If man’s concept of himself were different, everything in his world would be different.
Neville Goddard
I woke today feeling energized and excited. The sense of something hanging over me, which has characterized almost my entire quarantine experience, has gone. I look excitedly towards a future which I can envision.
I feel as though I am now living in that sense of astonishment that I felt the first time I read Neville’s explanation of “I AM.” My fear then was two-fold. I recognized that by accepting Neville’s teachings, it meant that I, me, Bird Brain, was powerful. That is a scary thought. A very scary thought, to be honest. Almost enough to make me run and hide.
Second, it meant that I couldn’t hide behind God. I’ve lived much of my life as a scardycat (irony for a bird such as me). I’m scared of the dark. Not the dark when you’re in your own house at night, but the unknown dark, when you’ve let it turn night while you were out in public and now you have to walk to your car alone, drive home alone, and walk into the house alone. There are other things I’m scared of as well. My solution, from years ago, was to picture myself holding Jesus’ hand as I did whatever scared me. But, to be honest, my usual solution was to avoid doing whatever scared me unless I just couldn’t.
So prehaps not hiding behind God is a good thing. It teaches me to trust in him in me instead.
The first time I read that I am I AM, I saw two things. First, the infinite power, wisdom, ability that that meant I had on hand always to tap into, and second, the loss of my hiding space. Both scared me. And then, within a moment, I loss the awareness of the infiniteness that is I AM within me. I knew I had seen it, but it was like viewing something that my brain wasn’t equipted to handle yet, and while the memory stayed, the vision and understanding disappeared.
This weekend, I have been listening to Neville for hours on end. I’ve found the audiobooks online. There is a list on Reddit of each book separately to download and listen to for free, but you have to go chapter by chapter, or you can listen to everything on Scribd (the link will let both of us have a free month of their service). Scribd also has about 35 hours of Goddard’s recorded lectures. I’ve listened to some of those already, they’re fascinating.
Somewhere in the listening, while working and playing, but always with headphones on, the idea sunk in. We just recently rewatched Disney’s Aladian, and that’s what it feels like. For far too many years, I’ve been stuck down inside that lamp. Yes, maybe I had some power, but I was stuck in this little space, so what good did the power do for me? I’d even blame it on not having enough power. I was stuck in the itty, bitty living space, fettered to the limits of what I imagined to be my reality, and I could only make changes when someone else would rub the lamp.
But this weekend, the realization sunk in. “I AM not stuck.” Just like Aladin’s last wish, I have been set free. It doesn’t mean I have figured everything out yet, but now I see the limitless potential, not as a brief vision, but as a reality of my everyday living.
In one of the books I listened to this weekend, Neville says, “Would you rather have the thing or the ability to create the thing? Some people want the thing ifself and that is their entire focus.” He talks about a building there in NYC and asks if you’d rather have the building or the ability to create the building. Then he answers his question. For him, he’d always rather have the ability to create, because then you can make another building or another anything. I totally get that.
So, what would you create? What’s holding you back?
