Neville Goddard Lectures: “The New and Living Way”

Everything, listen to the story carefully, all the testimony of Jesus, for everything to which he testifies you are going to experience if you will accept it. You cannot walk beyond where you’ve gone in Imagination, and so when you hear the testimony, you’re response may be negative and you will not accept it. So I ask the question, “Can any man go forward where his Imagination has not gone before?” And the answer is no. So you listen carefully and then you respond. If you say, “I’ll walk with you, I’ll walk that far with you, but I can’t go any further. That is as far as I can go with you; beyond that, leave me right here. I’ll go back and hold onto these things that seem so much more real, and so I’ll hold onto the things around me. But I won’t go that far.” And so, listen to it. It’s the most fantastic story that man could ever hear, for it’s the story of God. It’s the story of you. How you awaken into the whole being that is God, for there’s only God. For in the end, the Lord is one and his name one; there aren’t two, just one, and you are that being. If you hear the story, respond to it positively, then you can walk as far as you’ve heard. If you haven’t heard the story, you can’t venture beyond what you’ve heard, for no man can go forth where he has not walked in Imagination before. And so when I hear a story or someone tells me something else, as I hear it I am walking with him in Imagination. Turn on the TV, I may deny it or accept it, but I walk with him in Imagination. And everything is one’s Imagination. There’s nothing but one’s Imagination.

So the story must be heard, and having heard it, it must be responded to, either negatively where you deny it and reject it, or you accept it. So it’s entirely up to us to accept it if we really want to walk as far as the story will take us, which is the new and living way, right through the curtain. And the curtain is one’s own wonderful—-it isn’t this [body]—I saw this split. But surely when I woke in the morning to find this body still knit together and no scar on it, it could not have been this. This is but the shadow world. So Blake in his wonderful Jerusalem: “I know of no other Christianity,” said he, “and no other gospel than the liberty both of body and mind to exercise the divine arts of Imagination. Imagination the real and eternal world into which we shall all go after the death of these vegetable, mortal bodies of ours.” Then he asked, “What are these gifts, these treasures of heaven that you and I must lay up for tomorrow, are they not all mental gifts—the arts, the literatures, all these lovely mental gifts of the world.” He said, the apostles knew of no other gospel, only the arts of Imagination.