Something For Nothing

Question: Isn't there a law that says you cannot get something for nothing? Must we not earn what we desire?

Answer: Creation is finished! It is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom. The parable of the prodigal son is your answer. In spite of man's waste, when he comes to his senses and remembers who he is, he feeds on the fatted calf of abundance and wears the robe and ring of authority. There is nothing to earn. Creation was finished in the foundation of time. You, as man, are God made visible for the purpose of displaying what is, not what is to be. Do not think you must work out your salvation by the sweat of your brow. It is not four months until the harvest, the fields are already white, simply thrust in the sickle.

Source: Neville Goddard -1948 Lessons Q&A

I Come, Not To Bring Peace, But The Sword

Here is how Neville explains this little understood statement by Jesus.

Question: Do you use the Apocrypha?

Answer: Not in my teaching. I have several volumes of them at home. They are no greater than the sixty-six books of our present Bible. They are simply telling the same truth in a different way. For instance, the story is told of Jesus, as a young boy, watching children make birds out of mud. Holding the birds in their hands, they pretend the birds are flying. Jesus approaches and knocks the birds out of their hands. As they begin to cry, he picks up one of the broken birds and re-molds it. Holding it high, he breaths upon it and the bird takes wing.

Here is a story of one who came to break the idols in the minds of men, then show them how to use the same substance and re-mold it into a beautiful form and give it life. That is what this story is trying to convey. "I come, not to bring peace, but a sword." Truth slays all the little mud hens of the mind; slays illusions and then re-molds them into a new pattern which sets man free.

Neville Goddard - 1948 Lessons Q&A

You Can Write Your Own Novel And Realize It

There is so much wisdom in all of Neville's lectures. If we take the time to read and think about what he says, it helps us to understand what we see in the world around us.

Take the current turmoil in the Middle East. Neville teaches that everything is created in the mind first and then it appears in reality. This makes perfect sense to me. The dictators being removed from office in the Middle East today, have done so much to hurt their people over the years, that it is not difficult for me to imagine that hundreds of thousands of individuals were imagining the scenario being played out today.

In many of his lectures Neville talks about "a woman treading in the wine press" who could have caused something to happen in the world. He tells us to be careful what we think about and what we imagine because we are creating what we are imagining.

Following is the complete lecture "You Can Write Your Own Novel And Realize It"

All day long I think the same thing over and over. I am working at the wheel of recurrence. Everyone here can be the man or woman they want to be. I know it from my own family. Have you ever noticed how if you go into a business and take all the facts and estimate just how things will come out, how often they come about as you said? Who did it? You are not a prophet, but you are imagining, and the state then comes true. Not a thing is brought into being by any power outside itself. It is sustained by the activity of the one who brought it into being. So, if I brought in poverty it can only remain as long as I am conscious of being poor. The moment I cease to imagine that I am poor then things begin to change.

There was a play on Broadway called, “The Millionairess“, and a critic wrote sarcastically that Katharine Hepburn was trying to impress us with the fact that all a pauper needs to become rich is the arrogance of wealth. He was wiser than he knew! The arrogance of wealth is all he needs to stop being a pauper. You walk in a state and it is an activity of mind, and to the degree you can sustain it, to that degree you will create it. The whole world is nothing but God, and God is imagining and man is Imagination and we dwell in him and He in us, and we are one.

Now you try it. You take something tonight. If you are too close to your own picture, do it for someone else and see that one as he would like to be seen by himself and then remain faithful to it. He may never know you did it for him, but that doesn’t matter. When the thing happens so naturally he will never think that what you did was responsible. He has exchanged the glory of God for an image resembling mortal man. He will say he met a certain person and they influenced someone else, or recommended him, and that brought it all to pass. These things get the credit and he forgets immortal God.

I have told you the story before of a friend who came to me because he desperately needed a larger income, etc., to care for the educational needs of his family. His present bank position held no hope of advancement. I taught him what to do and while I was absent in Barbados he did it, and when I returned he told me he had secured this fabulous position with The Rockefeller Foundation, where he still is. But as time went on he is so literal minded that he began to forget how it came about, and now he gives full credit to the man who spoke to him in church and finally asked him to come into the Foundation. This man is now a powerful person in my friend’s mind and is the cause of his good fortune. He has transferred the glory that belongs to God to the image of a man.

No matter what you are doing, can you see clearly what you want to do and carry on a conversation inwardly with a friend which will imply that which you desire is now a fact? Then do it. For on higher levels of imagining inner activity is revealed by inner conversation. If man would listen to what he is inwardly saying, he would know what he is setting in motion. As man walks the street if he would pause and say: “What am I saying now?” he would find that ninety-nine per cent is justifying failure. But we are told: You are without excuse for you have seen him and his work, yet you deny it. When you hear the word God or Jesus Christ you think of some being external to your own imagining, but there is none, for imagining is God. That is what lights every being in the world, and as you imagine, so you will become. So no matter what your present limitations are, you can start now to dream the most noble dream, and you can walk through this door tonight as though it is true knowing that your imagining is God, and give to him the Power and glory. There is no fiction. You can write your own novel and realize it. Even someone in a dungeon may be imagining, and who knows what he may call forth! If I were in a dungeon I would move the world if necessary to get out. A body may be physically confined, but you cannot confine God. Man only sees the proximate cause. The real cause of something you cannot see, for the invisible power is what is creating. Who knows who may convulse the world? It may even be a woman treading in the wine press.

Everyone here…you can be what you want to be no matter what your dream is, if you are willing to let God do it…God being your own imagining. You walk completely suspended above appearances and you will become what you desire. This is the only Christianity I know: the freedom to exercise this divine art of imagining. Now you try it. If you are here for the first time I challenge you to disprove it. Everyone has the same power. Because one has a million does not make him any more a creator than you are. Be careful what you are imagining, for what you are imagining you will create, though it may convulse the world.

Neville Goddard

All A Pauper Needs Is The Arrogrance Of Wealth

All day long I think the same thing over and over. I am working at the wheel of recurrence. Everyone here can be the man or woman they want to be. I know it from my own family. Have you ever noticed how if you go into a business and take all the facts and estimate just how things will come out, how often they come about as you said? Who did it? You are not a prophet, but you are imagining, and the state then comes true. Not a thing is brought into being by any power outside itself. It is sustained by the activity of the one who brought it into being. So, if I brought in poverty it can only remain as long as I am conscious of being poor. The moment I cease to imagine that I am poor then things begin to change.

There was a play on Broadway called, "The Millionairess," and a critic wrote sarcastically that Katharine Hepburn was trying to impress us with the fact that all a pauper needs to become rich is the arrogance of wealth. He was wiser than he knew! The arrogance of wealth is all he needs to stop being a pauper. You walk in a state and it is an activity of mind, and to the degree you can sustain it, to that degree you will create it. The whole world is nothing but God, and God is imagining and man is Imagination and "We dwell in him and He in us, and we are one."

Now you try it. You take something tonight. If you are too close to your own picture, do it for someone else and see that one as he would like to be seen by himself and then remain faithful to it. He may never know you did it for him, but that doesn't matter. When the thing happens so naturally he will never think that what you did was responsible. He has exchanged the glory of God for an image resembling mortal man. He will say he met a certain person and they influenced someone else, or recommended him, and that brought it all to pass. These things get the credit and he forgets immortal God.

I have told you the story before of a friend who came to me because he desperately needed a larger income, etc., to care for the educational needs of his family. His present bank position held no hope of advancement. I taught him what to do and while I was absent in Barbados he did it, and when I returned he told me he had secured this fabulous position with The Rockefeller Foundation, where he still is. But as time went on he is so literal minded that he began to forget how it came about, and now he gives full credit to the man who spoke to him in church and finally asked him to come into the Foundation. This man is now a powerful person in my friend's mind and is the cause of his good fortune. He has transferred the glory that belongs to God to the image of a man.

No matter what you are doing, can you see clearly what you want to do and carry on a conversation inwardly with a friend which will imply that which you desire is now a fact? Then do it. For on higher levels of imagining inner activity is revealed by inner conversation. If man would listen to what he is inwardly saying, he would know what he is setting in motion. As man walks the street if he would pause and say: "What am I saying now?" he would find that ninety-nine per cent is justifying failure. But we are told: "You are without excuse for you have seen him and his work, yet you deny it." When you hear the word "God" or "Jesus Christ" you think of some being external to your own imagining, but there is none, for imagining is God. That is what lights every being in the world, and as you imagine, so you will become. So no matter what your present limitations are, you can start now to dream the most noble dream, and you can walk through this door tonight as though it is true knowing that your imagining is God, and give to him the Power and glory. There is no fiction. You can write your own novel and realize it. Even someone in a dungeon may be imagining, and who knows what he may call forth! If I were in a dungeon I would move the world if necessary to get out. A body may be physically confined, but you cannot confine God. Man only sees the proximate cause. The real cause of something you cannot see, for the invisible power is what is creating. Who knows who may convulse the world? It may even be a woman treading in the wine press.


From Lecture #308 "Worship The Creator Not The Creature" by Neville Goddard, 1959

When A State Is Imagined It Is Created

There is nothing that appears in perception which cannot be duplicated in fancy, and what the world perceives is all imaginative in character. Here is a graphic example: I am sure everyone knows what it is to detect the fragrance of a rose. Now smell is a chemical sense and depends upon contact for perception. But does one really need a rose to detect its fragrance? Cannot its fragrance be reproduced imaginatively?

Having smelled an Easter lily, can you not discriminate between the smell of a rose and a lily, imaginatively? Then they do not exist independent of you, but live on some level (or levels) of your imagination! Can you call upon your memory of an experience of long ago, bring it back, and duplicate it in fancy? If so, then this world is no different from your imaginal one!

In 1820, William Blake wrote “The Presence of the Divine Teacher,” in which he said: "Man is all Imagination and God is Man and exists in us and us in Him. The Divine Body Jesus, we are his members." In this statement Blake does not separate the members from the one body, the one spirit, one hope, one Lord, one faith, one God and Father of us all. There is only one Imaginal Body. We are all His members, for we are all Imagination!

You can reproduce and duplicate any perception you have ever encountered, in your imagination. A friend or dear one does not need to be physically present for you to think of him. Nor do you have to be in your living room in order to see its contents. You can see the plains of Kansas, the mountains of Colorado, or the great Mississippi River without being there. So when we think from the premise of this as a world of imagination, we start on solid ground, for imagination is He who creates reality. There is no fiction in the true sense of the word, for when a state is imagined, it is created. Prayer is imagination drenched in feeling. A desire, drenched in the feeling of fulfillment, objectifies itself. This I know to be true; so regardless of what the world thinks, when you reproduce anything in your mind it takes on form in your outer world.

-from Perception by Neville Goddard, 1968

You Can Change The Dream

Travel with me in your mind as we read the morning paper. On the first page we read of an air crash, a war, a hold-up, a murder, and embezzlement. Turn the page to the social column. See the pictures of the bride and groom and read all about their wedding and the guests attending. Another page lists the deaths, and finally we turn to the financial page, which tells us who is making money and who is losing it. Isn't that disjointed? Lost in the reading, we have traveled from violence to a wedding, to gossip, deaths, and finance. All written by ten or twelve men who are sound asleep, and dreaming their columns into being, while you - and the millions who read the paper - will see the out-picturing of all that you thought during the reading. 

How do I know this? Because I have awakened from the dream of life. I know that God laid himself down within me to sleep, to dream that he is I; for when he awoke, I was he! How do I know that I am he? Because his only begotten son, David, called me father. 

While I remain in this body of blood and flesh, I must abide by its restrictions and limitations; yet remembering it is a dream, I can change it. If this world is reality I cannot change it; but if I am its reality, I can change my world relative to myself. I can imagine a desire fulfilled and watch it come to pass in my outer world. But first I had to know it was a dream. This I do know, for he who is in the depth of my own being said to me: "I laid myself down within you to sleep and as I slept I dreamed a dream. I dreamed that I am you." Yes, he dreamed that he is I, for he awoke and he was I. A few months later he revealed his mystery to me by bringing his son David to call me father. Through an innate wisdom I knew he wasn't just a boy who called me father, but the David of Biblical fame who is God's only son. 

When God awakes within you he is the same God who awoke within me. There aren't two Gods. You and I are really one. Although there appears to be billions of us here, we are all one being, one God acting out this play, to expand our creative power and wisdom. 

- from Behold The Dreamer Cometh by Neville Goddard, 1969

Embrace The Desired State

I tell you that imagination creates reality and I ask you to imagine a state, any state, which would imply the fulfillment of your desire. It doesn’t really matter what anyone else thinks; it’s what you think that matters to you! If you create a scene which implies the fulfillment of your desire and dwell in it until you have an inner conviction that it is real, what does it matter what another thinks?

In the Book of Habakkuk (which means “to embrace”) the prophet speaks to the Lord as: “Thou who art of purer eyes than to behold evil.” Then he asks the question: “Why are you silent when the wicked swallows up the righteous? I will take my stand upon the watchtower, to see and hear what people say to me and what I will answer.” Now the Lord speaks, saying: “Write the vision plain upon the tablets so that he who runs may read it. For the vision has its own appointed hour; it ripens and it will flower. If it be long, then wait, for it is sure and it will not be late.”

There are those who try to rush everything into being. They try to force birth from conception, but it cannot be done. There are many experiences not recorded in scripture, and I am not here to stand in judgment of anyone as to whether they have experienced scripture or not. But I do know from experience that on this level, if you dare to assume you are what you want to be, your inner conviction, your feeling of certainty will bring it to pass. When you embrace the desired state, you have assumed its impregnation, and its fulfillment has its own appointed hour. It will ripen and flower. If the state is slow in objectifying itself wait, for it is sure and will not be late.

- from An Inner Conviction by Neville Goddard, 1968