AWAKENED IMAGINATION

This past May(1954) in New York City, there sat a lady who had been coming for years and I made a simple observation that people must become doers of the word and not mere hearers only. For if a man only hears it and never applies what he hears he will never really prove or disprove what he has heard; and then I told the story of a lady who had only heard me three or four times and how she transformed the life of another, and this lady hearing what one who came only three times and this miracle took place in her life, she went home determined that she would really apply what she had heard over the years, and this is what she did.

Two years before, after a violent quarrel, she was ordered out of her son's home by her daughter-in-law. Her son said "Mother, you need no proof from me that I love you: it's obvious: I think I have proven that every day of my life, but if that is Mary's decision, and I regret it, it must be my decision, for I love Mary and we live in the same house and it is our house: it is our little family, and I am sorry she feels this way about it, but you know these little things that culminate in an explosion as took place today. If that is her decision, it is mine".

That was two years ago. She went home and she realized that night after night for over two years she had allowed the sun to descend upon her wrath. She thought of this wonderful family that she loved and felt herself ostracized from it, expelled from the home of her son. She did nothing about revising it and yet I had been talking revision to my New York audience for the past year.

This is what she did now. She knew the morning's mail brought nothing. This was a Wednesday night. There had been no correspondence in two years. She had sent her grandson at least a dozen gifts in the two years. Not one was ever acknowledged. She knew they had been received for she had insured many of them; so she sat down that night and mentally wrote herself two letters--one from her daughter-in-law, expressing a great kindness for her, saying that she had been missed in the home and asking her when she was coming to see them; then she wrote one from her grandson in which he said "Grandmother, I love you". Then came a little expression of thanks for the last birthday present, which was in April, and then came a feeling of sadness rather because he hadn't seen her and begging her to come and see him soon.

These two short notes she memorized and then, as she was about to sleep, she took her imaginary hands and held these letters and she read them mentally to herself until they woke in her the feeling of joy because she had heard from her family; that she was wanted once more. She read these letters over and over feeling the joy that was hers because she had received them and fell asleep in her project. For seven nights this lady read these two letters. On the morning of the eighth day she received the letter: on the inside there were two letters--one from her grandson and one from her daughter-in-law. These letters were identical with the letters she had mentally written to herself seven days before.

Where was the estrangement?
Where was the conflict?
Where was the source of the displeasure that was like a running sore over two years?
When man's eye is opened he realizes all that he beholds,
though it appears without,
it is within--within one's own imagination,
of which this world of mortality is but a shadow.
Neville Goddard 1954