Neville Goddard Lectures: Imagining Creates Reality

I can’t tell you my thrill when I got that letter. She told it to me in person and I asked her to write it. And that is the letter. So here, to have a great experience there must be an experiencing nature, there must be. For only if I have an experiencing nature can the furnaces through which we must pass refine the essence of faith, hope and love. And when it happens, you can’t restrain that outburst of tears. Jesus wept. The outburst…and Peter wept bitterly when he saw the truth of all that he had heard. But he heard it intellectually; it had not yet moved him emotionally. And when the whole thing came to pass in him, well then, he wept bitterly. So everyone will one day have that experience. I know how true it is, for I’m speaking from experience. You stand in the presence and answer in the words of Paul, “Faith, hope and love, these three, but the greatest of these is love.” And then you’ll be embraced by man…it’s man, it’s infinite love, and that man is God. Today we speak of an over-soul, we speak of some impersonal force, and scientists get more and more abstract in their concepts of this creative power…and this creative power is man. Hasn’t a thing to do with any over-soul or any intangible force, it is all man, and speaks with the voice that I speak with now. You hear it in the tongue in which you were born. Were you German, you would have heard it in the tongue wherein you were born. Were you Swede, were you anything, whatever is the natural tongue, you would have heard it in that tongue. It is all, yet it is human, and one being. You stand in the presence of an infinite God that is man. It’s all love. So I tell you, I can’t tell my thrill, my joy, in hearing it from an audience of this size… how fast they’re all awakening in this room.

Now it may come to you in this manner. Now here is another, we’re told in the Book of Genesis, the doubling of a dream means that God has fixed it and that it shall shortly come to pass, the doubling of a dream. Now, she said, “Neville, while you were gone”—I was gone for two months and I closed the 16th of December and opened, as you know, last week, the 16th of February—“in that interval I had this experience. I’m in an enormous mountainous country, and here in a very deep valley runs a river. On the banks of the river I noticed three stone elephants. As I look at them they become animated, the three elephants become alive. Then enter the river and swim down the river. While still in my dream I say to myself, ‘This is the second time I have dreamed of stone elephants. Only a couple of weeks ago I dreamt of stone elephants, but instead of being formed when I saw them, I looked at the mountain and out of the mountain that’s solid granite came three elephants. They came out of the mountain. But the mountain was just as solid and still as they were, the ones that were formed, and they came out. I remembered this is my second dream of stone elephants. When I woke, I realized it was my third dream.” And the first dream, I do have the letter at home, so that she was not exaggerating concerning these dreams. For I have the third letter at home. In this letter there are two. The first letter she said, “I saw elephants, many of them, at the mating season, and they were all in the creative act. I saw the little ones and these big ones, at the mating season, all in the creative act. So here, three times I saw the picture of elephants.”

Now, there is a language of symbolism that is universal. You will find this in The Lost Language of Symbolism by Bayley. The elephant, whether it be in Africa, in China, in Europe, or here, in the depths of the soul the elephant is a symbol of the creative power and wisdom of God. Well, the creative power and wisdom of God is defined in the first chapter of Corinthians as Jesus Christ. You read it, “And Jesus Christ, the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1Cor.1:24). In this case, it’s symbolized as an elephant. So what did she dream about?