Neville Goddard Lectures: “Our Real Beliefs”

01 Jan Neville Goddard Lectures: “Our Real Beliefs”

3/6/64

Tonight’s subject is “Our Real Beliefs.” I really want this series to be the most productive that we’ve ever had. By that I mean I want everyone present to really have a goal, a noble goal, and realize it, realize it before we close in May. May I tell you, you can realize it, I mean that seriously. So what do I mean by our real beliefs? Our real beliefs are what we live by. Real belief and knowing are one. When a man really believes, it’s just as though he knows, it’s tantamount to knowing. But I tell you, belief—I call it faith, I call it belief—it is not complete till it becomes experience. One must experience it and then they know it. Now you will hear the same thing tonight. Everyone present will hear exactly the same thing, but no two will hear it in the same depth. Some will hear it on the surface, others will hear it below the surface, and others will hear it down in the very depths of their being. It’s where you live. As we are told, “The word came to them as it did to us; but it did not profit them, because it was not mixed with faith in those who heard it” (Heb. 4:2). They heard it and rejected it, but they heard it. It came in and went out. It did not receive acceptance by those who heard it, and so they instantly rejected it. Tonight, I hope you will not reject what I’m going to tell you. But that’s your choice. You’re free; you can accept it or reject it.

But I tell you, if I get through tonight and you apply it…because you are the operant power. I can tell you but it doesn’t operate itself. If this very moment I ask you to think of a friend, just think of a friend, and now hear him tell you something lovely, something lovely about himself, about a mutual friend or about you, just hear it, do you believe that that actually took place? You may say, well, I imagined it, but it didn’t really take place. I will tell you, the day will come, and I hope now, that when you imagine a state, before you have external confirmation of that state, to you it is as though you heard it externally, you know it; that this internal act is equal to the external confirmation of that act. You get to that point, because the difference between God and man is measured only in terms of this imaginative power.

If I would now speak of the power that is God—as we’re told in scripture, it’s revealed constantly as power, sheer power—3rd chapter, 4th, 5th, and 6th verses of the Book of Exodus—sheer power. Moses stands in the presence of power, but it’s creative power. And the difference between God and man is measured by, simply, power. On this level, if I am on the surface of my being, only this is real, what my senses allow. But if I go deeper into my own being, moving ever toward the core of my being, who is God, then my imaginative act becomes externalized, quickly externalized, as I go deeper and deeper. On the surface it seems to take an interval of time, if I believe. If I don’t believe, it never comes into some external form at all, never. Yet I’m living in a world not understanding it, not knowing what it’s all about. So, really, the story that I want to tell you is trying to ask you, to plead with you, to buy your religion wholesale. Go to the Maker, go to the source; don’t buy it retail with some man in between. No one in between you and the source, you go right into the depths and buy your religion wholesale by going to the source which is your own wonderful human Imagination, your own I-am-ness. That’s God.