The Psychological View of Reality

Kindred spirits
In this blog series I draw on certain valuable sources: GI Gurdjieff (as reported via Ouspensky), Dr. Maurice Nicoll, Dr. Rolf Alexander, and Dr. CG Jung. These authors all assert the primacy of mind and advocate the development of individual awareness of being.

The irony is that each, in his own way, was captive to the mindset of materialism.

Idealism
The relatively unknown Neville Goddard sets himself apart from these erudite kindred spirits by taking his convictions to their logical conclusion. Judging by their written works, he is the only one among the group to fully express the psychological view.

 Neville often gives this quote:

And all you behold, though it appears without,
It is within, in your imagination,
Of which this world of mortality is but a shadow. (~Blake)

With the benefit of Analytic Idealism, the metaphysical system of Bernardo Kastrup (or at least my understanding of it - see previous post) I made this diagram of the individual/universal mind:

Most people have a materialist view of the world of trees, grass, mountains, rivers, lakes, oceans, and for that matter, stars, planets and galaxies: these are thought to exist, as they appear to us, independently of our perception of them. In like manner, we consider the built environment of cities and towns to have their own separate reality. But to the school of thought we can call idealist, or visionary, which includes Neville and Bernardo Kastrup, but also JG Fichte, Douglas Fawcett and particularly William Blake, the world without has another explanation.

 Implications
To the visionary, all seeming outward things are mental constructs – a sort of psychological rendering. Nothing exists physically in and of itself on the outside, because “the physical” and “the outside” are themselves mental constructs. Consistent with this view, physics reveals that the physical stand-alone world (as such) is not there.

Similarly, our physical bodies, too, are “emanations” (metaphorically) of mind. When you see another, you have a mental experience of psychic (not physical) content which we call “seeing”. If you catch the idea, you will have something of a shock, when looking at a person, of directly encountering meaning, with no intermediary concept.

 Is everything “illusion”?
This is not to say that everything that appears to the senses, as the saying goes, is illusion. It is a question of the nature of the thing we are encountering. Neville’s view is that the world “out there” is not material, sitting in physical space. It is our own mental representation, non-spatial, showing us the human psyche, which is, in its hidden depths, coequal with the mind of God. He explains (Power of Awareness, Ch. 2):

...what appears to you as circumstances, conditions and even material objects are really only the products of your own consciousness. Nature, then, as a thing or complex of things external to your mind, must be rejected.

Man is all imagination
Everything in the life of man takes place in what Neville, following Blake, calls imagination, and nowhere else. Man and his world are all imagination. Thus we have a complete picture of man’s world. All, the outer and the inner, is mental.

In the current podcast episode S2E06 The Psychological View of Reality we trace through more implications. Peruse the diagram above, and check the audio or transcript.