In this lecture Neville Goddard invites listeners to discover Jesus Christ as an inner presence through the faculty of Imagination, rather than worshiping an external deity. He draws on scriptural passages—from Genesis’s Joseph the dreamer to John’s Gospel—to illustrate how the eternal states of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Christ unfold within each individual. Goddard emphasizes that Imagination is the divine body in man, capable of perceiving, touching, hearing, and tasting realities beyond the physical senses. He encourages daring experiments in consciousness, such as visualizing objects and using inner senses to validate the presence of Christ within. The lecture critiques all external worship as idolatry and calls on practitioners to trust and commune with their own “I AM” presence. Personal anecdotes, including conversations with departed loved ones, demonstrate the practical power of inner sensing. Ultimately, Goddard calls listeners to awaken from spiritual amnesia, take up their role as divine dreamers, and bring their noble dreams into tangible existence.
As I told you when I opened last Monday, this will be the most practical course you ever heard. It will be the most profoundly spiritual, but whatever is most profoundly spiritual is in reality most directly practical. And the promise I made you on Monday I’ll keep tonight. It seems the most extravagant claim in the world. The man who stands before you, who must make the inevitable exit from this world and this little garment be turned into dust, and that I dare to tell you I will this night bring you to the Lord Jesus Christ. I will bring you to him this night. You may not believe him, you may not accept it, that’s entirely up to you, but I will bring you to him.
As told in scripture, “And Philip found Nathaniel, and he said to Nathaniel, ‘I have found him of whom Moses in the law and the prophets wrote, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.’” Now, in this same first chapter of John, John makes the statement, “Among you stands one whom you do not know. I myself did not know him; but he who sent me to baptize with water, he said to me, ‘The one on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain, he baptizes with the Holy Spirit.’ And I saw the Holy Spirit descend as a dove and it remained upon him. Through him all things were made, and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men.” Now, you listen to it carefully, for I’ll bring you to him this night, as we’re told in scripture Philip brought Nathaniel. Listen carefully as I unfold these words, because they are so important to you to really follow what I’m going to talk about. I have titled this “Behold This Dreamer.” If you are familiar with scripture, it’s the 37th chapter of Genesis, and the one spoken of is Joseph. “Behold this dreamer cometh.” So he came, his brothers sold him into slavery in the land of Egypt; and Joseph saves the entire civilization from starvation by interpreting the dreams of Pharaoh. Then be bought the entire land of Egypt for Pharaoh, including those who stole the land and made all of them slaves of Pharaoh; and then he was the great power next to Pharaoh.
The Bible begins, the Book of Genesis, “In the beginning God…” and it ends “…in a coffin in Egypt.” The one placed in a coffin is Joseph: “In the beginning God…in a coffin in Egypt.” And yet, this one placed in the coffin in Egypt, before he’s placed there, he extracts from his brothers the promise they would not let him remain there; they would take his bones up and take him back to where his fathers were. That’s on the surface.
Here, in scripture you cannot take the characters Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and eliminate them and still have the Bible. They are found in the two genealogies of Jesus Christ, both in Matthew and in Luke. In fact, Matthew begins it with Abraham. Abraham was the father of Isaac, and Isaac the father of Jacob, and Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers, and so on. So here we find these three, the inner core of the patriarchs of scripture. Yet, they have not turned up in any ancient Near East manuscript or record, either as individuals or as tribes. If these are the core, the entire background of that which is now brought to complete fulfillment in Jesus Christ, and that is part of his genealogy, and they are not discovered outside of scripture in any ancient contemporary world, either as individuals or as tribes, why? This whole drama unfolds within you. These are the eternal states through which man, the immortal you, must pass. And you begin in the state called Abraham, and you end in the state called Jesus Christ. When you end there you awaken and you are the creator of it all, God himself.
So here, listen carefully as I take these passages, and just try to recall them, try to keep them in mind as I unfold them; for I’m bringing to you this night the great dreamer who dreams everything into being, but everything, good, bad and indifferent. “I have been crucified with Christ; it is not I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Gal.2:20). Galatians ___(??). “If we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.” Note the difference in tense. “If we have been united with him in a death like his”—that’s past; we have all been crucified with him—“we shall be”—now come to the future—“we shall be united with him in a resurrection like his” (Rom.6:5). The identical resurrection! “In him the whole fullness of the Godhead dwells bodily” (Col.2:9)—not figuratively, but genuinely in a body. In him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily. “This is the mystery hid for ages and generations…Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Col.1:26,27). Therefore, “I consider the sufferings of this present time not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed in me” (Rom.8:18). In me! What glory? The whole Godhead dwells bodily in me, and when it’s unveiled, I am he.
Now you listen carefully as I bring you now to meet him dwelling bodily in me—not a portion of him, the whole Godhead dwells bodily in me. And I use myself as an example, but I say he dwells in you, the whole, not a portion of him. Can I prove it? Now I’m called upon to test myself, “Test yourselves and see. Do you not realize that Jesus Christ is in you?”(2Cor.13:5). Well, ask that of anyone who calls himself a Christian and if they are honest, they would say, “No, I don’t realize that at all.” And here is Paul in his 2nd letter to the Corinthians, the 13th chapter,“Do you not realize that Jesus Christ is in you? Test yourselves.” Now you must make the most daring test in the world of Jesus Christ. Brood upon him, learn to know him better, and then as I am doing this night pass on to our successors what we have found in him. If he dwells in me bodily and I’m called upon to test myself to find him, well, I cannot be indolent about this. I must make every attempt in this world to find him. He dwells in me bodily and the whole, not a little part, the whole Godhead dwells in him bodily, and he dwells in me in his fullness, then I’ve got to find him. Only the indolent mind would fail to respond to this challenge. Well, I was not ___(??) about him. My whole life has been devoted to finding him; and finding him I have done. I found him.
Let us go back now and get a few words and define them for you. He dwells in me bodily; therefore, like myself he must have organs, he must. On the outward self I have organs—I see, I hear, I smell, I taste. Well, the eye is the organ of vision, the ear the organ of hearing, the nostril the organ of smell, and so on. An organ is any part of an organism that performs some definite function…that is an organ. An organism is an organized or living being, that’s an organism. I see here and I can touch this, and I can do all the things here now. But I am looking for something far greater, something in me through whom the entire world was made: “…through which all things were made and without him was not anything made that was made.”I’ve got to find him. He has a body; it must have organs just as I have organs here.
Now I put him to the test. Think of your living room right now, just think of it. You see it with your mind’s eye, don’t you? If someone changed a piece of furniture or changed a picture, on returning home tonight you’d know it. You’d recognize that someone came in my absence and there’s a change, because this is not the way I left it. But right now you remember it as you left it and you can see it in your mind’s eye, see it with the eye of Imagination. Alright, can you hear the sound of a voice that is not even in this world? My father made his exit in ’59, my mother in ’41, I can hear their voices as distinctly as though they were here in the flesh. So I don’t have to go back for now some voice that is still being echoed in this world, I go to voices that are gone from this sphere.
I can hear my brother now, who recently departed this world on the 4th of August. We were born and raised like fingers on a hand. No one could feel important in the family, because we all were just simply like one. We all would be pulled right down, all one. And this past summer in Barbados he was making his departure from this world—we all knew it, and they all thought I was, too—but this was his greeting to me in the morning. Called me up one morning and he said—my sister answered the phone—he said, “Is the Lord there? Put him on the wire.” He knew exactly who he was calling. And so when I got on he said, “Are you my kid brother?” “Yes, I’m your kid brother, but I’m your Lord.” I knew exactly what, because Daphne said, “He wants the Lord.” So here I am talking to him and then he said, “Do you feel alright?” I said, “I feel fine, why?” “Well, you sound sober.” I can hear him say it now, “Why, you sound sober…you can’t be alright.” And that was my brother Lawrence to me. But I can hear that voice as distinctly as though he were here.
So I can hear with an organ that is not this ear. I can see with an eye that is not this eye. I can taste with a tongue that is not this tongue. And I can feel with a hand that is not this hand. Try it. Can you feel a baseball? Can you feel a tennis ball? Can you feel a piece of mohair like this? Well, can you feel numberless different objects? Well, who is doing the feeling? You have imagined the object, but the being that is performing the act of the touch and the taste and the sight, do you know who he is? That is Christ Jesus.That is the immortal you who cannot die.No man can die because this presence is not tied to this [body]. It cannot die. But it must completely awaken, and when it awakens it is God the Father.
This is the immortal dreamer in man, dreaming dreams that could save the entire world. As the prototype called Joseph saved the whole vast civilized world from starvation. He could dream and interpret the universal language of dream, and make earthly preparations based upon the dream. He rose to the very heights; and in the very end he could forgive all; forgive those, his brothers, who sold him into slavery. All go into slavery. Now listen to the words carefully, “And the Lord spoke unto Moses and said, ‘The time has come for you to sleep with your fathers; and this people will rise up and play the part of the harlot, with strange gods of the land, where they will be going to be alive. And I will in that day hide my face from them because of the evil which they have done, having gone and worshipped strange gods” (Deut.31:16). That’s in Deuteronomy, just before he gathers himself together and sleeps with his fathers. Here we find idolatry equated with playing the harlot.
Now, you say, “I believe in God.” It’s an external God? Well then, you are playing the part of a harlot. I don’t care what god you worship that is external to this one that I’ve just introduced you to. When you put your hand upon the tennis ball and I asked you at the moment, “Who is feeling it?” you would have replied “I am.” Well, that’s his name. If I say, “What are you hearing?” and then you tell me that you are hearing something, and I say, “Who is hearing?” you would have replied, “I am.” Well, that’s his name.“That is my name forever…and by this name I shall be known throughout all generations” (Ex.3:14). So, you would have replied “Yes,” correctly, “I am.” But it’s not the God you worship. You go to church and you see these strange, monstrous things that men have created. Images fashioned out of their own hands and they worship them, and think that is God. So I speak to the orthodox of any denomination, whether it be Christian, Jew, Mohammedan, and they have an external god to whom they turn. And they do not know they are playing the part of the harlot, for “Your Maker is your husband, the Lord of hosts is his name” (Is.54:5). If my Maker is my husband and I turn to another other than my Maker, well then, I am playing the part of a harlot. I am serving a strange and false god, and I am now not faithful to my husband who is my Maker.
Well, who is my Maker? “My name is I AM.” You will never find God in eternity, not the real one, save in a first-person, singular, present-tense experience. That’s when you’ll find him. He reveals himself in the first-person, present-tense experience; not plural, singular. And it takes his one only begotten Son to reveal him to yourself. He stands before you and calls you Father. And there is no uncertainty in this moment; you know exactly who he is and exactly who you are. You are the Elohim. You are the God spoken of in the very first verse of scripture, “In the beginning God…”—where?—“in a coffin in Egypt.” This is the coffin, this is the sepulcher, the tomb of God. And what was originally only the tomb of God becomes transformed into the womb from which God is born. So the tomb becomes a womb, and out you come, born from above, the being that is God.
By the act of self-limitation he achieves his purpose of expansion: the story of the little seed that falls into the ground—“Unless it falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone; but if it falls into the ground and dies, it brings forth much.” It expands beyond the wildest dream of man. So he falls into the ground, like this [body], and dies, complete and utter amnesia. And I don’t know who he is, so I play the part of the harlot. And they ask me to worship this god, to worship that god, and I bow down before so-called more important than me. You hear people say, “Who do you think I saw today? I had lunch at a certain place…who do you think was there?” All ears…and they mention some little ___(??), and they’re so impressed, so impressed with this peculiar little thing that took place at a lunch. He didn’t pick up their check for them. Paid his own check and he couldn’t care less if people were there or not. But you’re so impressed by his own press agent who is building an image for him to his own satisfaction. And you’re impressed…when “Among you stands one whom you do not know.” While you were eating whatever you ate, there was one present whom you did not know, and he was Christ Jesus, the hope of glory.
“Christ in you is the hope of glory.” This is the one of whom I speak. And when you touch these imaginary objects…the word imaginary in the dictionary is defined as “existing only in the Imagination; unreal,” that’s what they say. Let me tell you, Imagination is the divine body in every man. “Man is all Imagination, and God is man, and exists in us and we in him. The eternal body of God”—and therefore man—“is the Imagination” (Blake, Annot. to Lavater). “God the Creator is like pure imagining in myself. He works in the very depths of my soul, underlying all of my faculties, including perception, but he streams into my surface life least disguised in the form of productive fancy” (Douglas Fawcett).So I sit alone and I perform a certain imaginary act; and I trust this presence implicitly who is performing the act, for all things are possible to him. ___(??) man? Yes, to man it’s not possible, but with God all things are possible. And I have found him. He’s in me.
So I would say to you this night who are embarrassed financially, or embarrassed in some other way, you could conceive a scene if true would imply the fulfillment of your dream, couldn’t you? But, I’m speaking now of the great dreamer, “Behold this dreamer.” For can’t you conceive a scene and actually take, now, the hand of God and hold it? In him is life, and his life is the light of men. No child could cross the threshold that admits to conscious life were it not that he is in that child, but no child. So God in man is the light of man, and in him there is life, and that life is the light of men. So trust him.Put your hand out on any object that if true would imply you have what you want in this world, just put your hand on it. Now trust the hand of God. See it and trust the eye of God. Hear a conversation with some friend that would imply the fulfillment of that dream, and trust the ear of God, this inner you which you say is all Imagination. I tell you, Imagination is the divine body in every man. It is the eternal vine on which all things grow.
Now, tonight, take it, take the challenge. Test yourself and see. Do you not realize that Jesus Christ is in you? And through him all things were made, and without him was not anything made that was made? Well, now I’ll make my world according to my noble dream. If through him all things are made and I’ve just been introduced to him, and he’s not on the outside. I don’t have to get up and run to church tomorrow morning early to meet him, I don’t have to go tomorrow night to meet him, wherever I am—while standing at a bar having a beer, or a nice good dry Martini which I prefer—wherever I am, there he stands. “Among you stands one whom you do not know.” But I’ve just shown you who he is, and that is Christ Jesus.
The day will come, he will stand seemingly on the outside, described in the Book of Daniel, the Ancient of Days. You actually look into the face of this ancient being of infinite love. He embraces you and you are one forever with the Spirit of God…forever one with the Spirit of God. And then you will know what it means, “He baptizes with the Holy Spirit.” “I came to baptize with water,” said John, “but he who sent me said to me ‘He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain, he baptizes with the Holy Spirit.’”When you are embraced and fuse with the body of the living Christ, the risen Christ, you have been baptized with the Holy Spirit, and you are it. You know it beyond all doubt: I am he.
But the work must be done, not yet completed, and you are sent back into this world of death to tell the story of the risen Christ, and to tell them how to find him.You know that you actually saw him as something objective to yourself, and fused with him, and now he’s not objective any more.He was your very being…no objective being, your very being.No mortal eye can see it. You now wear forever and forever the human form divine, which is love, nothing but love. But the outer mortal eye cannot see it and the outer senses cannot touch it and hear it and commune with it. But you who wear it know it, and you’re communing all day with self, the one being that you are.
So I introduce you this night to Jesus Christ, the only savior in the world. In scripture, when we speak of Jehovah, that’s Jesus Christ. The name Jesus is the same as Joshua, and Joshua the same as Jehovah, the same root, the same being. And we are told, “I am the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior…and beside me there is no savior. I know not any” (Is.43:3,11). And that is your Savior. I hope I have succeeded in introducing you this night to him of whom Moses, and the law, and the prophets wrote. That you will put your hand upon him, as you’re told in the epistle of John: We have seen him with our eyes and handled him with our hands, the very word of life. “I bring you our own information concerning him of whom we have seen with our very eyes and handled with our very hands, the word of life” (1Jhn1:1).
Well, you this night felt him, because you exercised his organs. You exercised his limbs when you spread out your hand to touch a tennis ball, and there was no tennis ball, when you stretched it out to touch a baseball and there is no baseball. So when you actually called upon self to test it, and you could bring in to play organs not known by the scientific world, and they called them imaginary, existing only in the Imagination, and, therefore, unreal. Why he is the only reality, because through him all things were made.There isn’t a thing that is now made in this world that it wasn’t preceded by an imaginal act. What is any picture in the world that you now see and you call it fact but what it first began in the Imagination of the artist? He caught the thing on canvas…and you call that the reality. It existed first in his Imagination. We are living in a world of Imagination, and that being that is the Lord of it all is housed in you. And the world, they know him not. He comes unto his own and his own receive him not. They can’t believe it.
But if someone can take in their imaginary hand, called by the world the unreal hand, and pour out the contents of an imaginary bag and count the contents, and they’re bringing out the very pay that they would receive at the end of the week were they now earning a certain sum of money…which was more than twice what they had ever earned before…and doing it over and over until it took on the tones of reality. When it seemed to them to have all the sensory vividness of reality, they dropped it. And then in a matter of two days, that lady was employed by one she had never heard of before and had never seen, paying her that sum of money to the penny. She was a combination seamstress and designer in the city of New York. She took in my word, as I hope tonight you will, and she went home either to prove what I said or disprove it. And so she accepted the challenge.
So let me repeat, we must make daring experiments with Jesus Christ. Brood over him. Learn to know him better. And when we have proved his existence as the creative power in ourselves, then share it with others. Pass it on to all the others and tell them what we have found in Jesus…and you will find a living God.For I tell you nothing dies. You cannot die, for I have seen the immortal man that cannot die, and he is housed in everyone. When the man is called dead, it’s only the departure of the one in whom there is life. The man of Imagination departs a moment from the little garment of flesh. Everything here dies. So, “Awake, O sleepers, and rise from the dead.” So try now to exercise him, become familiar with him. And one day when you least expect it, he arrives with such dramatic suddenness that you have no time to observe him. You can’t observe his coming he comes so suddenly within you. The wind, just a strange peculiar unearthly wind, and you feel yourself waking, waking, waking. You wake in this grave that was the coffin that was placed in Egypt: “In the beginning God…in a coffin in Egypt.” You wake within this tomb and you do not ___(??) know how you got there, who put you there, or when you were put there. Now all of a sudden you awake, and then you come out, and you’re born from above, just as told you in scripture.
Until that day comes believe me, that the one that I’ve just introduced you to is the only true Jesus Christ, the only God of the world. There is no other God. “All that you behold, though it appears without, it is within, in your own wonderful human Imagination of which this world of mortality is but a shadow” (Blake, Jerusalem, Plt.71).
Now let us go into the Silence.
* * *
Next week were speaking on Tuesday rather than Monday, and you’ll notice a few weeks where we only have one lecture. The club is not available that week for a Friday night. So the nights we cannot get the Friday we have no substitute, we simply do not speak more than the one lecture in that week; and it may either be a Monday or a Tuesday. I have no knowledge of the days until I look at the program myself. I happen to know that next week it’s going to be Tuesday and Friday. The following week I haven’t the slightest idea. Maybe there is no Friday that week, I don’t know. So I do not wish you to take a long trip and come here to be disappointed. So please look at the program if you’re inclined before you start to attend. Again, let me repeat it’s going to be the most profoundly spiritual and at the same time most directly practical.You can transform your earthly life when you know who Christ is., when you find him within you and challenge him to transform your world, knowing you are doing it. You and he are one. Trust in him and do it. I tell you, it cannot fail you, it will not fail you; but remember you are the operant power, it doesn’t operate itself. I may know it from now to the ends of time, but knowledge of it is not enough, I must apply it.
So we are told, the world heard it, the same Word that we heard, but the message that they heard did not benefit them because it was not mixed with faith in the hearers. They didn’t believe it. So I’ve asked you now to touch this, but maybe you’ll say, “That’s stupid. I can tell you that’s still my Imagination; that isn’t real.” And so, maybe you will go out and not put it to the test at all. I am powerless to make you do it. I can’t compel you, I can only instruct you, and then tell you what I have found concerning Jesus Christ.
Now are there any questions, please?
Q: (inaudible)
A: My dear, you can do it with all things. Oh, no, take as many as you want. Look at the world, three and a half billion of us, and the one being is doing all. And no two have the same desire. So don’t think for one second you’re bothering him with multiple desires. Don’t think for one moment that you are interfering with the record as it were. It’s entirely up to you. God speaks to man through the medium of desire. “Is anything too difficult for me?” he asks. When the man said “If you can!” the exclamation mark caused him to be authority. “If you can!” said he, “All things are possible to him who believes.”
Any questions? Now when you get the results that you will, may I ask you to do me a personal favor and share the results with me, that I, in turn, may tell it to those who are here? It increases their faith if I can tell your story…how you heard it, applied it, and then the results that you got.
Q: Neville, I was interested in a point that you made earlier this evening when you said that Eastern philosophies and religions did not have the experience of Christ. Could you say why? In the Western world, in the early times, evidently there were people who had this experience.
A: Now, David, I must correct you. I did not say they did not. If anyone has a tape recorder, they’ll know I didn’t say that. I said, any orthodox religion, whether it be Jewish, Christian or Mohammedan, are worshipping external gods. I didn’t say they did not know of some inner power. But if the teacher who brings it is now picked up…like Mohammed for instance, we have a record that such a man lived as a man…and then millions turn towards what they consider Mecca, his holy place, and several times a day they must go down and bow towards this place, they are worshipping a piece of clay on the outside; they haven’t found Christ. For, if on the other hand, the Christian does the same thing by genuflecting as he goes into a church, and bows before the altar, does all these things before the altar, and he’s got to go to church or else he has some mortal sin or maybe some unforgivable sin, he’s worshipping a false god. As told me in the 31st chapter of Deuteronomy, he said, “You are about to sleep with your fathers; and this people they will now rise and play the part of the harlot…these strange gods in the land, where they are going to be among. And I will hide my face from them in that land” (Deut.31:16). Well, his face is completely hidden…until man stops worshipping a false god, God’s face is hidden. He hides himself while I play the part of the harlot and worship a false god.
Q: What interests me is the fact that the Christian mystic over the centuries has experienced, evidently, the father-son relationship, whereas the Oriental mystic never experienced that in the writings.
A: Well, David, you know I am not familiar with the Oriental literature to the extent that maybe I should be, so I can’t say yes or no to that. I’ll take your word for it, for you’re a scholar and studied much, and so I would go along and say, “Well now, David said so.” I, personally, am not familiar with such literature. I’ve read the Upanishads, the Gita, and things of that sort, and I love them, as the Light of Asia, it’s beautiful poetry, I love it. But I do not know of anything outside of the Jewish-Christian faith that is so altogether true based upon my own personal experience. I have experienced Judaism in Christianity; Christianity is the fulfillment of Judaism. All that was foretold and prophesied, recorded in the Old Testament, the New Testament is its fulfillment…like the flower on the tree. And when it happens, it is so unlike what man thinks it ought to be he stands bewildered. It’s so different in prospect from what it actually seemed to be in retrospect.
So the Father-Son relationship I have experienced. And that everlasting Son is David: “Thou art my Son; today I have begotten thee,” the 2nd Psalm (verse 7). That is literally true. This divine sonship of David is unique, the only one like it, and totally supernatural. It’s not the result of generation as we understand it. I go back to the core, the inner core, par excellence of the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and they are not discovered in any ancient Near East record. Yet, they are in the genealogy of Jesus Christ. And you can’t rub them out, you have no writers…so who are they? I have encountered these various characters in my visions. When I saw Abraham, this majestic…with a look beyond…you can’t describe the look of vision. He was not looking into space, he was looking in time. And you’re told in the 8th chapter of John, “And Abraham rejoiced that he was to see my day; he saw it and was glad” (John 8:56). As we’re told in Galatians, “And the scriptures”—now he takes the scripture and he personifies it—“the scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the heathen through faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham” (Gal.3:8); gave him a preview of the entire plan of creation and its fulfillment, a preview. But when I saw him, this majestic being, I didn’t have to ask, who are you? You don’t ask, you know exactly who the being is. These are eternal states personified. Here is Abraham standing under a tree, the most gnarly oak you’ve ever seen; not a leaf on it, just gnarled…a gnarly, gnarly oak. His head came almost to the very top of the trunk. And wrapped around that tree was this strange and wonderful, wise, wise serpent, the wisest thing you could ever see, looking right at you. He didn’t look at me, he was looking off into the distance, completely oblivious of me, but not the serpent. There was the serpent looking at me but his eye buried upon my eye, the most knowing, knowing look. Here, he was looking into time: “He rejoiced that he was to see my day.” And the serpent is looking…for was it not he who said, “you shall not surely die? Oh, yes, you’ll die. Did God say you’ll die? Well, I tell you, you will not really die” (Gen.3:4). But, you’ll die but not really die.
And that’s my next subject, which is next Tuesday night, “Where God Only Acts.”
Thank you for coming.
Goddard’s teaching reframes traditional Christian mysticism by relocating the locus of salvation from an external authority to an inner, experiential reality. He reinterprets familiar biblical narratives—highlighting Joseph’s dream interpretation and Paul’s writings on crucifixion and resurrection—as metaphors for stages of human consciousness, asserting that each believer literally embodies Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Christ in turn. This hermeneutic challenges ecclesiastical structures and invites individual empowerment, positioning Imagination not as fanciful thought but as the actual organ through which God operates in man.
Central to the lecture is the bold ontology of Imagination as the divine body. Goddard systematically dismantles the idea that imagination is unreal, arguing instead that every material form first passed through the creative mind. By recounting vivid experiments—hearing voices of the deceased, sensing unseen objects—he validates inner perception as empirically trustworthy. This methodology subverts the mind–body dichotomy and establishes Imagination as the bridge between the finite self and the infinite Creator.
Goddard’s use of anecdote and scriptural exegesis serves dual functions: it grounds his abstractions in relatable scenarios while also granting authority to his claims. The dialogue with his brother and references to Moses and Deuteronomy provide a lineage of revelation that spans both personal experience and sacred text. This blend of the intimate and the canonical embodies his broader pedagogical strategy: to make the deeply mystical both accessible and operational for the modern seeker.
Practically, the lecture issues a clear challenge: to perform “daring experiments” in consciousness and validate the presence of Christ within. This call to action democratizes spiritual transformation, insisting that faith must be corroborated by personal proof rather than passive belief. Goddard’s insistence that “you are the operant power” underscores the individual’s responsibility in co-creating their reality, weaving together metaphysics, psychology, and devotional practice into a cohesive discipline.
Finally, the lecture transcends doctrinal confines by equating all external worship with spiritual infidelity. Goddard’s provocative charge—that any god worshiped outside oneself is a “harlot”—forces a reevaluation of religious habits. In doing so, he redirects devotion inward, proposing that true fidelity and union with the Divine arise only through the first-person, present-tense experience of “I AM.” This radical interiorization of faith remains a defining hallmark of his mystical system.
The Bible Through Neville
Neville Bible Sparks
Neville Lecture Series
