Neville Goddard Lectures: “Outer World Responds to Imaginal Acts”

11 Nov Neville Goddard Lectures: “Outer World Responds to Imaginal Acts”

4/7/69

“All that you behold; tho’ it appears without, it is within, in your Imagination, of which this world of mortality is but a shadow” (Blake, Jerusalem, Plt. 71). You cannot conceive of something that is not already contained within you. If you imagine it and enter into that state as though it were true, the outer world will respond to bear witness of this imaginal activity within you.

Now you try it. And if you prove it to your own satisfaction that it does work, then you come to this conclusion—you’ll read it in the 13th chapter of the Book of Acts: “I have found in David the son of Jesse a man after my own heart, who will do all my will” (13:22). Now if the entire world responds to my imaginal activity, well then, that is David who will do all my will, for, he is doing my will. Well, if the Lord said David does my will and I by a simple imaginal act command the outer world to respond to it as though I struck a chord and everything in sympathy with the chord struck must respond to bear witness to this that is active within me, well then, who is the Lord? If I notice the world responding to what I am imagining, and David is one after my own heart who will do all my will, I see who David is: David is the outer world responding to my will. Now, it’s not “will” as the world will use it…I will “will” it to be so. No, I will imagine it to be so. I am inwardly convinced that it is so. If I imagine that it is so and persist in that imaginal state as though it were true and the world responds, I have found David. And I have found the Lord…the Lord being my own wonderful human Imagination. The imaginal act in its response is David…there is David.

Now in Hebrew thought, history consists of all the generations of men and their experiences fused into one grand whole; and this concentrated time into which all the generations are fused and from which they spring is called eternity. Now we are told in Ecclesiastes that “God has put eternity into the mind of man, but so that man cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end” (3:11). Only in the end will we find out what God has put into man’s mind. Well, he’s put eternity which would contain all things. If all the generations of men and all of their experiences fused into one grand whole is put into the mind of man, every conceivable variety of experience is contained within that one grand whole. The word translated eternity is also translated “the world.” But it is also translated and quite often in scripture as “the youth, the stripling, the young man” and these are three titles used of David. He said, “I have found David the son of Jesse.” Well, Jesse means “I am” and that’s the name of God. “I have found in David”—the Son of God, the son of Jesse—“a man after my own heart who will do all my will.” Well, now I see that he really is the entire vast world of humanity and all of their experiences, but I do not know this until the very end. In the very end of the journey I find him personified as a single youth; not as unnumbered people, one single eternal being. For, eternity is personified as youth and not as an old man as the Greeks did. It is simply one single being and he is the youth called David. I will know this only in the end.