Fiction Writing: Understanding the Teachings of Neville Goddard
- Admin
- Mar 30, 2017
- 2 min read
"There is No Fiction" is the title of a brilliant lecture delivered by Neville Goddard during the middle of the last century. (Listen to a reading on YouTube.) The phrase itself is one that Neville repeated often during his talks, cautioning us to be careful of what we imagine, even for the sake of art.
One of the foundational premises of Neville's teachings is that imagination creates reality. This idea permeates almost all of his work regarding The Law, or the principles of creation. Neville teaches that the subconscious mind, or the creative apparatus, which he also identifies as God, does not distinguish between what we experience in the physical world and what we imagine with feeling and faith. The creative apparatus feeds upon the things we imagine, feel, and believe, and in time creates corresponding conditions in our outer world.
In the teaching "There is No Fiction" Neville gives several examples in which writers created stories which later manifested in physical form. Neville's examples are cautionary tales, because in each case the results were quite disagreeable. The principle that imagining creates reality holds true in literature, music, and art, as well as all other forms of creative endeavor, such as fantasy, speech, and memory.
While the author of a work of fiction might be perfectly able to distinguish fact from imaginings in her conscious mind, the subconscious (or Universal) mind, has no discriminating faculty. It is utterly incapable of analyzing input; it's function is simply to incubate and materialize all input received. This means that the author and any readers who become emotionally connected with the work, are actually inputting the story into their inner creative faculty, and without remediation, will see some type of corresponding manifestation.
Neville strongly cautions writers (and by extension, all creative artists) not to use our divine power of imagination to create undesirable things. He urges us to direct our creativity towards that which is loving, virtuous, good, and beautiful. This, of course, gives rise to the question, would modern people be interested in art, music, or literature that was free of negativity? Would people listen to music that created no angst, or read stories that contained no traces of tragedy or tension?
We will be exploring this teaching further, and sharing some of the questions and observations that arose as we at Voicings attempted to apply this concept in our own work. Please check out the next post.
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