The Flood Is Still Upon Us

Neville Goddard

[The tape starts in the middle of a sentence]…describing things that happened unnumbered years ago, but I tell you it’s contemporary. You read about the flood, and you think: “Well, certainly that happened unnumbered (if it ever did happen) – it happened unnumbered years ago.”

This morning, as is my custom, I turned on channel KFAC. That is a radio station that plays through the day and night, twenty-four hours a day, only lovely classical music; so you can read to that music – only a few interruptions. On the hour, you get a five-minute bulletin and weather report. But between 9:00 and 10:00 o’clock there is always a lovely piano recital, as it were – the great masterpieces played by great artists. So I can sit down with my Bible and read as I listen to the music. And the one interruption that came today was an ad from the Herald-Examiner. They were advertising this paper as the one paper in our city that gives the facts – only facts, not embellished, no frills – just plain fact, all facts. That’s why we should buy that paper, because it is simply filled with facts.

Well, facts have overflowed the world like the flood. Man actually is “drowned” with facts, victimized by facts. It is in the Imagination that everything lives, and not in its actuality, not in the fact. Unless Imagination penetrates the facts, the deluge remains a deluge. We are now in the deluge. This is the flood!

A man is in jail. That’s a fact. And he knows he’s there for “x” number of years; that’s a fact. And he simply waits and hopes that in some strange way he will get some early release from this confinement. He never uses his Imagination, save in some violent way to get out, but not to penetrate the fact. When in March of 1943, by using my Imagination to penetrate the fact I, too, was in “prison” in the Army, but I didn’t want any part of it. So, I simply penetrated the fact and saw myself in New York City, in my own apartment with my family. And in nine days I was out, honorably discharged, in my apartment in New York City.

I wrote a friend of mine who was in the army. He was my age. He was a Freudian, – a professional psychoanalyst, but Freud was his background. That was his schooling. When I wrote him in detail exactly what I had done (I didn’t mince matters; I told him exactly what I did): as I physically slept on my little bed in the barracks, I imagined I was simply elsewhere. The “elsewhere” was a definite spot in space: New York City, in my apartment. I told him what I did. I could “feel” the bed. I could “feel” the things in my house. I went about feeling all the familiar objects in my apartment, and I gave it all the tones of reality and all the sensory vividness to the best of my ability. I “touched” everything, and it felt real, and then I went back to sleep. Then I told exactly what happened to me that morning; and then nine days later, I was honorably discharged by the same man who had disallowed my application.

He didn’t answer my letter. In New York City he used to come to my meetings as a friend because he was so convinced that the Freudian concept was true. He said: “I come to your meetings for this reason, Neville…” (We knew each other well. He’d come home for dinner; I’d go to his place for dinner)… but he said: “I come to your meetings because you turn my daily bread into the substance of fairy. I sort of like that,” he said. “But when I listen to you I hold the chair and I put my feet right firmly on the ground to feel the reality and the profundity of things. You aren’t going to take me away with you. You are going to leave me right here where things are solidly real, so I feel the place under my foot and I feel the things next to my hands.