Neville Goddard Lectures: “Abdullah How We Got Together Q&A”
06 Jul Neville Goddard Lectures: “Abdullah How We Got Together Q&A”
Editorial note: This post was written before the archival work that positively links the Atlantic City “G. M. Abdoullah” to Neville Goddard’s teacher at 30 West 72nd Street. For the consolidated, source-based account (with clippings and research), please refer to the Abdullah series.
- Part 1: Harlem’s Secret Fire — Esoteric Currents of the 1920s–30sScene-setting: mysticism, street lectures, Hebrew schools in mystical Harlem
- Part 2: Obelisks, Lodges & Ethiopian mysticsTracking the Black Freemasons, Ethiopian mystics across the occult underground
- Part 3: Mokomba, Mahalla & the Names That VanishMytho-historic clues from Egypt, Ethiopia, and the Caribbean
- Part 1: Harlem’s Secret Fire — Esoteric Currents of the 1920s–30s
- Part 4: Abdullah Identified – The Baritone Mystic of Atlantic City and 30 West 72nd StreetThe first documented trail of Abdullah, linking his Atlantic City advertisements and census records to his later presence at 30 West 72nd Street in New York
- Part 5: The Man Behind the Silence — The True Identity of AbdullahA culminating profile
Now are there any questions, please? Yes, sir?
(Question mostly inaudible but about Abdullah and imagining and demonstrating)
Well, I’ll tell you in details exactly how we got together.
It was 1933. If you remember, there was a frightful Depression on in our country. Millions were unemployed. In New York City, you would go through the tunnel into Gimbel’s (Department Store) from, say, the square (Herald Square), where Gimbel’s begins… it goes all the way through to the… well, the Holland Tunnel. They were sleeping with the permission of the Mayor… three and four deep, as far as the eye could go. There was no place to go. In the park, in the summer months, they were allowed to sleep in the park, sleep all over the place. And the long lines for coffee and bread were there to give them. There were millions unemployed. We then had a population of not more than, say, a hundred thirty million, as against today’s a hundred ninety two million.
I was a dancer, and if you couldn’t eat, you couldn’t pay to watch a dancer, so there were no shows playing on Broadway. I think we had five Broadway shows, and they were running on paper… just.. (unintelligible 1:20) passing out paper to go and see them, really, instead of the usual 50 to 60 shows that you usually get.
Well, what I’m getting at is, I didn’t have a job, I had no money, and I was living in a basement on 75th Street and he (Abdullah) lived on 72nd Street, in a very lovely home that was owned by Morgenthau, whose son (Henry Morgenthau Jr) was then the treasury (sic) of our country, a cabinet member (US Secretary of the Treasury under President Franklin D. Roosevelt), but his father owned this house, but he didn’t live there, and he rented the first floor to my friend Abdullah.
I said to Abdullah, in the month of October, late October, “Ab, you know I’ve been gone from Barbados for almost twelve years… I came here in ’22. And it’s almost 12 years, and I’ve never had a desire to go back. But now I have a hungry desire, a haunting desire, to go to Barbados. Not a thing stops me but a lack of money. I have no money.”
He said to me, “You are in Barbados.”
I said, “I am in Barbados?”
He said, “Yes. You are now in Barbados. And so… you see Barbados, and you see America from Barbados, and you can smell the tropical land of Barbados, see only the little homes of Barbados, and that’s all you do. You just simply sleep this night in Barbados.”
Well, I thought him insane, really… I mean, at the moment, it seemed so… stupid. Because… 72nd Street, we still had 50- and 60-story buildings. And little Barbados with a little three-story building almost the tallest that you’d find. And narrow little streets and no sidewalks. And I’m walking on a sidewalk that is wider than the widest street in Barbados on 72nd Street.