Neville Goddard Mentions Spiritual Awakening By Chuck Stockdale
05 Nov Neville Goddard Research – “Spiritual Awakening” by Chuck Stockdale
Recovered from archive.org
Spiritual Awakening
By Chuck Stockdale
I’ve had quite a few people contact me privately asking if I’ve had the experience known as “awakening” which is described by Neville in his writings and lectures. I’m going to answer this in an indirect way in the paragraphs that follow.
The overwhelming sense I’m getting from all of this inquiry is that there is an expectation that we each reach a point in our individual spiritual development as human beings where lightning flashes in our head, the mysteries of life become instantly solved, we crack the case, know and see all, and the heavens split wide open allowing us to survey the perimeters of eternity with a sweeping glance. Is this what’s in store for us?
In certain metaphysical/spiritual circles there is much talk about being spiritually “alive” versus being spiritually “dead” or asleep. There is this prevalent notion that you are either one or the other. This smacks of spiritual elitism within closed societies of spiritual stuffed shirts, some of who see themselves as being elevated above their spiritually slumbering neighbors. The Awakened Believers versus the Dead Pagans. (sounds like an amateur battle of the bands).
So as you go along the course of your spiritual studies do you suddenly awaken and receive a “Certificate of Awakening”, a badge or a wristband denoting that you are now the best of the best, the elite, the spiritual top gun? Awakening to yourself is a very gradual process. If you were to come into contact with the person you were fifteen years ago you would scarcely recognize yourself. If you could see and talk with the self you were two lifetimes ago, fifteen lifetimes ago, thirty thousand years ago, you would find that the worldviews you looked out from then, the choices you made, the life circumstances you experienced, are scarcely on conceptual speaking terms with the person you are right now this moment. You would realize that your consciousness has been steadily and consistently widening and expanding and there is no “end” to it, no crossing of the finish line
Vital to realize here, is that being “asleep”, as some people like to put it, is not a dilemma. Let me repeat this: being asleep is not a dilemma. It is not a condition you must escape from at all costs. Rather, being asleep is a voluntary condition which is enabling you to suspend your cosmic disbelief to the point where you can accept that your physical experience is real. Once you completely accept and embrace physicality as reality you are able to garner the spiritual prize of feeling from it. As Neville has said; God is not simply pretending that IT is the human being that you are, God has actually become you. God has taken the infinite expanse of IT’s cosmic body and literally crammed it into your flesh, blood and bones. This willing compression of Divine Identity into your physical alias is for an extremely high purpose – comprehension. Trying to awaken from the dream of physicality is like trying to dig a seed up out of the ground before it has sprouted, or taking a loaf of bread out of the oven before the dough has risen and passed the dry fork test. As Richard Bach has informed us there is a simple way to determine whether your mission on earth here is finished – if you’re alive, it isn’t!
Life here is like an infinitely well made feature film that you are enjoying in the comfort of your Celestial living room. But your film projector is of an extremely advanced technology which enables you to actually enter the movie and be the star with all of your senses engaged and alert. The feature starts with you seeing bright lights, feeling cold, seeing giants around you, coughing up fluid, and being generally terrified. So jarring is the opening sequence that you recoil in fear and run back out of the theater many times during the days and nights that follow. Gradually, ever so gradually, you give up your disbelief in limits, restrictions, the memory of eternal youth and life which is your natural state of affairs and you permit a completely convincing spectacle of mortality to be temporarily imposed over it. After awhile you sit back and relax, surrendering to the movie with all of its drama, delight, excitement, and horror.