Neville Goddard Lectures: “Thou Art Our Father, Our Potter”

06 Nov Neville Goddard Lectures: “Thou Art Our Father, Our Potter”

11/7/69

In the 64th chapter of the Book of Isaiah we read, “O Lord, thou art our Father; we are the clay. Thou art our potter; we are all the work of thy hand” (64:8). Well, when you read it you might think, “All right, O Lord” and you think of another. Then you say, “Thou art our Father”…that’s the same other. We are but clay and thou art our potter. Well, it’s identified with the Lord and with the Father, so you think also of another, and we’re all the work of thy hand.

The word “potter” by definition simply means “Imagination.” The word “Lord” is Yod He Vau He, which is defined for us as I AM. You mean that my own wonderful I-am-ness is the Lord, is my Father, and is my potter? That I am actually shaping myself and shaping my world? Yes, that is exactly what it means, that the Father is the Lord and the Lord is the potter shaping my entire world. But I am the shaper shaping it into a form, molding it into a form. Now, can I prove it? Am I really all Imagination as everyone who has experienced it knows? That “Man is all Imagination and God is man, and exists in us and we in him…that the eternal body of man is the Imagination, and that really is God himself” (Blake).

Now let me share with you a story I read two weeks ago in the New York Times, the magazine section. It was written by one who was imprisoned on the island of Amorgos in the Aegean Sea. He was a Greek imprisoned by the present regime that has taken over Greece, the generals. He was under house arrest and he was watched twenty-four hours a day. He was allowed to leave the house for a restaurant and by doctor’s orders to go for a certain walk after he had signed in at 6 PM with the police. Every morning at nine he had to sign in at the police and at 6 PM to return and sign in. Then he could go for a walk. These are his words, he said, “I began to imagine the scene in the village of horror the day after I escaped.” Then he imagined, “the elderly would be drinking coffee at nine in the morning, and then the cobbler would have opened up his doors for business, and then the scent of fresh bread would come straining through the windows of the bakery. By 9:30, because I had not registered, they would inquire of the one who had always sat in the public square dressed as a civilian looking at my apartment, and he would tell them that he had not seen me…I had not come upon my balcony. By 10:00 they would come to investigate themselves and then they would knock down the door. Then by 10:30 it would be, well, the news would scattered abroad and all would know that I was not there. Throughout the day the villagers would pass in their silent way, secretly but in a knowing way look one to the other that he isn’t here. That night they would gather in secret around their little shortwave radios listening for news from abroad of my escape. And so, I began to imagine that scene. The scene that gave me the greatest happiness was the scene when they all would know that I had escaped.”

Well, it came to pass, and he wrote his letter. His name is George Mylonos. It was on the 26th day of October, this last month that that letter appeared in the New York Times magazine, the Sunday issue. It all began in his Imagination. He was there for 409 days. At first it was only a dream, only a daydream. Then in the end he began to really do something about it. Now he told a story—which I will question because he wants to save the other prisoners on the other islands, also on the mainland—concerning exactly how he did it. Oh yes, there were physical means, but the means came into being as a result of his imaginal activity. To attempt to change circumstances before you change your imaginal activity is to struggle against the very nature of things. For this world in which we live is a world of Imagination. You are all Imagination and God, your reality, is all Imagination. Divine Imagination has reproduced himself in the human Imagination; therefore, all things exist in the human Imagination for all things exist in Divine Imagination.