Neville Goddard Lectures: Your Future (1966)

04 Apr Neville Goddard Lectures: Your Future (1966)

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Tonight my subject is “Your Future.” This is open season for prophesying—astrologists, numerologists, teacup leaves, monkey bones—using all these to tell the future. Well, we will confine ourselves to the Bible, and tonight you will find it the most practical right down here in the world of Caesar. The Bible does not tell any man that he has a predetermined future in the world of Caesar. Everything here is conditioned. The Bible teaches that you have an ultimate future which is to awaken as God; that’s your real future that’s unconditional, unearned. You don’t earn it, it’s a gift. It’s called in the Bible “grace.” So everyone is destined to succeed because God is playing the part, playing all the parts; and in the end he awakens and you are he. On this level everything is conditioned.

Now we turn to the Book of Matthew, the 21st chapter, the 22nd verse: Whatever you ask in prayer you will receive if you have faith. It doesn’t say that you ask for things that are good for you…“whatever” is all inclusive. Whatever you ask in prayer you will receive if you have faith.

Now prophets, as Blake told the Bishop Rexford, in the modern sense of the word have never existed. Jonah was no prophet in the modern sense for his prophecy of Nineveh failed. Every honest man is a prophet. We value his opinion both private and public in this way: if you go so, the result is so. He shall never say so-and-so shall happen let you do what you will. He will never say that, for he is a seer, not an arbitrary dictator. You go to a medium and they will tell you so-and-so is going to happen to you, allowing you to be anything you want to be in the meanwhile. It’s not true, it’s a lie. The only way it would come true or could come true is if on departure you believe what you heard. If you believed it and completely convinced yourself of the truth of what he or she said, whether they use tea leaves or coffee grounds or stars or anything else, your future is in your hands. You cannot be in one state of consciousness and not suffer the consequences of not being in another state of consciousness. You cannot change the course of your future life so long as your present state remains the same. A change of state is a change of your world. This whole vast world is infinite response. It’s response to you; you are the operant power.

Listen to the words of scripture, “We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19). We love because he first loved us. What “he”? He’s speaking of God. Something out there? No, God is in man as man’s own wonderful human Imagination. So I will now have the world respond? Well, then I must be the operant power and ___(??) it. What would I do? Well, I’d make a selection, single out what I want to be this year 1966; assume that I am it; persuade myself that I am it now, though not a thing in this world suggests that I am it or could even become it; and to the degree that I am self-persuaded the world will respond. It has to! The little word “because” implies causation: Because he first loved us. You dwell upon it.