Neville Decoded: The Art Of Dying

Part Two

“Man is not willing to outgrow, [and] yet he wants other things than those he has. But if you remain in one state, you will forever have to suffer the consequences of not being in another state,” (Neville Goddard, The Art Of Dying, 1959).

If you were to die today to whatever state led to your current experience of the world, you’d awake tomorrow as a different person in a different world. The essence of manifestation is simple: My inner state creates my “outer” reality. Or perhaps even better put, “My inner state and my ‘outer’ reality are one and the same; the outside world is how my inner state “looks” when projected externally, and, similarly, my inner state is how the outside world “looks” when invited inward toward the core of my Self, my very being.”

If it’s so simple though, why can conscious creation seem extraordinarily difficult at times? Why can we dedicate weeks, months, and years to studying Neville’s teachings, to visualizing, and to doing SATS, but still, we can’t seem to affect any “external” change?

There is no such thing as “progress” as it pertains to internal states. States are binary — either you’re in your desired state or you aren’t. There is no “in-between.” Any apparent “in-between” is really its own distinct state.

Imagine a color gradient that goes from pure white to pure black. You can go to any point on this spectrum and say you’re in a “gray area” — that you’re in between black and white — but you aren’t actually. Any point you choose on the gradient (outside the two extremes of black and white) is its own distinct shade of gray. If you start out at black and you want to get to white, nothing except pure, complete white will ever satisfy you. It doesn’t matter if you’re as close to white as you can be without actually being white — if there’s just the slightest bit of black still present on the palette, then you haven’t arrived at your destination yet. As Neville says, “Man passes through states as through cities.” If I want to be in Manhattan, I won’t be happy upon arriving in Brooklyn just because it’s close — even if I started out in Shanghai.

Still though, understanding this doesn’t solve any problems. We all know that our goal is to change internal states. That doesn’t mean we’ll be any less frustrated when we spend hours and hours researching the best route from Shanghai to Manhattan, when someone sells us a ticket that says “Shanghai —> Manhattan,” when we double, triple, quadruple check that we’re on the right path, when we ask everyone around us, “I’m still headed toward Manhattan, right?” and they tell us “Yes, you’re on your way to Manhattan” — then we finally arrive at our destination and are greeted by a sign that says, “Welcome To Brooklyn!”

To move forward we have to understand what it is that’s preventing us from dying to our old state and entering into our desired one. And to do that, we have to ask the question, “What actually is a ‘state?’”

In the same way that a symphony is a collection of instruments all working together to create a greater unified song, a “state” is a collection of thoughts, feelings, and sensations all working together to paint a bigger picture.

Have you ever called out sick from work or school and spent the entire day sitting on the couch watching movies? Maybe you decide to watch a comedy that makes you laugh out loud from start to finish. Is this the same experience as watching the same comedy and laughing the same way, but on a Saturday night when you’re perfectly healthy and feeling great? Just because you’re laughing at the movie, do you cease to be sick? Or do you laugh as a sick person in one instance, and laugh as a healthy person in the other?

Just to clarify the point, one more quick example: When you’re having a bad day, everything you do or encounter becomes “imbued” by the taint of your crappy mood. You might go to work and spend hours typing away at an Excel spreadsheet, but you do so as a person in a bad mood, which is a different experience from typing away at an Excel spreadsheet as a person who is about to leave for a two-week beach vacation in a couple of hours.

Now for the point of all this.

To truly die to any state, you must die fully to it. The old man must die before the new man is born. But, the old man cannot die if he hides away from death.

I am a big advocate of actively “releasing” or “letting go” of old, unwanted states. This process involves fully acknowledging how we currently feel (but don’t want to feel) and accepting our state fully without fighting back against it so that ultimately we can let go for good — you can read about all the nitty, gritty details of this releasing process here.

Whenever I discuss this process, many insist that we should never acknowledge unwanted thoughts/feelings/beliefs/states on account of Neville’s advice to “let the dead bury the dead.” I understand that point of view, and to a large extent, I agree with it. But remember that death comes before burial; to die and to bury the dead are not the same thing.

Christ carried the cross to his own crucifixion. His dying was not a passive process — he didn’t just “skip” to the resurrection. He didn’t leave the dying to someone else. He was active in accepting the invitation to die so that he might be reborn. He was given the opportunity to deny his station as the Son of God and King Of The Jews, but he chose not to.

You too should be active in dying to your old states. You shouldn’t accept the opportunity to deny your current thinking/feeling/believing so as to spare the man who holds those states the discomfort of his dying.

It’s almost entirely worthless to try and brute force a new internal state over an old one without first acknowledging the old state fully and surrendering it to its death. That’s the equivalent of wanting to skip over the crucifixion right to the resurrection. In the short term, yes, it’s more comfortable to hide the old man away somewhere and to dress him up in the new man’s clothes. But the old man in new clothes isn’t the same as the new man. And the old man denies himself the possibility of rebirth and resurrection so long as he refuses to pick up his cross and walk it to his crucifixion — in the long term, the denial of that possibility is a lot more uncomfortable than death.

This essay is getting long now, so I’ll leave us with two quick points to conclude. The first is another quote from scripture that should make clear the necessity of acknowledging our current state fully before trying to birth a new state:

“What you have said in the dark will be heard in the daylight, and what you have whispered in the ear in the inner rooms will be proclaimed from the rooftops” (Luke 12:3)

What you repress gets expressed. If you cloister away your negative thoughts and feelings in the inner room of your mind (your subconscious), they’ll be proclaimed from the rooftops (they’ll manifest in your experiences).

And lastly, a taste of how all this connects to “The Promise,” which we’ll be getting back to in the next installation of this series.

Just as we can die to specific internal states, we can die to all attachments and aversions. In spirit, we can die to the outer world. Upon undergoing this spiritual crucifixion — the crucifixion of the ego — there’ll be no “thing” left to cling to — not even one’s “self” — and one is granted an opportunity to be resurrected in the nothingness (the no-thingness) of God’s being. At this point, the promise is fulfilled. But again, that’s a topic for another day.

As always, good luck.