Neville Goddard Lectures: “God is the Great Artist”

03 Aug Neville Goddard Lectures: “God is the Great Artist”

5/19/69

God is the great artist and there is no artistry so loving but that which perfects its work through ages in the making of its image. God has but one consuming objective: to make his image…making his image in us to reflect himself and to radiate his glory.

Now, on this level, he exists here as our own wonderful human Imagination. All things exist in the human Imagination, because the human Imagination is the divine body called the Lord Jesus. That is God. On the highest level his artistry is towards the making of his image. On this level we’re asked to do something similar…and so I say to a friend, what would you like to be? And he answers, “Well, I would like to be a doctor.” All right, that’s an image. And you, “A business man.” And you…and then he names this, that and the other. Well, we, too, are the artists lowered to this level. For we are the artist on the highest level making ourselves the image, which would radiate and reflect the glory of the being that we really are who is God. But while we are there on this level, we simply single out what we would like to be.

Now, are we willing to give all of our time to making of this image in the world of Caesar—to become a great doctor, to become a very successful businessman, and to become…and you name exactly what you would like in this world? Well, how does God do it? God is the great dreamer in man. And here he is bound in a deadly dream until he forms in himself the image that we name in scripture, Christ. Only when it’s formed in him will he awaken from the dream. So he is bound in a deadly, deadly dream. Well, we can be bound in a dream, too. And so the dream is, well, what would it be like if it were true? What true? That I am a great doctor, that I am a most successful business man, that I am a great painter, a great musician. What would the feeling be like if it were true?

Now I am told in scripture that all things are possible to him who believes. Can I believe it when at the moment I assume it that my reason and my senses deny it? Can I persist in that image of myself? “When you pray, believe that you have received it, and you will” (Mark11:24). Therefore, what is prayer but Imagination drenched in feeling? What else is it? It certainly isn’t using a lot of empty words. Taking any prayer, I don’t care, even the Lord’s Prayer. Every Sunday in church they all repeat the Lord’s Prayer and come out just as they were when they went in…no prayer is answered. Now they’re going to stop praying to these demoted saints, but all the saints are equally mythological, all of them. There aren’t any! Read the 115th Psalm and see what those things really are; and those who believe in them are just as stupid as those who make them and sell them.

So here in our world, how would I go about being the artist that could make myself into the image of the successful…and I name it…the successful minister of the word of God? Why, I have to start just as I did on the highest level: that I have finished it. I must actually go to the very end. I assume that I have done what now I am starting to do, and remain faithful to the end. For the most creative thing in us is to believe a thing in. I bring it into existence, objective existence by believing it in. So can I really believe that something is already objective in my world that at the moment no one can see and my mortal eyes can’t see it, but I can walk drenched in the feeling that it is? Can I support that feeling in my world until it becomes an objective fact? Well, that’s how all things are brought into being. For all things exist in the human Imagination, but everything! And the human Imagination is God himself; that is the divine body that we call in scripture Jesus the Lord. So am I willing to step out completely and ask no one if it’s right, wrong or what else, and dare to walk in that assumption as though it were true? I tell you it will come to pass.