In this lecture, Neville Goddard emphasizes the power of imagination as the divine force within each individual. He argues that by believing in and assuming the reality of our desires, we can shape our experiences and manifest our dreams.
Goddard dismisses the notion of an external Christ, instead teaching that Christ resides within us all, and that recognizing this inner divinity is key to transforming our lives.
He encourages listeners to apply this understanding in their daily lives, stressing that imagination is the true creative power that shapes reality.
AI Transcript
So, you imagine what you want.
Believe that you have it and see how it works in the world.
Those who scoff at it aren’t at themselves.
Five years from now when you’re on the top, they may be working for you.
And they’ve even forgotten that they sat in the same audience with you.
When you heard and believed, and they also heard but they didn’t believe.
And so you moved on and they remained behind.
And that’s life.
But there’s only one creative power in the universe.
Scripture names that power as God, Jesus Christ, the Lord, the same power.
Because there aren’t two gods, there aren’t two lords, there’s only one.
And that one Christ dwells in us.
He did not appropriate a single man as scripture, I mean the priesthood of the world teach.
They tell you of a single man.
And the single other man that differs from all men.
He isn’t dwelling in this man or that man.
His desire was to save humanity.
And so he dwells in us.
Not in that particular man.
He didn’t become this one man, dwelling in one man.
Let no one tell you that the Christ in you differs from the Christ and let them name any man they want.
He cannot differ.
If there is a Christ other than that Christ who is crucified within us and who rose and continues to rise in humanity, he’s a false Christ.
And the teachers who teach of an external, objective, different Christ are false teachers.
Christ is within and he rises within.
And so you go out and put it to the test.
Put it to the extreme test.
Christ in us, not out there, is the hope of glory.
So this word of which I speak and the word by the way, its true definition is meaning.
In the beginning there was meaning to the whole thing.
And that meaning was with God and God himself was the meaning.
There is a purpose, there is a plan behind it all.
Awakened in us so that we and he are one.
So he actually became us, that we may become God.
It seems incredible, but it’s true.
That’s the purpose of life.
To take humanity and lift it to God.
So it becomes God.
So he became man, that man may become God.
Now tonight you need not confine it to yourself.
Take a friend without the friend’s consent, without the friend’s knowledge and lift him up.
Do you know the friend who is unemployed?
Well then see him gainfully employed and don’t tell him that you may brag tomorrow, don’t tell him that.
Just see him gainfully employed.
Here is a friend of mine in LA and this man was unmercifully balled out by his superiors and told that he was no earthly good and they are considering letting him go, they’re going to fire him.
Well the man had no support outside of the job and he had a family.
He told my friend.
Well my friend lives by this law.
So he said to him, all right go your way.
Didn’t tell him what he was going to do.
He sat quietly at his desk and heard the man tell him that they praised him beyond measure for something that he had done.
It wasn’t 48 hours that they complete reversal of their attitude towards this man in their praise of something he did in the advertising world.
But the blow had left its mark and he said to my friend, yes they’ve reversed it but I don’t feel easy on the job because they could not have said the unlovely things that they said and forgotten them.
So he will come back and I’m going to quit.
I have no money, I’m giving them two weeks notice.
I’m going to ask them to give me one week of the two that I may get myself together, maybe take off a few days and just get my thoughts in order.
Well at the end of two weeks he didn’t have a job.
My friend when he told him what he was going to do, my friend knew he could not afford to quit and not work.
So he saw him gainfully employed and earning 25% more than the present job.
He took off the second week.
When he came back the end of the first week, he came into my friend’s office and said only yesterday I got the offer and I start Monday.
I do not lose one day’s salary and I start at 25% more than I received on the past job.
What did it?
My friend’s imagination.
A loving use of the imagination on behalf of a friend.
Had he gone without that imaginal state he would have walked into the place, the man would have said we have nothing or we can’t use you.
Why are you quitting?
He didn’t ask anything, he simply wanted the man.
So if you precede your visit by an imaginal act, they will see you as you see yourself.
If you walk in knowing that you’re no good, they’re going to see you exactly that way.
But if you walk in the assumption that things are as you desire them to be, they’re going to see you that way and this is life.
Now what greater claim can anyone make than to claim that he’s God?
When he claimed it, he said he is blaspheming.
For here is a man and the man dares to claim he’s God.
The tenth of John and he said is it not written in your law I say you’re God’s sons of the most high?
If he called them gods to whom the word of God came, do you say of the one that he anointed and sent into the world that he is blaspheming?
Do you have any greater claim in the world than for a man to identify himself as God and walk as though he were?
And not be ashamed to admit it?
He doesn’t go bragging about it but he knows in his heart he is one with God.
For if his imagination is God and he imagines, well then that’s God.
And if he imagines a state and it comes to pass, then he knows the creative power that is God.
He doesn’t have to brag about it and boast about it but he doesn’t have to hide it either.
He doesn’t have to bury it and be ashamed of it.
He sleeps in a noble state because he’s one with God.
But let everyone take that attitude and the world will change.
Not be beaten but you can take the whole vast world if they feel themselves slaves, give them the world, they’ll want it again tomorrow.
If a man has self-respect you can give him all the money in the world and it means nothing.
That goes for the individual, it goes for a family, it goes for a race of people, it goes for a nation.
Just as our late President Hoover said, “The rise and fall of ideas will determine the rise and fall of men, the rise and fall of nations, the rise and fall of communities.”
So tell me the idea, the community entertains itself, I’ll tell you that community.
But now change that idea of itself and you’ll change that community.
Let a family feel important in itself.
It doesn’t have to have a background.
Who has a background?
So you go back far enough and almost everyone who now claims importance would be ashamed of that background.
So don’t go back, start just where you are and don’t pay anyone to look up your family tree because you’re going to pay them to forget it.
Just all of a sudden start right now and assume the dignity that is God.
That’s what your real background is God and so assume it and then walk in that assumption and if you have children, I hope you do, well then instill that into the child.
Instill it into all within the environment and have them feel important.
I have no background judged by human standards, either intellectual, financial or these things.
We made it.
But mother instill in us, when we did something of which she was ashamed, she would say to us, “Have you forgotten that you are a Goddard?”
We didn’t know.
That must have been very important.
Because mother said, “Have you forgotten that you are a Goddard?”
Well, I never heard that we ever had any background.
But all of a sudden you began to feel that you must be important.
So mother instilled it into our mind’s eye.
She made the name important.
So today it is important where we are.
In the business sense, in every sense it’s important.
But mother did that and she married a man who had no background and took his name.
But she made it important.
All right, who has any background?
As far as I’m concerned, I refuse to accept the aristocracy of any being in this world other than the aristocracy of the spirit.
What other aristocracy?
Give me the aristocracy of the spirit, but don’t come to me with any physical dissent.
I’m not an animal.
I’m not a horse where you develop it by one horse after the other.
I’m God.
We’re all God.
You can’t go back beyond God.
So if that’s the start of all of us, well then that is our root.
And so claim it now.
At any point in time, claim it.
And you’ll find yourself being washed clean of anything you might have thought.
The family tree held.
You don’t have any family tree.
The true Israelite is not a descendant after the flesh, but the elect of God of whatever nation.
That’s the man of God.
So you simply dare to assume that you are that man of God.
And then apply what I’m telling you tonight.
And may I tell you in the not distant future, in the immediate present, it’ll work.
If you don’t falter and do not change the assumption, if you remain faithful to the assumption, it will harden into fact.
Because imagining creates reality.
It does.
Now let us go into the silence.
Now are there any questions, please?
My dear, there’s a man in this state today by the name of Krishnamurti.
He was a member of the Theosophical Society.
When Annie Besant and Alcott and that entire crowd ran it.
That book is still in print.
They brought out a book without his consent.
They tried to make him a Christ.
The reincarnation of Jesus Christ.
He didn’t deny it.
He didn’t go against it.
He allowed it.
And that book came out and they are literally hundreds of full-page pictures of his so-called reincarnations of the past.
One male, female, male, female, Chinese, Indian, Oriental, Caucasian, all these.
I don’t think they included the Negro.
They hadn’t quite integrated them in this setup.
And here he went all the way back, but not into the Negro.
He was something different.
Then when he got big enough and courageous enough to deny it, he denied it.
But they printed those books and they’re still in the library and they’re still in the homes of individuals.
And now he will go from the world as they have departed this world and those who will come tomorrow will not know it was refuted and go along and believe it.
I tell you my dear, stick to the Bible.
All these are simply theories.
Man-made theories for one purpose to make a buck.
It’s cruel to say that, but I cannot let it go by. 99% of them are in it only for a dollar.
Seems cruel, but I’m telling you what I know.
I’ve gone through these many isms.
Has nothing to do with spirituality.
You are individualized and you tend forever towards greater and greater individualization.
You will never lose your identity.
You will awaken one day and you are the Lord Jesus Christ himself without loss of identity.
That’s the great mystery.
I will know you.
And when you awaken and you’re born from above and you can behold the fatherhood of God and you being the father, I will know you.
You will not lose your identity and yet I will know you to be God.
I will know you to be Jesus and I’ll know you as you are now.
And it will not seem strange to you that you are Jesus.
You will not bow your head in shame and yet you will not lose your identity.
Yes, ma’am.
I have had these men and women too, who make these claims.
You can induce it.
You can actually induce it by an assumption.
I’ll give you my own personal experience of the crucifixion and it’s so unlike what the world teaches.
I have experienced scripture.
Scripture has been fulfilled in me.
I found myself this night in the fulfillment of the 42nd Psalm, which is, and he went with them in a throng to the house of God.
He led them in a gay procession to the house of God.
Well, here I am in this enormous crowd, all like the Arab world.
And as I’m walking with them, a voice out of the blue sings out.
And the voice stated, and God walks with them.
A woman at my right asked the invisible voice, and if God walks with us, where is he?
And the voice answered and all heard the voice.
And the voice said, at your side.
She turned to her left, looked me full in the face and began to laugh.
And she said to the voice, you mean Neville is God?
And the voice answered yes in the act of waking.
Then the voice spoke, but from within me, no one but the speaker heard it then.
And the voice said within me, I laid myself down within you to sleep.
As I slept, I dreamed a dream.
I dreamed and I knew exactly what the end of that sentence would be.
He is dreaming in his eye.
With that, I became so emotionally thrilled.
I felt myself drawn into this body that was on the bed.
For this took place in the spirit world.
I felt myself drawn into this body.
And this hand was a vortex.
This hand was a vortex.
My head a vortex.
My feet vortices and my side, the right side a vortex.
And I knew then what the crucifixion was.
It was sheer ecstasy.
It wasn’t painful at all.
You can’t describe the thrill of these six vortices nailing me to this body.
So you’re told in the 10th of John, no one takes away my life.
I lay down myself.
I have the power to lay it down and I have the power to lift it up again.
And in spite of that statement, they teach year after year that a group of men murdered him and nailed him to a wooden cross.
He is not nailed to any wooden cross.
The universal Christ is nailed on humanity.
This is the cross.
And he did it willingly.
I lay down myself.
No one took it from me.
And I experienced that that night.
So you can bring all the arguments in the world about this little stigmata.
That’s no stigmata.
There was no blood running there.
The whole hand, both hands whirling vortices.
And the head a whirling vortex.
And the side a whirling vortex.
And both feet, the soles of my feet, vortices.
And they are six.
Yes sir.
Judas, I am self-betrayed.
No one knows me but myself.
No one knows the thoughts of a man but the spirit of man who dwells in him.
Likewise, no one knows the thoughts of God but the spirit of God.
Therefore, if I betrayed God, I would have to be the spirit of God.
One who has the secret.
And so it’s self-betrayed.
One night in a room about the size of this.
And here I am sitting on the floor with 12 men before me sitting on the floor.
We’re all dressed in robes.
And I’m teaching the word of God.
A man, one of these 12, jumps up quickly.
And the moment he jumped up, I knew exactly what he was going to do.
He was going to tell the authorities what I was teaching.
He went through the only door.
As he went through, I knew what was going to happen.
A tall, handsome man about six feet four in most costly robes came in.
Erect.
A man about 40, 44.
He walked straight down the side, turned at right angles, walked straight down the side, turned at right angles and walked down the middle.
But as he entered, he was one of such authority, we all rose.
He was one of tremendous authority in that community.
And we all stood on attention.
I facing my 11 now.
He came on down and he turned towards me.
And he took a wooden mallet and a wooden crag and he hammered it into my right shoulder.
Blow after blow into my shoulder.
Then he took a very sharp instrument and with one circular motion like this, he severed my sleeve and then pulled it and pulled off the sleeve and discarded it.
And I saw it a lovely shade of light baby blue.
Then he stretched his arms out this way and he embraced me and kissed me on the right side of my neck.
And I kissed him on the right side of his neck.
And as I kissed him, still embracing him, the whole scene faded.
Here is the 53rd chapter of Isaiah.
To whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?
It’s all symbolism, but the whole thing is true.
That was the betrayal.
For you are now nailed.
The pay goes in as you are told, I will now put upon you all the authority of Israel and you will rule it for a season.
Then I will break the page and that weight that you carry will be taken from you.
But who has believed our report and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?
He unveils the right arm, which is the symbol of power.
At that moment in time when he rises in you and you are going to rule as he rules.
And that’s the story.
So the whole story is true, but it’s all vision.
It’s not secular history.
It’s salvation history.
And the world treats the whole Bible as secular history.
And it’s not secular history at all.
The whole thing takes place above.
I am from above and you are from below.
You are of this world, I am not of this world.
And so the whole drama is unfolding above.
It’s a mystical drama.
Any other questions please?
Yeah.
Yeah.
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 90 years old now and if you drop this very moment you are restored to life, not as an infant, someone of 20 years of age.
And you are not old, you are young and any missing part, teeth, hair, limbs, all restored.
Unbelievably new and unaccountably new.
You can’t account for it.
How can someone cremated, turn to dust and stand before me 20 years old.
And when they drop, they look like a thousand, they are so old and withered.
And here suddenly before me stands this beautiful island woman or man, 20 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 is no escape from this until resurrection.
And resurrection comes to the individual, it doesn’t come collectively, it comes while we walk in this earth.
The individual is raised and set free from this bondage to decay and becomes then one with the risen Lord.
Because there is only one body, one spirit, one Lord, one God and Father of all.
Continues to grow, continues to grow.
He is the God of the living, not the God of the dead.
This world is the world of dead.
People won’t believe it.
Everything here is dead.
If you see it from above, well, you have to see it to understand what I’m talking about.
If you see this from above, everything here is like, well, something that is dead.
And you can come down, you can’t change it from above, strangely enough.
I’ve tried to change it from above.
Look at the body, it’s on the bed and it looks like something like a carcass that is dead.
Well, you know exactly the wisdom is from above.
If you can only do with it now, while you’re there with the clarity of vision, but you can’t do it.
You’ve got to come down and occupy it.
And then you forget.
This is the world of death.
Yes, sir.
Pardon me?
Animals?
I only know this much.
One night I found myself at the top of a very tall ladder.
And below me, I would say the forest.
The beast of the forest, like tigers, lions, jaguars, all the wild beasts of the forest.
And they were angry.
And I was afraid.
I stood on the very top rung and I was really concerned for my safety.
They were angry looking and moving with all the anger of the world.
Then it dawned upon me, but that’s myself made visible.
That is a creative power, enormous power in me.
I arrested the activity in me, caught in them, and they all stood still.
They’re frozen as though they were made of clay.
I came down the ladder and they were dead.
Their life was in me.
I came upon a scene, a simple little scene.
And the scene was just like a Sunday afternoon dinner.
And they were dining.
And the minute I saw them dining, I knew that if I could arrest the activity which I was feeling within me, that these people would go still.
They’d all be gone.
Well, I had no sooner entertained the thought than I did.
I froze my head.
As I did so, here was a foursome, two young fellows, about 21, 23 years old, and their parents in their middle forties.
And one fellow facing me was having soup.
And he had just bought the soup, spoon, this far.
When I froze the activity in my head, he couldn’t move it.
The waitress coming through the door with the second course, she stopped in her tracks.
Everything stopped.
A bird flying flew not.
The grass waving waved not.
Leaves falling fell not.
Everything froze.
And when I released the activity in me, all things continued in their course.
The bird that was frozen and arrested continued.
Now, if I froze that bird right now, and he’s in flight, would he not fall?
If a bird is now still, it can’t remain in the air and be still.
It has to be in motion to remain in the air.
Well, it was not in motion and it didn’t fall.
Everything froze and the leaves could not fall.
And the waitress walking with that second course couldn’t walk.
And the boy, young fellow, 21, 22, he couldn’t continue the action.
And when I released that activity in my head, then he continued the action and took the soup.
And she continued to bring the thing.
And I saw that when I woke from that state, everything changed in my world.
That everything here is dead.
And we are the animating power.
Without man, everything would be dead.
Nature would be dead.
For God is in man.
And were it not that that living word is in man, everything here would be dead.
And you take that power and arrest it, and everything is standstill.
For the world is yourself pushed out.
Creating a better world through creative endeavors.
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[Music]
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