Neville Goddard Lectures: “The Secret of Imagining” (1970)

30 May Neville Goddard Lectures: “The Secret of Imagining” (1970)

By Neville Goddard – July 1970

Tonight’s subject is: “The Secret of Imagining.”

In almost every particular is the world about us different from what we think it. Why then should we be so incredulous? Life calls on us to believe not less, but more. The secret of imaging is the greatest of all problems, to the solution of which everyone should aspire, for supreme power, supreme wisdom, supreme delight lie in the solution of this mystery.

If you have solved the mystery of imagining you have found Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is defined for us in scripture as “The power of God and the wisdom of God” (First Corinthians 1:24). As we are told in the eighth chapter of the Book of Proverbs, . . and Wisdom is speaking now, personified as a little child:

“When He laid out the foundation of the world I was beside Him like a little child I was daily His delight, rejoicing before Him always rejoicing in His inhabited world, delighting in the affairs of men.

He who finds me finds life

He who misses me injures himself;

All who hate me love death.”

(Proverbs 8:29-31, 35, 36)

So find that child that is the symbol of Jesus Christ, who is the creative power and the wisdom of God. Believe me when I tell you that this Jesus Christ of scripture is your own wonderful human imagination. “By him all things were made, and without him was not anything made that was made” (John 1:3). He is in the world, and the world was made by Him, and the world knows Him not.

Look into the world and name one thing that wasn’t first imagined. You name one thing that does not now exist in your imagination . . just name it. Name anything in the world that does not now exist in your imagination: “All things exist in the human imagination.” (from “Jerusalem” by William Blake)

“God is man, and exists in us and we in Him” (from “Annotations to Berkeley” by William Blake). The eternal abode of man is the imagination; and that is God Himself. Try to disprove it.

God is my pure imagining in myself. He underlies all of my faculties, including perception, but He streams into my surface mind least disguised in the form of productive fancy. I can catch Him in the act of producing these images in my mind. Just try it as you are seated here. Try to think of anything. Try to catch Him in the act of actually producing in your own mind’s eye all these images. “For all things exist in the human imagination.” But how can I single out one and clothe it so that it becomes an objective fact?

That is the secret, for they all exist within me. But how can I catch one and clothe it? Well I will try to show you tonight what I know from my own personal experience. Scripture teaches it, but it tells it in a strange and wonderful way: how to clothe it.

You see this room in which we are now? It’s more real now than your own home is to you; yet you know your home more intimately than you know this room. Yet this room, at the moment, while you are in it, is more real than your own home. How different the cubic reality from the plane of any depiction of it. This room is now so “real” because we are in it, and we are all imagination. We’re in it; and to us, it’s real. Think of your own home. Do we not have the capacity to draw it, to paint it? But in your mind’s eye you have a plane depiction of it, but it’s not as real now as the room is. This room is real because we’re in it.

Now this is what I mean by making something that is only a thought . . something that is real. How do I do it? I single out, out of my own wonderful human imagination, that which I want to make real. It’s all in you. Then I must enter into it as I have entered into this room. “If the spectator would enter into any one of these images in his imagination, approaching it on the fiery chariot of his own contemplative thought” (from “Visions of the Last Judgment” by William Blake), it would become just as real to him as this room.