Neville and His Imaginal Activity

I've recently been reading two of Neville Goddard's books, Power of Awareness published in 1952 and The Law and The Promise published in 1961. He was part of the New Thought Movement, which first began developing in the late 19th century. His work is sort of a mystical look at Law of Attraction. I've been a huge fan of Abraham-Hicks for a long time, and this has given me a new--or older, depending on how you look at it--twist on these ideas. Neville explains what he calls imaginal activity as experiencing in your imagination what you would experience in reality had you achieved your goal.

Often Neville uses Bible verses to support his ideas. Now if you're not into Christianity--and I'm not--before you go off running and screaming, this is a very different interpretation of these Bible passages. Its one that I've never encountered before--a mystical, metaphysical, symbolic interpretation. If you're a fundamentalist or conservative Christian, you can go off running and screaming, because you won't like this at all!

Here are some of Neville's main points...

You are Consciousness, and Consciousness is the only reality

Man's chief delusion is his conviction that there are causes--in the physical world--other than his own state of consciousness

Imagination is the instrument by which you create your world

You make your future dream a present fact by assuming the feeling of your wish fulfilled

Neville suggests engaging in imaginal activity every night as you're going off to sleep.

Here are some passages from his books...

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.

The world in which we live is a world of imagination. In fact, life itself is an activity of imagining.

Events happen because comparatively stable imaginal activities created them, and they continue in being only as long as they receive such support.

The man who is aware of what he is imaging knows what he is creating.

An awakened Imagination works with a purpose.

Do not bow before the dictate of facts and accept life on the basis of the world without.

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 a futile readjustment of surfaces.

A note about the art featured on this post. I've been painting and drawing my whole life, but the idea for this painting came about in a new way for me. It was about 20 years ago, and I was deep in meditation, when images started popping up spontaneously in my mind's eye. I saw a woman in the sky. She was dreaming, and the earth was her dream. This watercolor was my attempt at putting down what I saw in a painting.