Neville Goddard Lectures: “The Father And Son”

02 Jun Neville Goddard Lectures: “The Father And Son”

4/17/67

It is my desire to make tonight just as clear as a bell, as I can and I’ll tell you why. A friend of mine, who came here last Friday—it’s the first time he’s been here this year—a very dear friend of mine, in fact, he’s my dentist, and I go to his home in the Hollywood hills, well, almost every weekend if the weather permits. He has a lovely pool and we thoroughly enjoy four or five hours together. But said he to me last Saturday, he said, “You know, Neville, you lost me last night. I sat down and was already to take everything you said, and I so love what you said about the lady who revised the doctor’s decision about her eyes. I said, now this is a marvelous evening as you started off. And how she was so completely convinced of this power of revision that she took it into dream, and in a dream she revised the dream, and the dream came out just as she wanted it. I thought, now, really, we are in for a wonderful, wonderful evening, and then suddenly you went off into that strange thing about David. And you lost me, completely lost me.” Now, here is a man who loves a challenge, and he loves a challenge. He rides his horses every weekend and he just loves a good spirited horse, owns a horse. On the golf course he wants everything to be a challenge, and life to him must be challenge. Yet, in this he couldn’t follow me.

Now tonight I insist that you follow me, for this is so important. I say imagining creates reality and that I mean, I mean it seriously, that everything in this world is but the product of imagining, everything. And God is the creator of the world. I need not go beyond that to just ask you, then who is God? But we are all trained in our Christian-Jewish faith in this Western world of ours, and we have strange concepts concerning these characters of scripture. Now as Blake said to his critic, the Rev. Dr. Trusler, “You say I need someone to elucidate my ideas. Do you not know that that which can be made explicit to the idiot isn’t worth my care? And the ancients discovered and considered that what was not too explicit was fittest for instruction, because it rouses the faculties to act.”

The Bible is addressed to the Imagination of man, said Blake, and only immediately to the understanding or reason. And he explained to the great Reverend that Imagination is spiritual sensation. You’ve got to sense it, you’ve got to feel it. You’ve got to get beyond the surface and feel what this whole thing is about. Now tonight if I said “Jesus,” instantly you have some mental picture, and no two here would have the same mental picture concerning Jesus. I say Jesus Christ and you have this picture, based upon your training. Now I’m going back to scripture, just scripture. And they say he called himself the Son of God. He said God is his Father. I’m quoting now from the 5th chapter of the Book of John. He called God his Father, making himself equal with God. That’s blasphemy. And Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing; whatever the Father does, that the Son does likewise” (John 5:18,19). So here, he claims he does nothing but what the Father does.

In the Book of Luke he makes the statement, after someone said to him and the one who spoke to him was a ruler, and a ruler said to him, “Good teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” And Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone” (Luke 18:18). So in this he denies that he’s God. No one is good but God alone. So here is a denial that he, Jesus, is God. Well then, who is Jesus? I ask, who is Jesus? He only does what the Father does. He denies he is good; but only one is good, and that is God. And no one else is God, only the good. He said, I have come to do the will of him who sent me. It is not my own will but only the will of him who sent me. Well, who is he? Who is Jesus in this world of ours?