man who is aware of what he is imagining knows what he is creating; realizes more and more that the drama of life is imaginal - not physical. All activity is at bottom imaginal. An awakened Imagination works with a purpose. It creates and conserves the desirable, and transforms or destroys the undesirable.

Divine imagining and human imagining are not two powers at all, rather one. The valid distinction which exists between the seeming two lies not in the substance with which they operate but in the degree of intensity of the operant power itself. Acting at high tension, an imaginal act is an immediate objective fact. Keyed low, an imaginal act is realized in a time process. But whether imagination is keyed high or low, it is the "ultimate, essentially non-objective Reality from which objects are poured forth like sudden fancies" (Hermann Keyserling, Count, "The Travel Diary of a Philosopher"). No object is independent of imagining on some level or levels. Everything in the world owes its character to imagination on one of its various levels.

"Objective reality", writes Fichte, "is solely produced through imagination". Objects seem so independent of our perception of them that we incline to forget that they owe their origin to imagination. The world in which we live is a world of imagination, and man - through his imaginal activities - creates the realities and the circumstances of life; this he does either knowingly or unknowingly.

Men pay too little attention to this priceless gift - The Human Imagination -and a gift is practically nonexistent unless there is a conscious possession of it and a readiness to use it. All men possess the power to create reality, but this power sleeps as though dead, when not consciously exercised. Men live in the very heart of creation - The Human Imagination - yet are no wiser for what takes place therein. The future will not be fundamentally different from the imaginal activities of man; therefore, the individual who can summon at will whatever imaginal activity he pleases and to whom the visions of his imagination are as real as the forms of nature, is master of his fate.

The future is the imaginal activity of man in its creative march. Imagining is the creative power not only of the poet, the artist, the actor and orator, but of the scientist, the inventor, the merchant and the artisan. Its abuse in unrestrained unlovely image-making is obvious; but its abuse in undue repression breeds a sterility which robs man of actual wealth of experience. Imagining novel solutions to ever more complex problems is far more noble than to run from problems. Life is the continual solution of a continuously synthetic problem. Imagining creates events. The world, created out of men's imagining, comprises unnumbered warring beliefs; therefore, there can never be a perfectly stable or static state. Today's events are bound to disturb yesterday's established order. Imaginative men and women invariably unsettle a pre-existing peace of mind.

Do not bow before the dictate of facts and accept life on the basis of the world without. Assert the supremacy of your Imaginal acts over facts and put all things in subjection to them. Hold fast to your ideal in your imagination. Nothing can take it from you but your failure to persist in imagining the ideal realized. Imagine only such states that are of value or promise well.

To attempt to change circumstances before you change your imaginal activity, is to struggle against the very nature of things. There can be no outer change until there is first an imaginal change. Everything you do, unaccompanied by an imaginal change, is but futile readjustment of surfaces. Imagining the wish fulfilled brings about a union with that state, and during that union you behave in keeping with your imaginal change. This shows you that an imaginal change will result in a change of behavior. However, your ordinary imaginal alterations as you pass from one state to another are not transformations because each of them is so rapidly succeeded by another in the reverse direction. But whenever one state grows so stable as to become your constant mood, your habitual attitude, then that habitual state defines your character and is a true transformation.

How do you do it? Self-abandonment! That is the secret. You must abandon yourself mentally to your wish fulfilled in your love for that state, and in so doing, live in the new state and no more in the old state. You can't commit yourself to what you do not love, so the secret of self-commission is faith - plus love. Faith is believing what is unbelievable. Commit yourself to the feeling of the wish fulfilled, in faith that this act of self-commission will become a reality. And it must become a reality because imagining creates reality.

Imagination is both conservative and transformative. It is conservative when it builds its world from images supplied by memory and the evidence of the senses. It is creatively transformative when it imagines things as they ought to be, building its world out of the generous dreams of fancy. In the procession of images, the ones that take precedence - naturally - are those of the senses. Nevertheless, a present sense impression is only an image. It does not differ in nature from a memory image or the image of a wish. What makes a present sense impression so objectively real is the individual's imagination functioning in it and thinking from it; whereas, in a memory image or a wish, the individual's imagination is not functioning in it and thinking from it, but is functioning out of it and thinking of it.

If you would enter into the image in your imagination, then would you know what it is to be creatively transformative: then would you realize your wish; and then you would be happy. Every image can be embodied. But unless you, yourself, enter the image and think from it, it is incapable of birth. Therefore, it is the height of folly to expect the wish to be realized by the mere passage of time. That which requires imaginative occupancy to produce its effect, obviously cannot be effected without such occupancy. You cannot be in one image and not suffer the consequences of not being in another.

Imagination is spiritual sensation. Enter the image of the wish fulfilled, then give it sensory vividness and tones of reality by mentally acting as you would act were it a physical fact. Now, this is what I mean by spiritual sensation. Imagine that you are holding a rose in your hand. Smell it. Do you detect the odor of roses? Well, if the rose is not there, why is its fragrance in the air? Through spiritual sensation - that is - through imaginal sight, sound, scent, taste and touch, you can give to the image sensory vividness. If you do this, all things will conspire to aid your harvesting and upon reflection you will see how subtle were the threads that led to your goal. You could never have devised the means which your imaginal activity employed to fulfill itself.

If you long to escape from your present sense fixation, to transform your present life into a dream of what might well be, you need but imagine that you are already what you want to be and to feel the way you would expect to feel under such circumstances. Like the make-believe of a child who is remaking the world after its own heart, create your world out of pure dreams of fancy. Mentally enter into your dream; mentally do what you would actually do, were it physically true. You will discover that dreams are realized not by the rich, but by the imaginative. Nothing stands between you and the fulfillment of your dreams but facts - and facts are the creations of imagining. If you change your imagining, you will change the facts.

Man and his past are one continuous structure. This structure contains all of the facts which have been conserved and still operate below the threshold of his surface mind. For him it is merely history. For him it seems unalterable - a dead and firmly fixed past. But for itself, it is living - it is part of the living age. He cannot leave behind him the mistakes of the past, for nothing disappears. Everything that has been is still in existence. The past still exists, and it gives -and still gives - its results. Man must go back in memory, seek for and destroy the causes of evil, however far back they lie. This going into the past and replaying a scene of the past in imagination as it ought to have been played the first time, I call revision - and revision results in repeal.

Changing your life means changing the past. The causes of any present evil are the unrevised scenes of the past. The past and the present form the whole structure of man; they are carrying all of its contents with it. Any alteration of content will result in an alteration in the present and future.

Live nobly - so that mind can store a past well worthy of recall. Should you fail to do so, remember, the first act of correction or cure is always - "revise." If the past is recreated into the present, so will the revised past be recreated into the present, or else the claim... though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow (Isaiah 1:18). is a lie. And it is no lie.

The purpose of the story-to-story Commentary that follows is to link up as briefly as possible the distinct but never disconnected themes of the fourteen chapters into which I have divided the first part of this book. It will serve, I hope, as a thread of coherent thought that binds the whole into proof of its claim! Imagining Creates Reality.

To make such a claim is easily done. To prove it in the experience of others is far sterner. To stir you to use the "Law" constructively in your own life - that is the aim of this book.

Chapter 2. Dwell Therein

"My God, I heard this day, that none doth build a stately habitation, but he that means to dwell therein. What house more stately hath there been, or can be, than is Man, to whose creation all things are in decay?" - George Herbert

I wish it were true of man's noble dreams, but unfortunately - perpetual construction, deferred occupancy - is the common fault of man. Why "build a stately habitation", unless you intend to "dwell therein"? Why build a dream house and not "dwell therein"?

This is the secret of those who lie in bed awake while they dream things true. They know how to live in their dream until, in fact, they do just that. Man, through the medium of a controlled, waking dream, can predetermine his future. That imaginal activity, of living in the feeling of the wish fulfilled, leads man across a bridge of incident to the fulfillment of the dream. If we live in the dream - thinking from it, and not of it - then the creative power of imagining will answer our adventurous fancy, and the wish fulfilled will break in upon us and take us unawares.

Man is all imagination; therefore, man must be where he is in imagination, for his imagination is himself. To realize that imagination is not something tied to the senses or enclosed within the spatial boundary of the body is most important. Although man moves about in space by movement of his physical body, he need not be so restricted. He can move by a change in what he is aware of. However real the scene on which sight rests, man can gaze on one never before witnessed. He can always remove the mountain if it upsets his concept of what life ought to be. This ability to mentally move from things as they are to things as they ought to be, is one of the most important discoveries that man can make. It reveals man as a center of imagining with powers of intervention which enable him to alter the course of observed events, moving from success to success through a series of mental transformations of nature, of others, and himself.

For many years a doctor and his wife "dreamed" about their "stately habitation", but not until they imaginatively lived in it, did they manifest it. Here is their story:

"Some fifteen years ago, Mrs. M. and I purchased a lot on which we built a two-story building housing our office and living area. We left ample space on the lot for an apartment building - if and when our finances would permit. All those years we were busy paying off our mortgage, and at the end of that time had no money for the additional building we still desired so much. It was true that we had an ample savings account which meant security for our business, but to use any part of it for a new building would be to jeopardize that security.

"But now your teaching awakened a new concept, boldly telling us we could have what we most desired through the controlled use of our imagination and that realizing a desire was made more convincing 'without money'. We decided to put it to a test to forget about 'money' and concentrate our attention on the thing we desired most in this world - the new apartment building.

"With this principle in mind, we mentally constructed the new building as we wanted it, actually drawing physical plans so we could better formulate our mental picture of the completed structure. Never forgetting to think from the end (in our case, the completed, occupied building), we took many imaginative trips through our apartment house, renting the units to imaginary tenants, examining in detail every room and enjoying the feeling of pride as friends offered congratulations on the unique planning. We brought into our imaginal scene one friend in particular (I shall call her Mrs. X), a lady we had not seen for some time as she had 'given us up' socially, believing us a bit peculiar in our new way of thinking. In our imaginal scene, we took her through the building and asked how she liked it. Hearing her voice distinctly, we had her reply, 'Doctor, I think it is beautiful'.

"One day, while talking together of our building, my wife mentioned a contractor who had constructed several apartment houses in our neighborhood. We knew of him only by the name that appeared on signs adjacent to buildings under construction. But realizing that if we were living in the end, we would not be looking for a contractor, we promptly forgot this angle. Continuing these periods of daily imagining for several weeks, we both felt we were now 'fused' with our desire and had successfully been living in the end.

"One day a stranger entered our office and identified himself as the contractor whose name my wife had mentioned weeks before. In an apologetic manner, he said, 'I don't know why I stopped here. I normally don't go to see people, but rather, people come to see me'. He explained that he passed our office often and had wondered why there wasn't an apartment building on the corner lot. We assured him we would like very much to have such a building there but that we had no money to put into the project, not even the few hundred dollars it would take for plans.