Neville Goddard Lectures: “The Mystery of Christmas (1969)”

Then comes that great revelation where God knows who he is. He has no way of ever knowing who he is unless his Son stands before him and calls him “Father.” The Son is David; and David is the sum total of all the generations of men and all of their experiences fused into a single being and personified before the one he’s about to reveal as God the Father. So I am the father of David and you are the father of David. If you have not yet encountered him, may I tell you, you will. Then you will know what Graves said today in his poem which I quoted. Because, only in this dream manner will you know true unity. For if I am the father of your son, and if one you know other than the speaker is the father of our son, are we not one father? So in the end, are we not told there’s “only one body, one Lord, one Spirit, one God and Father of all” (Eph.4:5). So all are coming towards the one body that fell and was fragmented and the fragmentation is humanity. So all these are the sons of God all being collected and brought back into that unity, that true unity that is God the Father.

So you are God the Father. And having played all the parts—the good, the bad and the indifferent—then you are gathered together. And that moment in time when you confront him, these are the signs of the end; for Christianity is based upon the affirmation that a series of events happened in which God revealed himself in action for the salvation of his sons. He brought all the sons back, and in the bringing them back he gave all the sons himself. In the end there is only God the Father. It takes all the sons to form God the Father.

So, all these things when you read them it takes one who has experienced it to explain the Old Testament. Who on earth would ever have believed that when we are told in the 3rd chapter of John—for he calls himself the Son of man: “And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of man be lifted up” (3:14). He likens himself to a serpent, and who would have thought for one moment that the Son of man is just like that fiery serpent? And that you go up, just as he described it, in spiral form right into heaven, where heaven is within you as you’re told in the Book of Luke, “The kingdom of heaven is within you” (Luke 17:21). So you go up into yourself, having split the entire body from top to bottom. “For the curtain of the temple”—and “We are the temple of the living God”—“was split from top to bottom” (2Cor.6:16). Then the Son of man, like a serpent, rose into that heavenly state, and when he rose into it, it reverberated like thunder. Exactly that…the imagery is perfect!

Who would have thought for one moment that when the Holy Spirit descends, it descends always in bodily form as a dove? It does…right upon you. It so loves you, the Holy Spirit, because you have finished the work that you yourself planned to do. For you and I agreed to dream in concert before we descended and became fragmented. We were a unity, a brotherhood of one; and then came that fragmentation in this world, and each became a seeming separate being at war with one another…and there is no other. Because eventually he is God the Father and his son is your son…so, really, he cannot be another.

So, “Hold fast with both hands to that royal love which alone as we know certainly restores fragmentation into true unity.” Well, I can’t tell you how my heart jumped this morning when I read it. If you haven’t discarded your paper, you’ll find it in the Book Review in today’s L. A. Times. They are all lovely…there are about five or six that he quoted…but this one…and Graves has been such a difficult poet to read because his words, too, are enigmatic, no question about it. Well, this seemed so clearly stated for those who have had the experience. Maybe others will pass it off and think, “Oh, what stupid things to have said.” So beautifully said, but oh so deeply said.