Neville Goddard Lectures: “The Law and the Plan of Redemption”

16 Mar Neville Goddard Lectures: “The Law and the Plan of Redemption”

4/21/69

Our presentation of the gospel must clearly show that it has specific relevance to life now as well as hereafter, for secularized man is far more concerned with the present than the future. So if you would interest anyone in this work, first appeal to what they can do here and now. For the Promise is so fantastic that they may turn from you in disgust. Show them what can be done right here in this world now and then you’ll get their interest. Then you might find them becoming more and more interested in the Promise.

Now here let me share with you a couple of stories that came to me this week. You’ll see why I tell you this. He’s not here tonight but he’s here quite often, and he wrote these two stories. He said, “About ten days a go my wife told me of this little girl, fourteen months old. My wife is a very dear friend of the grandmother of this little girl. And the little girl had cancer. She developed certain lumps in her neck; took her to the hospital, and a little biopsy was made of the tissues and they brought back the verdict, cancer. Another doctor looked at it and he questioned it, he wasn’t quite sure, not convinced, so there was a difference of opinion there. Then they brought in three specialists separately; each brought in the verdict, cancer. So here were four and one not quite convinced. But they kept the child in the hospital for further examination.

Now this night ten days ago his wife told him the story. He said, “I sat there and I listened to much of the story and then I tuned her out to the point where I couldn’t even hear what she was saying. I reconstructed the entire story in my mind’s eye and redid it along the lines that I wanted to hear and I actually heard my wife’s voice telling me an entirely different story. As she was telling me the story, I completely revised it at a certain point. Then that night when I was completely alone and not distracted, I redid the whole thing to make myself convinced and to be sure I actually heard my wife’s voice telling me the revised story.” The child was kept in the hospital and then they made another test from another lump in the neck and a unanimous vote was brought in: the child does not have cancer, and therefore because they had no remedial treatment done in the hospital she never had cancer. They couldn’t conceive of any other treatment…they did not give her any radium, gave her nothing, no injections. Therefore, they were 100 percent wrong they confessed the first time, because without treatment the child could never have overcome the condition. So, when the wife heard the new verdict of a complete change in the little fourteen-month old child, she told the mother and the grandmother what her husband had done.

Meanwhile, the neighborhood has been told this and they are agog, but they can’t for one moment credit an imaginal act as causation. That imagining creates reality is the height of insanity. Nevertheless, this is his story…that as every mystic knows that every natural effect has a spiritual cause and not a natural one. A natural cause only seems and it is a delusion of this world. And man has a very, very poor memory. He can’t relate what’s taking place to any imaginal act in his past, because he’s looking for physical causation. And he cannot believe that he did anything that would have produced this, not knowing that the doing was imaginal, not physical. He sat alone and he imagined, and he set in motion a cause and when the cause came into the world and he saw the effects, he did not go back into the psychic state of his being; he went back into the physical state. And he can’t remember where he ever did physically anything worthy of this thing that he is now reaping. So, his Imagination is setting the whole thing in motion, but his memory is faulty, and that is the vegetating memory that simply disintegrates because it isn’t, really. So, he looks upon the man who claims that it is all Imagination as a fool. As Blake said, “The idiot reasoner laughs at the man of Imagination.” So I tell you, everything in your world is caused by an imaginal act.