Neville Goddard Lectures: “This World is a Dream”

22 Jun Neville Goddard Lectures: “This World is a Dream”

5/7/65

Now tonight, I think you’ll find it very practical. The purpose of a teacher is to encourage and to stimulate, sometimes even to belabor one to become curious to detect the principle in operation. Our principle is that imagining creates reality. We make the claim that “the eternal body of Man is the Imagination and that is God himself, the divine body Jesus…we are his members” (Blake, Laocoon). Buried in everyone is Christ Jesus, and Christ Jesus is God himself.

Here, we must awaken from this state, and awakening from this state is called in scripture, the resurrection. The signs of the resurrection in the life of the believer are the indispensable internal testimony, without which Jesus might have been raised but could never have been preached as risen. Everyone will have this experience, and they can preach from experience that he is risen because he is in them. When he rises in them, they become a witness and they can preach from experience that Jesus Christ is risen. If they don’t have the experience, he may have been raised, but they will never know with that authority that they can preach that he is risen.

As I stand before you tonight, I can speak with the authority of one who is witness to the risen Christ, for he has risen in me. I know beyond all doubt I am he. I know we are one. Limited, yes, in this world of the flesh, for I can’t prove it to anyone’s satisfaction. When they say, “Turn that into gold” or “Turn that into bread” or “Turn that into something else” or “Jump off the cliff—would he not give you some support and if so, you would not dash your foot against the stone?” No, I will not attempt in any way to prove anything to another. I am sent to tell you only of one presence: the risen Christ. So, “The eternal body of Man is the Imagination and that is God himself, the divine body, Jesus; we are his members” (Blake). So buried in all, every child born of woman, buried in us is Jesus Christ.

Now, let me tell you of a story. As I said as I opened the meeting tonight, my purpose is to stimulate, to encourage everyone to prove this, what to others who have not yet proved it is a theory, that imagining creates reality; that man’s dreamer is all Imagination, the whole vast world is a dream, and we are the dreamers of the dream. The day will come we will awaken. When we awaken from the dream, we are the dreamer who is God. This morning’s mail brought a letter from a friend of mine who came here over a period of two or three years, Tom C., a young lad, maybe in his late twenties. He’s now living in New York City, and so he’s been informing me every two or three weeks with his visions and his dreams. He knows I’m interested in his visions. What he does in the world of Caesar that interests me too, but not really. If he has a job he makes money, perfectly alright, but his visions, they do interest me, and so on the morning of the 30th day of April of this year, this is what happened to him.

He said, “About 5:30 in the morning I woke and I was completely cataleptic. I couldn’t move any part of my body, not one little part would move, it wouldn’t respond to my will. After a little while, with an enormous effort my right hand moved, but it seemed to have been such an effort I was completely exhausted and I fell back into the state of catalepsy. Then suddenly I found myself behind an enormous bar, and I seemed to be the bar owner. In front of me stood my brother Jerry and Jerry said to me, ‘Someone just died!’ I stopped him and I said, stop, say that over again for me, which he did. As he said it over again, I realize that I am in a dream. I was the one who couldn’t move my body, it was a dead body…someone had just died. And suddenly I said to myself, Neville teaches us that if I know I am dreaming, all I need do is to hold some solid object, a pillow, a chair, anything that is solid that will not move when you hold it, and don’t let it go. Hold it and then compel yourself to awake while you are holding it. So I held what seemed to me like a box-like object and I held it and said to myself, Tom, wake up! As I did this, I began to awake and I was fully awake in this place.