Neville Goddard - What Can He Do For You?

You may not have heard of Neville Goddard. You may not have heard of the New Thought movement. However, you almost certainly have heard of The Secret or The Law of Attraction or something along those lines.

Yeah, you probably know someone who's always telling you that positive thoughts are the key to everything. How about this nugget - "You can make your own reality!".

This can be a pretty hard idea to grasp, apparently. Not unreasonably, I suppose. After all, reality is a pretty big place. How can you possibly have made all this? Indeed, how could anyone have made all this?

Well, my interpretation, for what it's worth is that there are broadly two philosophical positions in the world. The materialist position, and the non-materialist position.

The Materialist's Viewpoint

According to the Materialist, matter is the fundamental substance of the Universe. Matter came first. Matter exploded into existence at the start of everything, for reasons that are not entirely clear. What is clear to the Materialist however, is that matter is the be-all and end-all of what there is. Light is made of particles, electricity is made of electrons, things are made of atoms, atoms are made of quarks, gravity is made of Higgs-Bosons. Basically, if you can't touch it, or detect it with a machine, or predict it with mathematics, it isn't really there.

The Materialist viewpoint has some issues, but the Materialist is just expecting those problems to eventually be resolved by the invention of a new machine (like the large Hadron Collider or the Hubble Space Telescope), or by the application of new mathematics.

Quantum Mechanics does pose some currently insurmountable problems for the Materialist, but for now he/she is just ignoring those problems. In fact, the Materialist has been ignoring the problems posed by Quantum Mechanics for around one hundred years!

For the Materialist, everything is just an artefact of matter - a side effect of matter interacting with itself. Life and consciousness, for example, are just complicated things that can happen to matter. Eventually, the Materialist believes, everything will be shown to have a physical analogue. We will find the DNA that stores memories, we will find the synapses that trigger daydreams, and we will find the structure in the brain wherein lies the thing that gives rise to an individual person. Feelings will be quantified, and so will decisions. Not only that, we will discover, eventually, that strange force that animates living tissues and be able to define it in some way other than "some kind of electricity".

The Non-Materialist Viewpoint

The Non-Materialist stands in complete opposition to all this, and his/her disagreement with the Materialist is really rather straightforward. The Non-Materialist believes that something else is the prime substance of the Universe. This is the naive viewpoint. It is also the Jedi viewpoint, the New Age viewpoint, the New Thought viewpoint. It seems also to be the ancient Egyptian viewpoint, if the work of certain rogue scholars of ancient Egypt are to be believed. It is the Biblical viewpoint.

To my mind, this viewpoint has taken a lot of flack in the last two hundred years or so from the Materialists. The criticisms don't make a whole lot of sense. It is seen, simultaneously, as the the naive viewpoint, the primitive viewpoint, the ancient viewpoint, and the New Age viewpoint. Exactly how it can be 'new' when it is demonstrably the most ancient viewpoint is strange, but, like I said, the Materialist's arguments don't make a whole lot of sense when you really look at them.

Broadly, the Non-Materialist believes that Consciousness is the prime mover in the Universe or, more vaguely, Spirit. Something non-material. Many like to call this thing God, or Dao, or simply Energy. The idea is that matter, the whole materialised universe, arose out of a Universal consciousness, and not the other way around as the Materialists would have you believe.

So there you have it. I will write more on this in due course, but I don't want to put you off by going on about all the implications of these two viewpoints for too long. Suffice to say that the Law of Attraction, Neville Goddard and, indeed, thousands of great sages through the ages all have a philosophical common ground - non-materialism. To my mind, it is foolish to dismiss it all as mumbo-jumbo, because there is a real philosphical discussion to be had.

I found this to be a useful way to broach the subject with Materialists, since they love a bit of cold hard philosophy and tend to run screaming for the nearest material object to cling to whenever they find themselves confronted with someone who believes wholeheartedly in the power of positivity, vibes and the idea that consciousness may have some kind of effect on matter.