Gift's Bestoed By God

Gifts Bestowed By God

(audio lecture “I AM ALL IMAGINATION”)

Neville Goddard 06-04-1971

You will find tonight very practical, and yet I assure you, very, very spiritual. Christianity has to be continually redeemed from secular history, for Jesus Christ is the human imagination. As Paul tells us in his First Letter to the Corinthians:

“We have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit which is from God, that we might understand the gifts bestowed upon us by God.”

Now tonight we’ll show you one of these gifts if you really understand who Jesus Christ is. I tell you, He is your own wonderful human imagination. That is Christ. It comes as a shock when you first hear it if you were raised in the tradition as the speaker was. I was raised in a Christian home; and naturally, like hundreds of millions of Christians, we were taught it as a secular history: a little boy who was born of a woman who knew not a man, and that his father was God, and he was the son of God; and that was the story as I was taught it. But I was searching and seeking from the time I think I can remember.

I believed the story as Mother taught it to me. I did believe it. And I can’t tell any one the shock that was mine; and sometimes, maybe, I wondered if it would not have been better to turn back, like Israel in the desert, and go back into slavery; but I couldn’t, any more than they could. They had to keep moving towards the Promised Land. For when you are disillusioned, having been taught the story as we all have been taught it, to discover that he is not something in history, — he is nearer than your breathing, — in fact, he can’t even be “near”; he is your very Self; he is your own wonderful human imagination, — it comes as quite a shock.

I can tell it best by telling you a story. The year was 1933. Roosevelt was elected. I had been in this country for eleven years. I never really wanted to go back to Barbados. My parents came up in that year, and they pleaded with me to come to Barbados and join the family – become a member of the family; and I declined. I said, “No.” I saw them off at the boat; and strangely enough, as they sailed, — and they were on the deck and I waved “goodbye” to them, — a peculiar feeling came over me, and I had a desire that I had never had in eleven years to go to Barbados. I had just said “goodbye” to them, and said “No” to their request. They would have paid all expenses and brought me back, and everything would have been perfect.

Then from the boat, I went to my old friend Abdullah. He was born, so I am told, in Ethiopia. He was a black man, raised in the Jewish faith, but really understood Christianity as few men that I ever met understood it. He understood the Law, not the Promise. He understood the Law. So, I went to him and I told him the feeling that came over me: that I wanted to go to Barbados. I had just waved at my parents, and a peculiar feeling possessed me; and he said to me, “You are in Barbados.”

Well, that did not make sense to me. I am standing in his place on 72nd Street, off Central Park West; that’s where he lived. He lived at 30 West 72nd Street. And here I am in his place, and he’s telling me that I am in Barbados! He didn’t explain what he meant.

So, as the days went by, I said to him, “Ab, I am no nearer to Barbados than I was when I spoke to you.”

And he said to me, “If you are in Barbados, you cannot discuss the means of getting to Barbados. You must actually live in Barbados in your imagination as though you were there – just as if – and view the world from Barbados. If you sleep in Barbados and view the world from Barbados, the means will appear, and you will go to Barbados. But as far as I am concerned, you are already in Barbados, because you desired it with intensity. All you had to do was simply to enter it; and you enter it now in New York City even though it is two thousand miles across water, — and you aren’t going to walk across water; but you enter Barbados and view the world from it. If you see the world from Barbados, then you have to be in Barbados.”