Happy Holidays and Death to Old Men

Happy Holidays and Death to Old Men
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Sorry, this is not an article about murder. It's about faith, imagination, and the inevitable change that must proceed from conviction to belief.

It's about Neville Goddard who said:
"I must learn to die to what I am in order to live to what I want to be."

Goddard was a metaphysical prophet and new age author/orator who spoke to a notion of manifesting through faith and imagination some 70 years before modern day luminaries such as Abraham's Esther Hicks or The Secret's Rhonda Byrne. To his credit, that late great man, Dr. Wayne Dyer, often credited Neville Goddard as influencing his own teachings about manifesting desire.

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Neville Goddard's message was blissfully simple! See it in your mind's eye, believe it, and live like it is so; through imagination, faith, and of course, death to the old man.

IMAGINATION
The first element of Goddard's blueprint for manifesting.... the ability to imagine the circumstance(s) you desire. Create the story you want and get inside it. You don't view it like watching actors on a screen. You become the actor and live the experience from your eyes outward. This can be tough, especially if you've never experienced what you are now trying to imagine. But get there you must so take a guess, imagine how you think it will feel and feel it now.

FAITH
The second part...faith... the willful, perseverant and vigilant madness of belief in an unseen reality, absent reason. The I don't care what you or the world say, I know this to be so. Again, its tough to have this kind of incontrovertible faith when there is no one or no thing in your outside world that even suggests the possibility. However, this is the opportunity of faith; the chance to stretch your spirit and embrace a more paradoxical, transcendent notion of life, independent of proof or control. This faith, according to Goddard's blueprint, must be implacable, so much so that one becomes free to act on it. It is a faith that says I am so sure of my new world that I am preemptively leaving my old world...I will kill my old man so that the new man may take his place.

DEATH TO THE OLD MAN
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There is no safety net in Neville Goddard's toolbox for manifesting desire. For Goddard, a safety net implies a lack of commitment to desire, a lack of belief. And if you don't believe it, why should the world? No, in Goddard's universe you must literally kill off the old man, the old world, so that the new one can take its place. There is no fall back for there is no need. You believe or you don't, straight up.

WHAT'S MORE
There is also no waiting until the new you appears before giving up the old man. In fact, the opposite must occur as the new man and the old man cannot co-exist. Sorry, the old guy has to go. It's a case of metaphysical ageism to be sure.

FINALLY
Neville Goddard was, by all reports, a brilliant and intuitive man. He understood that on some level, man may not like or want change and that change can be frightening. He understood the thorny comfort we take in our discomfort and how we cannot easily let go. Goddard knew that to most folks, it could be the height of insanity to believe that imagining could create reality and just how unsettling it could be to consider a world apart from concrete constructs; a world where motion, action, and results could occur causally untethered from the physical world.

Goddard accepted these frailties of man without judgment and doubled down as the prophet/model for his beliefs. You can hear it for yourself any number of audio transcripts from live talks that Goddard freely let anyone and everyone record.

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And what do I think? I think I too am a frail man wanting desperately to believe in the grace and elegance of Neville Goddard's philosophy but as yet unwilling to knock down my house to make room for the new one or kill my old man so that the new one might take his place.

As for you, I wonder that you may have read to the end because, against all reason and knowledge and in the season of faith and imagination, you believe!

Happy Holidays

Dr. Robert Lusson is a licensed clinical psychologist living and working in Los Angeles, Ca. He can be reached at robert@drlusson.com

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