Neville Goddard Lectures: “Be Master of the Mood”

01 Jan Neville Goddard Lectures: “Be Master of the Mood”

4/10/64

Tonight’s subject is “Be Master of the Mood.” First of all, I want to thank you for your perfectly wonderful letters. Another windfall this week…one gentleman enclosed eight pages thick, another six, a lady two, and so it goes. Perfectly marvelous, really! The gentleman with eight said he only started coming here when I returned this past November and gave me this perfectly wonderful epistle. Tonight we will tie them in—-not all of them, we can’t use all—but tie a few with the deep part of the story which is taken from the 42nd Psalm, and how we read the Bible.

First of all, we are told the three-fold cord is not quickly broken. The first strand is that which anyone who can read will discover when they read the story. What you can’t read you can listen to the story, and the one who can read it for you can tell you. If he can tell it with understanding so you understand the story, that’s one strand. Then there’s a second strand—for that is simply a story, but it’s secondary to his meaning—and you try to extract the meaning of the story told. Then you must put it to the test because you are the operant power. If you can take what you extract or think you’ve extracted and test it and it proves itself in performance, you have the second strand. And the third comes by revelation, and you’ll find every passage of the Bible autobiographical. Every chapter of the Bible will be seen eventually in an autobiographical manner.

So we’ll take the 42nd tonight and show you how it is seen after one has had the experience as an autobiographical chapter: He’s experienced it. On the surface it’s called a Maskil. Well, a Maskil…there are thirteen Maskils in the Psalms…this is the second of the thirteen so called. A Maskil is simply special instruction, that’s really what it is. Unlike all the other psalms, read the Maskil, you’ll find that they are telling you something very, very deep. And don’t let go, just read it, and ponder it, and simply scrutinize it carefully, for it has something very profound in it. That’s a Maskil.

Take the Psalm, a psalm of loneliness, and here it is trying to give us instructions concerning the overcoming of loneliness. So here, as you read it, everyone suffers eventually, if not in the past or today, some time in one’s life they have a sense of loneliness, where it may be through the loss of some human company. But in this case it isn’t, for the beginning of it is a thirst for God that nothing in this world can satisfy but an experience of God. You could be among millions of people, and he’s alone, because he can’t be entertained by things outside of himself; he wants to find God. And so, here in this thirst…he said, “As the hart panteth after the waterbrook, so panteth my soul after thee, O God. My soul thirsts for God. When will I come and behold the face of God? My tears have been my food day and night, while men say to me and they say continually, ‘Where is your God?’” (verses 1,3). And so, here is this bruised body as it were. The scoffers knowing his interest in God, his belief in God, and he can’t prove the existence of God, and they throw it up at him. He has not a thing to prove the existence of God, the reality of God, yet he cannot quench the thirst with anything that happens on the outside. It’s a thirst for God that only an experience of God can satisfy.