Neville Goddard Lectures: “Blake: Four Types Of Vision”

Well, one day Blake came home and in his garden was stretched out a drunken soldier, and he ordered him out of his garden. The man wouldn’t go, so Blake took him by the elbows and led him out of the garden and down about fifty yards. The man with another soldier agreed to bring the charge of sedition against Blake. Well, a garden is not something that just happens, it’s a creative plot. Man must be present to call any plot a garden—you take care of it, you plant it, and you take care of it or it will go to seed. So here was Blake’s garden and here is a drunken soldier. A soldier is one of authority. Here he saw in the soldier…of course, he was exonerated through Haley’s efforts, but Haley was his friend physically. He was well fed, he had shelter, but he was his spiritual enemy. And Blake said, “I can tolerate my physical enemy, but not my spiritual enemy,” for here he was destroying his creative power. He didn’t want any part of Blake’s poetry or his artistic work; and after three years of a slumber on the banks of Felpham, said he, he returned to London to face poverty but at least to be creative.

So Scofield, the name of the soldier, he used in Jerusalem as a symbol of the one who would be his spiritual enemy, even though a physical friend. So everything in Blake’s life became a symbol…but everything was a symbol. So he saw ___(??). He never saw a tree, he saw something else. Someone said, “When you see the sun, don’t you see some round disc like a guinea?” He said, “No, I see a host of angels singing ‘Holy, holy, holy Lord God Almighty!” Another person sees just a round disc and that’s the sun. Not Blake. He saw a tree filled with angels. Everything to him became a symbol and he thought in terms of symbols. That’s double vision.

Now, threefold vision is when these images intertwine, inter-blend, have love affairs, marry, and beget new images. A day dream is threefold vision. A dream of the night is threefold vision, because it’s “soft Beulah’s night.” But you don’t have to wait for night: Your moods are your dreams in daylight. I can capture a mood. If I could sustain a mood, and dream through the day with a mood which would imply the fulfillment of my dream, I am setting something in motion.

If I could become now intense from that three-dimensional or threefold thing and dream intensely and enter my dream, that’s fourfold vision…if I could now start with my images and dream so intensely that I step into the dream. But if I don’t, it doesn’t mean it will not work. If I persist in it so that the dream obliterates what was and becomes the reality, that’s fourfold vision. Now this [world] is fourfold vision. Man has forgotten when he started this dream and he’s entered his dream. As Thoreau said, “The truest life is to be in a dream awake.”

Now we are in a dream awake. And we have forgotten where we laid ourselves down to dream this dream; but it became so intense we awoke in our dream and now we return to single vision for this is taking the place of reality. It was once only a dream and now it’s become the stream of reality. Now man knowing this could start this night with his images and let them inter-play. So let them inter-play that they fall in love…they’re sort of having love affairs…then let them marry and beget a new image, which new image would imply the fulfillment of the dream. So I assemble in my mind’s eye images that if true would imply the fulfillment of my dream. Its potency is in its implication. So they all play together, interweaving, and finally they fall in love, and then comes the fulfillment.