Neville Goddard Lectures: “The Divine Body”

I thought at the moment that this would simply be gossamer . . just a shadow of what I had remembered. It wasn’t any shadow; it was a solid as this (touching the podium). My hand could not go through it; it was solid. I am solid to myself, and the ladies that are walking down . . they are as solid as you are. They followed what I call the “duck file.” One got in front of the other, and they got as close to that wall as they could, because they were afraid of me, and they hastened their step and kept on moving toward the end of the hallway. And, then, before they disappeared, they looked back to see if this thing is still in the hallway talking to them.

Then I realized, now there is no way back to my body. I can’t go back to the room, and from the room go back. I am shut out! I am locked out completely from this world, and I am in a world just as real as this. That world was just as solidly real as this world, but here I am, shut out, with unfinished business. My business is, I have a wife. I have not provided for her adequately. I have an uneducated daughter. She hasn’t yet gone through high school. She is qualified, I know, and she desires to go to college, and I have not made provisions for her college, and I have unfinished business in that section of a world that this seems to be but a section of it. If I do not return to that body and re-animate it, they will find the body and they will call it a dead body, and they will give some reason for the dead body. They will say it is heart failure. They will find some way to account for it. They have to, first of all, operate on it, for I carried a small insurance policy. So, it is customary to open it up to see why it died. I knew that that is simply the end of that body unless I got back.

I closed my eyes; held it for a few seconds. When I opened my eyes, I am still standing in the hallway. I close my eyes again, and I could see nothing any more than I can see anything now with my eyes shut. I open my lids, and I see you. I opened my lids, and I see that wonderful hallway, with lovely chandeliers and everything lit. And here I am, fully aware of what I did deliberately.

Then I remembered something I did many years before when I found myself awake in a dream. I wanted to experiment, and I held the object in my dream, and I wouldn’t let it go, so I said to myself, “I know this is a dream. Now hold an object and don’t let it go” . . something that is stationary, not a living animal that can move, but something stationary, which I did. And holding it, I compelled myself to remember what I did! And I awoke in the dream . . and here I am, completely awake in my dream. I realized then that I awoke by feeling the solidity of that world. I remembered that I returned to this world by feeling the solidity of this world. So, then, standing there, with my eyes shut now to the obvious, I assumed that my head was on a pillow . . the pillow that I knew I had placed my head upon before the whole thing started. I could feel the pillow. That’s all that I did.

Then I felt myself, instead of standing vertically . . I assumed I was lying horizontally, and then I could actually feel myself in a horizontal position with my head on the pillow, but I could not move. I was cataleptic. There I am, now, with a body that is as dead as bodies can be, and I am alive in a dead body. I couldn’t move my finger. I couldn’t open an eyelid; I could do nothing!

Now, I know exactly where I am. I am back in Beverly Hills, and the body is cataleptic and I can’t move it. It seemed an eternal time, but after, maybe, about twenty-five or thirty seconds I could move the little finger, and then a few seconds later I could move some more, and then I could move the elbow. I pushed it out, and I could feel the warmth of my wife’s body. And after tremendous effort, I could open the eyelid, and there I saw the familiar objects on the wall. I saw the bureau. I saw all the things return, now, to consciousness; and here is my body that I have shut out completely.