Neville and Buddhism

Show Transcript

[edited for clarity]

This is E9, Neville and Buddhism.

In this episode, we'll continue an exploration of aspects of Neville's teaching, and this time with the help of various quotes from Alan Watts, who was a lecturer on Zen Buddhism. Both in E8 last time and today, I'm making references to several quotes by Alan Watts. So please check the show notes for E8. I actually updated them to show you the links. And the recordings by Alan Watts can be hours long. For that reason, I gave a time stamp for each quote.

1. Awareness of Being as God.

Let's recall conscious experience as I recommended that you read about it in the exercise back in E1. But there's a nuance here that I thought was worth pointing out. When going into a state of self awareness or self remembering, self consciousness, the experience is a wordless sort of witnessing. But there is no so called witness. It's not an entity, it's the experience itself that is intended.

The reason I'm bringing that up is because I think it's fairly easy to get caught up if you're new at this in trying to nail down a specific entity, looking for the witness, or trying to identify or locate with a witness. And yet there is no witness. It's only the witnessing, it's the experience. In our first example here of a quote to back up our view of this, he comes up actually with a really good formulation. He says “The thinker of the thoughts is an abstraction that we create out of memory.” Now, I never heard it expressed that way -- pretty brilliant... Some other place, Alan Watts says “the godhead is never an object of its own knowledge”.

Well, let's turn our attention to what Neville says in this. And one of the best quotes that I found from Neville along these lines was from the book Freedom for All. He says, “The most difficult thing for man to really grasp is this, that the I am-ness in himself is God. It is his true being or Father state, the only state that he can be sure of. The Son, his conception of himself, is an illusion. He always knows that he is, but that which he is is an illusion created by himself, the Father, in an attempt at self definition.”

It's just that last part that I thought was striking and never heard of express quite like that before...

2. Observations on our trials and experiences with both systems.

I wanted to point to a seeming contrast in the experience of contemplating the words of Alan Watt on one hand, and those of Neville Goddard, on the other. So as Westerners listening to Neville, I think it's natural to feel that we want to positively do something, to understand something, to conquer something, to find a higher self. And of course, we want to manifest something. That's one of the most popular aspects of his teaching.

On the other hand, the experience in listening to Alan Watts might lead to a strange sort of flatness or absence of emotion, just a feeling of being put back to square one, without any insight. I think the reason for that is because the Zen Buddhist argument is not the sort of logic that we're used to. Now, this feeling of flatness or just being left cold is not particularly pleasant, and it doesn't even seem desirable. It just seems frustrating. But at a certain moment I thought -- oh, wait a minute, let's be careful here, because this could actually signify something, along the lines of letting go, being devoid of my usual feeling of myself, in other words, at least in a small way, a sort of psychological death.

That is perfectly aligned with Neville's approach, because there you have to continually put off the old. And it's not a wilful approach on Neville's part, where you can force or coerce the creative principle. No, he says the whole thing has to operate by belief, by faith -- you can't force the issue.

So I think the two approaches lead to a common experience of having a feeling that is not the habitual one of yourself.

3. The promise, is it the same for everyone?

There are two aspects to Neville's teaching. One is the law, which is what we focus on most of the time, and then the other one is the promise. According to Neville, each person is destined to awaken as God. And the way Neville discusses it, it seems that he's saying that everyone the world over will undergo the same visions, the same mystical experiences, in other words, the Biblical drama, just as he did, even though in presenting other people's dreams and visions, people from his own audience, he did allow for different variations, and he commented on individual variation.

If he meant, though, that the promise, this awakening experience is going through the same visions and so on, exactly the same way the world over, regardless of your background and so on, I would be very surprised at this, and I would actually have a hard time accepting it. But I really don't have any other information on it.

Neville, for his part, did not address other schools of thought and other religions, with the exception of Judaism. As far as Alan Watts is concerned, I did find this quote. He said that yoga is “the state in which the individual self finds that it is ultimately the supreme self.” So without considering the individual experiences in terms of visions and Biblical dramas and so forth, at least Alan Watts does confirm the original premise -- that the individual is destined to awaken as God, or find unity with God.

4. Our nature: unitary, yet fragmented.

Neville continually refers to “the seeming other” and the world is “oneself pushed out”. He also said at one point, standing in front of a group that he was lecturing, that he's only trying to convince himself, because they are simply aspects of himself “pushed out”, so to speak.

So it becomes something like an exercise, where you have interaction with other people, and within yourself, you're secretly asserting to yourself that the other person is in some strange way, your own psyche, or some part of it.

Another way to think of that is that there are not a lot of personal instances of consciousness, but rather there's only one consciousness.

I believe that Neville was expressing all this before the popularization of Jung's concept of projection, where you see in another that which you really don't want to realize and accept in yourself. In any case, Neville puts the matter much more bluntly, in a stark phrase -- this is the one that I was thinking of: ”Everyone in your world is nothing but a dead image revealing who you are... We breathe life into these images.”

Alan Watts, for his parts, confirms this. He says, “the colossal reality, the energy that is everything -- that is a unitary energy that is one -- plays at being many.

5. “All that you behold, although it seems without, it is within, in your imagination.”

Well, that's the quote from William Blake that we're familiar with by now, having listened to many of Neville's lectures where he repeats it. I discussed this at length in E2, that was pretty much the subject of the whole episode.

It's very similar to the last point where the world is yourself pushed out, but it has to do not just with other people, but really with the world at large -- with all the circumstances, events, situations and so on. Alan Watts, for his part, talks about the principle of mutual interdependence and says, “the world is not existing independently of those who witness it.” So there we get direct confirmation: the notion of an independently existing external world, that we normally have in Western society, is actually false.

6. Detrimental effects of institutions.

Well, in E3, when discussing difficulties with methods and techniques, I talked about the detrimental effects of institutions, and how we might counteract that. And in the last episode, I drew attention to an interesting channel [see show notes]: Sylvie Ivanova's New Earth channel. She explains that our real history was deliberately eradicated and falsely reformulated. This caught my interest because she's not the only one who has been calling into question over the years the accepted institutional education and academia.

There's all kinds of discussion by, let's say, John Taylor Gatto. He's the author of Dumbing Us Down. There's a fascinating testimony by Norman Dodd, who was a congressional committee research chair assigned to investigate the philanthropic foundations. There's a very interesting videotape interview (see the link in the show notes for that).

But to return to Sylvie, she outlines the events of the Reformation which took place back in what we consider to be the 16th century -- although there again, the dating of the history is called into question in a severe way, according to her evidence. But at this time of the Reformation, there was a mass cull of forbidden books. She laments also the perpetuation of the myth of Darwinism. Now, in this, Neville agrees wholeheartedly. He says that there isn't a shred of evidence to support Darwinism, and yet everyone is obliged to swallow it in the school systems. And here I'm thinking myself of a book that was published by James Perloff, which was a thorough repudiation of Darwinism.

Well, whether the answer is a strict Creationist view, or something much less obvious, for the moment, that's sort of beside the point. My point in bringing all this to your attention is to say that Sylvie is making exactly the same point about institutions that I was making back in E3. She said that a deep inculcation in people's minds that we are descended from monkeys and cavemen was done specifically to remove the possibility in our minds that we might think of ourselves as anything but inferior, unworthy, incapable, random accidents in an absurd universe.

Quite unexpectedly, in the middle of a lecture I heard from Alan Watts: “we have all been brainwashed by several centuries of put-down theories of man.”

7. The nature of evil as a necessary part of creation.

In E7 and E8, we discussed several aspects of the nature of evil. Taking Neville's claims, substantiated by Scripture, it's pretty clear that evil is an undeniable part of creation. It's part of the totality, and therefore it exists in potential in everyone. And it's also a matter of exercising free will to be free from it.

Now, either you embrace the golden rule, or you run the risk of your own ill will against others being visited back upon you. That seems to be the law. And at the same time, strangely enough, evil itself, what it consists of, seems to be subjectively defined.

I think that aligns perfectly with Alan Watts view. He says, “You can see at one level that the evil side of things is part of the total harmony.” And then he says, “The joy of life is to be in the process of getting rid of it.”

8. Two contradictory aspects.

It looks like there's two stark differences between Neville's understanding of Christianity and Alan Watts’ explanation of Buddhism.

Now, Neville did not discuss other religions or systems directly, as I mentioned, as far as I know. But he did want to make one striking comment, which is an obvious comparison with Buddhism. He said, “Other religions teach you to kill out desire”. Whereas he himself, by contrast, counsels you to honour your desires as gifts from God, because they flow from your state, naturally, and so they kind of move you forward.

At the same time, Alan Watts does qualify the idea of Buddhism killing out desire. He says that's not the whole story. It's only how the dialogue begins.

Now another aspect that seems like a stark difference is the whole idea of the human imagination itself as a creative power, in Neville's view. But there again, Alan Watts, while he doesn't discuss that, at least not that I've heard, in so many words. He says that we misinterpret Buddhism as being just passive, and that's not really the correct view of it. That's just sort of the Western perspective [perception] of it, whereas the reality is much more nuanced.

Conclusions

Well, what conclusions can we draw then, from this comparison of points between Neville’s view of Christianity and Alan Watts’ expression of Buddhism?

You couldn't really say that the two systems are one and the same. Obviously, that would be really an oversimplification. But neither, as we've already shown, are they diametrically opposed. There are many points of agreement and points of contact.

So it's probably a case of another sort of wave phenomenon, the sort of thing that Alan Watts talks about all the time. That is -- as long as each system is taken not in a rigid and literal way, but in a subtle and psychological way -- then we could say that in the total picture of humanity, there's an elegant complementarity and mutual assistance between the East and the West.

Each system is, of course, aligned with the underlying deep psychological idiosyncrasy that is either in the mind of the Easterner or in the Westerner. And yet at the same time, we seem to share a common destiny.

I think that spirit is really well reflected in a Buddhist text that I have. It's called The Questions of King Melinda. In sort of a preamble before the dialogue, they describe the ideal conditions of this wonderful city that's beautifully laid out with markets, hills, rivers and lakes and so on. And here the streets are crowded by men “of all sorts and conditions -- Brahmins, nobles, artificers and servants. They resound with cries of welcome to the teachers of every creed. And the city is the resort of the leading men of each of the differing sects.” So there I don't see any trace of bigotry or dogmatism.

And for Neville's part, he said at one point, you know, “men have made religion a thing to defend instead of a thing to practice.”