Neville Goddard Lectures: “Life Through Death”

Now let us show you the difference between survival and a hundred thousand people die in our world every day. A hundred thousand every day, but none cease to be, all survive. But survival is continuity; resurrection is discontinuity. Now here is the story. Possibly you’ve had this experience. I know many who have had it, but I will now quote one. No one need know who she is or who he is or they are, because it’s a story that many have had. I have told you in the past that every dream is a parable. Its earthly story is secondary to its meaning. But every dream is a parable. And God speaks to man through the medium of dream; he communicates some profound message to the individual. So an individual finds himself clothed in the garments of those who walked this earth 2,000 years ago. Then someone comes towards him…he thinks it may be a play and so he treats it lightly. The man points a gun at him and he said, “Go ahead and shoot.” So he shoots and it goes right through his brain and he falls. At the very moment he falls he sees the thing on the floor, just like a costume, and he has survived. The ridiculousness of the whole thing that he hasn’t been killed yet here is the body with the bullet through its brain.

Now, two thousand years ago there were no guns. Right away you can rub that out, the literal story, you can take it apart. There was no gun powder known then. So he wore the costume, yes, of, say, 2,000 years ago. Purposely the depth of his soul is trying to show him something. It could not be reincarnation, because 2,000 years ago you could not have been shot by any bullet. We didn’t have bullets. We didn’t have guns. Well, what is the central jet of truth in this story? Survival is continuity. There was no change in the consciousness of the one who saw the event. He rose and he saw the body that was just blasted and, in the eyes of the world, dead. He came out of it a living being but the identical being that he was one second before. You can discount a bullet; there were no bullets 2,000 years ago. No such thing as, well, dynamite 2,000 years ago. We didn’t know it. But he finds himself in an ancient world, so it’s trying to show him regardless of unnumbered deaths in this world, there is continuity.

But tonight I am speaking of discontinuity. It’s an entirely different picture and everyone is destined towards discontinuity. And resurrection is God’s mightiest act, the one act that sets it apart from all other acts, and reveals God as a God of the living, not the dead. We all become sons of God by God’s mightiest act, the act of resurrection. So we are told, “He was designated Son of God by his resurrection from the dead.” No one comes into this world from any holy womb in this world as a physical womb, no one—all of this is descended from David. So forget the story as told this day of Mary’s son, and know the being that is really here, present in this audience tonight, wearing all these garments. And you may say…use your name, don’t say Paul, whatever your name is…and “from Paul”—you say from John, from Robert, from Neville—-“a slave of Jesus Christ,” because he, the Jesus Christ in my own I-am-ness, emptied itself. Being in the form of God, it emptied itself of this wonderful splendor, and took upon itself the form of a servant, or a slave, and being born in the likeness of man, and finding itself in the form of man, it became obedient unto death, unto death upon the cross (Phil. 2:7). And this is the cross.