Neville Goddard Lectures: “Feel After Him”

08 Apr Neville Goddard Lectures: “Feel After Him”

February 1972

New ideas require many reiterations and restatements before they become part of the generally accepted currency of thought. The idea that I’ve been trying to get over since I started back in 1938 is still new. It comes as a shock to anyone who hears it. And even after you’ve heard it for years and years, and think you’re living by it, I’ve discovered that one is not really living by it. It has not yet become a part of their thinking. And it is that imagining creates reality.

I say this because I identify imagining with God in action. To me, man is all imagination and God is man and exists in us and we in him. The eternal body of man is the imagination. And that is God himself. If by God, I mean the creator of the universe, the maker and the master of the whole vast universe and I identify that creator with the human imagination, then man should be more careful as to what he’s imagining. So, I can give lip service to the statement imagining creates reality. And yet if I’m observant in the course of a day, if I observe what I’m imagining, I would find unnumbered moments in my life, in one twenty-four hours or other, the waking eighteen, where I am imagining things I do not wish to experience.

If I really believe that imagining creates reality, I would be more careful, more concerned about what I’m imagining. So, I will give it lip service and say imagining creates reality and go blindly on imagining anything other than what I want to create, beginning with the morning paper and reacting to things that you do not know, whether they be true, they could be planted by some press agent, planted by some lobbyists. You do not know. And here we react as we read and then we go through life in just twenty-four hours and find that most of the twenty-four hours we spend imagining what we do not wish to experience. If man would only look upon the world as a world of appearance, behind which the reality of imagining lay, he would find the truth, he would find God.

As it is totally told in the 17th chapter of the book of Acts, now it’s a story, whether it was historically true or not, it doesn’t really matter. It’s trying to push a point to the fore. It is said that the men of Athens spent all day in the marketplace looking for a new idea, either telling one or hearing one. Then came upon the scene one called Paul. And they wondered, what has this babbler have to say? What is his new idea? And he told them the idea of Jesus and the resurrection. And we are told the Epicureans and the stoic philosophers mocked him and scoffed at him. Others say we will hear more about this later. And he said to them, and this is all ironical if you read it carefully. He said, “Oh men of Athens, I see in every way you are very religious. For, as I passed by, I observed the objects of your worship.” Right away that’s irony, the objects of their worship. Then he said, I noticed this inscription over an altar, “to an unknown God.” What you, therefore, worship, unknown, I declare to you. Then he tells them of the only God, the God that created everything and he’s not a God of far off. He is indwelling, he is within every single being in the world, the God of the universe, not made with hands. You wouldn’t find him in a temple, in a church, in a cathedral, or the little objects of your worship that you make of man with your own hands and then worship him and call him Apollo. But hear the God that I speak of is within everyone. That’s the God of whom I speak. That’s the God that raises from the dead.

Well, they laughed and they mocked him. Then we are told he went on from Athens to Corinth. What he performed there, no one knows, whether Athens ever took him up because they were the wise men. They were called the very learned men of the day. We have them today, too. They scoff at anything that is not part of their great voluminous works. But I am telling you, if as Paul said to the Athenians, if you would only feel after him, you’d find him. If you would feel after him, you would find him.