Neville Goddard Research Cultivating A New Observer By Kirsten Mortensen

05 Nov Neville Goddard Research: “Cultivating A New Observer” By Kirsten Mortensen

Recovered from the internet archive

Cultivating A New Observer

By Kirsten Mortensen

Neville teaches that we have an Imaginal Self. But who is that self? What relationship does that self have to the self we normally associate with our everyday reality—the one who is typically fused with current outpictured states?

One way to answer this question is through the phenomenon of “lucid dreams.” A lucid dream is a dream where you suddenly realize you’re dreaming. Many people have encountered this phenomenon spontaneously during a nightmare: we suddenly realize we are having a bad dream. This happens frequently enough that it has generated a cliché: in times of crisis, we say we feel like we’re living “a nightmare” from which we “cannot wake up.” Yet in actual nightmares, most of us have learned that we can wake up as an act of will.

What does waking from a nightmare entail? First and foremost, it entails the realization that the dream “is not real.” More precisely, it entails the realization that an experience that appears to have an objective reality is, in fact, “negotiable.” It is one of at least two experiential possibilities, the other being “I’m safe and sound in my bed.”

Lucid dreaming is a more pleasant variation of the “I need to wake up” decision we sometimes make during nightmares. In its most fundamental element, it is simply the realization that one is dreaming. Techniques people use to induce the lucid state, therefore, include the auto-suggestion that one notice incongruence. If I’m walking down the street and suddenly realize that I’m with someone I know to be dead, for example, this might prompt me to realize that I’m dreaming – assuming I’ve planted the suggestion that I notice such incongruence.

Once one becomes lucid, one can then “play” with the dreamscape. The laws of physics, for example, do not apply. So in theory, your experiences are unlimited. In theory, you can fly, experience any imaginable pleasure, etc. (In practice, however, there are limitations. For example, if you occupy a feeling-state of lack, you’ll experience lack in the dreamscape just as you experience it in waking life.)

The “this is a dream” awareness and willful decision to interact with the dreamscape is, I believe, helpful in understanding the metaphysical model Neville describes. In Awakened Imagination, Neville proposes a dual self: the inner, or Imaginal self and “the outer man of sense” for whom “the world . . . described from observation” is the only world.

To assume the feeling of the wish fulfilled is to shift one’s sense perspective from that of “the outer man of sense” to the Imaginal self.

Neville stresses the importance of becoming conscious of this dual self. “. . . every man must become conscious of this inner activity and see the relationship between the inner causal world and the sensuous outer world of effects.” (AI, p. 9)

This is analogous to lucid dreaming. Awake, we must become aware that our seemingly objective surroundings are, in fact, a projection of our own consciousness—just as, in a lucid dream, we become aware that the dreamscape is a projection of our own consciousness, and is therefore ours with which to play.

We are always observing. But as Neville points out, most of us spend our lives unconscious of the fact that we are fused with a state that we have created. For this reason, our “observer” plays a passive role, rather like that of an accountant tallying numbers in a ledger. “Look at what’s happened to me today.” “He’s never liked me.” “I suppose it’s going to rain again, like it did yesterday.” “What a stroke of luck.” We catalogue events, and judge them good or bad, negative or positive.

What we don’t do is cultivate an awareness of our own complicity in the events of our external lives. We don’t ask ourselves to become lucid. But we must become lucid to realize the full benefit of Neville’s techniques.

The Imaginal Self is also an observer, but an observer who does recognize that complicity. And in that awareness is power. “[M]an’s ability to identify himself with his aim [i.e., shift his awareness to that of his Imaginal self] . . . is proof of the birth of Christ in him.” (AI, p. 11) “The moment man discovers that his imagination is Christ, he accomplishes acts which on this level can only be called miraculous.” (AI, p. 10)