Neville Goddard Lectures: “The Fundamental Sin”

27 Feb Neville Goddard Lectures: “The Fundamental Sin”

6/25/65

We just have a couple left, tonight and next Tuesday night; then we’re closed for a little while, back on the 19th of October. I take it that most of you are on the list and so you’ll receive a notice. If you’re not on the list and you would like to receive a notice where we will be, may we have your name and address? Because we have but two left, I thought we’d try to make this just as practical as possible; not omitting, of course, the most important thing of all which is God’s wonderful promise.

We are told in scripture that the fundamental sin in the world is man’s lack of faith in I am he. If you want the quote, it’s the 8th chapter of the Book of John. You’ll find it confirmed in the 16th of John: “You will die in your sins unless you believe I am he.” You can take that literally. You may believe in this presence before you know from experience I am he. You don’t have to wait for the experience when it’s revealed to you by actual experience that you are the very being that conceived it all and played it all. You don’t have to wait to that extreme; you can start believing it now and prove it. The day will come you will know from experience I am he.

So that’s the fundamental sin. Sin means “missing the mark.” If you do not believe that I am the one that I would like to be, then you will miss the mark. You must dare to assume that I am the man or the woman that I want to be, so that I stop wanting to be it because I am it. If I am it, then I will sleep in that state and view the world from it as though it were true. If I view the world from that state, I am putting this claim to a test, and I tell you from experience it will become a fact in your world. Start to believe it before you actually know it from experience, but the day will come you will know it from experience.

Blake made this wonderful statement, he said, “Everything I have ever painted, everything that I have ever drawn, everything that I have written came from vision, pure, pure vision. I saw it, I experienced it.” That’s what Blake claimed. Now this is what he claimed, this is in his wonderful book of Milton: “God himself enters death’s door always with those who enter and lays down in the grave with them, in visions of eternity.” Just think of it, “God himself enters death’s door always with those who enter and lays down in the grave with them in visions of eternity…‘til they awake and see Jesus and the linen clothes lying that the females had woven for them.” Just imagine, God himself entering death’s door. What is death’s door and how did he enter with all who entered it and in it, he had these visions of eternity with those who entered? Then as he saw all these fabulous things, he waited ‘til we would awake. So he equates death with sleep, this profound sleep, and he waited until the dream was over; and then as the dream is over we see Jesus, and then we see the linen clothes that the females had woven for us. What sheer beauty and what depth he saw in that one little passage in the 32nd plate of Milton! Read it, the 32nd plate of Milton.

Now, in the word…he knew Greek, he knew Hebrew, Latin, Italian, French and a master of the English tongue. He never used a word carelessly, not Blake. He wasn’t simply writing poetry; not one word was used carelessly. So when he speaks of the linen clothes, in Hebrew the word linen also means “marble; to bleach, to whiten.” But it means marble…when they are made of marble, all the columns of marble…same word called linen. And now I will give you my experience that will simply corroborate all that he said in that one wonderful verse in Milton: “God himself enters death’s door always with those who enter, lays down in the grave with them, in visions of eternity, ‘til they awake and see Jesus and the linen clothes lying that the females had woven for them.” Well, my mother is a female…she wove this. Is this the linen cloth he speaks of? And is this linen cloth called my physical body also marble? Is it something that dead?