Neville gives the most radical answer

Somehow synchronicity has been showing me challenges to human freedom, in different situations. Out of the blue, my son asked me to explain the sci-fi trilogy I had read to him some 25 years ago. It was called The Tripods (John Christopher, 1967). Recalling the plot, I saw how prescient it was. Alien masters, having fitted metal caps to human heads, used this portable technology to track people, control their thoughts and keep them docile, as they stagnated in a life of servitude.

Later, a friend at dinner started talking about institutions, and, despite their necessity or possible benefits, the constraints they impose, and the way people unwittingly derive personal identity from them — family; education; work; religion; consumer society; social media; government; healthcare; finance; etc.

In a world where institutions too readily tell you who you are, Jung offered the route of individuation to achieve personal freedom. This was brought home to me in a video that popped up “by chance” from Philosophies for Life.

Yet they said we should accept our weaknesses. This seemed an odd way to liberty.

Well, the subject of freedom soon came up for me yet again in the form of videos from Academy of Ideas. Consider these titles:

• Why are Most People Cowards? Obedience and the Rise of Authoritarianism
• The Psychology of Conformity
• The Manufacturing of a Mass Psychosis - Can Sanity Return to an Insane World?

The essential theme is the encroachment of tyranny on contemporary society, and the need for a renaissance of individual thought.

What answer does Neville Goddard give regarding the problem of human freedom? His instruction is more radical than political, institutional or even Jungian principles. Neville's answer is to tell Man (generic Man = man, woman) “who he is”. He is the creative power itself.

The notion of individual freedom in the face of state power is noble. Yet Neville advised that any action unaccompanied by a change in consciousness is but “a futile readjustment of surfaces”. We exercise control of the imagination. Consciously realized and directed, it is the source of freedom.