Welcome to the Teachings of Neville Goddard: SERIES I - Foundation of Conscious Creation (week 6)

Lesson 6 – Inspiration, Desire, Aspiration and Experience

Note to Readers:

This study is important to me. Everything I am saying here, I am saying to myself. Many have misinterpreted Neville’s “everyone is yourself pushed out” but there is one thing I know. Even if I am the only person reading this, I am sending these vibrations out into the world. They strengthen me and I can only pray that they strengthen you in this journey. Neville Goddard was a blessed soul and his determination to tell his story has blessed us all. He said that people should only talk about what they have experienced. I haven’t experienced every aspect of the Law but I have practiced it with great effect. I am grateful for every one of you who are on this journey of deepening the outplaying of life’s meaning and purpose.

Neville opens his book Awakened Imagination (1954) with a quote from the poem Jerusalem, by William Blake:

I rest not from my great task

To open the Eternal Worlds,

to open the immortal Eyes Of Man inwards

into the Worlds of Thought:

into Eternity

Ever expanding in the Bosom of God, the Human Imagination.

- Blake, Jerusalem 5:18-20. 

William Blake inspired Neville because Neville recognized in Blake's writings descriptions of realities that he later experienced himself.

Inspiration → Desire → Aspiration → Experience

We encounter something - a person, an idea, a passage, an inner realization - that inspires us.

It awakens a desire.

That desire becomes aspiration: I want to know more. I want to go further. I want to experience this for myself.

And eventually Neville's aspiration became not merely wanting to believe in God, but what he called:

“the deepest of all desires … to know God from experience.” 

I (Rosechalice) remember a time in my journey where I saw the images of two beings sitting in church pews. I was instantly touched with their spiritual depth and devotion, and suddenly I wanted that more than the state I was currently living in. I determined to focus my energies on my spiritual lessons with every ounce I could muster. I began to feel the closeness within to the source of life so that all previous ways of living were just mist in comparison. 

From God’s Creative Power  (February 9, 1968)

“Now I ask you to examine yourself. When confronted with a problem, do you turn to someone on the outside for its solution, or do you believe that all power resides in your human imagination?

Do you believe in . . . meeting the right people, or living on the “right” side of the street? Or do you believe in your own wonderful human imagination?

I have found he of whom Moses and the law wrote, Jesus of Nazareth, to be my human imagination -  and I turn only to him for the solution of my problems.

I do it by asking myself: 

What I would see if my problem dissolved and its solution rose in its place. What would I hear? How would I act?

Having discovered Jesus to be my imagination, I act as though the problem was solved, and have found from experience that I have brought things not seen by mortal eye into the world to be seen by all. I have proved it and encourage everyone to try it.

Examine yourself to make sure, really sure, that you have completely accepted Jesus Christ as your human imagination, so that when confronted by any challenge you turn to the only Jesus Christ and not to a false one. If you turn to anyone outside of yourself you have turned to a false Jesus Christ and failed the test. Turn only to God and not to anyone or anything on the outside. No one can tell your future, for your future is to fulfill Scripture, and you have no other!” (end of quote)

Practice — What Inspires Me?

This week, notice what genuinely inspires you.

Not what you think should inspire you.

What actually does.

It might be a person.

A passage from Neville.

A line from Blake.

Music.

Beauty.

Kindness.

Courage.

A mystical idea.

Something in nature.

An experience you cannot quite explain.

A quality you see in another person and recognize as something you would love to express more fully yourself.

When something inspires you, stop for a moment.

Instead of merely admiring it, ask:

What is this awakening in me?

Then ask:

What does this make me aspire to become, understand, or experience?

Choose one quality, idea, or ideal that genuinely calls you upward.

Sit quietly with it.

Do not strain to make anything happen.

Contemplate it.

Feel your love for it.

Do what the great mystic Thomas Troward said, and "enter into the spirit of it"  

Imagine what it would be like if this quality were already naturally alive within you.

And remember Neville's discovery:

“We become that with which we are en rapport.”

                                                                         — Awakened Imagination, Chapter 8

For this week, allow inspiration to become aspiration.

And allow aspiration to become experience.

What inspires me?

What does it awaken in me?

What do I now aspire to know for myself – to be?

-----

And now, let us go into the Silence . . . 

Rosechalice