Neville Goddard Lectures: “The World is Imaginal in Character”

23 Feb Neville Goddard Lectures: “The World is Imaginal in Character”

4/26/68

There is nothing perceived which cannot be duplicated in fancy; consequently, the world perceived always resembles our private fancy, and is, therefore, so far as the evidence goes imaginal in character. Here is a graphic example. I suppose everyone here, unless our sense of smell is impaired, knows what it is to detect the fragrance of a rose. Now, smell is a chemical sense and depends upon contact for perception…but do you need the contact? Can’t you reproduce that fragrance in fancy? I do not need a rose to detect the fragrance of the rose. If this very moment I wanted to smell, all in my Imagination, that of a sweet pea, that of an Easter lily, I can discriminate between all of these odors. And everyone should be able to do the same thing. So if I can discriminate between these objects, then I say they do not exist independent of Imagination on some level or levels. They exist imaginatively. I’ve had the experience of such fragrance and they are now in existence, imagined, and I can call upon it from my memory of that experience and bring it back and duplicate it in fancy. So if I can duplicate it in fancy, then is this world different from my imaginal world? It isn’t.

Well, William Blake in 1820 printed a very small short little work of his. He called it The Presence of the Divine Angel and in this he said, “Man is all Imagination. God is Man & exists in us & we in him. The Divine Body of Man is all Imagination. The Divine Body is Jesus: we are his members.” He doesn’t separate the members from the body, for the body is one. As we are told, “There is only one body, one Spirit, one hope, one Lord, one faith, one God and Father of us all” (Eph. 4:4). Only one body, we are his members.

Now as we read of this imaginal body containing all beings, and we are all Imagination, can we really prove it? I can prove, as I’ve just done to my own satisfaction, that I can reproduce and duplicate any perception in this world that I have ever encountered. I can duplicate it. I see you and if I’m interested, I don’t have to have you physically before me to think of you and to reproduce you in my Imagination, as you and I can now reproduce our living rooms. I don’t have to be physically there to see the contents of that room, and how I left them when I was there. I left them arranged in a certain order and in my mind’s eye ___(??) the entire room, and every room within my apartment, it’s all vivid. Yes, the cutlery, I can see it, the plates, everything. Well, I can reproduce without being there to actually see them and perceive them.

So here, we are on solid ground when we start from the premise that this world is a world of Imagination and that Imagination does create reality. Therefore, there can be no fiction in the true sense of the word in this world of ours. For, if I can imagine a state, I create it. I create to the extent that I can drench it with feeling. To me “prayer” is simply imagining drenched with feeling. So, I want something and I imagine it, and then I drench the thing with feeling. Then it seems to objectify itself and becomes real in my world. Well, if I have evidence for a thing, it doesn’t matter what the world thinks. If I can reproduce my image in my mind and make it take on form in the outer world, does it matter what the world of rational minds thinks? So they tell me, “Oh, that’s all hallucination.” Well then, go kick it. If it’s all hallucination, go kick the thing that was only yesterday an image in my mind and is now a fact. So you go and simply throw it away…it’s all just a little nothing. Everything in the world…you say to them, “But everything in the world was once only imagined. There isn’t a thing in this world we now call true that wasn’t first “only” imagined…the dress you wear, the suits we wear, the building in which we are now housed, the chair in which we are seated, everything was once only imagined. And so he says, “only Imagination” and yet the whole thing starts from there. It all starts from God and God is all Imagination; the source of all phenomena is divine imagining.