“If Knowledge Is Power, It Is Also Pain”

Introduction to Daydream Believer

“What are all beliefs but the possibilities of I?” — Austin Osman Spare, The Focus of Life

Several years prior to this writing, a famous political operative — someone you would immediately recognize and perhaps be surprised by — asked me to meet him at a suite in a posh Park Avenue hotel. I biked up from my then-home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. As I settled into a sofa with my helmet in my lap, he asked me: “Who is the best writer in New Thought?” My questioner referred to the philosophy of positive-mind metaphysics that began in the transcendentalist ferment of New England in the mid-to-late 1800s and mushroomed across the nation.

“Neville,” I immediately replied, referring to Neville Goddard, one of the most intriguing mystical voices of the past century.

“No,” he said, ribbing me — “I didn’t ask who’s the coolest, I asked who’s the best.”

I repeated my assessment. The British-Barbadian Neville, whose career spanned from the late 1930s until his death in California in 1972, was a resplendent speaker who, under his solitary first name, wrote more than ten books on the limitless powers of thought. He has been my greatest influence. But I have differences with Neville’s ideas, which I do not believe cover the full…