"The bridge of incidents" according to Neville Goddard

[Sena]

I am starting a new thread for this topic as I think it is quite important and fully consistent with the Seth teachings:

"All objective reality is solely produced through imagining. The clothes you wear, the chairs on which you are seated, this in which we are now placed – everything was once only imagined.

Now tonight, find out exactly what you – not what they think you ought to want – what you want.

Ask no one's permission. You don't need any one's permission; you only need your own decision. What do I want? Now, what would it be like if it were true? Now catch the mood, and try to give that mood all the sensory vividness of reality – all the tones of reality, and then sleep
in it just as though it were true. And then await the inevitable.

The inevitable is that you are going to resurrect it and objectify it on the screen of space, and then the world will call it real, and they may not believe you. It doesn't really matter. If you tell them it came to pass because you simply imagined it – no, they will point to the series of events that led up to it, and they will give credit to the bridge of incidents, across which you walked towards the fulfillment of that state, and they will point out some physical thing that was the cause. No, the cause is invisible, for the cause is God, and God is invisible to mortal eye.

Who knows what you are imagining? No one knows, but you can sit down and imagine, and no one can stop you from doing it, but can you give reality to the imagined state? If you do, yes, a bridge of incidents will appear in your world, and you'll walk across some series of events leading up to the fulfillment of the imaginal state. But don't give causation to any physical step that you took towards the fulfillment of it."

(Click on thumbnail)

https://freeneville.com/live-in-the-end-july-19-1968-neville-goddard-pdf/

It is worth noting that in the Neville Goddard vocabulary, "God" is not a being external to oneself. God is one's own consciousness.

This is a definition of the bridge of incidents which I found on another website: "The Bridge of Incidents is a "chain" of linked fortuitous events that occur in such a way they lead to the desire being fulfilled."

Another point to note is that one or two incidents in the "bridge" may appear to be contrary to what you desire, but these incidents are essential in achieving the final result.

[leidl]

Thanks for posting this, Sena.  I had never heard of Neville Goddard until I started poking around on this website.  Last fall I started listening to his talks on Youtube occasionally, which I've enjoyed, but he's been something of a guilty pleasure for me because the talks I've listened to seem to focus on manifesting cool stuff.  I'm up for honing my manifesting skills, but Seth's message just hits me in a deeper place. 

That said, I've been reading more about Goddard this evening, and am confident now that he wasn't just using people's desire for fancy cars and fat wallets as a way to fatten his own wallet by selling tickets and books.  Apparently somewhere toward the end of his life, he had an inner experience that caused him to deepen his focus.  I'll post some bits from a website I found, which you might find interesting.

"In the last twelve years of his life, the teacher took his philosophy in a radically new direction – one that cost him some of his popularity on the positive-thinking circuit. Neville told of a jarring mystical experience he had in 1959 in which he was reborn as a child from within his skull, which opened as a womb. (In the Bible, Golgotha translates as skull). In a complex interweaving of Scripture and personal experience, Neville told of "the Promise:" that each of us is Christ waiting to be liberated through metaphysical rebirth; this is the true symbolic meaning of the crucifixion in which God became man so that man could one day know himself as God. Our imagination, Neville taught, is the God-seed. He saw literal and final truth in Psalm 82:6, 'Ye are gods.'

Neville's lecture audiences, however, seemed to prefer the earlier message of affirmative-mind success, or what he called 'Imaginism.' Many listeners, the mystic lamented, "are not at all interested in its framework of faith, a faith leading to the fulfillment of God's promise," as experienced in his vision of rebirth. Audiences drifted away. Urged by his speaking agent to abandon this theme, "or you'll have no audience at all," a student recalled Neville replying, 'Then I'll tell it to the bare walls.'"

https://www.harvbishop.com/neville-goddard-a-cosmic-philospher/

This helped give me more confidence in him, and your info serves the same purpose, while also highlighting his Sethian qualities.  I especially liked the comment you included on causation:

But don't give causation to any physical step that you took towards the fulfillment of it."

The article I quoted above also ties Goddard's (and Seth's) ideas to quantum mechanics in a clear way:

"In a challenge to our deepest conceptions of reality, quantum data shows that a subatomic particle literally occupies an infinite number of places (a state called "superposition") until observation manifests it in one place. In quantum mechanics, an observer's conscious decision to look or not look actually determines what will be there.

For example, quantum experiments demonstrate that if you project an atom at a pair of boxes interference patterns prove that the atom was at one point in both boxes. The particle existed in a wave-state, which means that the location of the particle in space-time is known only probabilistically; it has no properties in this state, just potentialities. The wave became localized in one box only after someone looked. Neville described man's power of creation similarly: Thought, he said, does not so much manifest the outcome as select it from an infinite universe of already-existing possibilities."

(There's a good chunk more on quantum mechanics in the article that is worth reading.)

Finally, Goddard even drew his students' interest in worldly stuff to their attention.  It seems that he saw this as a necessary phase of development which they would ultimately move past, which is a perspective I really like.  One of Seth's main gripes about Buddhism is that it calls us to deny the flesh, deny our desires.  Goddard doesn't:

"One day you will be so saturated with wealth, so saturated with power in the world of Caesar, you will turn your back on it all and go in search of the word of God ... I do believe that one must completely saturate himself with the things of Caesar before he is hungry for the word of God."

I'll keep listening to his talks, but I'll focus on the later ones, and if I come across any that feel like him speaking his truth "to the bare walls" I'll post a link here.

[Sena]

Neville's lecture audiences, however, seemed to prefer the earlier message of affirmative-mind success, or what he called 'Imaginism.' Many listeners, the mystic lamented, "are not at all interested in its framework of faith, a faith leading to the fulfillment of God's promise," as experienced in his vision of rebirth. Audiences drifted away. Urged by his speaking agent to abandon this theme, "or you'll have no audience at all," a student recalled Neville replying, 'Then I'll tell it to the bare walls.'"

https://www.harvbishop.com/neville-goddard-a-cosmic-philospher/

leidl, thanks for the link and your comments on quantum physics, which helps us to make sense of Neville's views on creating one's own reality.

I have today been trying to find information on Neville's views on the afterlife and reincarnation. He totally rejected reincarnation, and his views on the afterlife were rather bizarre. I still think that Neville's books provide us some useful instruction, but where the afterlife and reincarnation are concerned, I stick with Seth.

Here is Neville on the afterlife:

"Neville: Well, freedom is "That Age." No one is free by dying here, because death here is
restoration in a world just like this. No one - I don't care who you are - you could be ninety
years old now, and if you dropped this very moment, you are restored to life, not as an infant,
some are 20 years of age, you are not old, you are young, and any missing part: teeth, hair, limbs
are all restored - unbelievably new and unaccountably new. You can't account for it.

How can someone cremated, turned to dust, stand before me twenty years old? When they
dropped, they looked like a thousand; they were so old and withered. And here suddenly before
me stands this beautiful - either woman or man - twenty years old, in a world terrestrial just like
this, in a body that is physical just like this - cut it, it will bleed, and they age there as they age
here, and they die there as they die here. And, so, there's no escape from this until Resurrection,
and Resurrection comes to the individual. It doesn't come collectively. It comes while we are
walking this earth. The individual is raised and set free from this bondage to decay, and
becomes, then, one with the Risen Lord, because there's only One Body, One Spirit, One Lord,
One God and Father of all. (See Ephesians 4:4-6)"

https://archive.org/stream/NevilleGoddard002/live_in_the_end_djvu.txt