Neville Goddard Lectures: Believe It In (1966)

04 Apr Neville Goddard Lectures: Believe It In (1966)

1/07/66

Tonight’s subject or title is really “Believe It In.” But the paper didn’t believe that I meant that and so they rearranged it, without my permission, and called it “Believe In It.” So when they sent the proofs back, it was so late I had no time to correct it because they had gone to press. Well, they did no more than our scholars do to the Bible. We have a passage in the Bible that “woman is saved by the bearing of children (1Tim.2:15RSV). They give you a footnote that the real passage reads “woman is saved by the birth of the child.” It’s all the difference in the world. And through the Bible you’ll find when it does not make sense, our scholars give it sense…and it isn’t so at all. In the Book of Jeremiah, we’re told that man draws himself out of himself, and he begins the drawing when he reaches the hips. He actually comes out of himself, and then he uses his hands to draw the remaining portion. Well, the scholars could not believe that and so they say “Why do I see every man with his hands on his hips just like a woman in labor? (30:6)”

So I did not intend the title they gave me. The title is “Believe It In.” The late Robert Frost, oh, maybe two or three years before he died, some reporter from Life magazine interviewed him, and he said—and it startled the readers of Life—that “our Founding Fathers did not believe in the future, they believed it in; we are always believing ahead of our evidence.” He said, “What evidence had I that I could write a poem? I just believed it.” He said, “The most creative thing in us is to believe a thing in.” The Bible teaches that “all things are possible to him who believes” (Mk 9:23)—not a few, not if the wise men say that it is possible, if you can believe, all things are possible to him who believes. If this is true, you and I should devote all of our lives, really, to the mastery of the art of believing.

How to believe when reason denies it, my senses deny it, everything denies it? Yet I am haunted with the statement of scripture, “All things are possible to him who believes.” So how do I do it? Fawcett said—using the word Imagination, but really you can take the word belief in the same way—he said “The secret of imagining is the greatest of all problems to the solution of which the mystic aspires, for supreme power, supreme wisdom and supreme delight lie in the far off solution of this mystery.” Well, if that is true, I should devote all of my energies to the mastery of this art of believing and the art of imagining. For Imagination and believing are the stuff out of which we fashion our worlds…every one of us. There isn’t a thing in this world that comes suddenly upon us that really did not have its cause in some invisible imaginal state where we believed it. We forgot it, yes, went about our business, things are active, and suddenly it confronts us, and we don’t really recognize our own harvest. But everything comes by reason of the law, and we plant it by believing. We were told the story and we believed it. Others rejected it; we believed it.