Neville Goddard Lectures: “It is Within You”

07 Dec Neville Goddard Lectures: “It is Within You”

12/3/65

Tonight’s talk is “It is Within You.” We’re told in scripture that the Pharisees asked him when is the kingdom of God coming? He answered them and said, “The kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed; nor shall they say, ‘Lo, here it is!’ or ‘There!’, for the kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:20). It’s translated in the Bible “in the midst of you,” but the footnote tells us the literal meaning of that Greek phrase is “within you.” So when you come across that phrase throughout the New Testament change it back to “within you”…all the difference in the world. When he took the little child and then put it in the midst of them, it is within you, that’s where he put it. He took a little child and put it within them. Taking the little child in his arms, he said to them, “Whoever receives one such child receives me, and who receives me, receives not me but him who sent me” (Mark 9:36). This will prove eventually to every person in the world to be literally true. It will come with the most, I would say, dramatic suddenness. So much so you have no time to observe its appearance, its coming, it just comes so suddenly upon you. That story is told in the 17th of Luke. Well, tonight I want you to believe that this statement “within you” is literally true. The whole drama is taking place within you, in your own wonderful human Imagination. “All that you behold, though it appears without, it is within, in your Imagination of which this world of mortality is but a shadow,” just a shadow (Blake); and all the pipe-dreams of Imagination, but all of them, the most simple little thing in the world, are really the enduring essence of things that were themselves the passing dream. I’ll show you what I mean.

In 1933—looking at your faces, many of you didn’t experience it, you were too young—1933 we went through the most frightful depression in this land—seventeen million unemployed, every one a bread-winner. We didn’t have 190-odd million people; we had 120-odd million people. But you take seventeen million workers, all bread-winners, from that work force out of a maximum number of people of 120 million—that includes children and the aged and those who could not work for numberless reasons. What an enormous number! Well, in 1933 I’d been in this country eleven years. Like the other seventeen million I was unemployed and I did not have a nickel, but I mean that literally. People will say, “Well, I didn’t have any money”…but he has a thousand in the bank. I don’t mean that, I mean I had nothing, absolutely nothing, living in a basement on 75th Street in New York City, not knowing where the next meal was coming from. But one thing I knew I wanted was to remain in America. I came here in ’22 and I never wanted to leave…unless I knew I could get back. Yes, I went off to Canada for a few months, but I always came back; went to England for four months, I always got back. If I ever had a nightmare it was that I had a dream where I was in some other part of the world and could not return to America. It was my one consuming desire to live in America.

My parents came to America that year, 1933, and spent a few months. I saw them daily. Every day they would pressure me to go back with them to the little island of Barbados and get three good square-meals a day, and have no problem with rent, no problem with clothes, no problem period. He had his businesses and I’m his son…I could enter the businesses with my family. But it did not interest me. I went to the boat the day they sailed and for the first time in eleven years a peculiar feeling possessed me. As I waved goodbye and the boat pulled down the Hudson River I had the feeling I would like to go to Barbados just on a visit. I had just said goodbye to them and said, at the very last moment, “No, I’m not going to Barbados.” Yet strangely enough as they pulled out it possessed me, I would like to go to Barbados. I didn’t have a nickel and they offered me a ticket, and I refused it. Here I am now with a desire to go and no possibility of going.