Lifting the cross

While typing quotes for a third Neville From My Notebook collection, I came across this, from Neville Goddard’s lecture Bear Ye One Another’s Burdens:

Don’t limit your friend because of his financial, social, or intellectual background. That’s a heavy cross for him to bear. Rather, lift his cross and set him free… You and I can lift the cross from our own shoulders, for as I lift your cross, I am lifting mine, and in a way I do not know, the burden is lifted from me.

It’s funny that Neville used the phrase “in a way I do not know,” because in the very next sentence of this lecture, he answers why this is true:

Everyone you meet is yourself made visible, for there is nothing but yourself in the world.

I get it. And I’m sure Neville did, too.

The proposition Neville put forth repeatedly in his teachings, which he urged us to put to the test, is that, in the words of poet William Blake, “all that you behold, though it appears without, it is within, in your imagination, of which this world of mortality is but a shadow.” “Seeming others” express and reflect that which I believe to be true.

So… if I “lift the cross” of “another,” I am, in effect, revising and changing what I assume to be true. And so I am changing self AND “lifting the cross.” Because that other is just reflecting me. So change “them” in imagination and I have changed self. Or, rather, change “self” in imagination, and then “they”– myself pushed out– is also changed.

That is the answer to “the way I do not know.”