We will take a simple little verse and show you why it is not addressed to the natural man, Ecclesiastes 3:15: “That which is, already has been; that which is to be, already has been; and God seeks what has been driven away.” The “natural man” cannot grasp that, for to him reality is based only on the evidence of the senses. The man of reason could justify the verse’s end, saying if it has any meaning then the writer must mean recurrence. The sun comes every day and the moon completes its cycle and the seasons come and go. If we took a picture of the universe today, the scientists can compute how long it will take to return to this point in the picture. So the intellectual man could justify the verse; but that is not what is meant, for it is addressed not to the man of reason or the man of sense, but to the man of Imagination. What is it all about? “That which is, already has been; that which is to be, already has been, and God seeks what has been driven away.”

We are told that he made generic man (male-female) in his own image and called them “Man.” Then we are told that this man was driven out, and the priesthoods tell us he was driven out because of some “original sin.” I send my child to school to prepare her for living in the world, not to punish her, but to do it I must send her out. In Barbados we have a good school system, though not beyond high school, and when I was a boy there I would see these children arriving from the other islands at the beginning of the school year with their new clothes and their new books. They thought it was exciting, not knowing what it was all about. But then the time came for the parents to kiss them goodbye and leave them in this strange place, and many a child cried himself to sleep not just for a night but for the whole term, such was their homesickness and loneliness. But the parents did it in love and left them there. Many sent their children on to England for still higher education at great sacrifice, and they could not afford to bring them home for vacations, so they had to wait years to see them again. But they did it in love and only love.

An infinite being of love did the same thing to us. We were “dead.” We were fully made and perfect but we were like the statue of Galatea. And then to quicken man and make him like God, he had to drive him out – not in space, out in mind. So God became man, the thing that was dead, and to do it he had to lower himself to this level – which in comparison to the higher states would be called “dead.” This garment of skin you wear has been long in preparation for the Son of God. We are told: “And He clothed them in garments of skin.” It is for schooling purposes.

Why are we here? To make images. The whole universe is an image of cosmic fancy. We are learning, so we begin with the simplest things – a job, a new home, a change in environment. We do it in the same way as our Father did it, but this is a classroom so we make mistakes – but the fault is not ours for we are not yet awake. There was the perfect system, existing for its creator, and then God set free certain portions of it, and so he “prepared the way for his banished ones to return.” God seeks what has been driven away, so that he may say: “This, my son, who was dead [and] is alive again.” So we are the one he is seeking. There is something hidden in this coat of skin that he is seeking.

We must get beyond the senses and begin to create. So I say to everyone that we must start the art of creating, no matter how simple or how big the thing is, no matter what it is that is creating. We create by faith, and faith is belief in the thing not yet seen. We create by assembling an image that implies we now have what we want in this world, and if we are faithful we bring it to pass, and as we do it we begin to move through this labyrinthine way for the return of his Son. “Whom God has afflicted He will comfort and call his friend.” So if you are hurt do not believe that it was because of what you did in the past. No. We pass through the fixed labyrinthine ways that he has prepared for the return of his Son. So the Son finally awakens and he walks with me through the whole roadway of these states.

You can create anything in this world if you know who you are, and if you do not know, that is why these platforms exist to teach you, for we are all interlaced. You may think you are insignificant; you may even be in jail – but even behind bars you are creating. And you need not remain in jail if you know who you are.

Have you ever flown over a lake or over the ocean? A friend recently flew in from San Diego. He had been in the navy and he had always owned boats, but he had never before observed what he saw now from the air. He was on the ocean side as the plane took off from San Diego, and looking down he saw this little thirty-footer coming in the opposite direction. He noticed the wake of this little ship and watched it widen, and nothing interrupted it. When his plane turned inland he was flying at three hundred miles per hour, but looking back he realised that this little boat – doing maybe thirty knots – was troubling the entire Pacific. As far as the eye could see this wake was moving and nothing could stop it and the occupant of that boat was totally unaware of what he was doing. We are all like that. You think you can imagine and not affect others? It is like the wake: in time it encompasses the whole world. It starts as a little “v” but it grows wider and wider. Everyone will be in some way influenced by my pattern. If one knows what he wants for himself or for others and remains faithful to it, he does not have to ask:  ,

A lady said to me the other night: “Look at my hands! A week ago they were blistered as if with acid; now there is no scar, but it took me five days of revision to bring about what you are seeing.” For unnumbered days prior to this nothing happened, but five days of revision brought this about. She produced in her own body this change. This seems stupidity to the rational man; to the Greek it is foolishness and to the Jew a stumbling block. It means that the man of reason cannot comprehend it; he cannot believe that one can create by imagination. The way is prepared for you, for there are unnumbered states, and we can create states to deliver others and pull them out of those into which they have fallen.

We are here on the earth as in a great schoolroom. We were not sent here to be punished, but to learn to become creators like our Father. There is no “original sin” for God made the decision to send me to “school.” In fact I was “dead.” I existed only for God, the creator of the perfect system, and then came the decision to subject me to this schoolroom in the hope I would be set free in the glorious liberty of the sons of God. Given the choice, what child would go to school? But loving the child the parents subject it to that training. How many years are taken from children’s lives and given to learning? It is the same with us, only it is a vaster school. So let no one tell you that you did anything wrong in being born. These coats of skin were prepared for us, for they help man – the invisible reality – to become conscious. And then some certain teachers sent by God tell them of the only value in the world and that is to awake. But if in the awakening you want a better home, a finer job, better health, then try to create it. Failure does not matter; you are learning. If you persist you will win. You create by faith. By faith the worlds were made and sustained. Things that are made are made from things that do not appear. So what would it be like if you were the man you want to be? See the world as you would like to see it.

Let me define Imagination for you. It is spiritual sensation, but the word “spiritual” is to most of us something that is not practical – the incorporeal as opposed to the corporeal. But Imagination is the power to perceive what is absent from the senses. Take a rose – there is not one here – but right now could I sense it in any way? Smell it? Touch it? I can, though it is absent from the senses. That is Imagination. If Imagination creates reality, such perception of what is absent from the senses makes it so. We have unnumbered case histories to prove it. Imagination is the power to perceive what is absent from the senses, and if you persist, you go beyond the sense man and go beyond the rational man. “The natural man receives not the things of the spirit of God for they are foolishness unto him.”

How can I discern my home spiritually? I cannot see it with my physical eye or touch it with my physical hands, but in Imagination I can do both. You may say: “I do not have a home.” Well, you do the same thing with a home you do not yet own.

Do it with funds you do not now possess. Nothing has quite the same smell as money, or the same sound. If it is money you want, use every sense to make it real. But do not say: “I perceive it because I know it is there.” To exercise the Imagination you see something that is not yet there. Then we get beyond the natural man, like the lady who in five days brought about a complete transformation in her hands. Everyone is here for image-making and to learn lessons, and the being who sent you here came with you and he has never left you. He became you and lit you with himself. As he lit man he awoke through the passage prepared for him into this schoolroom called earth. And then as he is lifted up he is embraced and given the ring and the fatted calf. “For this is my son who was dead and now lives again.” For the first state was death and then comes the quickening of this state. He was lost and now he is found again. “That which is already has been; that which is to be already has been, and God seeks that which was driven away.” So he drives him out by taking him out of mind. He is seeking Jacob in the Old Testament, and in the New Testament, Jesus. For when he finds him, he is Jesus. As he finds him, his is the reality of being, which is Jesus. He will find him in every being in the world. When this begins to awaken in you, the old form cannot contain it any more than new wine can be contained in old bottles. You cannot take this new wine of truth and confine it to the old dogma – it will blow it apart. So it has to take a new form as the Spirit begins to awaken within one.

So make your image and ask no one to help you, for like the wake of the ship it will change the whole world, if it is necessary to the fulfillment of your drama. “Everything in the Pacific had to encounter that wake; nothing could stop it.” You are the ark of God and what you are imagining is influencing all the others who are also imagining. So Imagination changes things. Do not base it on facts. Truth as we see it is not confined to facts but depends only upon the intensity of Imagination. Everyone can do it – but often reason will interfere. A friend told me tonight that he desired the answer to a certain problem and it was given to him. He said: “I prayed to the being within me.” It was a financial picture and he got the answer, but it seemed so stupid he did not apply it. Although he did share in it, it brought about everything that he desired. Reason interfered and he did not put his money into a certain venture. Reason stands between the man of sense and the man of Imagination.

Have you read Prodigal Genius, the Life of Nikola Tesla? He said there was nothing that was not within the Imagination. He conceived of alternating current, and when Edison told him it could not be done he said: “But I see it, and I am stopping it and starting it.” And when they brought his model into the factory they did not change a bolt of it.

A friend of mine, a violinist, cut an accurate model of something he had seen in his mind. It was a collapsible box such as now used by department stores to hold dresses and such. He had it patented and sold his patent for $10,000. Not one person in this country but has used that kind of box. Harry Webb got it in a vision. The manufacturer made millions. Harry did not labor for it. Reason was suspended and this came through.

Apply this principle to the little things of life and let no one tell you it is too material; the same ones will ask you for whatever it is when you discard it. You are here in this schoolroom to create out of your imagination and to do it by faith. Imagine and create the noblest concepts for yourself or for others and live in [them], and in a way you do not know, you will influence the lives of everyone in the world, and everyone who will be needed to bring about your dream will be drawn into it and brought to you. Even those who seek to stack the cards against you and think they are doing so very cleverly will find that the very thing they did will instead stack the cards against themselves. You are influencing everyone in this world when you are imagining. Who knows what being now in solitary is not disturbing the whole vast world. He will never be accused, for he is not out. They can find approximate cause, but they cannot blame him for he was in a cell. Yet he could cause a wave of hate out of the depth of his own being. That is why it is so important to imagine wisely. There is only one being awakening and that is God, and we were put into this schoolroom in love even though many a night, like the children, we cry. Loving fathers here have sent their unwilling children to school; a loving heavenly father sent you here on earth. You apply it and use the greatest talent in the world, which is himself. That is Imagination.

I cannot begin to tell you the thrill that is in store for you as you begin to live by Imagination. And then you can pass through all these states which were prepared for the return of his banished ones. Not a state but has been fixed before he put his Son into the depth to rise. So as he is the life of man, it is really God who is rising. So we deliver ourselves from states and at the same time deliver others from the same state. No matter what a man has done, he is only in a state and can be lifted out.

When we begin to awaken we will begin to comfort and heal, for whom God afflicts he did it for a sound end, and that was that he might awaken. “This is my son who was dead and now liveth.” The most monstrous beast that ever walked the earth cannot be lost, for God is also present in him. If one could be lost then God could be lost, for he became his Son that he might awaken that Son as God.

So make your dream and live in it and it will come true. We are told that as the sower sowed, the seed fell on four kinds of soil. The first is not prepared; it is the highway, and no seed took root. These are those who will not listen. Then you will find one who will take this teaching, but it falls on stony ground. They get something new but there is no root. The first thing they say is: “Oh, it would have happened anyway!” The third fell among the “thorns and thistles.” It grows deeper than the one on the rock, but they really believe that it is only with money they can get things and so the teaching was choked by the thorns of their unbelief. Then there is the well-prepared ground, and it roots deeply and produces fifty and a hundred been prepared for your education and that it is all interwoven in the labyrinthine ways of your own mind. And then you learn to walk in the feeling of your wish fulfilled, and you can create states from this heavenly alphabet of God, and then we find how the entire Bible story is a true story as seen through the eyes of those who wrote it. It is the history of the soul of man and someday you will know it is taking place in you, and then it moves rapidly and you will understand the vision you did not understand before. Then you can say: “The whole Book spoke of me!”

So, speaking of the one that God is seeking, the one who was lost, who found him? God found him. You find it unfolding within you. And then you see that you cannot from now on use the old bottle or the old frame, for the vision differs and you cannot put new cloth on old garments, or new wine in old bottles, [and] your friends tell you that if you do this you will have no listeners. But you must go blindly on, because you have been given the new wine. You see no one who is important and you do not consider the wise or the foolish to be in supreme states, but you see them passing through these states into which we may all fall as we are being educated, as we move from the state of death to the divine liberty of the sons of God.

So if you get a vision, do not let reason interfere like my friend who lost $50,000 because he allowed reason to interfere and did not follow through on the answer that was given him. Reason divides the natural man of sense from the man of Imagination. Blake says: “Those who restrain desire do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained, and the restrainer or reason usurps its place and governs the unwilling. And being restrained, it by degrees becomes passive, till it is only the shadow of desire.” If you desire the recovery of a friend, do not restrain it, for then reason will restrain it. Let no one tell you he is suffering because of the past. You are called on only to forgive him. You are not the judge. Let no one tell you that your father punishes. He seems to do it is for a purpose: “I kill, I heal, I wound, I make alive,” etc. Choose life, but there must be the contrary to awaken you. But we may choose from the tree of life, which is truth and error.

So deliver anyone from the state into which he has fallen. [Now] you see what the prophet meant: “That which is already has been,” etc., for the schoolroom is prepared for the awakening Son of God.

Now let us go into the silence.

When we read the scriptures, we find the thing says the raising of Lazarus, which is the most fantastic thing you can imagine. A man who is dead for four days and his sister said, “By this time there’s an odor.” And so he raises Lazarus. And yet only one evangelist recorded it; only John tells the story. Matthew, Mark, and Luke do not mention the story of Lazarus. How could you tell the story of a man in this world who could raise someone who has decayed and bringing him back to life, as we understand life, and not tell it as part of his biography? Yet it is only mentioned in the gospel of John.

So I could take you through the many stories and show that one story is told by two, sometimes three, and only by one. But here, in this story of the trial, all mention it. It has tremendous significance, this story of the greatest trial that ever took place in eternity. And may I tell you, it’s taking place here tonight, and you are the witnesses. You are the ones who will either cry out for the release of one or the other. It’s entirely up to you, for this is the story; it must always take place in this manner. The supreme effort of God to reveal himself in the present tense was the coming of Jesus. Jesus came to reveal God as the eternal contemporary. That’s the trial. One believes it or they disbelieve it. But here is this supreme effort to reveal himself in the present tense, for the present tense is “I AM. That’s my name forever. I have no other name” (Exodus 3:14). Man either believes it or he disbelieves it, and this is the trial.

Let us turn to the gospels, the 18th chapter of the gospel of John. Here, a man is on trial. He knows who he is, for he’s had all the experiences to reveal the being that he is; sent into the world to tell the world who he is; and tell them who they are, for they’re one. So he comes to tell the world who he is. He’s brought in to trial and Pilate, the arm of Caesar, is trying him. Pilate said to him, “What is truth?” but he doesn’t reply; he doesn’t answer. Pilate said to the crowd, “I find no crime in him. But you have a custom that I should release a man to you at this season of the year, at Passover; will you have me release the King of the Jews?” They cried out, “Not this man, but Barabbas!” And then it simply states, “Barabbas was a robber.” That’s all that it states, “Barabbas was a robber.” Not this man, release Barabbas.

Well, here is the trial. Who is Barabbas? Because Barabbas was a robber, he’s only mentioned in one little statement but in four gospels. It’s very significant. To find out who Barabbas was let us find out who the thief and the robber is in scripture. We go back to the 10th chapter of the gospel of John, that anyone who enters in any other way than through the door is a thief and a robber. They did not understand it. So he said to them, “Iam the door.” There is no other way into the sheepfold: “I am the door.” Anyone who attempts to come in any other way is a thief and a robber (verses 1 and 9).

Now, you present the case to the world. Will you believe it? Will you believe, as you are seated here tonight, regardless of your present limitations, the only door into your success, into your future that is as you would conceive it or desire it to be, there’s only one door, and that door is I AM? There is no other door into that sheepfold? And if you go through that only door, the sheep will hear your voice, they will recognize your voice as the shepherd, and they will respond and come out? So I decide that I would like to be, and I name it. I would like to be healthy if I am unwell at the moment. I would like to be gainfully employed if I am unemployed. I would like to be and I name it—to be happily married. And I name all the things that I would think would constitute a lovely life in my world. Do I really believe there’s only one door into that sheepfold, where I could bring all these unseen things out into my world? And these things can only respond to the voice of the shepherd, and the shepherd is I AM?

So he asked the crowd and the crowd shouted out, “Release Barabbas!” They would not have Jesus released; they’d have none of it. So they chose the robber, and the robber rules over them to this very day—that’s the world—I chose the robber. My senses rob me of all that I could be. So I see my bank balance. I know the world, as my senses allow it, I know what reason dictates in my world, and yet I want to be other than what they dictate. Yet I can’t bring myself to believe the only way into that sheepfold is by the only door in the world, and the world’s door is I AM.

So here, Jesus comes to reveal God in the present tense and man refuses it. So they speak of God in the past, he was or he will be, but few people in world can believe in the reality of I AM. And that’s the great trial. You are on trial tonight because you’re asked the question: Will you believe that your own wonderful I-am-ness is the one and only God? Or do you believe because of your present social position, intellectual position, financial position that you are less than someone else, and you allow your reason to dictate this as something that is final? Can you believe tonight in this trial and really believe that I am… you name it… and dare to believe it?

I could tell you unnumbered stories where it has worked. I could tell you unnumbered stories if people would believe me. In this audience tonight, there sits a man who, only a few weeks ago, was let out of a job. I told him it would make no difference to me if he was let out of a job and they told him it was forever and permanent and that I would hear good news for him, good news. And so I heard exactly what he would tell me were it true. Tonight, just before I took the platform, he could tell me that he’s been transferred to a new job, completely new job, where his income is in excess of what it was before. All things being relative, when you make $13,500 on a job, that’s not hay, yet it could be a hundred thousand. And I’m telling you right now, I don’t care what he’s ever done in the world that exceeded $13,000, it could easily be, if that’s what he wants. There’s only one door into the sheepfold and that door is I AM.

The supreme effort that God has ever made to reveal himself to us in the present tense came through Jesus. So Jesus comes affirming God as the eternal contemporary, forever and forever. If tomorrow you have a child, or a grandchild, they are going to say “I am”—it’s contemporary, it’s forever contemporary, eternally contemporary. And there wasn’t a “he was”; it’s always “I am.” And so for one to declare “I am” and just simply name it and sleep just as though it were true, there’s no power in the world that can stop it.

Now, this is one level of this fantastic trial. There are numberless levels to this trial. First of all, the word Barabbas means “son of a father.” Jesus means “savior.” Barabbas means “son of a father.” For every child born of a woman is the child of a father. Bar usually means “daughter”; and Ben, son, but they’re interchangeable depending upon the context. And so, Barabbas is now known as “son of a father.” And they chose the son and denied—it doesn’t say “the father”—but I will show you how they denied the father. For Jesus said, in the same gospel of John, “When you see me you see the Father, how can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? He who has seen me has seen the Father,” so he declares, “I am the Father” (14:9). I go back just one verse before it, the 6th verse of the 14th of John: “I am the way, the truth, the life; no one comes unto me (my Father), save by me. But no one comes unto the Father, but by me. Then they said, ‘Show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.’ He said, ‘I have been so long with you, and yet you do not know me, Philip? He who has seen me has seen the Father.’”

Now they deny the Father to fulfill prophecy: they will kill you, excommunicate you, and this they will do because they believe that they are pleasing God; and they do it because they know not the Father (John 16:2). For there’s a prophecy that when a son destroys the enemy of Israel the Lord will set his father free. But they didn’t choose the father to set him free; they set the son free. The one that robs them morning, noon, and night, they set him free. They wouldn’t set the father free. This I am quoting from the 17th chapter, the 25th verse of 1st Samuel, “He who destroys the enemy of Israel I will set his father free in Israel.” The father of the one who destroyed the enemy, his name was I AM, called Jesse, but the word Jesse, the word Jehovah, and the word Jesus are identical in meaning: they mean simply I AM. I will set that being free, and his name is I AM.

Now, if tonight you could do what dozens of you or hundreds of you have done and believe that this is not a little trick, it always works and really believe in it, you’d believe in God. When a lady sits in this audience and she’s in her seventies she has no money and she dares to sleep in a home in need of repair—and she has no money—and then she looks at the unrepaired, unpainted house, and she could smell the paint, and she could see the whole thing as it would be seen were it true that things are exactly as she wants them to be, and she sleeps in that assumption, what is she actually saying? If I said to her, “Who is smelling anything?” She would say, “I am smelling paint.” She said I am. And “What do you see?” “I am seeing a repaired house.” “What else?” “I am seeing that the whole thing has been paid for.” So she falls asleep in the assumption of seeing from her own wonderful center. “I am seeing it. I am smelling the paint,” all of these things she’s doing; and in one month, it’s all repaired and painted and paid for, with a surplus of $7,000, a gift from one she had never seen in this world, only communicated with her two or three times in the course of a year.

And here, she saw it. Whether she’s here tonight or she’s been coming recently, I do not know—her story I’ve told in my latest book. She may even have forgotten the name of God. Who did it? Well, she might point across the water to a lady in England, 8,000 miles away, who died and left a certain will where she received $7,500 in US currency, which allowed her to do all these things, with something left over. A considerable amount left over. She might think the cause of it all was one who died. I tell you the cause of it all: she called upon the only name of God in this world. She went into the sheepfold through the only door in the world, and that door is I AM. So she fell asleep in her bed. But before she fell asleep, she saw and could smell the paint; she saw the repaired areas all painted over, and she felt herself giving a check in full payment for all work done. And then she slept. Because it was so much fun she did it for, maybe, nine or ten days. Then came this wonderful draft from England and a letter from the bank, Lloyd’s Bank it was, telling her of the story.

She entered the sheepfold; and they all heard her voice, and they all came out. The sheep happened to be the money. Everything in the world responded to her voice. She was calling them out, calling out paint, calling out the repair job, and calling out everything. They only respond to the voice of the shepherd. Well, who is the shepherd? “I am the shepherd.” There is no other shepherd. If you think he will shepherd you and put your trust in our president or our mayor or our governor or your father or mother or some uncle who’s about to die, and so you are now giving him the most marvelous meal in the world because he’s going to leave you in his will, so he is your shepherd; and all these you think are the shepherds, you are simply looking in vain. There is no other shepherd, and no other door into eternity save the one door and that door is I AM.

So here is the greatest trial that ever took place in eternity, and you are called upon to scream out the one you want released. And the world invariably screams out—but not all; there’s always that minority who will scream out, “Release Jesus!”—but the majority invariably will scream out “Release Barabbas! Release the robber!” And so they chose the robber, and throughout the centuries, the robber has ruled over them, right down to this day. So you and I will go to bed tonight and our senses will dictate what we ought to believe to be true in this world. Read this morning’s paper and ninety-nine percent of the morning’s paper, including the ads, all paid for. You read an ad—that’s obvious it’s been paid for—and there may be something you would like to buy. It’s perfectly all right; it has been paid for and you know it.

But you don’t know all the news items were paid for. That has been concealed. They’re all paid for. All the press agents all over the world; there is not one person in this world who is in the public eye who does not maintain some press relationship. They call them—these, not “press agents”—they’ve been glamorized into some other name. But it’s still—they take your money month after month, and they put these little items into the story, and you read it morning, noon, and night. So you go to bed tonight, and you know all these things because you read it. That’s what you know. And you are fed morning, noon, and night on all this, and you believe that to be true.

I tell you: forget the entire vast world, and ask yourself a simple, simple question, “What would I like to be?” Just look at the world, “What would I like to be?” Forget Cuba, forget Russia, forget China, and forget all this stuff that is going on in the world. What would I like to be? A decent, wonderful being that contributes to the good of the world? To be happily married? Yes, to be in this world and contribute to the good of the world but really contribute, so that when I am gone and my children’s children are gone that they will say, “He gave a thought to the world that has fed the world.” The unborn tomorrow could be fed by what I have left behind me.

Would I like to do that, at the same time not neglecting my obligations tonight? For I am married—there is a husband, a wife, a child, a father, a mother, and all these things in this world—and they must all, if I love them as I think I do, take care of them. And so I want enough to leave them cushioned. Regardless of all things, but maybe they didn’t hear me. But they don’t need my cushion, but maybe they didn’t hear me. I’m selfish enough that if they didn’t hear me—that there’s only one door in the world into the great kingdom—that I could still leave them a cushion so that they’ll be cushioned against tomorrow’s blows. All right, I want that. Well, then, regardless of what the world will tell me, I will assume tonight that I am what I desire to be and dare to fall asleep in the assumption that it’s true, just as though it were true. Regardless of what the whole vast world will tell me, I will actually believe in it. So I will cast my vote: “Release Jesus and you hold on to Barabbas,” or else I will say, “Release Barabbas and hold on to Jesus.” And so it is entirely up to us. I either believe it, or I don’t believe it. The one called Jesus, his name is I AM.

Now let me quote you from the 4th chapter of Galatians. Whoever added one little phrase in it, all right, maybe they had reasons for it: And he had a physical handicap. It is Paul speaking. “When I came to you, I was a trial to you.” He said, “I was a trial, yet you accepted me.” And then one little phrase divides the thought—we will omit the phrase; it’s the tenth verse. You read the tenth and eleventh verses of the 4th of Galatians. Omit the phrase. “And yet you accepted me and received me as ChristJesus.” He’s telling you who he is. You accepted me, now are you going to turn back like those in the desert who disbelieved?

And then he said, “I see that you are observing days and months and seasons and years! I am afraid I have labored over you in vain” (Galatians 4:10). Here we are in what is called a season, the Lenten season, and then we have another season and another month. We had a few years ago the Marian year, and all this goes all the way back. I see that “you observe days, and months and seasons and years! I’m afraid I have labored over you in vain.” That man could turn outside of himself when the whole thing has been revealed to him—who he really is—and believe in the sacredness of a certain day or a certain month or a certain season or a certain year! He is trying to tell the whole vast world who he is: and they received him as Jesus Christ.

There’s only Christ. There’s only Jesus. Jesus Christ is God, and so are you and so am I, if I believe it. I am it even if I don’t believe it. But if I don’t believe it, then I go through all the fires of hell in this world. If I believe it, there’s no being in this world that can stop me from sleeping this night in the assumption that I am the man that I would be, just as though it were true. Falling asleep in that assumption, just as though it were true, I will bring it to pass in my world because I call all my sheep out, and my sheep are the invisible realities. No one sees them. They come right out and follow the voice of the shepherd whose voice they hear. They will not obey the voice of a stranger, only the voice of the shepherd. And the shepherd is “I AM.”

So here is the greatest trial in the world, and you are the one to judge. You sit as though you sat in a jury, and you bring in your verdict. And so he rises and asks those who hear the testimony. “And it is customary,” and may I tell you, there is no evidence as far back as man can go, there is no evidence to support this claim, whatsoever. There is nothing that we know of save in scripture. There is no custom to support this amnesty, where you forgive someone at this season of the year, none whatsoever. As far back as man can go, no scholar, and no historian can find any such custom, where there was an amnesty at Passover. It’s only attested to in scripture. So you can see it’s a play. It is a fantastic play and here is the play and every moment of time the play is taking place. “It is your custom that I release to you one man. Would you have me release the King of the Jews?” For he is the king of the Jews, and who is he? Jesus. Who is Jesus? I am and so are you and so is every being in the world. That’s Jesus. And his name is “I AM,” so the name is one with Jehovah: “I and my Father are one” as told us in John 10: “I and the Father are one.” His name is what? I AM. If I’m one with him, well then, what’s my name? I AM. And there is no other way in no other door, just one.

And so who will you have me release, the King of the Jews, whose name is I AM or release Barabbas, who’s a robber, a man based purely on the senses of the body? “Release Barabbas!” So they released the robber, and he to this day rules them. For man cannot believe, or is unwilling to believe, that something is real that his senses cannot confirm. He must have it confirmed by the senses. If reason allows it or my senses allow it, then I will accept it. But to sleep this night… I’m unemployed. They tell me there are six million unemployed and I’m not as qualified as I think they’re looking for certain qualifications, and I’m to believe that I am gainfully employed and put it up beyond what I made before, more than I ever made before? And go to sleep just as though it were true, in the conviction that it is true? And then I am employed, and it is beyond what I make.”

So when he told me I can’t tell you my thrill. He will not be here because this takes him away a hundred-odd miles. I say to him “Good!” Go and tell it. Tell it to those in your sphere. Tell it to everyone that you meet. If we never meet physically again, it really doesn’t matter. I like him personally, he likes me personally; but the physical contact, that’s not important. We are forever one in eternity, and so he can’t get away from me and I can’t get away from him, not in eternity. He heard the story, and he knows it works. Now go and tell it, tell it to every being in this world, whether they believe it or not, tell it. That’s the story.

So here we are, at every moment in time, we’re called upon to pass judgment upon the eternal drama—the greatest trial that ever took place. God is on trial, and he is presented to the world, and yet the sense-man that he wears is presented. Because the sense-man is what he wears, and so he presents it. Would you believe in me that you cannot see? Well, you can’t see I AM. You can see I am a man, that you can see, that’s the sense-man, a being of sense. But man cannot believe in the reality of I AM, something entirely different.

So here, this great trial will be presented this coming Sunday, called Palm Sunday. But they all will tell the story of how they placed the palms before him. If you have the ApocryphalGospels, may I recommend that you read, if you have it, the Gospel of Nicodemus; it’s called also The Acts of Pilate. In fact, it’s a combination: the title is The Gospel of Nicodemusandthe Acts of Pilate. What a fantastic story! It is all about this trial. It’s in the Apocryphal New Testament. I think many of you have the James’ combination of all the Apocryphal books. Why they deleted them I will never know, because they add so much to the thought. But here in this story of the great trial, where they placed the little piece of cloth before him as he came in to trial, and all the standards and all the images bowed before him. And they couldn’t believe that such things could happen, so they did it over and over and over again. Every time he was brought in, they all bowed before him. Every inanimate object bowed before him as he came into the building on trial.

How true that is! May I tell you, you are going to have the thrill of your life one day, when suddenly the whole vast world’s going to stand still before you. And it will be dead but really dead. You’ll look at it and then you’ll release it and it will move on; and you stop it, right in its motion, you’ll stop it, to prove that you truly are life and life itself. So when you read these words, “I am the way, the truth and the life” you’ll know how true that statement is. When he said, “I am the truth,” can’t you see what marvelous thing he’s telling you: a true judgment need not conform to the external fact to which it relates. Today I will say what is true concerning my world. Well, I pay so much rent and I have an average income of so much and I have certain obligations to life and these seem to be the facts, that’s true. I tell you, that isn’t true, for a true judgment need not conform to the external fact to which it relates. Truth depends on the intensity of imagining and not upon fact. So I will imagine that I am and I’ll name it that which I want to be. Believing that I am that which I’m assuming that I am and remaining loyal to that assumption, I become it.

I have done it or I wouldn’t be here tonight. I have actually done it, time and time again. But man will always slip back into Barabbas, the man of sense. We must ever remember the trial and always move out. In spite of all of the facts that would deny it, live in the dream just as though it were true, and no power in the world can stop you from becoming the fulfillment of your dream. But no power! You don’t need any other being because God’s name is not “he is” or “she is” or “they are”; his name is “I AM.” Before you say anything in this world, you have to say, “I am.” You don’t pronounce it. If I ask, “Who are you?” you’ll say, “John.” But before you say John, you say, actually in the depths of yourself, “I am John.” Before you said anything you actually were aware of being, and that awareness of being was actually declaring in the depths “I am.” And that is God. There is no other God.

So God stands on trial, and he will be tried in all the churches of Christendom this coming week. They will all weep and carry on, how God was tried, and the crowd shouted out release a thief and a robber, one who was an insurrectionist, and they do not know who he is. They’ll make some mental picture of a horrible beast, who was an awful, awful man. And that’s not the man at all. They are the man, for they are calling to release themselves of sense and make that the real being in the world and hold on and deny Jesus.

So listen to these words in the 16th chapter of Acts, “Believe in the Lord Jesus and be saved, you and your household (verse 31).” Well, the only Jesus that you could ever believe in that could save you would be I AM. Well, that’s his name (Exodus 3:14). Believe in the Lord Jesus and be saved, you and your household. He has only one name in this world, for the word Jesus simply means I AM. It is spelled Yod He Vau Shin Ayin. The root of the name of Jehovah is Yod He Vau. The Shin Ayin put into the name of Jesus, which is Jeshua, is for a definite purpose. Shin is made in three little prongs like that, and it’s called “a consuming fire; a tooth that devours, that consumes.” An Ayin is an eye. Were it not for that in the name of Jesus, I would have to accept as final everything that I see. But in the name of Jesus, which is called Savior, what I don’t want I can consume. So it’s Yod He Vau Shin Ayin. So the Yod He Vau is the root; that’s Jehovah, that is God, and that is I AM. But a Shin is put into my name, so is an Ayin, but a Shin. I can just see the world. I don’t like the way you look. “Don’t you feel well?” No. Well, then I will consume it. I will see you as you ought to be seen by me and the world, seen by yourself; therefore, if I actually see you differently, I am consuming what formerly you appeared to be.

How would I do it? The Ayin is an eye. So what is his name when he comes into the world, and how does he operate? Listen to it carefully, the 11th chapter of the Book of Isaiah: “When he comes into the world, he will not judge by what his eye sees or decide by what his ears hear (verse 3).” So I see… go to the hospital; you’re going to die. Go to anyone else, and you see it’s fatal. Regardless of the nature, it’s all—they can’t get a job, there are too many unemployed, this, that, and the other. There it is, the fact. I will not judge by what my eye sees, neither will I decide by what my ears hear. So what would I do then? I will see what I want to see. But now a Shin is present—it consumes the former state, completely consumes the fact as it seemed to me to be real—and I will put in its place what I want to see and what I want to hear.

So then they tried to quench the voice of Peter and John, and they said what they would do to them if they continued to teach this story. This is the 4th of Acts, and they said to the Sanhedrin, the great wise men of the day, “Whether it is right in the eyes of God to believe in you and not in God, you must judge; but we cannot speak other than what we have seen and heard.” So whether you think I should do what you tell me I should do, all right, you judge it. The wise men of the world, who were called the leaders in politics or in religion, they will tell you, without vision, what you should see and what you should preach. They had no vision, none whatsoever and never had one in eternity, but they’re going to tell you how you should tell the story. But “whether it is right in the eyes of God to listen to you rather than to God, you must judge; for we cannot preach other than what we have seen and heard” (verse 19). So I cannot preach other than what I’ve seen and heard.

And may I tell you: I have seen this story. When you see it from afar, it’s one man, just one man; and as you approach it, it becomes unnumbered races and nations of people. I saw it so clearly one night when Blake asked me to fall backward and I did exactly what he told me to do to produce the vision. And here was one man, a glorious man, a radiant man, and his heart was all like living ruby. I approached him. I moved forward. I fell through space like a meteor, and when I came to a standstill, here I saw one man. Then at Blake’s suggestion, I moved forward. Well, this was one man, a radiant being. As I came closer, I noticed the heart was like a ruby; and there were unnumbered, innumerable beings, making up the heart. The whole body was made up of nations and races—the whole body. When I came close enough, I recognized myself. I was he, containing within myself the whole of humanity. So I know from experience that when you see God, you’ll see yourself. At a distance, it’s one man; and as you approach, it becomes unnumbered men composed of races and nations—all one.

So this whole vast thing is the most wonderful play, and the final drama leading up to that very exit from this sphere is this trial. So I hope that you will bring in your verdict tonight and your verdict will be “Release Jesus!” But if your verdict is no, I must accept my senses more than I will accept the invisible reality; well, then, it’s your choice. You’re free to bring in your verdict. But your verdict will be brought by you. I can recommend the spirit if you dare to believe in the reality of your own wonderful I-am-ness, believing that it is God and there is no other God. Listen to the words, “I am the Lord thy God, the Holy One of Israel, thy Savior… and besides me there is no savior” (Isaiah 43:3,11). There is no other savior. “I am the Lord thy God, the Holy One of Israel, thy Savior… and besides me there is no savior.” Believe that and rather die than turn back, and you are moving toward being born from above.

Now let us go into the Silence.

Q:   (inaudible)

A:   Is there a fixed guide? Well, some believe that all of us present here have a certain code of decency, and I would go along with it, but I would put into practice what I told you tonight. I would guide myself with my code of ethics. I couldn’t, if you asked me tonight—although all things are possible to God—if you asked me to join with you in knowing that someone was dead for your good fortune, I could not. I would not deny you the right to want it, but I would say go elsewhere. I could not actually dream with you that someone died because you were left in his will. But I would not deny you the right to want such a thing. I would leave it alone up to your judgment. So we all have a certain code. And I think that anyone who would come to a meeting of this nature would have a code of decency—what I would call a code of decency. And so I’m always right if whenever I use my Imagination I use it lovingly on behalf of another. If I ever use my Imagination lovingly on behalf of another, I am on the right track. So that to me would be the guide: Is it a loving thing to do?

We have that wonderful statement in the Bible, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” So would you have someone, because you have wealth and you’ve named them, see that you make your exit tonight because it would be easier for them tomorrow? Would you want that? No, well then,… the state today. So do unto others as you would have them do unto you. It is the simplest code in the world. It is done in the positive manner: do—not do not do. But it is written in the positive in the New Testament. In all other religions, it is written in the negative: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” So what would I like in this world? Something lovely? Something wonderful? Well, do the same thing to anyone in the world; and every time you use your Imagination lovingly on behalf of another, you have done the right thing.

Q:   (inaudible)

A:   Read Galatians, the 4th chapter, the 14th verse. That one little thought that is “as an angel” is superfluous because the next phrase is “as Christ Jesus.” But “as an angel,” it might stop right away. That is all inserted to cushion him because they actually saw him as the central being himself: they “looked upon me as Christ Jesus.” But if you put the little phrase before it, “as an angel,” that arrests the mind and you don’t associate Paul with Christ Jesus. I tell you, he was the one in whom the whole thing awoke. It was Paul. Everything has to come right out of the Jew. The world will not believe it. It is the most fantastic story in the world.

Now, Bishop Pike, who was born a Catholic and became a priest, gave it up and became an agnostic. Then he became a most brilliant lawyer in New York City, practicing corporate law. He then rejoined the church as a Protestant priest. He then rejoined the church as a Protestant, and rose in no time—he was only in his forties—to Bishop Pike of California. If you have ever heard him, he is an able speaker. He has a wonderful brilliant mind. Bishop Pike made the statement “I am a Jew.” Remember, he was born and raised a Catholic, became a Catholic priest, gave it up, became an agnostic, became a lawyer, and went back into the priesthood, this time as a Protestant priest. Now he is the highest in the Protestant world. You can’t go beyond that. You may move from one section to the other, but he is tops in Northern California. And he said, “I am a Jewbecause I am a Christian. I could be a Jew and not be a Christian, but I can’t be a Christian and not be a Jew.”

You think about it. Meditate upon that thought. It’s true! The whole thing comes out of Israel. It’s a mystery, the most fantastic mystery in the world. So I am proud to say I am a Jew because I am a Christian. I have been born from above. I couldn’t possibly be unless I were the Jew. And I know when the veil is lifted and the whole thing is revealed, well, it’s fantasy beyond the wildest dream.

Good night!

I firmly believe that: “Man is all imagination, and God is man and exists in us, and we in Him;” [Wm. Blake, from “Annotations to Berkeley’s ‘Siris’”] “The Eternal Body of man is the imagination, and that is God Himself” [Wm. Blake, from “Laocoon – The Angel of the Divine Promise”] – the Divine Body that we speak of as Jesus Christ. I firmly believe that this is the Christ of Scripture that is buried in man – buried in the only Holy Sepulcher that there ever was, and that is the skull of man. And there he dreams the Dream of Life, and one day He will awaken within your skull, and then the drama of Christ as defined for us in Scripture will unfold within you, casting you in the first-person-singular, present-tense experience of the Lord Jesus Christ. Then you will know who He really is! You will actually awaken as the Lord Jesus Christ. That is the climax for every one born of woman.

But tonight let us get back to what I mean by imagination and what I mean by faith. First of all, faith is defined for us in the 11th chapter of the book of Hebrews. It is called a hymn in praise of faith. “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” (Hebrews 11:1)

By faith we understand a world was created by the Word of God, so that Things seen are made out of things that do not appear.” (Hebrews 11:3) That’s what we are told in the very first few verses of the 11th chapter of Hebrews.

Now, if faith is the evidence of things not seen and all things are made out of things that do not appear, then we must come to the conclusion that every natural effect has a spiritual cause, and not a natural. A natural cause only seems. It is a delusion of the fading memory. Man does not remember his imaginal acts, so when they come up and the harvest is ripe, he denies his own harvest. He cannot see where on earth what he is now experiencing could have been caused by him, because he has forgotten his imaginal acts. That is when he sowed it, and all things bring forth after their kind. Let no one be deceived, for God – which is his own imagination – is not mocked. As a man sows, so shall he reap.” (Galatians 6:7) So, I am forever reaping what I have planted, but because of my fading memory, I can’t remember when I did it. So, then, I deny what I am seeing as my own harvest.

Well, now, who is this God spoken of in this verse? He said, “By faith we understand that the world was created by the Word of God.” (Hebrews 11:3) Well, we are told in Scripture in the very first few verses of the book of John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (John 1:1) Then we are told, “The Word was made flesh and dwelt within us;” (John 1:14) therefore the Word spoken of here is equated with God. If the Word was not only with God, it was God, well, then, that’s God, and it now dwells in us.

Well, I tell you, this Word that dwells in you, spoken of in Scripture as the Lord Jesus Christ, is your own wonderful human imagination. This is the greatest secret in the world, and every one should strive after solving it. Supreme power, supreme wisdom, supreme delight lies in the solution of this mystery.

So, as far as I am concerned, the God who created it all and sustains it all is pure imagining in myself. He works in the very depths of my soul, underlying all my faculties, including perception; but He streams into my surface life least disguised in the form of productive fancy, like a daydream. A daydream is productive; a daydream is creative. I am planting when I daydream. I don’t have to be intense to drop a seed. I don’t have to go around and dig a hole and bury it. I can scatter it. So, a daydream is planting. So, I sit down and wonder, “Am I doing it lovingly?” I do not always check myself.

I may read the morning paper and then react on a story that I do not know whether it is true or false, but I react. Well, It knows exactly what I did, and It is my own imagination. It keeps the score, and so in time the harvest will come up, and I will see it. So, all objective reality is solely produced through imagining.

So, I say, imagining plus faith – I must actually believe in the imaginal act. Now, how do I go about doing it? That’s the important thing.

I am told by one scholar that if ordinary things that I observe in this corporeal world – if they are present, that is sense, if absent, that is imagination. The room around me seems to me more real than anything in the world because it is present. Yet I stand – I am not familiar with this room save once a year that I come for ten nights. I am far more familiar with the home that I have in Los Angeles, but at the moment it is not present to my senses, so I am told that is only an imagination. That is simply a memory image of what may be still a reality, but at the moment it could be gone. Yet I do not think it’s gone, so they tell me. All right, if I think of it but it is not present, then that is imagination. But if things are present, then that is sense.

Well, how do I make what is not present real? That is where we come to imagining plus faith. I have tried it unnumbered times, and may I tell you, it works. I could stand here and take a case history.

Years ago, right after the Second World War – the year was 1945, I sailed with my little family, my wife and daughter out to the Island of Barbados. I hadn’t seen the family through the war years, because there was no transportation available. I was in the Army for a very short span of time, about four months. Because of my age plus this law, I was honorably discharged because I was over 38. My son was in the Marines in Guadalcanal, but my little girl was only a matter of months in age. So, at the end of 1945 I sailed, on the first ship out, for there were no planes taking any one to the Indies. So, I sailed with my wife and my little girl on a one-way ticket, not thinking for one moment of the difficulty in getting back to New York, and I had a commitment to be in Milwaukee in the first week of May. So, I sailed the end of December – New Year’s Eve, to be exact. At the end of about three months, my brother Victor said to me, “You have a return ticket?” and I said, “No, but I want to get back the first week of May to go to Milwaukee.” He said, “How dare you leave the capital of the financial world, New York City, without making arrangements? All things are done there, and you have come to a little island like Barbados, and we have two little ships – one carrying a maximum of 65 passengers, and the other carrying a maximum of 120, one sailing out of Boston, one sailing out of New York, but all these islands are to be serviced, and we alone could use more ships several times a month. They only make a round trip – one makes it every 21 days, and the other one makes it every 32 days; and how dare you come out, knowing you must be back, without making any arrangement in New York City?”

Well, it was perfectly all right. I sat in my hotel room in a nice big easy chair, and I assumed it was a little boat that would tend the ship because we didn’t have a deep harbor in those days. We have one now, but there was no deep-water harbor, so I assumed that I was on a small little boat taking me out to the ship, and that my brother Victor and sister Daphne, my wife and other members of the family and little Vicki were all aboard the boat. Then I assumed that I was stepping off this little boat onto the gangplank. I could feel the rhythm; I could feel it give as I went up step after step after step. My mind wandered before I got to the top. So, I came back to the bottom again and started all over. It wandered again; I came back to the bottom and did it over.

When I got to the top I had no room where I could go. I simply assumed now: My hand is on the rail. I could feel the salt of the sea on the rail. I could feel the salt of the sea in the air, and then I looked towards the Island of Barbados with a mixed feeling: one of sadness because I was leaving the family, and one of joy because I was going back to America where I live. That was a peculiar feeling, but it was a natural feeling.

And while I had hold of the rail and assumed this state, I then fell asleep in the chair.

Now, I must go back. When I went down to the firm in Barbados to ask for transportation, they said, “You haven’t the chance of a snowball in hell of getting out of Barbados until October.” This was then the month of late March. Not a chance of getting out! They had a list that long and I was at the bottom of the list. Trinidad had a list that much longer, for they had so many more people. All the islands have lists. There were literally thousands of people waiting to get aboard, and they only had two ships, one carrying 65 and one carrying 120 passengers. So, they said, “Mr. Goddard, you have no chance of getting out before October.” I said, “All right.”

Then I sat and did that which would imply that I was sailing. I simply did exactly what I knew I had to do. I simply subjectively appropriated my objective hope. I hoped to be sailing on that ship, and so I subjectively appropriated the objective hope, for if I were sailing I would get into that little boat, get off onto the gangplank and walk up to the deck of the ship. The next day – the very next day – I had not dressed; I had not a thing to do but go to the bathing beach later on in the day. The phone rang, and it was the Alcoa Steamship Company asking me to come on down, that they had news for me. I asked them what news. They said we have passage for three sailing on the next ship, which will put you back in New York City on the 1st of May.

I went down, and I was very curious and asked, “Why do you offer it to me when the list, you told me, is so long, with hundreds and hundreds waiting on it who are all ahead of me? And what caused you to have the vacancy?”

Well, a lady on the island, so she told me, who desired to get out badly and wanted to go back to America – the first choice would be this lady. Well, suddenly she changed her feeling about it. Then they went down the entire list with no reason whatsoever and gave it to us, and they justified it in this manner:

“The ship only carries two in each room, but your little girl is only about three years of age, and she can sleep in a bunk with your wife, and you can have the other one. So, because she is such a little child – only three years old, we gave it to accommodate three rather than two, and the two that we do have couldn’t share it anyway because they are different sexes and not married.”

That is how she justified giving it to me when hundreds of people were before me. I know how I did it. Every natural effect has a spiritual cause, and not a natural. A natural cause only seems. It is a delusion. Well, I remembered what I did. It was only a matter of 24 hours between planting that seed and the springing of that seed into objective reality. By the 20th day of April I was on that boat, getting off in New York City by May the 1st to meet my appointment in Milwaukee.

I could multiply that by dozens and dozens in my own case, and unnumbered in those who attend my meetings. So, it is simply imagination plus faith. As we are told, without faith it is impossible to please Him. The one we please is not some external being; it is internal – your own wonderful imagination.

Now, I will put you to the test. We are told in the 13th chapter of II Corinthians: “Examine yourselves, to see whether you are holding to the faith. Test yourselves. Do you not realize that Jesus Christ is in you? – Unless indeed you fail to meet the test!” (II Corinthians 13:5)

Now I just gave you the test. This is the test: If the word “God,” “Lord,” “Jesus Christ” conveys the sense of an existent something outside of man, you have failed the test, for Jesus Christ is in you. He said, “Examine yourselves to see whether you are holding to the faith. Test yourselves. Do you not realize that Jesus Christ is in you? – Unless indeed you fail to meet the test!” (II Corinthians 13:5) If the word “Jesus Christ” conveys the existence of someone outside of you, you didn’t meet the test. And all things are done by Him. “Without Him was not anything made that is made.” (John 1:3) And He is your own wonderful human imagination!

So, here, when you know to Whom you pray and Who is actually doing it, you’ll find that it is your own wonderful human imagination. That is God.

“All things exist in the human imagination” [Wm. Blake from “Jerusalem”]. There isn’t a thing in this world that you and I call real – objectively real – that was not first only imagined. You name it!

The building in which we now are seated, everything here, the lectern, the clothes you wear, name anything here. You may go into other parts like the trees. We didn’t make those by imagination, but it was the Divine Imagination, the same as the human imagination, only we are keyed low. It is the same imagination, for there is only God. So, human imagination is one with Divine Imagination. On our level, God keyed Himself low with the weaknesses and the limitations of the body, God [literally] became as we are, that we may be as He is.” [Wm. Blake, “There Is No Natural Religion”]

In becoming man, He couldn’t pretend He was man. He had to actually become man, with all the weaknesses, with all the limitations and frailties of man, and assumed it completely. Then, in time, the whole thing unfolds within man, and man discovers that he is God! He discovers he is God because the drama is completely recorded for him. Everything said of Jesus Christ in Scripture, you are going to experience as something taking place within you. Not something of which you read as in the case of reading about another, no, it is all done within you. You stand dumbfounded. You are amazed beyond measure and belief. You cannot believe it, that you still capable of – well, of unlovely actions, could be that glorified. Yet you can’t deny the evidence of your senses. You cannot deny the experiences that you’ve had. And the whole thing will unfold in you. You will know from experience. I am not theorizing. I am not speculating. No one taught it to me. I never read it in a book – in the Bible, but I never saw it in the Bible until I had experienced it, and then I went back and researched the Scriptures to find it is all there, but adumbrated. It was not spelled out in a way that man could understand it. The whole thing was an adumbration from beginning to end; and when it takes place in man, and the man in whom it takes place tells it, those who hear him can’t believe it because they know him. They know his past. They know his background in every little detail, and they cannot believe their traditional concept of Jesus Christ to be what he is talking about that actually unfolded within him.

The Bible tells the same story: “He came to his own, and his own received him not,” (John 1:11) because really, in the end, there is only the Lord Jesus Christ. There is only God! God is buried in every being in the world, and only God will rise. And He will rise in the individual, and the individual in whom He rises, that one will know Who He is. And he will be the God of Scripture. That is the story.

But tonight, on the practical level you try it, knowing Who is doing it: that it is God doing it, and God is your own wonderful human imagination.

Now, take faith, as defined for us in the 11th chapter of the book of Hebrews, and you will see that it is simply the subjective appropriation of the objective hope. I wanted to be on that ship; that was my objective hope. Well, I first subjectively appropriated it. I did it as though it were true. I actually acted just as though the thing had happened. I walked up the gangplank, held the rail, looked back with mixed feelings, and then fell asleep. And when I found myself wandering, I went back to the very first step on the gangplank and did it over again, and went on doing it over and over until I could walk right up that gangplank and actually feel I am at the very top and turn around and put my hand on the rail. And strangely enough, in my imagination I allowed my brother Victor to carry my daughter Victoria up the gangplank, and to justify his action when we got off the little tender onto the gangplank, he said, “Come, your father’s arms aren’t strong enough to take you. I will take you.” But my arms certainly were strong enough to carry my daughter, but he had to justify it, as we all do. He had to justify that action, and then took her up. Well, that is exactly what he did when we got to the little boat!

So, here, I ask you just to listen to it and not say, Well, I’ve heard it, and forget it, but try it. You will be the operant power. It doesn’t work itself. We are the operant power. In fact, all day long we are operating it, but I would ask everyone to operate it wisely, nobly, consciously, and not go into a fantasy wildly that tomorrow, when it comes up, we will not forget the harvest. For everything in our world, man once imagined. And all the men of action in our world that you see out building the buildings and doing all the business – they are nothing more than the unconscious instruments of imaginative men.

A man sits down at the drafting board, and he has conceived a building. He does everything in detail all in his imagination, and then he turns the blueprint over to the men of action, and they get all the credit, but the man who did it was simply the man of imagination.

That is what William Butler Yeats meant. Having seen this law in operation, he said, “I will never again be certain that it was not some woman treading in the winepress that started that sudden change in men’s minds.” And because of it, so many nations were given to the sword because of some dream in the mind of some shepherd boy that lighted up his eyes for a moment before it went upon its way. Someone feeling herself neglected and wrongfully accused, and she is vivid in her imagination, when she, unknown by the world, is setting the world aflame. Many a man tonight is in jail, and wrongfully there; he knows he did not commit the crime for which he was charged, and he is paying a price that he feels he should not pay. That man’s mind is inflamed, and what is he doing? It is going undetected, but the events will appear in the world.

Two or three weeks ago I received a letter, and I thought it was a strange letter when I began to read it. It is from a prisoner. I do not know the man at all. He signed his name “Bob,” and enclosed a self-addressed envelope. He is at Folsom. Folsom is a place where only the hardened prisoners are sent. Well, he confessed that he heard me on TV, and he practiced it and it worked.

Well, I had twenty TV appearances on Sunday afternoons between 2:00 and 2:30. He said he applied it, and he said, “Neville, and it worked! Where I am going, I don’t know, but I am here for quite a stretch, and so it doesn’t matter whether you answer tonight, tomorrow or when you answer, because I am here. But I would like certain questions answered.”

That fellow is interested in the use of imagination. Strangely enough, they are vitally interested in the mystery of death. They would like to know if I can cast any thought whatsoever on death, based upon – naturally – my experiences; not things concerning others, but what I know concerning death.

Well, I wrote him just before I came up. By now he must have the letter. I wish I could go to Folsom and talk to the inmates and tell them of their true dignity – the Man that they are destined to be, for they are destined to be the Lord Jesus Christ! Every child born of woman is destined to be Christ, and to be conscious of the fact that he is the Lord. But how to get there and address them, I do not know. He has my letter. I wrote him in detail as much as I possibly could, and he will share it with those who are interested. They are vitally interested in death.

I told him, as I would tell anyone, I meet people who are not aware of the fact that they have made the transition. They know nothing of the fact that they have died, because they aren’t dead! They are not dead, and nobody can persuade them that they died. They are talking to a man who is just as alive as you are, and you tell him that he died and you went to his funeral and you know exactly where they put him in the ground, revealing what he would expect of you as a friend, but he laughs at you, because he knows he isn’t dead. I say, “No, you are not dead, but you died, you know.” “But aren’t you stupid,” he said to me – “I am not dead but I died!”

You see, there is all the difference in the world between restoration, which happens to everyone who dies here – instantaneous restoration in an unaccountable way in a new body – like it was before, but new – unaccountably new, and young. If you die at 90, you are 20, and it is an instantaneous restoration. Well, that is not Resurrection.

Resurrection is the story that I tell when man actually awakens from the dream of life, while the other is restored to continue the dream. He is dreaming the conditions round about him, as he is dreaming the conditions here.

What was it but a waking, controlled dream that I did when I went aboard the ship? When I got out of the Army, was that not a dream, a waking but controlled dream? When I put in my application for an honorable discharge, it was denied me and signed Colonel Theodore Bilbough, Jr. He was my Commanding Officer in the 11th Armored Division.” There was no appeal beyond my commander. I could not take it to the regimental commander or division commander; I could only take it to my battalion commander, and he was my commander.

And he signed it “Disapproved.” That night I went to sleep in my little bunk with all the other soldiers and assumed that I was in New York City in my own apartment in Times Square, where I had my apartment. I was in my own bed my wife was in her bed, and our little girl was in her crib. And then I got up – all in my imagination – and walked through my apartment and felt the familiar objects. I could see them all. I could see them in my mind’s eye. And I made it quite clear to myself that I was not there on furlough; I was honorably discharged and sleeping now as a civilian.

That same night before my vision about 4:00 in the morning came a huge white sheet, and here on the white sheet was the word “Disapproved,” signed Colonel Theodore Bilbough, Jr. Then came a hand – just a hand with a pen in it, and the pen scratched out the word “Disapproved,” and in bold script it wrote, “Approved.” Then a voice spoke, and the voice said to me, “That which I have done I have done. Do nothing.”

Nine days later the commanding officer, Colonel Bilbough, called me in, and after giving me a lecture about the best-dressed man in America is the man who wears the uniform of America – I said, “Yes, Sir.” Then he goes on, and I said, “Yes, Sir,” “Yes, Sir,” “Yes, Sir.” At the very end of it he said, “I have decided I am going to let you go,” and then he signed my release. That very day I was out of the Army honorably discharged. I didn’t tell him what I did. Would he have believed it? For geared as he was to war, sending millions of us into battle, could he believe that the imagination could bring about peace?

How can you take a man trained as he was trained and persuade him that an assumption, though false, if persisted in, will harden into fact? How could he possibly believe that? Yet I was the living evidence of what I had done. If I had told him what I had done, he would never believe that that was the cause of the physical phenomenon leading to the train and then the journey to New York City. That is exactly what I did in the vision of that night, just as I have told you. The sheet with his name and the word “Disapproved”; and then comes the hand striking out the word “Disapproved,” and it wrote in bold script “Approved.” And then this voice coming from the depths said, “That which I have done I have done. Do nothing.” I did nothing, and then nine days later he calls me in, approves it, shakes my hand, and he said to me, “Goddard, I will meet you in New York City after we have won this war.” I said, “Yes, Sir.” And that was it. No argument. I knew the causation behind it all, and I didn’t feel that that was the right time to share it with him. He was not in the mood to share what I had discovered. Well, I had discovered it, and I applied it. Why not apply the truth if you think you have found the truth? And so I found it, I used it, and it worked. When something proves itself in performance, what does it matter if the whole vast world rises up in opposition to it? It proves itself in the testing.

So, I am sharing with you that which I have proved. But it doesn’t work itself. You are the operant power. So, you take it home and know exactly who God is. Are we not told in the 4th Psalm, “Commune with your own heart upon your bed, and be silent.” (Psalm 4:4) Not with someone else’s heart – commune with your own heart. The words “heart” and “mind” are synonymous in meaning. Commune with your own mind, and trust that Mind; trust it implicitly. Believe in the reality of your imagined acts, and these imaginal acts will objectify themselves and become what the world calls objective facts. They will!

So, if you start behind the eight-ball, or behind anything that seems to be in opposition or an impassable something – well, you believe in God. I am telling you Who He is. Believe in the true God. Test yourself and see if you really believe in the true God.

I am convinced that ninety-nine percent of the world will claim to believe in God, but they believe in a false god. They stick him on the wall, made by human hands, and cross themselves. He isn’t there at all. Read the 115th Psalm. What a shocker! What a shocker when you see what man does with his own hands and worships that which he makes with his own hands and calls it God! He has no eyes that can see, no ears that can hear. He has eyes, he has ears, he has nostrils, he has arms, he has feet, but none of these things can move. The eyes can’t see, the ears can’t hear, the mouth can’t speak, the feet can’t move, and yet he looks upon it as God!

The 115th Psalm is the most marvelous thing to read. It is a shocker. And, then, come back to find the real God, the living God, the God that cannot die – the God that is in you, your Immortal Self. That God cannot die! And that is your own wonderful human imagination. And should you drop now, you would be instantly restored in a body just the same, only new, unaccountably new and young – not an infant, not born again, just new. How it happens, I cannot tell you. I only know I’ve seen them, and they do not know – the majority of them do not know that they have made the transition into a section of time best suited for the work still to be done in them.

So, it does not mean that because you drop in the year 1971 that you are going to find the year ’71 now. No. You could find yourself in the Year One Thousand or the Year Three Thousand, but that is irrelevant. The section of time into which you are placed is done by the depths of your own being. He knows best what you need for the work: that He has started within you, and He is slowly breaking down the wall of partition between two until they become one. He is rubbing out that wall between you and Himself; when it is completely rubbed out, you are one. It is essential that He leaves all and cleaves to his wife to become one, not two. You are His wife till the sleep of death is passed.

So, this is God’s emanation, and then, in time, He rubs out that little division and He becomes one with you. And when He becomes one with you, He awakes, and you aren’t two – you are one. And it is all spelled out for us in Scripture, and as we go through this series, the nine that follow tonight, we will try to explain it, using the Scripture to support my experiences. It is clearly stated, but I must confess I did not see it. I did not know it. I knew nothing of the Promise, even though it is right there in the Bible, speaking of promises, until it happened right here in this City twelve years ago tomorrow, on the 20th of July, 1959. It happened right here in this City at that hotel called Sir Francis Drake.

I had retired after a very pleasant meal with a friend of mine. I retired early. And then at 4:00 in the morning the whole drama unfolded within me. Then the whole series took twelve hundred and sixty days to complete, just as foretold in the 12th chapter of Daniel, and then reaffirmed in Revelation (Daniel 12:7; Revelation 11:3) one thousand two hundred and sixty days from the first great event to the fourth and final one.

I have recorded it all, and you have it in the book called “Resurrection.”

Now, tonight, let us make it a full and interesting evening. After the Silence we will have your questions, and I will try my best to answer every question that is asked. Now, let us go into the Silence.

Now are there any questions, please? [After a pause]: Surely there are questions!

A lady in the audience: Neville, then surely the memory must – [Remainder of question indistinguishable on my tape.]

Neville: If I dropped tonight after 66 years of acquiring experiences and it is not a part of me.

The Lady: But I mean, the conscious mind?

Neville: Certainly, my dear. But you live there just as you live here; and people are afraid of dying there just as they are here, because they die there, as told in the 20th chapter of the book of Luke. It is stated so clearly, but man doesn’t see it. There we have what is known as the Sadducees and the Pharisees. Well, in modern language the Sadducees would be the extreme disbelievers, scientifically trained, intelligent, but with no belief in survival, believing that the brain is the whole thing, not the instrument. They believe the brain is the reality itself; they cannot believe that the brain is not the whole, when others believe the brain is only the instrument and the “player” is unseen who plays that instrument. Well, the Sadducees thought they would trick the central character of Scripture, and they asked the questions “Master, Moses once said that if a man marries and dies with no offspring and he has brothers, the second brother should marry his widow and raise up seed for his brother.” (See Luke 20:27 and following) Well, there were seven brothers. The first died leaving no offspring, the second ditto – died leaving no offspring; the third ditto, leaving no offspring. Eventually all married her and all died, and eventually she died. “Now whose wife is she in the Resurrection?”

His answer is this: “In this age the sons of God marry and are given in marriages but those accounted worthy to attain that age and the resurrection, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, for they cannot die any more. They are now sons of God, being sons of the resurrection.” (Luke 20:35, 36)

So, if you cannot die any more – if they are not resurrected, they die as they die here. You cannot accomplish in threescore and ten years what is going to take six thousand years.

The Lady: I think you stated that before the Resurrection.

Neville: Before the Resurrection everything dies. In this world, it is a world of death. Actually, that is the question that this man from Folsom asked, and I could not answer him as I wanted to, because had I answered him, he would have thrown the letter out. If I had said to him that I have seen this world dead – that everything stood still; time stood still, – You have the power within you, and one day you will exercise it. You will arrest it in you, not in the world. You will release something that you feel within your own skull, and you will make it stand still, and when it is arrested, the whole vast world stands still, and it will look as though every one were dead. Every being that one second before was so animated and so alive is now dead. It is just as though it is made of clay or marble, and you look at it and you are amazed. Then you release within you the activity that you froze, and everything continues on its course.

The bird that stopped in space – well, the bird should fall, shouldn’t it? Suddenly a bird is arrested. It did not fall because of gravity. If the waitress is coming through and I arrest within me her activity, she wouldn’t fall. She was in motion, and she simply stands still supported by the earth or the floor. But a bird in flight, that bird certainly should continue to fall because I arrested its motion. It didn’t fall! The bird stood still in space, and she stood still, and the diners dining – everything stood still. As I released within me the activity that I had arrested, everything continued to fulfill its purpose.

Now, I could have changed their motivation and then released it. They would have changed their attitude towards life, and they would have thought that they had originated it. That is the power that is actually destined for every one on the globe, and you will know that it is from above. And from above, the whole world is completely controlled. He said, “I am from above. You are of this world; I am not of this world.” He is explaining an entirely different age.

So, this world belongs to the world of death. Everything appears, it waxes, it wanes, and it disappears. Even the sun is going to go or slowly melt – so I am told. I am no scientist.

I was telling a friend of mine before I started the meeting; I have more friends on the other side of the veil than on this side. At my age I should. They all look alive here. I start counting those that have disappeared, and they are all over there, and they are still living just as they lived here– reanimated in a body that is young – unaccountably young, and many of them do not know of the transition. They just don’t know it.

The Lady: Do they know you?

Neville: They know me, and yet they do not know of the transition. I can give you a story right here in this State. My secretary died suddenly at the age of 50. He was like my brother. He was my secretary, my friend, my brother. Jack Butler was his name. I got a cable saying they had found the body on the floor. He died of a massive heart attack. So, I went back and took care of the funeral. His sister insisted on a Catholic funeral because he was born a Catholic. He wasn’t a practicing Catholic, but she insisted, so I paid the expenses but she was the sister and I allowed that to take hold.

It was at Haverstrom, New York. We got the priest, we got the plot of land in a Catholic cemetery so all things were in order. My sister-in-law, my wife’s older sister, did not believe in what I teach, although she considers herself a pillar of the Episcopal Church. And I said to her, “What is it that you do not believe?” She said, “I do not believe in immortality. I believe that immortality is simply the descendants moving on and carrying on.” I said, “How can you be a Christian, and you do not believe in immortality or life everlasting? I can’t see, Al, where you could be a Christian – not in my sense of the word.”

Well, she still did not believe it. She said, “You are kind to my sister. You are a good husband and a good father, but I do not believe in your teaching.”

Six months after Jack died, I found myself conscious in what they call “that world,” fully conscious as I am now, and here was my sister-in-law, Al, and here is Jack. She said to me – she opened the conversation – she said, “I still don’t believe what you teach.” That is how she opened up the conversation.

I said to her, “How can you say that and look at Jack?” She said, “What has Jack to do with it?”

I said, “Don’t you know Jack died?” Well, she did. She remembered that he had died. She knew I came back from California to take care of the funeral, and so she remembered and her face changed completely, because Jack had died and she remembered that.

Then Jack said to me “Who is dead?”

I said, “Jack, you are not dead, but you died, you know.” “Oh, how stupid! I’m not dead, but I died!”

I said, “Yes, you died. I gave you a nice, homey funeral in sacred ground with a priest and all the things he is supposed to do.” And he looked at me so disgustedly. Then I said to Jack, “Jack, come over here.” He did; he obeyed me. He came over, and I turned to my sister-in-law and said, “Watch this, Al.” I put my hand on his thigh, and I squeezed it, and it was solidly real just as flesh and blood. He looked at me and did exactly what he would have done here and said, “Take your hand off me!” just like that as I squeezed his thigh. And at that, she was flabbergasted, and everything dissolved, and I am back on my bed.

That is my experience with Jack. He doesn’t know he is dead, because he isn’t. He didn’t die. He died only to those who could not follow him. He lost contact. But the world doesn’t cease to be at the point where my senses cease to register it.

The Lady: I believe firmly in life after death, but I thought, you know – if there was a carrying on of the understanding.

Neville: They are just as busy making a dollar as we are here. And there is no transforming power in death. A man who was a thief here finds himself still desirous of taking the goods of others. The one who is kind and considerate here, he is kind and considerate there. When I quoted from the 20th chapter of the book of Luke, the word worthy – I’ve been questioned time and time on that word worthy. But all Bibles translate it worthy; it is worthy. By definition, it means to seem entirely deserving. Well, in the eyes of whom? In the eyes of the one who is raised? No. In the eyes of those who behold. Those who await Eternity contemplate death. Those who are the resurrected in the eyes of their brotherhood – that one seemed worthy, entirely deserving, of being awakened from his dream. He has dreamed horrible dreams and beautiful dreams, and he has gone through the mill; it is time now to awaken him from the dream. He is worthy. His experiences are over when he takes off the body for the last time.

Any other questions, please?

A Gentleman: You said something about your television shows. I am not familiar with them.

Neville: I had 26 in L. A. on Channel 11. There were thirteen, and then I had a break for about three months, and they brought me back for another thirteen. There were 26 half-hour shows; I did just what I am doing now. They gave me a lectern, and I simply sat at a desk really and spoke extemporaneously. There was no cue to bring me in. When they started the camera, I was seated at the desk. I didn’t have to walk off the stage; I didn’t have to come on the stage. There was no director. I was simply seated at the desk, and then the camera simply moved in on me, and then at the end of what I had to say it just faded and went to the one to follow me. I had enormous mail on it. It was a tremendous success as far as what I do, but they couldn’t use it to sell perfume. I was told that I had an audience in excess of about three hundred thousand every Sunday afternoon between 2:00 and 2:30. That is what I was told by the survey; they estimate so many who view. In those days it was not done on tape; it was all done live. In those days everything was live for TV. The tapes came in after my days so those things are just a memory now.

The Gentleman: It was a number of years ago?

Neville: Oh, yes. Now I only appear on an occasional panel, and that is fun if they let you go completely out and tell them what you know from experience, that is fun, especially when you get a very critical bunch around you who try to dethrone you or make fun. Most of my critics are those who are only speaking from theory, not from experience.

A Lady: …someone who has written about Gurdjieff and Ouspensky. And contrary to what you say, he talks about evolving, but from what you say, I imply it is really like a dream.

Neville: As far as I am concerned, he could mean something entirely different than I would if I used the word evolved. I do not accept evolving. I believe that God actually became as I am, and God will awaken in me, and when He awakes, I am He. But, now, if the book you refer to is by Nicoll, I recommend Nicoll as a great thinker. Dr. Nicoll was a great thinker and a perfectly marvelous person. He is gone now from this sphere, as Gurdjieff is gone, and all the others are gone. Ouspensky is gone. But they used a different terminology. I do not teach what some of them do, which is reincarnation for one. No – to me, man is individualized and attains forever towards ever greater and greater individualization. I firmly believe that the true Temple of God is the individuality of man, made clearer by the indwelling of Jesus Christ. The only sepulcher in which He was ever buried is the skull of man. He actually indwells man, and one day He will awaken in man. And when He awakens in that man, that man will know he is the Lord Jesus Christ. But He will awaken in every man. He took upon Himself Humanity, so that killing man is killing God. People don’t see it. Hurting man is hurting God. He is suffering all the ills that man suffers, but everything.

Well, I think the time is up. Now we are here every night Monday through Friday this week and Monday through Friday next week, from 7:30 to 8:30. The door is open for us at 7:00, but we start at 7:30 and go through to 8:30. So, I do hope I’ll see many of you again. Good night.

“What is seen is made out of things that do not appear.” [Heb 11:3 RSV] Faith does not give reality to things that are not seen. It is loyalty to reality that makes things appear. Can I see the facts the world sees and still believe in the unseen state? If I can remain loyal to the unseen state, in some way I will get confirmation of it.

John 14:1-3: “… ye believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also.” This is not Jesus Christ talking to a disciple on the outside; it is I talking to myself. If all things are made by God, and without Him is not anything made that is made’ [John 1:3] then where is God? In my Imagination!

You aren’t called upon to make the things. All things already are. The whole, vast creation is already finished; I am only becoming aware of it. Any state that I can imagine can be occupied. The whole thing is finished, and all I do is adjust to it and “feel” myself there until it becomes natural.

You don’t give reality to the unseen; it is loyalty to the unseen reality that gives it objectivity. You can revise the past.

We, you and I – are here, born by the Grace of God, and yet we dare to put a limit on the power of God. Our “sin” is our doubt of God.

“Some men see things as they are and say: Why? I dream things that never were and say: Why not? [George Bernard Shaw] Sen. Ted Kennedy used this quotation in his eulogy of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy without giving credit to the author, however Sen. R. F. Kennedy was known to quote it many times, giving credit to G. B. S. I know that I must be whatever I am in Imagination. So don’t treat this principle lightly. You truly move yourself into states mentally, wittingly or unwittingly.

A bridge of incidents will develop, over which you will pass until the [state is fulfilled] like pure imagining in us, and that He works in the very depths of our soul, underlying all of our faculties, including perception; but He streams into the surface mind least disguised in the form of creative fancy, like a daydream – just a simple daydream.

I think of someone who is maybe a thousand miles away. Well, that act – that perceptive act, unseen by any one– that was God-in-action. Well, can I believe in the reality of that act? Can I represent him to myself as I would like to see him in the flesh? Can I see him successful? Can I see him – well, as I want to see him, and believe in the reality of that unseen state? If I can remain loyal to that unseen reality, I will have confirmation that he is the being that I am assuming that he is. Someone will write me or maybe I’ll meet him in the flesh, but in some way I will get confirmation that what I think I see in him or desire to see in him, and persuade myself that I do see in him, [that] it will come to pass.

Now, one day, in reading the 14th chapter of the book of John, having been told that Christ is in me, and here is Christ now speaking to the disciples, (well, if he is in me, what is he trying to tell me? He is speaking to the disciples) he said: “You believe in God, believe in me also. In my Father’s house are many mansions. Were it not so, would I have told you? Would I have told you that I go prepare a place for you? And when I go, I will come again and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye shall be also.” [John 14:1-3] Well, it came to me as I read it, from some peculiar intuitive depth, that I am not talking to a disciple (something on the outside). I’m talking to myself! This whole conversation is something within myself. I take the body called Neville – this visible thing that is weak and limited and fragile, and I’m talking to it. You can’t go; you’re limited. It will take time to get there; it’ll take money to get there. Maybe you can’t afford either the time or the money.

But it will take me – if I’m Imagination – to go any place in this world without money, and I don’t need time. I can sit in a chair and put my body, cumbersome as it is, on a chair or on a bed, and if I am all Imagination, and God is in man as man’s own wonderful human Imagination, then I can be any place in this world that I desire to be. So, I can go and prepare a place. So, I tried it. I tried assuming that I am where reason would deny it, my senses deny it, but I remained in that state until it seemed natural to me, just seemed natural. Well, then, I went there. And, then, I opened my eyes upon the world that I had shut out, and it was a shock to find myself back in the chair. Well, I if I analyze it, it seems stupid. What I did – it seemed real while I did it, and then one second later, here I am on my chair, and everything I see in my room denies that I did anything that the world would call real. But I did it!

And, then, in the not-distant future, I was forced across a series of events, which led up to the fulfillment of that state. Now, I did it on a very cold winter night in New York City. I had brought out my first book, called Your Faith is Your Fortune, in the month of February in 1941. It was so cold – twelve or fourteen inches of snow on the ground – and I expected in those days simply a voluntary offering on the part of those who came. And many came just for contacts.

They didn’t care what I had to say. They came to meet people, and they would go out for their coffee klatches and all these things after the meeting. I didn’t care. It was a crowded house – over a thousand people – in a little old church off Times Square. I expected that night, when I brought out my book, Your Faith is Your Fortune,that there would be the usual thousand, and this night because of the weather they couldn’t get through the snow, I think we had a hundred and fifty people, and there was a certain personal disappointment, because here was my first effort in bringing out a book. And, so I had my books there and a hundred and fifty came, not prepared to buy the book, and so, we packed up at the end of the talk.

When I went home that night the snow was, as I say, twelve or fourteen inches on the ground, and it was cold. When I got into my bed, I did this thing almost absent-mindedly, but I did it, and I knew exactly what I did. Barbados, where I was born, is a little tropical island in the West Indies, and I assumed that I was actually on my bed in my mother’s home that I knew and loved so well. And to prove that I was actually there, I just imagined the world relative to that position. I saw the world – not from my place in New York City, I saw it from Barbados. So, mentally I saw the world as I would see it if I were in Barbados. I thought of my place in New York City, and I saw it two thousand miles to the north of me. I thought of other places, and they were all related to where I am assuming that I am, and I fell asleep in that assumption. When I awoke the next morning, the snow was even higher, and I am not in Barbados, I am in New York City!

Well, time progressed. The war in Europe was on. England was at war. No ships were plying the Atlantic. They were going down faster than they could build them, and we were almost at war, and then came the month of August, and I received a cable from my family saying: “We didn’t tell you, because we knew you couldn’t come to Barbados. There aren’t any ships,” (and certainly in those days there were no planes) and they said: “Mother is dying. She’s been dying for two years, but now, this is it, and if you want to see her in this world once more, you’ve got to come now” – I mean, now.

I received that cable in the morning, and my wife and I sailed the very next night. One ship was leaving at midnight, the “Argentine,” and we sailed in late August for Barbados. And there I went to Barbados, the last place in that world that I intended to go. In fact, we had planned to go to Maine for a vacation. We were going to close that month and go to Maine for five or six weeks, and then return to reopen sometime in October. But all plans were changed to fulfill what I had done in an idle moment because of disappointment.

But it taught me a lesson: not to use this law idly, not to use it to escape, but to use it deliberately because you cannot escape from it. A series of events will mold themselves, across which you will walk, leading up to the fulfillment of that state. And so here I put myself, just to escape from the cold and the disappointment of the evening, in Barbados of all places. Then something happens, and I am compelled to make the journey, the last place in the world we intended to go. And we sailed at midnight, and got there four and a half days later on this “Argentine” ship. (It was an American ship, but it was called the “Argentine.”)

Mother dies, [1] as they all said she would, and I returned to the States with the knowledge of what I had done and began to teach it. And in that audience of, I would say, a thousand, they all began to apply it, with tremendous success. Then, where is God? If “all things [were] made by him, and without him [was] not anything made that is made” [John 1:3] then where is he? I knew exactly what I did, and I know what happened. Well, if I can trace what happened to an invisible cause (what I did) and repeat it, and tell that story to others, who can take it and try it and repeat it, well then, I have found causation. And if all causes spring from God, then I have found him. I have found Him as my own wonderful human imagination. That’s God. There isn’t a thing in this world that wasn’t first imagined. Now, here you aren’t called to make the thing. Things are.

All things in the world are. “Eternity exists, and all things in Eternity independent of creation, which was an act of mercy.” [William Blake] You can’t conceive of something that isn’t!

As a result of this in 1941, it was 1949 that I gave a series of lectures in Milwaukee, and the head chemist at Allis-Chalmers came to my meetings. I made some statement using a term that is a scientific term, and the word was “entropy.” Well, I might have used it, not as the scientist would have used it, but I had my own concept of what the word meant and my definition of it, and I said I can change the past. If I can make something, I can unmake it. Whatever I can create, I can un-create. Whatever I can make, I can unmake. He said: “You can’t do it. For we use entropy in our laboratory every day, and entropy means the past is unalterable; you can’t change it. If the past could be changed, I wouldn’t know what I am doing in the lab…” He said: “All day long I receive little samples of water from all over the world, because we make these huge turbines. And from Australia, New Zealand, South Africa – all over the world – they send samples, because the water passes through certain mineral deposits and carries with it whatever is in that mineral, and, so it cakes. We have to analyze that water and then bring up a solution, because we made the product.” And I said: “I don’t care what you say. I know what I’ve done. And you can undo the past. You can change it.”

“It can’t be done.”

I said: “As far as I am concerned, the whole vast world is finished. Creation is finished, and I am only becoming aware of it. Well, I need not confine myself to what my senses see and what reason allows and what wise men tell me I should accept. I can imagine a state. I can’t see it with my physical eye, but I can imagine a state, and that state imagined is. I can imagine a state that is in conflict with the facts of life. And the facts, you say, are, and they can’t be altered. I can imagine a state that would undo the fact. Well, that state exists. If I occupy that state it will undo the so-called fact you say is fixed forever.” Well, he questioned my sanity, but he was an awfully nice chap. His name was Professor Imhoff. He was the head of the department of this chemical setup. So, while he was a very wise and gentle and kind person.

I returned to New York City, and he sent me the “Scientific News Letter,” dated October the 15th, 1949, in which he said: “Now, Neville, I apologize for having said what I did. This man is far greater as a physicist than I am as a scientist. He is Professor Feynman, of Cornell University, one of the outstanding physicists of our day in speculative, theoretical physics; and this is his letter. And he wrote in this little letter, which was printed in the magazine, a story concerning the positron, a little particle that is produced in atomic disintegration. It’s like the electron, but differs in this respect. It is positive in its charge instead of being negative. Now, these are the words of Feynman, they are not mine. He says: “The positron is a wrong-way electron. It starts from where it hasn’t been, and it speeds to where it was an instant ago. It is bounced so hard its time sense is reversed, and then it returns to where it hasn’t been.” (Now, this is Feynman, this isn’t Neville.) Then he goes on to say: “When a little electron is moving speedily in space if it is bounced, it’s deflected, but continues on its course. But if it is bounced so hard, then its time sense is reversed, and it returns to where it hasn’t been.” “Now,” he said, “on the basis of this, we must now conclude that the entire concept that man held of the universe is false. We always believed that the future developed slowly out of the past. Now, with this concept which we have seen and photographed, we must now conclude that the entire space-time history of the world is laid out, and we only become aware of increasing portions of it successively.” This is 1949. That Professor, Richard Feynman, who is now at Cal Tech in Pasadena received the Nobel Prize last year for that paper. They held it up almost twenty years, for this is 1968 and he got it in 1967, and the paper came out in 1949.

I didn’t know it as a scientist. I knew it as a mystic. I see it. I can’t explain why; I only know everything is. The whole thing is finished, and all I have to do is to adjust to it. If I know what I want for myself or for another, I adjust to it, because the thing is.

Well, if I adjust to it and it feels natural, when it feels natural, then I open my eyes upon this world that I have shut out for that purpose. As I open my eyes, I am turned around. I have actually been where reason would deny that I have been there; and then, as I open my eyes, I have been speeding with the speed of light from wherever I have assumed that I am to where physically I am. Now I am so shocked to find that I am not actually there, but I am here physically. My time sense is turned around. And now, I move across a bridge of incidents – a series of events – that compels me to move towards the fulfillment of that invisible state.

And when I get there it is not invisible, it becomes visible. It throws itself on the screen of space, and the world calls that a fact. And they stand amazed at that, because that to them is real. Prior to its becoming objective, it was unreal.

So, I tell you: faith in unseen reality. You don’t give reality to the unseen; it is loyalty to unseen reality that is the secret of faith. So, when he tells us: “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen,” [Heb 11:1] by faith, we understand that the world was created by the Word of

God, so that “things seen were made from things that do not appear…”

Now, let me share with you this story. A friend of mine living in L.A. came many years ago from Pittsburgh. So in ’66 she returned to Pittsburgh and met the few friends who are still in this world. Many have departed. There was one lady she speaks of as Betty.

Well, Betty married this man, and his name is supposed to be Matthew. Well, Matthew was suffering from a certain disease, which led progressively to total deafness. In the interval, it is accompanied by dizziness, and retching. What the name is, I don’t know. [Ménière’s disease] She told me, but I am not familiar with these medical terms. But it is something that is incurable as of today. No doctor knows how to arrest it, and it progressively moves towards total deafness. In the meanwhile, it is a most painful condition that accompanies it, and these horrible dizzy spells, and then the retching. She told the story as I told it to her, how you can revise the past; that in spite of the fact that he is moving towards the inevitable total deafness, it need not be. They can go back and change the past to the point in time – which was fourteen years before – when this thing began to show in his body. He didn’t believe it. She said to me: “He would ask me a hundred and one questions concerning it, not because he wanted to be cruel, but he is a rational being, a very intelligent person, and it didn’t make sense. Because it didn’t make sense, he discounted it; but Betty thought: ‘”I will try it.’”

“Now, she said, “It was a very difficult thing for Betty and myself, because my parents were both deaf, and Betty’s parents were both deaf, and we were raised in the environment of deaf people. We had to learn sign language to communicate with our parents. So, Betty had the experience of deaf parents, both of them, and I had the experience of deaf parents, and to be confronted with this picture – it was a horrible, horrible picture. Betty said to me: “I will do it every night,” and she took a simple little sentence: “Matthew” (she called him Matt) – “Matt is hearing perfectly.” That’s all that she did. Meanwhile he’s getting worse and worse and worse.

A year went by, and he’s still progressing towards the inevitable end of total deafness, when in his business he had this excruciating pain from ear to ear, and he cried out. Well, they rushed him to the doctor [and] the doctor gave him an injection to alleviate the pain. Then the doctor said: “You can’t go back on the job right away. You must go to your room and rest for a while.” Well, in the room, he dozed, and went into a little sleep and when he awoke, he was hearing perfectly – hearing perfectly! He was sent home early that evening. He usually arrives at 6:00 o’clock. When he came home on the early side, the wife greeted him with the usual: “Oh, what’s wrong? What happened at the office today?” and he replied: “Betty, I am hearing perfectly.” He used the identical word that she had, night after night, heard. All in her imagination, she heard him say: “Betty, I am hearing perfectly.” So, she heard her own name called by her husband, Matt, and he confirmed it by saying: “I am hearing perfectly.” Then he said: “I believe, I believe, I believe!”

Now, that is a year and a half ago. She said: “In the interval we never breathed it, did not mention it in our letters. I communicate constantly, but I did not for one moment state anything further than I did when I was there in the flesh and told her of a principle,” a principle which you could call by any name. We call it God. Well, God is one’s own marvelous human Imagination. That’s God! Man is all Imagination, and God is man, and exists in us and we in Him. The eternal body of man is the Imagination, and that is God himself. And all things are possible to God. You and I– here we are, fashioned by the grace of God, born by the grace of God, and we dare to put a limit on the power of God! Here we, the creature born by the grace of God, and then we tell God (or tell ourselves) what he can’t do. And therefore, give to God, who made us and brought us into the world…and now we give to him the sin against the Holy Ghost, which as far as I see it is man’s doubt—the only thing that cannot be forgiven is the sin against the Holy Ghost, which is man’s doubt in the power of God.

You might have heard the late Senator Kennedy in one or two of his political speeches. He was very fond of quoting this passage from George Bernard Shaw – in fact, his brother Teddy, in the eulogy in New York City quoted it. He didn’t give credit to George Bernard Shaw, but his brother had done it time and again, and therefore people knew, those who heard him, that it was not Teddy’s or Bobbie’s – it was George Bernard Shaw.

And this is the quote: “Some men see things as they are and say, ‘Why?’ I dream things that never were, and say, ‘Why not?’” Why not? The world tells me it can’t be. Why not? Are not all things possible to God? And did not God become me, that I may become God? Well, if he became me, I can’t dissect the body and find him in an atom. I can’t find him in the brain. I can’t find him in any organ of the body. Therefore, where is he?

Just where is he? I am told in Scripture he has a name, and this name is his name forever and forever, and the name defined is: “I Am.” Well, that’s the core of my being. I can’t put it aside.

I sit down to imagine. Who’s imagining? I am. I have never been able to put “I am” out there and look at it. It is the being perceiving, not the thing perceived. It is the being making, not the thing made. It’s the being creating; not the thing created. And man stands amazed at his own creations – and forgets the creator. He falls in love with all the things he makes, and he forgets completely the maker; and the maker is “I Am.” There is no other maker. There is no other God.

So, when I found that out, I knew that when I went to Barbados, I was actually sleeping in my mother’s home in a bed that I knew well, and it was warm. I could feel the warmth of the tropics. I could detect the odors of the tropics; they differ from the northern world. All the things that are related to the tropics, I detected. Well, who is doing it? I am. I can’t get away from it. Is that God? Yes. Well, he didn’t take a train there. No, there aren’t any trains. He didn’t take a plane? No, there were no planes then. He didn’t take a ship? No. He simply was there. Wherever I assume that I am, I am there.

And, so, if I can assume that I am elsewhere, to the point that someone like my sister actually sees me there, well, I must be wherever I am in Imagination.

One day I had occasion, while in New York City, to assume that I am being seen by my sister, whose son was desperately ill, age 17, and riddled with cancer. No one knew what was wrong with him until they opened him, and then he was too far-gone. The whole body was completely riddled at the age of seventeen! And they say that if you are young when you develop this, then like all young things, it grows. If you are developed to the age of sixty or seventy, the chances are you won’t die of it because things aren’t building then.

You are only marking time. But youth is growing. Whether it be a good cell or a bad cell, it simply grows rapidly. So at the age of seventeen he wasn’t feeling well. They wonder: what’s wrong with the boy? And someone suggested going in and taking a little look on the inside. They thought it might be some appendix or some peculiar thing there. So they opened him up and sewed him back – not a thing they could do. The whole body was simply gone.

Well, to comfort my sister, I thought I would put my body physically in New York City and assume I’m in Barbados. I’m in my nephew’s room, and when my sister enters the room she is going to see me, and not her son. I actually assumed that I am there. I am occupying the same space that my nephew Billy occupied, and then when I felt it natural, I assumed that my sister came in. She came in, and she came over and she looked, and she couldn’t see anyone but her brother, Neville. I came out of that silence. I came into the living room where a friend, by invitation, had arrived for a cocktail, because I had said: “Drop by at the cocktail hour – it’s around 5:00 o’clock, and we’ll have a drink.” I went into the silence around 4:30, and I didn’t come out until maybe after 5:00 – 5:15 or 5:20. So when I came into the living room, she said: “Neville, what’s wrong with you? You are always so gay and light. Why do you seem so heavy now?” and I told her what I had just done.

Eight days later (we had no air mail coming, but had to depend upon mail by the sea), eight days later I received a letter from my sister. She said: “Neville, I don’t understand it, but this very moment I went into Billy’s room and I could not for the life of me see Billy. I am seeing you. I walked right over to the bed, and I looked at my son, and he is not there, and it’s you! And you’re looking at me and smiling. And I could not – I tried and tried and tried, and Billy was not there; it is you. I don’t understand it, Neville. If you have any knowledge or anything about it to throw light upon this, tell me.” That same lady was there eight days later, and I brought her letter out that I had received that day and showed it to her. So I had two witnesses: my wife and this lady. So, I know that I must be wherever I am in Imagination. So I tell you: don’t treat it lightly. You can put yourself in prison, and find yourself committing an act of which you are totally unaware, or accused of something of which you are not aware, and going to prison. People put themselves there. People put themselves out of it.

People don’t realize, not a thing is happening by accident. It’s all by unseen causation. So you actually move yourself into states emotionally, and dwell in [them] just for a split second. And you jump back – or you think you jump back. You did. But the bridge is now about to appear, and across the bridge of incidents you walk, leading up to the fulfillment of what you did unwittingly.

So, this is what I mean by faith. “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for.” You hope for it? Well, now, the assurance is faith. Faith is not going to make it so. Faith is loyalty to the unseen reality. You know what you did? Well, now, that’s unseen by mortal eye.

Now, you remain loyal to that unseen reality, and see how this bridge of incidents is woven, and you do not consciously devise it. No man can consciously devise the incidents necessary to lead you to the fulfillment of what you’ve done. Well, this is what I mean by faith. The very substance of what the world calls real is unseen. It’s unseen reality.

The whole vast creation is finished, just as Feynman said, and he got his prize for it. So he got the fifty thousand dollars for that which I said as a mystic, but you can’t give a mystic money, because he has no standing in the community. Feynman has standing. He teaches physics at Caltech, so he could say the identical thing in his own words, and they say: “Isn’t this marvelous?” And so, he has a paper on it, now a book on it, and a title to it, so he has all the titles. And because I am the unknown, and in the eyes of Feynman not educated by his standards, no formal education – but what I see, I see, and I can’t deny it. What I experience mystically, I can’t deny. So, I am speaking from experience; I am not theorizing. He goes in and he theorizes. He experiments, yes, and succeeds occasionally in taking a photograph of the so-called unseen little particle [and] he has enough photographs to prove the existence of the positron. And then comes his wonderful honor – fifty thousand dollars, and all that goes with it.

But I tell you, in spite of all the books that are written, with all the great titles signed behind his name of the author, the book of books is the Bible, and no one knows the authors. They are all anonymous. No one knows who’s Peter, who’s James, who’s Matthew, Luke, Mark, John – no one knows. They are anonymous and they remain so. The characters – no one knows if they ever walked the face of the earth. I tell you that they didn’t. Those who wrote it – they did, but the characters are anonymous. And the characters of Scripture are all eternal states through which man passes. They are states – eternal states, not historical states. It’s not secular history. It is salvation history.

What I have told you so far as of now, in the past week (I gave you five, and tonight is the sixth) it’s all based upon what I’ve experienced. And I tell you: everyone will experience it. Not one can fail, because if one failed, God failed. And He isn’t going to fail. So, let the fool say in his heart: there is no God, like this book, God is Dead and all that nonsense. Let them have fun. He wrote that just to make money. And of course, because the title caught on, especially today, he made oodles of money out of a title, a title with a book full of nonsense. But he’s not alone; he has a lot of company. I tell you: you have faith in God, but don’t look outside to find him. You aren’t going to find him out there. You are going to find him one day by a series of mystical experiences. And when they happen to you, they will happen in the first person, present-tense experience, and you’ll know who God is!

You’ll know that you are, for God’s purpose is to give himself to you as though there were no other in the world, just you. Well, if he gives himself to you completely, there can’t be you and God, just you, and you are he.

And the whole plan is set up, and when it begins to unfold within you in a first person, present tense experience, I can’t tell you the thrill. Now, when you depart this world, you are not restored to life, as all people are who have not had the experience, you instantly put on your body of glory, and you’re in an entirely different age, a different world altogether.

And all the others wait for that moment in time when they, too, have the experience. And then when death comes following the experience, they instantly move from the body of decay (for this [is] decay) into a body that is immortal, a body of glory. So, that is for everyone in the world. And may I tell you: don’t try to argue with anybody who tries to give you all the reasons of Caesar why it can’t be. They put you in a little furnace and bring out a few little ashes and say: that was the man. Therefore, he can’t survive, because that’s it. Well then, let him have his little fun. It’s perfectly all right. Let him be amused. Don’t move; let him be amused. He’s such a wise person! So wise in his own council and so wise in the eyes of fools. He can only be wise in the eyes of fools; so don’t argue with him. Leave him alone just as he is.

So, he will find himself – when men call him dead – restored to life, and he will be totally unaware how on earth it could happen. But he’s so blind anyway; he won’t even recognize it. He will take it for granted, as we take breathing for granted. We take all the normal functions of the body for granted, and yet each function is a miracle. You put a little of bread in your mouth, and suddenly by a chemistry you do not understand it is no longer bread; it’s blood and bone and tissue. And what you can’t incorporate into your system and use wisely, you expel. Even the act of expulsion from the system is a mystery. And yet we take all these mysteries for granted, and the whole thing is oh, well, we call it nature. That covers a multitude of nonsense. Nature! Define it for me.

So, I tell you tonight, you take your dream – your noble dream, not only for yourself, but for others. What do you want? Ask them. Now, don’t argue the point what do you want? Well then, in your mind’s eye dare to assume that they have what at the moment their reason and their senses deny and everything about them denies; but you remain faithful to the assumption, and your assumption relative to them. Though false at the moment, if you persist in it, it will harden into fact. Now, you try it. I could give you unnumbered cases, but why repeat them over and over? Every case history in the Bible has been repeated now for two thousand years, and they still hold up, but they are all to encourage man to test God – to try him. “Come, test yourself and see.” You are not asked to test another.

In the 13th chapter of II Corinthians: “Do you not realize that Jesus Christ is in you? Test yourself and see, unless of course you fail to meet the test.”

Well, if you fail to meet the test because of doubt and lack of faith, well and good. You might go and say: “It doesn’t work.” It’s perfectly all right. So, it doesn’t work for you because you did not believe it. He puts no limit to the power of belief. “All things are possible to him who believes.” So can I really believe at the moment that I am trying to believe, everything tells me it can’t be done? Can I ignore the facts of life, and then persuade myself that it is done and live in the end as though it were true? I tell you: if you try it, you will be able to write me and give me fantastic stories. But in the end, it is God’s Promise that concerns me.

Oh, to teach you the law is marvelous, teach everyone the law because you are living in the world of Caesar. You must pay rent, you must eat, you must shelter yourself, you must have clothing – all these things in the world of Caesar are essential, so teach man the law, that he may fulfill all these things. But don’t neglect the Promise. And God’s Promise is to give himself to you. That’s his Promise that he will actually give himself to you! Before he made the Promise, God was the Father, so when he succeeds in giving himself to you, though you are now in the female body, when he gives himself to you (and you will not find it strange) you will one day awake and you are the father, even though you may now be the mother of a

dozen children. And in the day it will not seem strange to you that you are father, God the Father. And if he has a son (because he has to have a son if he’s a father) and then that son is going to call you “father” (he is not going to call you “mother”) he will call you “father” in the fulfillment of the 89th Psalm, because Scripture must be fulfilled in man. So, man’s purpose in life is only to fulfill Scripture.

But in the meanwhile, Caesar demands. He demands taxes. He demands this; he demands the other. Well, give Caesar what is Caesar’s, but don’t fail to keep alive the Promise of God, and dwell upon it.

Now let us go into the Silence. Good. Now, are there any questions?

Inaudible

Neville: My dear, yes! To those who were not present: This friend of ours down south – her name is Marta – she was coming to Laguna to the Art Festival, she and three others, the four of them. It’s a perfectly marvelous festival every year down in Laguna. All the artists come, and the live artistry is perfectly marvelous the way they do it. They are simple little pictures of the great works of art, and then the curtain parts, the lights come on, and you think you are looking at a living, three-dimensional picture – unless there is some little child in it that can’t quite hold the stillness. This lively little girl one night, she had a little itch, and here in the perfect stillness she couldn’t resist the impulse, and there she was scratching herself. But it was a delightful thing just to watch it, because she was so natural in it. But they are perfectly rehearsed in it. Well, it is a sight that you can’t quite describe unless you go to see the Art Festival. Well, she was coming back, and the four of them stopped in at a Mexican restaurant to have a little snack. She doesn’t really smoke, but she said she wanted a cigarette. And her friend lit the cigarette for her and she took the cigarette and said: “Oh, I have such a strange feeling.” And with that she went right over and fell on the table and she was gone from this world! Well, Marta has had this experience. I tell you that God actually, literally became man, that man may become God. Every man that is “born from above” knows that he is God. But I could tell you from now to the ends of time, and you will only see me as an arrogant fool. You will never actually believe me until you have the experience to confirm the truth of what I say, because words could not persuade you. You have to actually have the experience.

So Marta, this night, finds herself in this huge, big interior. The front is one sheet of glass, and on the inside are huge, big columns like marble columns. It is very sparsely furnished. She sees one chair, and she takes the chair. She is seated, then, out of nowhere comes a carriage that is self-propelled. There aren’t horses, but it looks as though it should be drawn by horses. The door opens automatically and I step out, wearing an Inverness cape. (You know what the Inverness cape is.) I come forward into the interior of this place and, without showing any recognition of Marta I began to proclaim the power of God. And she said, as she looked at me I was clothed in sheer power. It wasn’t a merciful power, it wasn’t compassionate – it was simply power. It was creative power. And I am simply talking of power. And she said to herself: “Why, it’s Neville, and he is God!” and she kept on repeating to herself: “He is Neville and he is God; he is Neville and he is God.” And, then, without any further recognition of her, I completed the proclamation of power, turned, and then, as though by appointment, the carriage came into view. The door opened automatically, and I stepped in and vanished. The whole thing vanished.

So, here she saw God clothed in power, wearing the face of a friend. Her friend is Neville. Scripture tells you – and it’s the foundation by which man is set free – when Paul was accused of not being an Apostle, he said: “Am I not free? Am I not an apostle? Haven’t I seen the Lord Jesus?” So, he laid it down as an indispensable prerequisite: to have seen the Lord Jesus in order to be set free from this bondage to corruption and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God. Then, in the book of John, he said: “I no longer call you slaves, for a slave does not know what the master is doing; I call you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known unto you.” (John 15:15) So, here she saw a friend, but the friend was wearing power. It was God’s power, and she knew it was God. So she is set free. She is not restored as the world is restored when they die. She is set free from this age, and Marta is now in her glorious body. She has met the qualifications for freedom. But I can tell you from now to the ends of time… I could have told Marta, as I did, but not until Marta had the experience, could Marta ever believe. So, they laughed at Paul, because how can you share these experiences with man? You can’t do it. Man has to have the experience.

And the lady who was with her, whose name is Marge, had the experience of seeing me on the beach, standing with my back to an enormous body of water. There was no land beyond; it was simply an endless body of water, and I was speaking to an enormous crowd of people, all of different faiths, different persuasions – yet each heard me in the tongue wherein they were born. And as she came upon this scene (she knew that it’s Neville) she sees Neville, but she also knew he was Jesus, so she has had a similar experience. Only Marta called it God, and she called it Jesus, because she knew she was looking at her friend Neville, but she’s also looking at Jesus.

So, I tell you: in the end there is only one body, and that one body is Jesus. “One body, one spirit, one lord, … one God and Father of all” So, in the end, all are Jesus! All are God! All are the Father! I can tell you in words, but I can’t persuade you. I have to desire to persuade you against your will. I know the day will come when you will actually have a similar experience and others will see you in that role, and have an experience and be convinced that you are God.

Now, it frightens people to say that. They want some little God on the outside, and I say everyone is God. We are told that in Scripture: “I say, ye are gods, all of you, sons of the Most High. Nevertheless you will die like men and fall as one man, oh, princes.” (Psalm 82:6,7) That’s in Scripture, and yet you read it and say: “Oh, it doesn’t really make any difference. That isn’t right. That was wrong. When God dictated that, or inspired the prophet to write it, he must have been drinking. Well, how can that be?” And, so, the prophets – that is, the great scholars – cannot quite understand that passage, the 82nd Psalm. They can’t get it. So, because they can’t get it, it isn’t true. Well, we go through life that way. You will find people all over the world – if they can’t understand something, it just isn’t true, it’s not good, and they will set themselves up as the criterion of what ought to be. Their moral and ethical code is the only code that should be adopted. If they don’t smoke, no one should smoke. If they don’t drink, no one should drink. If they are celibates because nature allowed it, no one should know anything about sex. You find these people writing these things for us after nature has outlawed sex in their life. So, when they hit the age of eighty, because they are impotent, everyone should be. And they write laws and say they were divinely inspired. If today, eating meat on Friday is right (it was always right) and, yet for centuries it was wrong and a mortal sin – but now it’s all right, well, if it is right today, it was always right.

Now, if a man can marry today…and eventually they will say the priests can marry, it wasn’t always so that they could not. If you read Scripture, it speaks of Peter’s wife, and yet the present Pope claims that he is directly descended from Peter, the first Pope. Well, if the first Pope was married, then what’s wrong with marriage, when the very first command to man is: “Replenish the earth; multiply and replenish the earth.” That’s the command. So, what’s wrong with multiplying and replenishing the earth? Yet some Pope, who undoubtedly was impotent, just said that no one should marry. If he can’t perform the act, no one should perform it.

All right, we have Pope Alexander VI. Have you ever heard of the Borgias, Lucretia and Cesare Borgia, brother and sister? Well, they were his children, and he was Pope Alexander VI, and their name is associated with poison. If they didn’t like you, you were in their way politically – poison them. They were the Pope’s children. Go back and read history. You can find this in the Encyclopedia Britannica. Pope Alexander VI was the father of Cesare Borgia and Lucretia Borgia, the youngest ever given the cardinal’s hat, at the age of nineteen. Talk of nepotism! Well, now, all this is history. You don’t have to be afraid of it. These are facts. Well, if it was right then, it’s right now!

Because God’s Word cannot be altered. These things are not in God’s Book at all. These are the traditions of men. And we read in Scripture that to keep alive the traditions of men, you go against the Word of God.

That’s what he tells you. So, find out, is it Scripture? Or, is it something that a man wants to impose upon society?

Now, you take what we have tried to tell you tonight, the story of faith, and try to live by it. You’ll prove it. You won’t disprove it, not if you realize that you are the operant power. It doesn’t operate itself. You are the operant power. And, then, you will find an easier way of living in this world, and then put your hope fully upon the grace that is coming to you at the unveiling of Christ-in-you.

Now, the time is up. Thank you.

Tonight’s subject is: Who am I? That is the eternal question. If I told you who you really are, you wouldn’t believe me; but I will tell you how you’ll know one day that you really are the Being that I am going to tell you that you are. If I tell you now that you are the Lord Jesus Christ, you would not believe me, and you would think that I am blaspheming; and yet I am telling you the truth. There’s only one way you will ever know it, and there is only one way another will know it of you.

In the 16th chapter of the book of Matthew, a question is asked, “Who do men say that the Son of Man is?” And they said, “Some say John the Baptist, others Elias, and others Jeremiah or one of the prophets of old.” And he said unto them, “But who do you say that I am?” And Peter answered, “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God.” (Matthew 16:13-16) He accepts the confession of Peter, but warns not to say it or to express it to another until he has first re-interpreted this popular concept of Messiah in terms of his own experience; but he said to Peter, “Flesh and blood have not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven, He has revealed it.” (Matthew 16:17)

No man can tell you, to persuade you, that you are. I could stand here from now to the end of time, and you are not convinced; but I’ll tell you this night how you will one day be convinced. There’s only one way you will ever know you are Christ Jesus, who is God the Father, and that is through His son David, who will call you, “Father.”

There is a poem by Browning; he calls it “Saul.” It’s based upon the First Book of Samuel, the 16th chapter, the 14th through the 23rd verses; and in this, Saul is laid low with an evil spirit, and David restores him to health by playing and singing to him. Then David becomes a prophet, and prophecies the coming of Messiah; and then he says to Saul:

Oh, Saul, it shall be A face like my face that shall receive thee; a Man like to me. Thou shalt love and be loved by, forever; a Hand like this hand Shalt throw open the gates of new life to thee! See the Christ stand! [End of Stanza XVIII, from “Saul” by Robert Browning]

He paints a word picture of the one Being that is going to reveal to a man who has lost his mind for Saul had lost his mind, and did not know who he was.

This very moment, if you know a family I am one of a very large family: nine brothers and one sister. If one of my brothers this very moment became the victim of total amnesia, and the rest of us stand in front of him and try to persuade him that he is our brother, he’s not persuaded. If I brought all of my friends who know him intimately and tried to convince him that he is of a certain family, of a certain identity, you could not persuade him. If I tell you that you have forgotten who you are, that travelers from Eternity pass into bodies of flesh and blood and forgetfulness, travelers to Eternity pass to the Father, and remember. [1] Now, this is exactly what is going to happen to you one day. In my audience in L.A., as of today, there are over twelve who have had the experience.

One day an explosion will take place within your head and when the whole thing settles, as it were, standing before you will be David of Biblical fame; and there’s no uncertainty as to the relationship. You will know that David is your son and he will know that you are his father, in fulfillment of Scripture the Second Psalm. “I will tell of the decree of the Lord. He said unto me, Thou art my Son; this day I have begotten thee.” (Psalm 2:7)

You will never know that God gave Himself to you in any other way than the one way, when His Son calls you “Father.” When he calls you “Father,” you will know who you are. And then you could tell it for the rest of Eternity, and no one will be convinced until they have this experience concerning you.

Now I tell you, there’s only one body; that body is the Lord Jesus Christ. “There’s only one spirit; there’s only one hope, only one lord, only one faith, only one baptism, only one God, Who is the Father of us all, Who is through all, above all, and in all.” (Ephesians 4:4-6) This is how you will know that the man who dares to claim it really is what he claims.

Now, let me give you the experience of two ladies from L.A. I know what I have experienced. I could write it, as I have; I tell it to others, not convincingly because it seems, as I told you earlier – it seems blasphemous, for you and I have been trained from infancy that a man who lived two thousand years ago was the Christ, and only the Christ, and no one else is Christ in spite of Scripture that tells us, “Do you not realize that Jesus Christ is in you?” (2 Corinthians 13:5, RSV) If you are perfectly honest with yourself, you will say, “No, I don’t know it at all”; but read it in the 13th chapter of 2 Corinthians, “Do you not realize that Jesus Christ is in you?” And he who is united with the Lord is one spirit with the Lord, and that he shall change our lowly bodies to be of one form with His glorious body?

Well, now, here are the two experiences: A lady finds herself in a large interior; the entire front is glass. There are marble columns, and it’s very sparsely furnished. There is but one chair, and she finds herself seated in it. Looking through the glass, she sees a carriage self-propelled come into view. A door opens automatically and out steps from this door the speaker dressed in normal clothes, wearing an Inverness cape. I came into the place where she was. I ignored her; I showed no recognition of her, but began to speak on “Power” Infinite Power. And she looked, and she said, “Why, this is Neville, but it is God! It is Neville, and he is God!” and she kept on repeating this. Then I came to the end. I still did not recognize her; I paid no attention to her just proclaiming Power. Then she said as though by appointment the carriage came into view once more. I turned and re-entered this carriage and vanished. The whole thing vanished. It was sheer power.

When I was sent to do the work I am doing, it was Power who commanded me. I was first embraced by Infinite Love, and I fused with him; but while I’m one with Love and it’s Man, the Risen Lord I was taken before a being who was Infinite Power. Now, you might think it’s another being no, God plays all the parts. God is a protean being, like Proteus, the legendary sea god in the service of Neptune: he could assume any shape, any form anybody in the service of the One who sent him. So Infinite Power is the same being who is Infinite Love and we are told in Scripture that Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God. So, in seeing me speaking only of Power, and Infinite Power, she knew who I was. I could tell her from now to the end of time, I could not persuade her. She would have to have it shown to her by the only Being that could show it, and that is God. For God speaks to man through the medium of dreams, but He reveals Himself through the medium of vision, as told us in the 12th chapter of the book of Numbers. So, had she not had the vision herself, I could go from now throughout time, and I could not really persuade her of the truth of what I’m talking about.

Then another lady said, “I came upon a scene. It was an enormous scene, and every type of person was present all different nationalities; and strangely enough, they heard you in the tongue wherein they were born. And you are simply standing, not in the water, but standing on the beach; but at your back was an infinite body of water a huge lake, but you saw no shoreline. And there you were, clothed in a white robe, and you were speaking to the entire crowd. I knew you were Neville, and yet at the same time I knew you were Jesus! And there was no uncertainty in my mind. I knew, ‘This is Neville’ and I also knew, ‘That is Jesus’.”

Now, that seems insane, but I know from experience everyone in this world is the Lord Jesus Christ. There’s only one body. You do not lose your identity. You remain what you are. You are John, you are Mary, you are Peter; you remain the individualized being that you are, and yet you are Jesus! Yet, you are God! And everyone is destined to be all God. There’s no room in Eternity for two gods no room in Eternity for another. But you and I, separated from God the Father, in the sense only of losing memory as to who we really are, that is the separation. If this very moment I cannot remember who I am, I haven’t gone any place, but I certainly am separated from the being that I knew myself to be. So, when I say that we are separated from God, I mean it in that sense. So, separation from God is at once a tragedy and a triumph. It’s the “Fall,” and yet it is the beginning of a new creation. And this separation, which is now incarnation and complete incarnation is essential to individuality a complete incarnation which will now entail complete forgetfulness of the Being that I am when I drink that “cup of forgetfulness.” He said, “Shall I not drink the cup which the Father has given to me?” (John 18:11, RSV) The drinking of the cup is forgetting who I am, and believing that I am a little being of flesh and blood.

Everyone came out from the Father. He said, “I came out from the Father, and I came into the world; again, I am leaving the world and going to the Father.” (John 16:28, RSV)

So, coming out from the Father is simply forgetting the Being that I am, and believing myself to be this fragmented being, seeing billions of us, and I am now at war with my fragmented self, not knowing that everyone I meet is my very Self “pushed out.” There is no other! Until this experience happens in man when it happens in a man, he does not go and shout it from the housetops, he tells it to an intimate circle. And in that small circle, still only a very few will ever really know it those who have had the experience of meeting him in an entirely different world, for this drama is not secular. This drama of Scripture is a supernatural drama. There is no secular history in Scripture; the whole thing unfolds within the depths of the soul of man and everyone is destined to have this experience.

When the question is asked: Who am I? You cannot ask it of any one, save to one like a Peter; but Peter has the revelation, not from a book, not from reasoning. He didn’t sit down to rationalize the picture. It was unveiled to him from within him. So the voice said: Flesh and blood could not have told you this, but my Father who is in heaven and Heaven is within you has revealed it (Matthew 16:17, paraphrase) has unveiled it in a way that you saw the truth of what you now declare. So I accept your confession.

But now, then, let me re-interpret this concept that man holds concerning Messiah. It’s a false concept. They expect Him to come from without; and He never comes from without He comes from within. And He comes so suddenly that no one is prepared for Him. It comes “out of the blue, as we are told in Scripture: “just like a thief in the night” (1 Thessalonians 5:2). When He comes, no one is expecting Him. I know, in my own case, these four major things in my life were certainly not expected. The first, one night in this city, and that was the birth from above. Now, we speak, and we are told in Scripture: “Unless you are born from above, you cannot enter the Kingdom of God.” (John 3:3) Well, I had no concept none whatsoever that that birth was literally true. I thought that was simply a figure of speech: that I, a big man, grown man, the father of children and I must be born again? Well, I acted like Nicodemus: How is this thing possible? How can I, a man a natural man enter once more into my mother’s womb and be born; when at the time that I was reborn, right in this city (San Francisco) my mother was gone from this sphere. Now, how could it be? I didn’t realize that day, which was in 1959, that that drama was literally true until, within me, the whole thing began to unfold when my whole head became the most intense vibration, and I found myself awaking awaking from a long, long sleep. And where did I awake? I awoke within my skull! My skull was a tomb, and it’s sealed; and then I came out of it like a child coming out of the womb of a woman, and then the entire drama of Scripture confronts me. Here the wind, as told us in the 3rd chapter of the book of John, when he tells Nicodemus: “You must be born again.” And that word translated “again” is the Greek word “an-o-then,” [ἄνωθεν] which means “from above,” that is, from God, literally from above; not from the womb of woman below, but from the Womb of God above, which is the skull of man. That’s where the Real Man began to dream this strange, peculiar dream of mine. And that’s where man will awaken. And out of that tomb man will come!

So, he awakes, and awakening is the Resurrection. He awakes from the long, long sleep; it was so profound, it seemed like the sleep of death for you are in a tomb, and you know it’s a tomb, yet you know it’s your skull. And out you come! Then the wind a peculiar, unearthly wind you feel it and you hear it. Your attention is diverted from that body from which you’ve just emerged. You are only diverted for a matter of seconds and when you look back, the body is gone, in fulfillment of Scripture. “Where have they taken the body?” (John 20:11-15) The body’s gone! But in its place you’ll find three men. In my case, they were my three older brothers. There they were where the body had formerly just a few seconds ago lay. They, too, are disturbed by the wind and one, who is now gone from this world, arose and started toward what he thought was the cause of the disturbance. He took not more than a couple of steps when something attracted his attention on the floor and, looking down, “Why,” he said, “it’s Neville’s baby!” My other two brothers said, “How can Neville have a baby?” With this, he doesn’t argue the point; he lifts the evidence. He lifts a little child wrapped in swaddling clothes and puts it on the bed; and then I lift the little infant, and in the most endearing terms I said, “How is my sweetheart?” The child had the most heavenly smile. As it broke into this smile, the whole scene dissolved.

That was the first of the major acts. Then came the other three mighty acts to complete the four sides of man. So, I know from my own personal experience I am not theorizing what is in store for every child born of woman. It doesn’t even matter if those that you know beyond the veil do not have this experience. They’re not dead! Nothing dies in God’s Kingdom. They are restored to life instantly restored. That I do know from my own experience. No reincarnation, they are restored; and they are young and new same bodies in a world terrestrial, just like this, and unaccountably new – I can’t describe it. How can someone drop at the age of 90, withered and shrunken, in pain; and when you see them, within a matter of moments, they are only 20 years old? They are not little babies. They are young unaccountably new. No limb is missing. If they had a limb missing, it isn’t missing. If they had hair missing, teeth missing, legs missing, it is not missing. If they were blind, they are not blind. The body is restored but not resurrected. Resurrection differs completely from restoration. All bodies are restored. It’s a miracle. And the Being is still continuing in a world just like this. Those who are resurrected do not enter that world. They are in Heaven. They are one with the body of the Risen Christ without loss of identity. And everyone who is restored and all are restored they continue in a world just like this one, with the same problems. They marry there, too, and they are just as afraid of dying there as they are here; and they die there too, to be restored again. And this restoration goes on until they awake in the tomb of their own skull, and when they have the birth from above.

So, who am I? The very one spoken of in Scripture. You ask that question, “Who am I?” And the answer is: I am the Lord Jesus Christ! But you don’t know it really until you experience it. But I promise you; you will experience it. Not one can fail for the simple reason it’s God, and God alone, who is playing the part. He is playing all of the parts.

So when David comes into your world, there is no other way that you will ever know that you really are the Lord Jesus Christ. Now, listen to the words carefully. No one asked him the question. The Sadducees, who are called the scientists of his day – they did not believe in the Resurrection; so they said to him, to trip him up: “Master, Moses said that in the resurrection a man’s wife …”

First of all, he paints the picture. He said Moses said if a man is married and dies leaving no offspring and he has brothers, then the second should marry the widow to raise up offspring for his brother. Well, there were seven brothers. The first one married and died, leaving no offspring, and the second took her. He died, leaving no offspring, and the third took her. Finally all married; all died, leaving no offspring, and then she died. Now, tell me, whose wife is she in the resurrection? And he answered, “You do not know Scripture, for in the resurrection they neither marry nor are they given in marriage. Those who are accounted worthy to attain to that Age, they neither marry nor are they given in marriage, for they are sons of the resurrection. They are sons of God, and the Son of God is one with God, for I and my Father are one. But those who have not attained to that Age, they continue marrying, and they are given in marriage.” (See Luke 20)

So, here is an entirely different concept from what is taught concerning what is your future. Your real future is Jesus Christ. There is no other body. There is no other spirit, One being, fragmented.

Now, see how it was told us in the Old Testament. It’s the 82nd Psalm. “And God had taken His place in the divine council; in the midst of the gods He holds judgment. And I say, ‘Ye are gods, all of you – sons of the Most High.’ Nevertheless, you will die like men and fall as one man, O ye princes.” (See Psalm 82:6, 7)

It is said by scholars that this is the most difficult passage in the entire Bible to understand; that if at one time the ideas were perennial, they no longer are understood by the scholars of the world because it can only be known through vision. One man – now listen to the words: “He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world.” (Ephesians 1:4) Therefore, who fell? The One Man. He fell for a purpose – nothing wrong. Not a thing was wrong in that fall!

If I put you in garments of passion, as you are – these are all garments of the animal world, filled to overflowing with passion – and then I tell you under threat of death you must not entertain one concupiscent thought, you never convicted me. If you tell me the result of my concupiscence is death – well, then I must die. But nevertheless, “I say, ‘Ye are gods …’ and you are going to die like men. You will fall as one man, O ye princes.” (Psalm 82:6, 7) So, the One Man is scattered, like a rock being broken and fragmented. And every one now is to be gathered together in the same One Being – one body, but glorified by reason of the experience.

Well, now, Scripture tells us, I didn’t do wrong in the fall. Our priesthoods tell us that we did wrong. Well, then, listen to these words: If disobedience drove me out from the Father and caused me to lose the identity of my own being, which is Jesus Christ, and believe myself to be a little animal, then what are these words doing in scripture from the 11th chapter of the book of Romans: “God has consigned all men to disobedience, that He may have mercy upon all.” (Romans 11:32, Moffatt’s translation) So, if disobedience drove me out, the cause of my disobedience was the One who clothed me this garment of skin, for He put me in an animal body, and then threatened me with death if I entertained a concupiscent thought. Well, how could I help it? What man in this world, if he has any red blood in him and is healthy, could have helped it? Even if you went to the extreme and emasculated yourself, you still would entertain the thought. If you are impotent, the thought is still there. While the energy is turned down into generation, you cannot help it. When the curtain of your body is torn in two from top to bottom, and then the energies are reversed into regeneration, you can take all the world and expose them in the nude before you, and there is no desire. You couldn’t entertain a concupiscent thought. But until that moment – when you are turned down into generation, then you are condemned to death by reason of the fact He Who first told me I must not eat of this is the One who said to me He made me disobedient. “For he consigned all men” – consigned all men “to disobedience, that he may have mercy on all.” (Romans 11:32)

So, in the end, all return – all are forgiven, and everything is perfect. Man, when he’s down, can’t believe that. He wants to punish, he wants to hurt; but then you’ve never stood in the presence of Infinite Love. You cannot be in the presence of the Risen Christ and feel any emotion but Love. It’s impossible to feel anything but love, and you are looking right into the face of the Risen Christ. He asks a very simple question: “What is the greatest thing in the world?” And automatically, as though you were divinely prompted, you answer: “Faith, hope, and love, these three; but the greatest of all these is love.” (See 1 Corinthians 13:13) At that moment, He embraces you, and you fuse, and you become one with the Risen Lord. And he who is united with the Lord becomes one spirit with Him. Are we not told: “If I have been crucified with Him in a death like His, I shall certainly be one with Him in a resurrection like His”? (See Romans 6:5) So, the Crucifixion is over for all of us. The Resurrection is taking place, one after one, after one; and not one will fail. So, all have once been crucified with Christ – everyone. “He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world.” (Ephesians 1:4) So, His Crucifixion was our crucifixion!

Now the Resurrection has started; and one after the other, He is being awakened within the tomb of their own skull, and the drama unfolds within them, and out they come. So, in the end you shall only be the Lord Jesus Christ. So, when you are told in Scripture they saw the law personified, they saw the prophets personified in Moses and Elisha; here is Jesus transfigured before them. And when their eyes were opened, it was Jesus only; for Divine Mercy steps beyond and redeems man in the body of Jesus – only that one body. And, yet, you do not lose your identity; but those who have the vision will see you and know you, but still know that you are Jesus. They will know you, and still know that you are God and the Power of God. “And Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God.” (1 Corinthians 1:24)

So, this question is not something that man can answer. Flesh and blood cannot tell you that you are Jesus Christ. I could stand here and use every argument in the book, but you will still be unpersuaded. You will go out saying, “That man is either insane or it’s sheer blasphemy,” for it’s in conflict with what the churches have taught you. But I am not speculating, I am not theorizing; I speak from experience. I tell you what I know from my own personal experience. I did not read it in a book, I was not taught it by a man. It simply came by a revelation of Jesus Christ in the same manner that you read it in the very first chapter of the book of Galatians. And Paul said, “I did not receive it from a man; neither was I taught it, but it came through a revelation of Jesus Christ.” (Galatians 1:12) And he tells you, there is no other doctrine, and he made this claim in a statement of Scripture before the Four Gospels were written. In fact, it was not only written before the Four were, but it was an already established school of thought. The earliest book in the New Testament is Paul’s Letter to the Galatians; and no one dates it later than 52 A.D., and yet our Gospels go anywhere from 70 A.D. up to 95 A.D.

So, a generation after Paul’s letter appeared instructing the Galatians – and then came his Thessalonians, and then came his Corinthians; and these all predated the Gospels. So, I know that the story of Jesus Christ is the story of every child born of woman; that we all fall together, and all will rise in our own good time. He calls us, one by one by one.

In the meantime, He tries us in the “furnaces of affliction,” as we are told in Isaiah: “I try you in the furnaces of affliction. For my own sake I do it. For my own sake I do it, for how should my glory be given to another? I will not give my glory to another.” (See Isaiah 48:10, 11) You have to become Him to receive His glory. And the day will come that we will take off these garments of flesh and blood and put on the body of glory, which is yours. You took it off for this experience, and you came out of Heaven to have this experience. You’ve had it, and you’ll return glorified. And that’s how The Infinite Being expands. There is no limit to translucence, to expansion; there is only a limit to contraction, and man is the limit of contraction. Man is the limit of opacity, but the day will come that you will break the shell; and then you will add to the glory of the Body of God; for your glory adds to that glory, and it all expands and expands beyond measure.

Now, this may be a little different from what you had last year, or even in previous years; but this is based upon the experience of the last year and ten months. Not my own personal experience, for they go back to 1959, but I mean this confirmation from those in the audience.

Now, a lady will have the experience in this manner: She will follow the pattern, not of Abraham, but she will follow the pattern of Sarah. And Sarah was too old to have a child, for it is said of Sarah: “It has ceased to be with her after the manner of women” (Genesis 18:11). In other words, she would be incapable of conceiving a child and carrying it to fruition, as you’ll read it in the book of Genesis. So, a lady has it in this manner. I could give you a dozen from my audience in L.A.; we will take one.

She has two brothers. She hasn’t seen these brothers in forty-odd years. She has a landlord, whom she looks upon as a younger brother. She was away from home one night, a thing she rarely does unless she leaves the city; but she was in the city and someone was distressed and asked her to “please sleep here tonight.” But she said, “I’ve got to go home first of all and tell my neighbors where I am because they depend upon me. They are elderly ladies.” She said, “All right, but do promise me that you’ll come back.” So she did. She said, “I’m in a strange home with a strange person in a strange atmosphere, and here I am in the wee hours of the morning, when I feel this peculiar breeze and vibration in my head. It increases in intensity. When it reaches the apex of intensity, suddenly here come my two brothers that I haven’t seen in over forty years, and my landlord. My oldest brother said, ‘but she is too old to have a baby.’”

Well, they all agreed, but he picked up the infant wrapped in swaddling clothes and put it in his sister’s arms. Now, this lady is 77 years old – a retired schoolteacher of L.A. It comes in her case as it comes to Sarah – too old to have a child, but this is not a physical child. This is a supernatural experience. So, she heard the words: “But she is too old to have a child” when the infant was raised from the floor and put into her hands. After that, she found herself in a canyon where she lives. Unlike my experience, she’s in a canyon – the rugged side of a canyon; and here comes this blond, blue-eyed lad. And said, “I did not have to ask him, ‘Whose son are you my lad?’ I knew he was my son, and I knew he was David of Biblical fame.” She’s had every experience but the dove, and that takes nine months and two years after the third mighty one. She will have it, because she’s had the first three.

So, a man differs in this work from a woman. She takes the pattern of Sarah and he takes the pattern of Abraham – but the identical picture as related in Scripture.

So, you dwell upon it tonight, even though you cannot completely accept it. You dwell upon it: Who Am I? Is he telling the truth? Does Neville know what he is talking about? Has he really had these experiences? Ask – just ask, and see if you cannot get from within yourself an answer to the truth of what I am talking about. I tell you, the answer will come. In some strange way, God will answer, for God is not a being afar off. God is within you. He is never so far off as even to be near, for nearness implies separation. God cannot even be near me. Why? Because His name He gave to me. Well, what’s His name? I Am. Can you find anything that even is – well, you can’t say “I am near”; it’s the One; it’s the root, it’s the very center of your being. My hand is near, my head is near; my friends are near. But I can’t say, “I am,” and entertain this word “near.” And I Am is the name of God forever. If “I Am” is His name forever, well, then, He cannot be far off. In fact, He cannot be even so far off as to be near, for nearness implies separation. That is who you really are; and that Being which is “I Am” – that’s God! That’s the Lord Jesus Christ.

And when He asks: “Who do you say I am?” – he could have said, “You are the Power of God,” for the word “Christ” is defined in Corinthians as the Power of God and the Wisdom of God. One day you will have the experience, and you will see someone who has made the claim – without boasting; and you will come upon a scene, and the scene will unveil itself before you, and you will know her claim, or his claim, is a true claim, for you will know him to be Jesus, or know her to be Jesus, and you still will not think it is not the being you know. There is no loss of identity, and yet – Jesus. And you come back to your waking state here, and there is no uncertainty in your mind as to what you’ve experienced. And who did it? God-within-you did it. God unveils Himself within you.

Now, let us go into the Silence for a moment, and then have questions and answers.

Good.

Now, are there any questions, please?

Question: At the beginning of your talk, Neville, you said there is only one Spirit. At the present time there are a lot of books coming into the bookstores about necromancy and sorcery and witchcraft, and so forth. With what are these people who deal in the black arts dealing, if there is only one Spirit?

Neville: There is only one Spirit. Read Ephesians: “… one body …” It starts with the body first: “… one body, one spirit, one hope, one lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of us all, Who is above all, through all and in all,” as told us in Ephesians. (Ephesians 4:4-6)

Don’t get away from the oneness of God. The foundation of the whole faith begins with that Shema, or the confession of the Hebrews: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.” (Deuteronomy 6-4) You can’t get away from that.

When Jesus was asked to name the greatest of all the Commandments, he did not mention what we call the Ten. He quoted this Commandment: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.” It’s a compound Unity – one made up of the many. That’s what the word means. The word “Elohim” is a plural word, and it’s one; but, yet, being plural, it’s made up of many. There are billions of us, but we are all part of that One Body. That One Body fell. That One Body shall rise, taking with it all, but in its own good time, into the new living Temple.

I don’t care what books come out. Many a person thinks because something is printed, it is true; but nothing could be more false than that. The morning paper that comes out – that’s printed. Is it true? Nothing but violence and publicity. I have a scheme I want to put over, and so I get with my press agents and they write all the lies in the world; and the paper prints it, and you read. And because you read it in the paper, it must be true. Well, nothing could be further from the truth! But because imagining creates reality, it will prove itself in performance – and God allows it! There’s nothing but God.

Question: When we have attained resurrection, do we still have to return?

Neville: You do not. After resurrection, you do not find yourself restored to life; you are one with the Body of God. It will come to everyone, or one part of God would be lost, and that is impossible. He said, “It is not your Father’s will that one be lost” (See Matthew 18:14)

Question: The Parable of the Sower would tend to make us think that some will be, because it says that some fell upon rocky ground and some fell in thorn.

Neville: All right. It’s happening right here tonight. There’s rocky ground here tonight. They’ll go through that door and say, “That man is nuts.” That’s rocky ground. Then there are those who will say, “Well, you know, I’d like to believe it, and I think I’ll try it.” Well, that’s among the thorns. They go out all enthusiastic, but the cares of the day will choke it; and then there are those not prepared for the revelation, and so that will be choked, but there are those present who will receive it and will bear thirty-fold, fifty-fold, a hundred-fold. But every moment of time when this revelation is said, there are always those four grounds on which it falls.

Question: Just what does the resurrectee do?

Neville: What does he do? He’s part of the Body of God. He’s the creative power of the universe, without loss of identity. No loss of identity – that’s one thing I must assure every person who listens to me. You are not absorbed, and yet it’s one body. She saw me on the beach. She’s not alone; the other one saw me in the interior, and these two are not alone. Dozens find me on the outside at night beyond the world of dreams doing this work, teaching the Word of God, and they know the teacher is Neville, but they also know that he’s Jesus, and they also know that he is the Power of God; and some know he is God! And, yet, they all know I’m Neville. Yet, in this world, I’m as weak, I’m as limited and as fragile as the next. You take upon yourself the weaknesses of the flesh to reach those who are in the flesh.

Question: You say, “Beyond the world of dreams.” Exactly what do you mean?

Neville: Oh, there’s a world beyond the world of dreams, and that is where the real work is done.

Question: What is the world of dreams?

Neville: The world of dreams? Well, really, to be brutally frank, you are right now in the world of dreams. This is a dream – a nightmare. This is a dream. God Himself enters death’s door with everyone who enters, and He lays down in the grave with them in visions of Eternity until they awake and see Jesus, and the linen clothes lying there that the female has woven for them; [2] and the linen clothes are just a figure of speech. This is the linen clothes (referring to the body) that the female – my mother – wove for me, and when I take it off after I awake, that’s the linen cloth, and I can’t take it off until I am He, for Jesus is the one who resurrects; He is the resurrecting one.

Question: I consider myself fragmented as of now because I haven’t had that experience (remainder of question inaudible on the tape).

Neville: Can you divide “I Am”?

Questioner: No; but I mean at this time, since I haven’t had that experience.

Neville: Well, it doesn’t really matter.

Questioner: It doesn’t matter?

Neville: As you are seated here, my dear, you say, “I am,” don’t you? Well, it cannot be divided, for that’s the unity of which I speak. That is God.

Questioner: Even now, before that experience –

Neville: Before that experience, you can claim, “I am He.” You are told that if you do not claim, “I am He,” you will die in your sins. (John 8:24) You are passing the buck to some other person to do it.

Questioner: Oh, do it right now?

Neville: Why, certainly! You don’t resurrect right now. That comes in its own good time; but you exercise the power of God right now, for the power of God is your own wonderful, human I Am-ness. That’s God! So, when you say, “I am beaten” – all right, that’s the power of God, and you’ll be beaten. When you say, “I am wounded,” that’s the power of God, and you will be wounded; but if in the face of all things, you say, “I am wanted. I am contributing to the world’s good,” in spite of the absence of all evidence to the contrary, you will contribute and you will be wanted, for you are using the power of God!

Questioner: Right now?

Neville: Right now! You’ve got to use the power of God. There’s only God’s power. When you speak of the devil, what devil? Listen to the words of Scripture in Deuteronomy: “I kill, and I make alive; I wound, and I heal … I raise my hand to heaven and cry, I live forever. There is no god beside me.” (See Deuteronomy 32:39-40) The same one that kills is the one that makes alive. The one that blesses is the one that curses. So, man is the operant power, and he has to operate it. God became man, that man may become God.

Question: But most of us have put everything in the future. When, in the future, are we…

Neville: But “I Am” is not future. “I Am” is present. He didn’t say, “I was God” – “I am the Lord.” There’s no past and future; it is simply “I Am.” So, use the power now.

Any other questions, please?

Question: I can’t understand why I would – when I would be enjoying a sense of heaven, heavenly being – why I would choose to dream up this kind of a stupid experience.

Neville: Did you hear the question? It’s an interesting question. But, may I tell you, my dear, this is not stupid, a stupid experience. This was a plan. This is not something that is the result of some emergency thinking on the part of God. This was planned in the beginning of time. “He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world” (Ephesians 1:4)

Question: Well, why?

Neville: Why? To expand. If God was finished forever and forever, and could not expand, then He’s a finite god. He has to reach the limit of contraction to break it. He has to die to prove that He really lives. And, so, this is a constant wonderful challenge forever. Just imagine the joy when we all awake, and the whole thing seems to be the most frightening thing in the beginning. But we had faith, like Abraham – faith in God that He could die and still not die. And, so the power that comes as an increase of power and an increase of wisdom, an increase of luminosity – don’t let anyone tell you God is a finished product. Truth is an ever-increasing illumination.

Question: Why did the Kennedy’s have to suffer? They lost two boys –

Neville: My dear, I wouldn’t say the boys suffered. The family left behind grieves, yes. We do not ever recognize our own hearts. No one knows the thought of a man, but the spirit of man who dwells in him. Likewise, no man knows the thoughts of God, but the Spirit of God who dwells in Him. Who knows what thought those boys entertained? The three of them were killed violently, and so was a sister. Joseph was killed in the war. His sister was killed, her husband was killed, and these two boys were assassinated. Who knows what thoughts they entertained? To be dramatic, I do not know. In other words, everything was done when the first was assassinated to identify his name with Lincoln – the same feeling – not McKinley, but he was assassinated too. But they tried to make it a Lincoln fiction, to set it for the future, and they’ve done it. So, if you want glory on earth, they certainly have it. They have it if you want it on earth; but all the things of earth will vanish, and leave not a trace behind them. Everything here is going to pass away as though it never were; and all will awaken.

Now, here, I say you cannot violate Scripture. Scripture must be fulfilled in me. David is described in the 16th chapter of First Samuel as a blonde lad; he’s described as ruddy – ruddy with beautiful eyes, implying blue, blue, wonderful eyes and a ruddy complexion. (1st Samuel 16:12) In my audience the blackest man I personally have ever seen – and I was born among black people on Barbados – and we have them blue-black in Barbados; but Benny is the blackest man I have ever seen. Benny is the father of David, and he knows it. Benny has had the experience of the birth from above. And what was the child? A little babe – a little rosy-cheeked baby son. It would be impossible for Benny to marry the blondest woman in this world and produce a light child – I’m telling you, he’s so black! You have never seen anyone as black as Benny – Benny Gould, a big, strong, strapping fellow. He’s had the “birth from above,” and that child that was placed in his arms is a little blonde, blue-eyed, rosy-cheeked child. It’s the Christ Child. The Christ Child is the child, and David is a blonde, and Benny – he doesn’t object to my using him as an example to prove that we are not black or yellow or pink or white. We are spirit. But God is a protean being, and the same God that plays the part of Neville plays the part of Benny, for Benny says, “I am” – that’s God; and I say, “I am” – that’s God. Look at each other, and I can’t see how we could come out of the same parents. And we don’t come out; we are the parents! We are the parents.

Question: (Inaudible on the tape)

Neville: My dear, God didn’t will it, but God gives man complete freedom of choice. Listen to these words: “I set before you this day life and death, blessings and curses, good and evil. Choose life.” (See Deuteronomy 30:15,19) It’s entirely up to man. If I were not free in my choice, I were a puppet. If I had to be good, I’m no good! But give me choice, and let me make mistakes. Man will not recognize his own harvest. It couldn’t happen without a cause, and the cause is in the imagination of man. Imagination creates everything. That’s God-in-man!

So, if I want to make a fortune, and I have the means, and that is to sell guns – well, what’s happening now? What a lobby, that when two hundred million people really want laws that will protect the neighborhood! I have to register my car. Why can’t I register a gun? They don’t say I can’t have a gun. They say you’ll have the gun as you have a car, but there must be a license for it, and a renewal year after year; so if they come into my house and I can’t produce that license – well, then, they will question me: Was it stolen? Did I see it? Did I give it away? I must keep track of that thing that I bought with a license; and, yet, after this whole thing that has happened in our world – there were three: Martin Luther King and the two Kennedy’s; and the demand of the entire nation is to have a license. Other countries have it, but we still say, No. What a fantastic lobby to get to these people who are the lawmakers! Well, if he insists on doing it, he’ll do it. You can’t stop a man from imagining. Put me in jail and throw away the key, but you can’t stop me from imagining. And who knows who is “treading the winepress”? (Nehemiah 13:15) It could be some woman in jail who is thinking that she is injured, that she is not entitled to that treatment; and she is carrying on in her mind’s eye the most dramatic scenes – and they aren’t love scenes! These are all seeds that are being planted; and when the seeds come up for recognition, we don’t even recognize our own harvest.

Well, I think the time is just about up. I’ll take one more.

Question: I remember a passage which says, “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.” (Matthew 24:35) What does it mean by “my words”?

Neville: He is the word. The written word must be matched by the Living Word. Scripture must be fulfilled in me; so I come as the Living Word. If I am the Living Word, then what takes place in me must parallel what God wrote through His Promise in the written word.

(Question inaudible on the tape.)

Neville: Discriminate. Heaven is simply the final unity of humanity with God, because that one Body, wherever God is, that’s harmonious. That is Heaven. Heaven is harmony. So, wherever that Body is, there is no conflict. That’s infinite creative power and wisdom and love; so union with that Body is heaven. So, Heaven is really the final union of humanity with God. And there is only God. There is nothing but God. So, all things will pass away, but God cannot pass away; and He redeems us, one by one by one. Where? In His own Body. Whose body is that? The Lord Jesus Christ. So, when a man says, “Well, now, I’m a very wise person. I have a PhD, and I have all these degrees, and so and so, and I don’t believe one word of what you say,” it’s perfectly all right. Then they will say I am an atheist. Do you know what the Bible calls an atheist? He can be the wisest thing among men, but read the 53rd Psalm: “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God’” – only the fool; so what he calls “the fool” is in the eyes of God wiser than what he is in the eyes of God. He has to go through so many furnaces to burn off the nonsense he’s acquired in the world of men. All these are furnaces through which we go. The loss of a child, — that’s a furnace. A broken friendship, — that’s a furnace. All these emotional conflicts – these are furnaces. They are not furnaces where you walk through actual fire. These are the fires, and they linger and burn; and so all these are the fires of earth that I’m put through; and in the end, it’s Infinite Mercy redeemed. I didn’t acquire it. Let no one brag, let no one boast.

No one can, by acquiring merit, earn the Kingdom of Heaven. It’s Grace, Grace – Grace – Grace, and still, more Grace! And, so, my fitness for the Kingdom is not the consequence of what I did; it’s not the result of it.

It’s because God so loved me, He just simply picked me up. With all of my nonsense – with all of my weaknesses, He picked me up at that moment in Time, with unclear hands – unclean all over; but as I fused with Him, I was made clean.

(Question inaudible on the tape.)

Neville: No, it’s not a God out there, but I’ve got to convey between two people who seemingly – you seem to be “out there.” I’m speaking of one God all the time, but I repeat again, as I said earlier; God is a protean being. A dream is an analogy of it. In my dream there are a thousand characters that occur in my dream. I conjure them all, and I am the being playing all the parts because I am a protean being. Yet, in the dream I run from myself, scare myself to death – until one day you wake up to realize that it’s all yourself “pushed out.” This whole vast world is the dream of God.

For travellers from Eternity. pass outward to Satans seat, But travellers to Eternity. pass inward to Golgonooza.

Milton 17.29-30 E111 Wm. Blake

Thus they converse with the Dead watching round the Couch of Death. For God himself enters Death’s Door always with those that enter And lays down in the Grave with them, in Visions of Eternity Till they awake & see Jesus & the Linen Clothes lying That the Females had Woven for them, & the Gates of their Fathers House

Milton 32.39-43 E132 Wm. Blake

There isn’t a thing in this world that doesn’t need a man as an agent to express it. We speak of hate, we speak of love, we speak of all these things, well, some man expresses it, and then we write about the man. He was simply in a state. He either entered it knowingly, unknowingly, but if he remains in it then he externalizes that state. So, everyone in this world is free to choose. And so, I am imagining myself into my present state. If I don’t like it, I must imagine myself out of it into the state that I like.

For everyone in the beginning, believe it or not, we were all together. As we’re told in scripture, “He chose us in himself before the foundation of the world.” All form God. Now, here we have a preconceived plan. And then, we who conceived it collectively form one, one wonderful, glorious being. And then, together we spoke as one, and we said, “It is time for the play to begin.” And you and I, individually, answered, “I am ready,” and then we started. We conceived the play, every conceivable horrible thing in the world and every conceivable lovely thing in the world, every problem, every solution. You can’t conceive of something that was not in that original conception, that preconceived plan. And then, it is time to start. You and I, having conceived it ourselves, we said, “I’m ready.” When we said “I am,” that’s God. It’s ready to take upon itself everything that it had conceived, and then it starts off into this fabulous world of ours. So now, no matter what you are doing, what you are experiencing, you are not condemned by some being outside of yourself. You either wittingly or unwittingly fell into it, good, bad, or indifferent.

Now, how do we move? Here we are told in the very beginning of Genesis, it’s the second verse, “And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” We are told now that when he first speaks to Joshua, which is the Hebraic name for Jesus, in the first chapter of Joshua, that “Wherever the sole of your foot will tread upon I have given you.” Now, you be the chooser of where you will allow the sole of your foot to tread. Wherever it treads I’ve given it to you, because the whole is yours. And he speaks now to Jesus. Well, forget Jesus as some historical creature 2,000 years ago. I am speaking to Jesus when I speak to you. “Christ in you is the hope of glory.” “Do you not realize that Jesus Christ is in you?” I am speaking to your own wonderful human imagination. So when I say that God became man that man may become God, I mean the same as if I said imagination became man that man may become all imagination. It’s the same thing. But, man hasn’t the same association. He doesn’t use the word imagination as he uses the word God. When he uses the word God, it’s something remote, something out of his mind altogether, some being that created it all apart from him. If I use “imagination” you will know more of what I’m talking about. So, imagination became man that man may become all imagination. And everything in this world, the whole vast world, is all imagination.

And so, when our realists think that they are nearer to the truth, they don’t realize they are depicting nothing more than their own imagination. So they laugh at you and me when we call ourselves the mystically inclined. May I tell you, let them be just as they are. Don’t encourage them but leave them just as they are, and you go blindly on simply imagining that you are the being that you want to be, and you will become it. You have imagined yourself into what you are, and you must imagine yourself into what you want to be. No outside deity did it for you. You were not under compulsion to do it. You fell into misery or you fell into this, because you didn’t know you are God; that you are the being who conceived it in the beginning, and then fell deliberately. No one took it from you; you fell deliberately into these states and started the journey.

So I say, you can prove it right now. You can start tonight. Not by being a holy person… I’m not speaking of being any holy person, as the world calls it. For the story of Jesus is so unlike its original, when you read what the so-called wise men speak about it, all the churches, all these so-called isms. It’s so far removed from the original story. It is just as far removed as Dante’s Inferno is from the Sermon on the Mount, yet that is based upon scripture. That strange, peculiar concept into which he fell… so he had the capacity to write and what beautiful, beautiful words he could string together, but what state into which he fell! Yet, he is writing, supposedly, scripture. And that’s what the churches follow.

So, it is so completely different from the real true story of Jesus. Jesus is every being in this world. There’s only Jesus. The word means “Jehovah saves.” There’s only one savior. The one who fell is the one who saves himself. No one else saves you; you are saved by your own being. You become aware, you begin to remember, and remembering, you turn around, and simply come out of the very play into which you have sent yourself. All in the end are united and we form into the single being that fell. One being containing all fell, and in the end all are gathered, not one will be lost, and all are re-gathered into the one being that is the Lord Jesus Christ. That’s the story.

Now, I received this week some beautiful letters, perfectly wonderful letters. Here is one. The lady said, “I heard you ten years ago, but then I didn’t write you because, first of all, you were not asking for letters and, secondly, I was not in the habit of writing. But I did make a record of what happened soon after I heard you. I found myself in what the world would call dream, but it was more than dream, I call it vision. I was at the top of the highest mountain,” she didn’t use the word “world,” she said “the universe,” “and some force held me looking toward the horizon, this fantastic vastness without a shore. I knew below me there were clouds, strange clouds, but I couldn’t look down from this enormous height. I was held to look at the distance. Then to my right a little flicker, a spark, appeared. Then, to my left, the vastness of it all, another little spark there. Then another spark there. And suddenly I felt that this cloud made an imperceptible forward motion, a slight… I knew it was moving forward. Then these lights appeared. And then suddenly, through the clouds came a burst of light, white light that filled infinity. As it filled it, the clouds began to move, not only forward but in all directions. They took on motion in every direction.

“And standing there, I knew, how I knew I couldn’t tell you, but I pointed and I said, ‘That’s Paul.’ Then, the light diffused, filling all. And then another burst of light came, this time in multiple color. I can’t explain it but the light was living, the color was alive, the whole thing was alive. Living color, but every color conceivable, was all bursting through. I knew as I did prior to this who it was and I said, ‘That is Neville.’ Then came a shower of golden needles penetrating my brain. It was almost unbearable as it penetrated my brain. And then, I woke from it all and wrote it down. Over the years I would ponder on this. I would take it out from my drawer and think about it, pondering, but I’d get no response to the meaning of it. My friends Natalie and Lucy would discuss it with me, but we couldn’t bring any light to bear upon the meaning of it until last Monday night when you spoke. And then I saw, of a world beyond dream where a being of light shoots his fiery arrows into the brain of those that he’s called.”

It’s the same story, over and over and over. There’s only one Jesus Christ, there’s only one Lord, only one God and Father of us all, and we are that God and Father of it all. We conceived it and we are playing it, and each in his own wonderful good time will play it, play the part. In the end it’s all God. So hate no one, because all agreed in the beginning and we’re under masks while we play. Because we are completely masked, we don’t recognize ourselves who agreed in the beginning when this whole play was conceived and predicted. Not in a fatalistic sense, for I fell into a state or that state… not by some being outside of myself. That was arranged in the beginning, that I could fall into any state and get out of any state and keep going. But I had to keep going; I must complete the play, I must finish the play. But when I get to the end of the road, I turn around and come back. I go from here to the end, and then I turn around and return. And then return to whom? Return to the very being that I was in the beginning.

Now a gentleman writes me that he had this unusual dream which puzzled him. He said, “You asked for the unusual. Well, I had this experience. Here I saw this man about twenty-six years old, golden curls on his head, golden hair, all curly hair. But he seemed to be in this cylinder and seemed to be sunk into at least the floor, or the earth, because he only came up to the waist of two men who were next to him. They were working on what I thought to be his hair. I thought they were giving him a haircut. They seemed to be working on the top of his head, towards the back of his skull. Then I realized as I looked at him that they were doing more than that. They were not only taking off the hair, they were going down into the skull. I looked at the man and the man simply raised his hand and put it on his skull and felt that emptiness as he pushed his hand down into his own skull. Well, I was intrigued. It was unbelievable what I’m seeing, and so I went around to look at him. I got above him and here the skull, this enormous vacant area, and I thought, ‘Well, they might have removed the brain.’ But they hadn’t. The whole thing seemed to be plastic… made of clay or some plastic. So I got in the front of the man. When I got in the front of the man, by then, as it happens in vision, it switched from an interior to exterior and it’s a desert. His chin is resting on the sand itself. I looked at him. It’s the kind of a mask that you see in Africa or in Hawaii where the native wears it. You could never see the wearer; you could only see the mask that the wearer is wearing. I couldn’t see who wore it; I could only see a mask. It was just a mask.”

Well, that is the world. You don’t know who you’re looking at. You’re looking at the most intimate being in the world when you look at anyone in this world, one you knew in the beginning, and one that you will know forever. We all put on masks and we’re all playing the play. Playing anything, playing the weak man, the strong man, the rich man, the poor man, and we play it all by imagination. For, it was in the beginning conceived by imagination, and then imagination is playing it all. For you are all imagination and God is all imagination. That’s all that it is. This whole vast universe is nothing more than imagination ceaselessly creating. That’s what it is.

So you and I are moving from state to state to state, either deliberately knowing what we are doing, or falling into it by headlines, by the books we read, by all the things that confront us. And so, tonight they simply hear anything on TV or radio, accept it, they know none of the facts, and fall right into it. It makes you buy things you do not need, makes you fill your house with all kinds of trivia that you have not the room for, all because imagination is operating. Someone conceives a plot, a plan, to get you to empty your pockets and buy their trivia. You’ll do it, someone will, because we are sound asleep in our journey until we turn around and start home. And then we begin to become more and more awake, more and more awake.

Nothing about Jesus is known by those who think they are so very wise in this world. Only the seers, the mystics know who he is, for they have seen the flickering light that he claimed that he is. They’ve seen the light that he claimed that he is. They knew without seeing the face, the form, who it was. No loss of identity but the same being, the same light. There aren’t numbers of lights, just one vast infinite light. So, if one takes on all white and one all color and one something else, it’s still the same wonderful infinite light. And there is only Jesus Christ; there is nothing but Jesus Christ. There’s only God, playing all the parts in the world. So in the end, you will know that he is love, he is light, he is spirit. You’ll know it from your own personal experience.

So if I stand here tonight and, standing here, seeing all the facts of life, here they are, and then I shut it out mentally, who in the world looking at me, physically, would know where I am dwelling in imagination? So if I dwell in imagination where I would like to be, dwelling elsewhere other than here, and then I see what I would see were I there, and then I open my eyes and I’m still here, you’d wonder, “What did he do?” Well, I moved within my own being, didn’t I? Everything here that comes into being comes into being because of a movement within God. In the beginning God moved, and the Spirit of the Lord moved upon the face of the waters. And wherever I go and stand, there it has been given to me. It was given to me in the beginning when the whole thing was conceived by us.

And so, one day, having done it, having gone through it, and beginning to awaken, then the first one that came out stands there as the anchor. And everyone comes through the same, re-forming the same being. So when you and I awaken, we are drawn by our fiery brooding upon this wonderful mystery to the risen Christ, who is formed out of all. As we come into the risen Christ we fuse, and the mortal reassumes immortality. So we fell into the mortal state where we have the experience of death, and we go through it; and then suddenly we return, all gathered into the one being. So in the beginning, one came up first. Certainly one comes up first. But a second, a third, and the billions join into that one body, and all form the one body, without loss of identity. Just as she could, without seeing a face, without seeing a form other than light, know who it was. And she could from the highest mountain, she said, in the universe: “I knew this was Paul. I knew this is Neville.” But she didn’t see a face, she didn’t see a form, but she knew intuitively who it was that burst through the clouds and illuminated all that was there.

So I tell you that you are the very being spoken of in scripture as the Lord Jesus Christ. You are the being spoken of as the Lord Jehovah, who conceived the play. You and I did nothing that was wrong to warrant this. We deliberately did it. It was an adventure… and without an adventure what is life? I mean, just to have someone leave me a million dollars so I can sit down and just have my help and be cushioned for the few little, tiny years that I flicker here? Is that living? But, no, life must be an adventure. I must leave all behind. He empties himself of all that he is, and takes upon himself the form of a slave. This is the form of a slave, this is the mask. And then he wears it… and no one knows who the wearer of the mask is. But you can’t meet anyone in this world that you have not known in eternity, but you don’t know him when you see the mask.

I looked at Benny when Benny came home a week ago. I looked at him on that chair of mine and nothing but love came out of him, but nothing. I couldn’t see his face. As you know, his skin is as dark as you can find, and I’m looking at that face and nothing but love is coming out of it, a being that I’ve known in eternity, knew him in the beginning. For we were all in the beginning the Elohim. The Elohim… it’s a plural… it’s a compound unity, one made up of others. And here he is as dark as I’ve ever seen a man. I am not as light as you can see a man. But here we are and you could think that we came out of different beings, but we didn’t. We are only putting on masks. We’re wearing masks. But he has turned around and so near the end, wearing a dark, dark mask when the whole thing is taken off.

And who are we? The light of the world, infinite love, and yet put it into one form it is man. And when you see man, that is actually the gathered togetherness of all, it is infinite love. I will know you by the light; you will know me by the light. But when we know each other gathered as one, it’s love, and it’s man, the human form divine, and everyone is gathered into it and not one is lost. For we agreed in the beginning, we agreed to enter this in concert and we did. Then we went our seeming separate ways, each falling into different states, and blaming the other. And discords came into our world. That’s alright… we’ll resolve it. All will return and all the discords will be resolved into dissonance, and finally into the most glorious harmony in the world. And then we have expanded beyond whatever we were prior to this play. The whole thing is a play and the Elohim plays it. The Elohim is God. “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” That word is Elohim, a plural word, a compound unity, one made up of others. So all are playing this glorious play.

Now, you can put me to the test, and tonight just learn how to move… just learn how to move. I teach it every night when I move beyond the world of dream. I do every night. But here, we can take this small crowd. And so I stand here, I put myself into an intimate brother… one who in the world is called a brother, for he’s my brother Victor. When he had nothing, but nothing, the family had nothing, I mean broke, living on a little borrowed money, trying to open and run a small little shop on a side street in Barbados… well, a side street in Barbados is really a side street. They only had one main street. And so here on the little side street, on borrowed capital, and he stands before one of the biggest buildings on the main street and he looks and he sees what, if it were true, would imply that our family owned it. In his imagination he sees not “F. N. Roach & Co.,” which was there. He sees “J. N. Goddard & Sons.” Every day on the way to the little shop on the side street he sees it and feels a thrill, until finally it was fixed in his mind’s eye. In that interval of two years of doing it, it failed. You say that’s wrong? Nothing is wrong in God’s kingdom. We ate of the tree of good and evil and failed right and wrong. So he sees it in his mind’s eye.

The day of the sale of that building, a man who never came home for a cup of tea, came in and asked him if he would buy the building, knowing he had no money. When my brother said to him, “With what would I buy it?” he said, “Well, I have money. If you would like to buy it, I’ll buy it for you. I have my lawyer, because they know I have money, and so if I start bidding they’ll bid me up. But if I get my lawyer, he represents other business people and they won’t know who he’s bidding for.” And so, he got his lawyer to bid. Only asked my brother to sign a little note: “If I buy it, you will accept it, and then pay me six percent of the money over a period of ten years, reducing the principle every year; so at the end of ten years the principle will be paid back and you will have paid six percent on principle that is still due over the period of ten years.” My brother agreed to it. That day we owned the building. And then the sign went up, “J. N. Goddard & Sons.”

Well now, what did it? Was it not all imagination? He didn’t have a nickel. He couldn’t put up as collateral a pair of rabbits. He had nothing. Whatever he had in the little store on the side, he owed someone money because they put in that little bunch of groceries that we had. Yet he got this building. And then, with more borrowed capital, put it in and started. That’s now back in 1922, here it’s ’67. And from that little beginning… I don’t know what the family owns. I only know that I own almost ten percent of it, but I do not know what it’s worth. But I don’t think you could buy them out for 25 million. I don’t think you could. And I hold ten percent of the stock. But I haven’t the slightest idea what it’s worth… and I don’t care.

All I want to know is to tell my wife, and my daughter, and you, and all that I’m drawing into my world, how it operates. So take it all tonight and someone will rebuild it again. If you take everything and you know this principle, can’t you rebuild it? If it happens this way in the beginning, well, does it always happen this way? Certainly, this is how it works: I imagine myself into what I am. If I like it, well, enjoy it. The day I tire of it, well then, imagine myself into what I want to be. That’s the story. So you become what you imagined yourself to be, good, bad, or indifferent. There is no deity outside of yourself who actually swore you into this place and condemned you into what you are doing. You did it either wittingly or unwittingly, for God and your own wonderful human imagination are one. So when it is said in scripture, “I and my Father are one,” he’s only speaking of your own wonderful human imagination.

So here, I have been sent to clarify and take off the barnacles on the story, called the story of Jesus Christ. Alright, a small beginning, what does it matter? You will outlive me and you will tell the story, and tell it, and bring it back to something near its original form. For, it’s not now as it’s interpreted by the world, anything near. In fact, in this morning’s paper I read Buckley, I read him just because of his use of words, he’s quite an interesting fellow, and he was speaking of the bishop of some part of England who spoke at the cathedral of Canterbury. He said, “I don’t believe the good bishop would recognize a Christian if he met him. But to be honest and to be kind to him, I don’t think he would recognize Christianity if he read it.” And may I tell you, what he said prior to that I would agree with Buckley. I don’t always agree with anyone… sometimes and sometimes not… with everyone that I know, we agree some times and we disagree others. But today I certainly would agree with what he quoted the bishop having said. “I don’t think he would recognize a Christian if he saw one.” Well, that is not only true of that bishop, but that’s true of all the priests that I’ve met, whether they call themselves cardinals or popes. So far removed from this wonderful glorious story of Jesus: how God became you… alright, became us.

He saw the mask, and the mask was the kind of a mask that you see in Hawaii, you see in Africa. Haven’t you seen that mask? You can’t tell who wears it. Well, we have our little masks too, but we have little false things. And they all want to be identified… they don’t need that kind of mask. When we go to a palatial party in the Western world and we have a little false thing over our eyes, hoping that the one we really want to dance with really recognizes us, we’re not disguised at all. But they don’t know that they are disguised in the very thing that they wear, because no one knows who they are. They are part of the Elohim, who in the beginning conceived the play, who is playing it, and in the end when all the masks are taken off. And it’s taken off only in the resurrection.

So I will say to my friend who wrote about this mask that he saw and the empty skull made of plastic, the day will come that with one of us whose mask is already taken off we will ascend together. And you will point out that skull and say of it, “I once dwelt there.” You will, in this skull that was once your dwelling place, and you take off the mask, that you were never the thing that you wore. Never. But in eternity we’ll all know each other and all will be enhanced, expanded beyond what we were by reason of the journey that we made.

Now tonight, you try this and you test it, how to move… just learn how to move. This is simple. I told you the story of my brother. Now take a simple little thing. Ask yourself simply, what do I want? Now look at the world as you now see it. If you had what you want, would you see it as you now see it? I doubt it. There would be a difference, some little change. The slightest change, I don’t care what it is, but there would be a change. It need not be a change from where you now live, but there would be a change. You would see the world differently and, naturally, your closest circle would see you differently. Well, begin to let them see you differently and you see your world differently, all in imagination. This is a movement in God, for we are the operant power moving in our own being, for we are God. And so, we move. As I move from where I am to where I would like to be, I can detect that motion only by a change of position relative to another object. For motion cannot be detected save by a change of position relative to another object. To speak of the motion of a thing in itself without some frame of reference against which it moves is nonsense. You can’t do it.

And so, I stand here. Well, take it now physically. If I were elsewhere thinking of this club, I wouldn’t see myself on the platform. I would see it as I now see it, but from another point. That vision would prove that I am not here. Now, take it in another light. If I were now a man, take a person who would like, say, $30,000 a year income, and his income now is less than ten. Alright, what would it be like if I had 30,000 a year? My present circle of friends, how would they see me? Would they know it? Would they discuss it… would they speak of me as the one that they knew when he only made, and they name it, say, eight, nine, or ten thousand? Would they now speak of the change in his life? Well now, eavesdrop and listen in on that. So you hear your friends discuss you as one whose income is 30,000 a year.

Well now, that’s a motion in being. That movement produces the results. For, everything in this world is nothing more than the result of a movement in God, and a movement in God is a motion in your wonderful human imagination. And the slightest imaginal act, that is a change. I don’t mean just the act… I can imagine something that I don’t believe. If I imagine something that is something believed, that is a change that sends a thrill through divine being. For that’s creation; I’m creating something. I’m actually entering another state, and making that state alive and real in my world.

So tonight, you try it. It costs you nothing, doesn’t cost you a nickel to try it. But I’ll tell you the risks that teachers run when they are sent. For when you stand in the presence of the one being who is drawing all towards itself, you run this risk. You are sent into the world to tell them of the most fantastic story in the world, and if they do not listen well or do not apply what you tell them and become disillusioned, they hate the one who invited them to dream. So I’m only sent to invite you to dream, for the world is a dream. I’m inviting you to dream, but to dream consciously, deliberately. And if your hope is delayed and you think it isn’t true, this whole thing is crazy, insane, you invariably will turn all the fires of your being against the one who invited you to dream.

And so they said he was always rejected. Whenever he comes he’s rejected. Well, what does he do? He invites man to dream. For he tells man, “Whatever you desire, believe that you have received it, and you will.” Well now, a man who makes that bold assertion and gets the compliments of those whose ear he reaches, and they try it, but they do not know quite how to do it, and then after a while they’re disillusioned, they’re disappointed, and then they become so embittered, they invariably hate the one who invited them to dream. So that’s the risk every teacher who was sent must run.

So, I tell you it’s true, anyway. And if one fails in the dream so that they cannot bring it into being, I will say to myself, “Well then, how often must I tell them? Seventy times seven”… until they really understand it. Not multiplying seventy by seven, but until they understand it. So I must repeat it and repeat it and repeat it. And those who hear me will carry it forward and they will tell it. And in the end they’re all gathered back into the one being who conceived it. But we were that being and who plunged into the wonderful play. So when it was said to us in the beginning, “It is time for the play to start,” not one of us failed to respond in the first-person-present, “I am ready.”

Now let us go into the silence.

I’ll use that letter on Monday… this fantastic experience of this lady. So on Monday, it will be “Trust in God.” The most incredible thing ever told man is true. It is about twenty pages long. She doesn’t write in big script, small hand. And I think when I say twenty pages I am being very, very conservative.

But until the experiences I could not have conceived infinite love, until love embraced me, infinite love. The first forms the anchor and all. And it increases. You can’t believe it could increase, but it must as each comes into it. And here, the mortal has finished the job. He was an immortal in the beginning, but he took on mortality; and then, in the end, the mortal reassumes immortality when this one being embraces him. You didn’t begin here as a little germ. Oh, let people say what they will, about how you came out of a rock, turned a rock over, and some little thing came out of it. And then, all of a sudden you began to move and you moved something else. The tadpole, the tadpole begins this. Oh, let them have all the fun they want with that. You didn’t begin that way at all. You began in the beginning as God. You are the Elohim. And you played all these parts, allowing all these beliefs. Let them get all their little medals. They get a present from this government, $50,000, for discovering that he came out of a tadpole. Then what he really wanted was the $50,000.

And so, man in his wonderful peculiar state believes that was true. We haven’t the slightest, not an iota of evidence to support the belief in evolution. I saw a picture tonight on TV, this wonderful man and his child. Yes, he has long hair, so let him have his long hair, what does it matter? The boy has long hair, but the father also has it. He has a beard. A very cultured gentleman, nice looking man and his wife, and he said, “I am here…” I don’t know, but I mean, to hear him speak, he undoubtedly is a very cultured gentleman. And he said, “Why must we here be always for or against, pro or con? Can’t we allow a certain freedom in the world? We either are against this or for this, and there is no other shading, black or white. Can’t we have some shading in the world?” So they sent this boy up, fourteen years old, for some ponytail. Until he cuts his hair he can’t go back to school. Well, of all the nonsense in the world. I mean, he hasn’t disturbed the class. He hasn’t come in and done things to the people. And so, tomorrow maybe we’ll all be wearing long hair. And we’ll wonder what happened to that judge that disallowed it.

Just like… I presume today if you saw Mr. Hoover, a perfectly wonderful gentleman, with his tall collar up to here, choking him to death, you would send him to jail too. “Get that collar off. You can’t come into this meeting with a collar like that.” Well, I mean, all this nonsense. In England they still wear these long silly things on their heads in court. The judge comes in with this long white something on his head, you know what it is. But that is part of his world. Well, allow others to be what they want to be. I mean, if you don’t interfere with my freedom, then be what you want to be. You can come in here in the nude if you don’t interfere with someone else. But with their prejudice, so what! If you’re going to interrupt people’s freedom, that’s a different thing altogether.

In the April issue of the Atlantic Monthly, there is an article by General David M. Shoop, retired commandant of the Marine Corps. In this article, he claims that there is an ambitious elite of high-ranking officers who are turning this country into a militaristic and aggressive nation. They are promoting war in the belief that through it they will receive the promotions and glory they desire and cannot achieve while serving in a peacetime army. They dream of a war they can command in glory. Where? In their own wonderful human imagination, the hidden cause of all life! Imagination can be used infernally, as these men are doing, or towards the kingdom of heaven. This is done by thinking of a friend and hearing him tell you his good news. You can watch his facial expression change as he speaks to you. You can see him stand erect, wearing clothes he is proud of, as you feel the thrill of his change. And if you will believe that what you are now seeing is real, you can relax in the knowledge that one day your friend will conform to what you have done in your imagination!

Do you know that you can take that same individual and hear him tell you sad news? You can see him dirty and ashamed, and he will conform to that image which you have created in your imagination? Your creative power, which is Christ, can be used infernally or in a heavenly way. Its use is entirely up to you. General Shoop claimed that our involvement in Vietnam was a direct result of the ambition of an elite group of high-ranking officers who prefer war to peace, in order to receive glory and prestige in their chosen field! You and I are now burdened with the enormous task of continuing their effort, which began in the imagination of a small group of men.

The prophets and poets, inspired by the same voice, have told us this throughout the centuries. Yeats said: “I will never be certain that it was not some woman treading in the winepress who started that subtle change in men’s mind. Or the passion, from which so many countries have been put to the sword, did not begin in the mind of some poor shepherd boy, lighting up his eyes for a moment before he ran upon his way.” Who knows who is treading in the winepress this night? Who knows what a person in solitary confinement is imagining? Is he using this only power in the universe infernally or blissfully? I hope you use your imagination in the state of bliss, for the outside world is alive because of this hidden power within you. I know that a man, imagining intensely, can influence millions. He can act through many men and speak with many voices. This little group of men, imagining their promotions, are influencing millions and moving through unnumbered men toward their goal. Those who cover their costumes with medals, like the Stalins and the Hitlers of the world, are displaying their complete misunderstanding of God’s power of imagination.

I ask you to believe me, for I am speaking from a level of one who has awakened from the dream of life. I have experienced scripture and know it is a true story from beginning to end. The gospel tells us of a pattern which repeats itself in everyone, for every child born of woman has within him an ancestral self, a heavenly being who supports him. This is the one who said: “I will never leave you or forsake you.” A child is alive because a son of God, who is the emanation of that ancestral self, is in it. We are told that bounds have been set to the peoples of the earth according to the number of the sons of God. You were given the gift of awareness because of the immortal son of the ancestral you who will never forsake you, not in eternity. See how precious you are in the eyes of he who is the power of powers?

Now, do not misuse this power, but use it only in love. Every person you meet, regardless of his pigment of skin, the nation behind him, or the so-called sect he is associated with, is alive because your ancestral being who has no beginning and no end is behind his mask, as he is behind yours. That one is taking him through the necessary experiences to make him one with himself, as the ancestral you is taking you through the necessary experiences to make you one with himself. Eventually you and he will return to that one being who sent you out in the first place. That is your destiny.

Now, in the gospels we are told that the Risen Christ turned to his apostles and said: “There are those standing here who will not taste of death until they see the kingdom of God.” Scholars claim this prophecy failed because they do not know what or where the kingdom of God is. It is not a realm, but a body. And it is not out there, but within. If, as Luke tells us, the kingdom of heaven is within you, who would know you entered it but yourself? And if you told your friends and it was not what they expected, would they believe you? No! They would continue to claim the promise was not fulfilled, yet I say the promises of God will not be broken. There are some standing here who will not taste of death before they enter the kingdom of God.

The kingdom, being within, is entered when the curtain is split. Only then can you see the blood of your ancestral being who died to become as you are. Recognition causes you to fuse with it, and rising like a fiery serpent, you enter that holy sepulcher where the drama began. Matthew knew that the violent took the holy sepulcher by force. The word translated “violent” here means “life; to press oneself into; to find a place within.”

Life is in the blood. Contemplating the blood of God Himself, you fuse with it and become life itself. The Father, having life in himself, has granted you, his emanation, to be life itself. Becoming one with your ancestral being, you are no longer the emanated, but the Godhead through which the emanation occurred.

So the statement is true: there are some standing here who will not taste of death before they enter the kingdom of God. But the only ones who will know it are those who experience it. This goes on forever and ever. If you are looking for the kingdom of God on the outside, you will look in vain, for the kingdom is within and cannot be entered from without. In his 16th chapter, Matthew claims they will see the Son of man entering his kingdom, but in the 9th chapter of Mark and Luke, it is called the kingdom of God.

Now, after making the statement that some standing here will not taste death before they enter the kingdom of God, Peter, James, and John are taken into a high mountain where his countenance is completely altered before them. You may think this took place on the outside, but it takes place within. The evangelists took this appearance of resurrection and recorded it as Jesus’ external ministry; just as when I tell you what happened in me, I speak externally, yet the three people who witnessed my transformation appeared within.

Recently a lady wrote telling of finding herself in a cage, observing three men etched in gold and a woman holding an infant. This is a perfect adumbration. The three first appeared to Abraham in the Book of Genesis, and were confirmed in Peter’s second letter, where he remembers when Peter, James, and John were formed to witness the majesty of the one who was born. There are always three. The cage in which this lady found herself is the holy sepulcher, her immortal skull, where the drama began, and where it comes to its fulfillment. She saw the sign of her approaching birth from above, in the form of a woman holding a child and the three witnesses to this event. She, the emanation of her ancestral being, will awaken in that cage to return to her ancestral being, enhanced by becoming one with her celestial self.

While in this world of Caesar, seemingly detached and lost, you are not, for your human imagination is a wonderful power. It is yours to use lovingly, or as unlovingly as those men did with their dreams of wars, in order to get a little medal and be promoted. So what if they do? Eventually they will all be buried, and two generations later no one will know they ever existed. Our cemeteries are filled with monuments to those who thought themselves so important, yet no one recalls who they were. So I say: what does it matter if you own the world and lose your life?

I urge you to seek the kingdom of God, for when you do, you come into a power unknown to mortal man. All of the atom bombs in the world cannot compare to the power you are destined to fall heir to. You will possess a power that can still the world. But you will never know this power without love. With this power, unrestrained, you would still a nation, face its inhabitants toward the ocean, and put the idea of entering it in their mind. Then, when you release this power, they would all march into the ocean. But you will never know a power greater than you know love. The power known to earthly man is nothing compared to the power of love. With that power, you can stop the thought process of another, change it completely, and when you allow that energy to flow once more, he will move in a different direction, not even realizing that a change had taken place within him.

When the embodiment of reason asked the Risen Lord: “Do you not know that I have the power to crucify you and the power to set you free?” Imagination replied: “You have no power over me were it not given you from above.” Just imagine knowing you have that kind of power! You came to play a part called Man, and when you have experienced it, you will play the part called Jesus Christ. His play takes place in heaven, which is within. And when you tell your story, those who hear your words on the outside will either believe or disbelieve you, and you will have no power to persuade them otherwise. Those who do not believe sit in darkness, breathing war as recorded in this month’s Atlantic Monthly. Although the salaries of these men come from the pockets of civilians, they are believing our country into a militaristic and aggressive nation, in order to become more glorious in their own little minds.

But I tell you, your ancestral being, called the son of God, shed his blood for you that you may have life in yourself. I know, for when my body was torn in two from top to bottom, I saw that blood of God as my own wonderful ancestral self. I am an extension of that self, not another, for that would imply there was a greater creative power than I am. I have seen this body of love. I wore it when we embraced. I will return to it and wear it forever when I leave this body of death for the last time. Then we will not be two, for I, an extension of myself, will return to myself, adding to God’s glory, His luminosity and translucency, giving him a greater creative power by reason of the part I played, called Neville.

I urge you to use your imagination lovingly on behalf of everyone, and believe in the reality of your imaginal acts. If you have a friend who would like to be gainfully employed, listen carefully until you hear his voice tell you of his new position. Feel his hand clasp yours. See the smile on his lips. Use every sense you can possibly bring to bear into the imaginal scene. Persist until you feel the thrill of reality, then drop it and let that scene fulfill itself on the outside. We are told that the kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed. Your imaginal act, created for your friend in the kingdom of heaven, is that seed. Don’t pick it up to see if it is growing; just leave it alone, and it will grow and bloom as a solid fact in your world. Then you will have found this hidden cause within you called Christ.

Christ, the power and wisdom of God, is in you as your own wonderful eternal being. He will never leave you or forsake you, as told us in the 13th chapter of Hebrews. If, perchance, one day you are swept into an unlovely state and go through hell, remember: there is that in you who will not leave you or forsake you; and if you know this principle, you can detach yourself from the state and it will vanish, as you move into a more desirable one.

There is truly nothing new under the sun. That which was recently recorded in the Atlantic Monthly is the same as that which was recorded in Genesis as the first frightful act, when Cain slew his brother Abel. This same act is taking place over and over again, and if a man knows how to detach himself, he need not be pulled into that state. While in the army, I was told I could not get out, but I dared to assume I was out. I acted, in my imagination, as I would act were I free to come and go as I chose. I persisted in this assumption for nine days. Then the one who first denied my request granted my freedom, and that day I was honorably discharged.

People plan a depression for personal gain. There are those who sell short for a personal gain. All kinds of things are done in order to be known as a billionaire; yet in time they die, to leave their billions behind for those who can’t even remember their names. Leaving this little section of time, he who was known as a billionaire here moves into another section of time to once more seek his fortune. So the words are true: there are some standing here who will not taste of death.

May I tell you, no one can leave this earth until he awakens, because the earth does not terminate at the point where the senses cease to register it. When you shed your little garment, you will still be on this earth in a body like the one you left behind, only young, vital, and wonderful, but your environment will change. You may leave this world a billionaire to find yourself shining shoes, if that is to be your lot to fulfill. Your ancestral being knows what it will take to weave you into the likeness of himself, for you must be perfect as he is perfect. You will not be brought to the end until you can actually be superimposed upon his image and fit it perfectly. Then you are one!

No one ever leaves this age of death until he awakens. This earth stretches for a length of time long beyond the three score and ten. The world remains terrestrial, with all of its struggles. We continue to marry and die, to know sickness and health, sorrow and joy, just as we do here, as we go from one little section of time into another and then another until, in the eyes of our ancestral self, we are as He is. So you see, that statement is true: “There are those standing here who will not taste of death.” The apostles who are called will not taste of death. No power can sweep them away from this section of time, until they go up that spiral roadway into the sepulcher where their drama began.

No mortal eye can see the kingdom of heaven, and it cannot be entered from without, but must be taken violently. This I know from experience. When I went up, it was with such force I felt a tremendous pressure in my head where I was pressed in, just a little bit left of center. I tried my very best to go beyond it, but I could not. It was so crowded I pressed myself right into the kingdom as a living mural, having entered it with a force akin to violence. I have now fulfilled the 11th chapter of the Book of Matthew: “The kingdom of heaven is taken by violence, and the violent take it by force.” The old age of the law and the promise up until John the Baptist is behind us now. There is no need to do violence against your body in order to get into the kingdom. No diet or suppression of the normal urges of life will get you in. Only when you are one with your eternal self, so that you can be superimposed upon him and fit perfectly, will you find yourself split in two to be absorbed by the life of the being who kept you alive here as something on the outside, and like a sponge, you become one with it. Then, having life in yourself, you will return to your skull where the dream began, arriving with such force your head reverberates like thunder. But, knowing that there are people in this world who plot and plan violence, don’t try to compensate; rather, plot and plan things of love and affection. Do that and you cannot be drawn into another’s circle.

I tell you, you are an immortal being. You were the Son of God long before the universe came into being. It was you who brought it into appearance for this great experiment. You are a ray of the being you really are, one with He who is radiating you. And He will not forsake you, but will continue to put you through the paces as He fashions you into his likeness. Then He receives unto himself all of the experiences through which you will have passed, and is enhanced and glorified by them. He is afflicted as you are afflicted. He suffers as you suffer, and when you return, you and He are one, for the being radiating is one with the ray.

Take me seriously! Know what you want and then claim you have it. Tell a friend about it and feel his excitement for you. Persuade yourself that what you are imagining is true. Believe in its reality and it will come to pass as an objective fact on this level, I promise you. Then, when the image is perfect, you will return to your ancestral self, and time will no longer be necessary between the imaginal act and the fact.

There are many levels: a level here, a dream level, and a level of spirit waking, where every thought is a fact and is known. From that level you return through various barriers to this, the lowest level, where everything is completely concentrated and limited in these little garments of flesh. Here we are slaves to our mortal bodies, serving them morning, noon, and night as we feed, clothe, and shelter them. When you feed your body, you must assimilate what it eats. Then you must eliminate its waste and care for it.

Every child born of woman is a slave to the body he wears. There is no slavery comparable to the slavery of the body. If I were a slave to one who had purchased me and I must feed and clothe him, though he has millions and I have nothing, he is as much a slave to his body as I am to mine, for he and he alone must assimilate and eliminate for himself. No matter how many slaves he may have, he cannot command them to perform the functions of his body for him. He must perform them all for himself. Everyone who comes into this world becomes a slave to the body he wears.

We are told in Philippians: “He emptied himself of all that was his and became obedient unto death, even death upon the cross.” When God came here, he found himself a slave and was born in the likeness of men, thereby entering slavery. And I can’t conceive of any slavery comparable to the slavery of the body. Just imagine: you must wash it, shave it, bathe it, and do everything for it. And when it begins to wear out, you must get glasses for its eyes, false teeth, hearing aids, and heart transplants, to name but a few. You must continue to patch it up while remaining its slave to the very end. Do you know of any greater form of slavery? While in our teens and twenties, we never think that our body might get old and wear out, yet one day we turn a little corner of time and it becomes so obvious. Although the body wears out and becomes weaker and weaker, you are still its slave. I cannot conceive of any greater slavery.

But try to live a noble life, for you are immortal and cannot die. He who radiates you will never in eternity forsake you. He could not, for you and He are one; and when you return from your journey, you will be with the one who radiated you, just as you were before the journey began.

Now let us go into the silence.

We do not remember these moments in time when we imagined certain states. So when that imaginal state takes form, so we can see it with the outer eye, we do not recognize our own harvest and deny that we had anything to do with these natural effects that are taking place in our world. Because our memory is faulty, we do not remember.

“There is a moment in every day,” said Blake, “that Satan cannot find, nor can his watch fiends find it. But the industrious find this moment and it multiples and when it once is found, it renovates every moment of the day if rightly placed.”

Now, by the word “Satan,” he simply means doubt. Doubt cannot find it. I desire a certain state in this world. Reason tells me it’s difficult; my friends tell me it’s impossible; and so if I doubt that I could ever realize it, that’s the voice of Satan speaking to me. He’s always challenging God. God is my own wonderful human imagination. That’s God.

So the protagonists are God and Satan – simply faith and doubt.

Can I imagine that I am the one that I would like to be and remain faithful to that assumption as though it were true. If I can – and remember that assumption – and when I did it, then I will see when it happens in my world the relationship between the natural effect and its spiritual cause.

The spiritual cause was that moment of assumption.

Now let me share with you what was given to me this past week in the form of a letter. He’s here tonight. His barber was the low man on the totem pole when he first encountered him. There were four in the shop. Well he was the fourth man. If you’re familiar with the barbershop, and maybe you ladies do not know, and so the boss always has the first chair; and so if it’s a slow day, he gets the man. By the time he’s through, he gets the second one. He doesn’t share it. If three should come in, then they go to the different chairs. Well, four chairs, the fourth one waits for his customer.

Well, this friend of mine one day happened to sit in his chair. And he liked the way he cut his hair and gathered from what he said that he liked cutting hair. He was proud of his profession as a barber, proud of it, not making excuses as so many barbers do. He was proud to be a barber and wanted to be the very best barber and win competitions.

So having heard this man express this desire, my friend imagined that he was tops.

Well, in a little while he bought out the boss barber and then dismissed him and rearranged his staff and then from then on began to proceed to the top. Well, three weeks ago, while sitting in his chair, which is his now – the boss barber is his barber for he was the low man but now he’s the top man. He said to him, and in a very exciting way, that there was a contest to be held in San Francisco. And he would like to enter this contest for hairstyling and cutting of hair.

Well, my friend said when “I discovered that he really wanted it, and no one goes into a contest unless he wants to win, I saw on the wall the trophy that would be his. And I heard him tell me how he won.”

Well, there were four men in the shop. One was committed for that weekend and so, this past weekend, he took two with him. So there were three from that shop of four men. There were only nine trophies given in the State in this competition and that one little shop won four.

The boss barber won first prize and a second prize, and the two men that went with him each won a second. So they came back from San Francisco bearing four out of nine.

Now he said to me, you’ve often said from the platform, “I will tell you before it takes place that when it does take place you may believe.” Well now, I’m going to tell you, Neville, before it takes place. There’s going to be a contest in Southern California and I have seen his trophy as the first one on that wall. And so, I will tell you before it takes place that when it does take place, you will know that I am putting this into practice. I know he lives by it.

“Then there will be another contest,” said, he, “in Miami and one must win in Miami to be eligible for that which will be held in Brussels which will be international. I am putting him there in Brussels as first among all contestants.”

Well, I know that he will win. For every natural effect has a spiritual cause and not a natural. A natural cause only seems. It’s a delusion of man’s perishing, vegetable memory. He doesn’t remember. Well now, he will remember what he did. And I have his record at home in his letter.

Now he said to me in this letter,

“I had a dream. I repeated the dream and then I had a third dream, all in the same night.” So, the first and second was simply the same dream, repeated. “I do not bring back the details,” said he, “of the dream but it was all about, in detail, strangely enough, about my birthday. But I cannot recall all the things that happened. I only know, here stood a man in a white robe with a book in his hand, opened in the middle, it was gilt-edged, and he had a quill in his hand (or it could have been a scythe). He looked almost like a cartoonist’s concept of Father Time. And he was insistent that my birthday was a certain day and I was equally forceful in stating that it was not because I knew my birthday to be the 19th of September, 1927, and he was insisting, over my protests, pointing all the things out in the book.

And then I woke. In spite of his insistence and my protest, for I knew my birthday, at least that was my physical birthday.” I’ll call his attention to the 87th Psalm,

“And the Lord records as he registers the peoples. And he said this one was born there.”

It’s all about birth. There are only seven verses in it. It’s a small, short psalm. But this is the birth, not of a physical birth, this is a spiritual birth, “and this one was born there.” I can say to him, you did the perfect job as I knew you would in challenging the Lord’s angel, the recording one.

For to sin by silence when we should protest, makes cowards of us all.

And no coward can be used in his stable of studs. I can say from the way you worded your letter that you have been born; but the perishing, vegetable memory has not brought it back. You have been born from above. You have had other experiences which would imply an adumbration. But from this letter, I would say you have been. But memory has not brought it back. I am convinced of that from your letter. For it’s all in the past, it’s not present and it certainly is not future the way you worded the letter. For you know your birth date which is physical, and you said the 19th of September 1927, and he denied that was the day of your birth. To deny that was the day of your birth would imply you were born in the spirit world because he represents not the physical world but the spiritual world. So I would say of you, you have been born from above.

So, here, take these moments, every moment in time. It’s a special moment, a precious moment, a moment where you can actually use it to plant what you want planted in this world and, remembering that moment, well then, it has to come out. For every natural effect has a spiritual cause and not a natural.

Well, that spiritual cause is that moment when you dare to assume that you are the man or the woman that you would like to be or that another man, in his case the barber, that he is the top as he desired to be.

So, you can do it not only for yourself, do it for another or do it for many as he did.

And these are these precious moments in this wonderful world of ours, but our memory fades and we do not remember. So when the whole thing rises in our world, we do not relate it to our own harvest. We can’t remember when we ever did it.

But not a thing could happen in my world that comes by accident. It couldn’t. All things come because I planted it, either wittingly or unwittingly. I either did it knowing what I’m doing or I did it not knowing because I was lost in some emotional state, and I felt intensely about a state. It might have been a lovely state or an unlovely state, but the seed was planted and I will reap it. And the whole thing will come into my world whether I recognize my harvest or not. So, if I know this to be the law of life, it is entirely up to me now to select and plant only what I want to reap in my world.

So, everyone in this world is here for a purpose, and the purpose is to fulfill scripture. There is no other purpose.

And the fulfillment of scripture brings me out of this world where I must remain until I awaken. Well, I can’t awaken until I fulfill scripture, for scripture is the plan.

Now, another lady wrote this one. She said,

“I found myself in this glorious mansion, high, high up. And they had the most beautiful gardens and perfectly kept. And a man and a woman left in a white car and someone said to me, –give me two names and they’re names of two relatives of mine.’ But I knew that it was you who had left and I also knew that you would return. Now, I have no memory whatsoever of what transpired between knowing that it was you who left and that you would return. But I awoke saying, –now I know that I have experienced what Neville said that I would.’

Then my throat was parched as though aflame and I went and got myself a nice cold drink of water, went back to bed and had this dream. I’m in a department store and there I am with all these Bibles for brides, Bibles given out for weddings. And, in a strange way, all the brides were dressed in their bridal white gowns and the department store supplied the grooms. They were all being married by proxy. And the department store supplied all the grooms that they may have a wedding picture taken with the groom supplied by the department store.

Then I turned to one and, speaking to her, she said she’s going to Paris. And then I said to her, – I’m getting married next month.’”

Well, this vision that you had, my dear, is a beautiful vision because, as you’re told in scripture – the Book of Isaiah –

“Your maker is your husband, and the lord of Hosts is His name.”

So that what you saw is the perfect symbol of what the depth of our own being revealed to you – that you will have union with the Lord and union with the Lord means that that which is in you, like an egg, will be fertilized and then it will erupt within you. And the whole thing said of Jesus Christ will unfold within you, and you will be He. So I can say, you had the perfect vision.

Then another lady wrote.

“So, I took my son into the backyard and here was the fishpond that I had. It wasn’t yet stocked with fish, but with clear water and about twelve inches deep. And in it was a little shaggy white dog lying in the water with its little black nose right above the water. I took the dog out and dried it off and took it into the house. And it romped and played all over the place and then I missed it and, searching for it, I went back into the yard and here was the dog in the pool again. But this time, when I walked by, it wagged its tail as though, –leave me here, I like being here.’ And it was quite satisfied to be submerged in the water minus the nose above. But the tail wagged as though it was happy to be in that water.”

Well, may I say to you, in the Bible, we speak of stone, the water, and the wine.

The stone is the literal story, the allegory. And man must discover the fictitious nature and character of a story. And when he discovers the fictitious character of the story in scripture and then learns its meaning, he has found water. He has struck that rock like a Moses and water flowed out of it.

Now, the first miracle or sign in the Book of John is the turning of water into wine. And so, you’re told, “Fill the stone jars with water and when they draw it out of the stone jars, that water that was in the stone jar, it was wine, perfect wine, lovely wine.

So, first we have a story and man takes the story and accepts the story literally and so he goes through life with the literal meaning or the stone.

When he discovers the fictitious character of the story and then it reveals itself to him, the true meaning, he has the psychological water.

Now the little dog is the symbol of faith. Your faith is now in the psychological meaning of these great truths. If you apply what you know, you will convert it into wine. If you apply it. If you will take what you now know, that imagining creates reality, and dare to imagine that you are now what you would like to be, then you are turning this water into wine.

As told us in the Book of Genesis when Jacob brought the flock into the field, the well was covered with a stone. And he rolled the stone away and watered his flock and then he put the stone back again. He didn’t turn it into wine but he did withdraw water. But a stone covered it and hid the view of the water. So the story is told to man, because it’s a parable, the whole thing is a parable, the whole thing is an allegory, and if you take it as factual and not as what it really is, the most wonderful parable in the world, well then you’ll never use your imagination to extract from that stone, the water. Therefore, you cannot feed the flock.

But if you can actually get from any story in scripture, its psychological meaning and tell it to the world as when Isaac brings his son, and Isaac is blind and can’t see, and he has two sons. One is called Esau and one is called Jacob. And Jacob covers himself in the skins of a goat to give himself the feeling of hair. For the first one was Esau and Esau was hairy all over. And so when Jacob deceived his father into believing that he was Esau, Isaac gave him his blessing.

So you take the story, and as I stand here now, reason tells me that I am not where I would like to be, that I am not the man that I really desire to be.

So I shut out what reason is suggesting.

I deny everything that reason dictates.

I close my eyes to the facts of life, the obvious things, and I clothe myself mentally in all that I would like to be.

I imagine that people see me as they would see me if I were the man that I want to be.

I imagine that I am actually standing where I would stand if I were that, and that I’m actually doing all the things I would do, normally and naturally, if what I am assuming were really true – if it were a fact.

Well now, when I do this, I am clothing myself in the outer garments of naturalness of the facts. Now when I open my eyes on the facts of life, it denies everything that I’ve done. But I remember what I did. I caught that precious moment. For there is that moment in each day that doubt cannot find, and his helpmates cannot find it. But the industrious find this moment, and so become the industrious.

You find this moment and you clothe yourself in all the lovely things that you want to be in this world and, having done it, you can break the spell. Open your eyes upon the facts of the world and the facts will deny everything that you did. But you’re told in scripture that Isaac, having done it, having given the blessing to that moment, he couldn’t take it back. He could not retract it. And so when Esau comes into the world and tells his father, “but you’ve been deceived; first of all, he took from me my birthright. Now he’s taking from me my blessing.” He’s rightly named. You named him Jacob which means “he supplants.” He’s a supplanter. But the father Isaac said, “even though he came through deceit and deceived me into believing that he was Esau, I’ve given him your blessing and I cannot take it back.”

So that moment cannot be called back. It’s on its way and it will move towards what? The fulfillment of itself. And when it appears in this world, suddenness is only the emergence of that hidden continuity. So it was moving, unseen by the world and suddenly it erupts in the world. But having remembered what I did, I can relate now that spiritual cause, the thing I did, unseen by others, to the thing seen now, that the whole vast world will share with me.

So, in your case, my dear, having seen the little dog which is the symbol of Caleb or the hound of faith, the one that goes with him, goes with Jehoshua across the river into the promised land. No one else could go. So, you walk in faith in this. And the day will come, you will turn it all into wine. In other words, you will find yourself fulfilling scripture. The whole thing will unfold within you.

Now we told you last Monday the story of Moses and that he did not cross into the promised land, but Jehoshua went over. You may not be familiar with scripture but Jehoshua’s original name was Oshea as told us in the Book of Numbers. You’ll find that in the 13th Chapter, the 16th Verse of Numbers. And Moses called Oshea, the son of Nun, Jehoshua. So when you take the prefix, “Je” and put it before Oshea, you turn Oshea which means saviour or salvation, into He by Whom Jehovah Will Save. So it becomes that creative power that actually, I would say, fertilizes what Moses represented. Moses represented the pattern man. See that you make everything according to the pattern as it’s being shown you on the mountain.

So here, you’re seeing everything clearly. That is a pattern. Don’t alter one little thing. Make it just as it’s shown you on the mountain. But I can’t go in. That is the egg, the perfect egg. That’s the ovum. But an egg remains just an egg until fertilized. It must be fertilized by the sperm. So that sperm must penetrate the surface of the egg. It leaves no hole – either before or after penetration. And no one understands how it happens. Because no one knows, it’s all imagination.

I do not need to go through any door to put myself in a closed room. Seal the room, and I can imagine that I’m in it – and I didn’t open a door to go through – and I didn’t break down the wall to get through – and when I depart – I didn’t go through an open door -and I didn’t go through by breaking down the wall. I entered without leaving any hole and I departed without leaving any record of my entrance and departure.

So, a little sperm penetrates the surface of an egg and it leaves no hole, either before or after penetration. But unless it penetrates, that egg remains just a perfect pattern of what ought to be or could be but could never by itself, ever unfold. It takes the sperm to penetrate it to make it unfold.

And so, it is Jehoshua, which is the Hebraic name of Jesus – the word Jesus and the word Jehoshua are the same thing. So, He by Whom Jehovah Will Save. And so, man awakened from the dream of life, if he is a powerful man, a man like the one I spoke of earlier tonight, one who would defy the angel of the Lord and over his protests, he still is insisting that it’s not the right date. And here he’s pointing to the book of God and showing him that it is. But in spite of that, he didn’t sin by silence. And because he didn’t sin by silence, he can be used perfectly in the stable of the Lord. To actually impregnate those who have accepted the word of God and have it within them as a pattern. The perfect pattern that must one day, having been impregnated, erupt within that one and unfold within him.

So I congratulate him on his accomplishments. For everyone who is awakened if they are of that spirit, they are members of the stable of the Lord, used for impregnation, to inseminate the brides of God. For he’s God. Everyone in this world is God. But as the lady wrote, she said, “I wrote this letter. I don’t quite understand it but I wrote and I was repeating, the thing is we are bifurcated, divided beings.”

Well, who is the divided being but the Lord Himself? The Lord and his emanation, a divided being. And out of Adam comes Eve, a divided being. And that emanation of the first. Well, here we are emanations. But now these contain the pattern of God’s plan of salvation. And it has to be, I would say fructified, fertilized. And, may I tell you, it seems strange in this world to make these statements, but I know from experience that they’re true. I know how we play these parts after we have been awakened from the dream of life.

When man is twice born, and he’s born from above, if he’s of that school, that spirit, that you re-enter like a serpent. If you go up in this small little way like this, that’s not it. But when you go up as though you are a bolt of spiral lightening and you vibrate the entire skull and you’re still vibrating it trying to get out, and finally you subside. That’s the power it can use. And that’s the one He uses in the fertilization of his bride.

But tonight, you test it on this level and come down to this level and try it. There is a moment in each day and not just a moment, every moment of time is such a moment if you have a desire. You could actually isolate that moment and then clothe yourself with the feeling of the wish fulfilled whatever that wish is until you actually feel all the tones of reality, all the things that you would normally feel were it true.

Now, don’t forget that moment. That moment is productive. And in its own good time, that moment will appear in this world properly clothed as an objective fact. If it takes the whole vast world to aid its birth, it will take the whole vast world. If it takes an army of men to bring it to pass, an army of men. It doesn’t really matter. You don’t have to guide it. All you have to do is simply do it. And then let it alone as you would put a seed into the ground, confident that it will grow. Well, so you simply drop this, knowing what you did so that you aren’t surprised when it happens in your world.

So you want to be a man of wealth; all right assume that you’re a man of wealth. Not that it has any purpose in this world other than that you desired it. Because the man of wealth and the poor man are the same being. The poor state, the wealthy state are only states.

The man who occupies the poor state is an individual that never ceases to be that individual. But if he falls into the state of poverty, well then you call him a poor man. But he doesn’t differ from the man who falls into the state of wealth. For the man in the state of wealth; he’s not any better; he has money, lots of money if he’s a fabulously wealthy person. But that doesn’t put him in a spiritual sense beyond the man that is poor. But the man that is poor doesn’t know he could get out of the state of poverty.

All these are states, infinite states and man blindly falls into states. If he knows they’re only states and he dislikes the state he’s in, he’ll get out of that state by now planting one of these moments, these heavenly moments by assuming that I am now secure.

Security is a relative term. It may be that someone feels, well, insecure with a hundred thousand a year income. I’m quite sure that if you take any of the fabulously wealthy men of our world and say, “your income as of now will be only a hundred thousand a year,” they would instantly have to sell their yachts, their homes, all these things, and give up membership in certain clubs because they couldn’t even pay their servants. If they had a full complement of servants in their many homes, and you said a hundred thousand a year, well, they’ll feel poor.

And the average person, if you said,” you have a hundred thousand,” he would feel fabulously wealthy.

So wealth is a relative term. It hasn’t a thing to do with the spiritual growth of a being. None. Because all these are states.

So, I can put myself into any kind of state in this world. And so if I don’t enjoy poverty, well then, don’t get into the state. I, on the other hand, have no desire for fabulous wealth because I do not wish the responsibility of fabulous wealth and thinking about it. I can’t see how anyone who is fabulously wealthy has any time whatsoever for thinking about spiritual matters.

He is so concerned about his wealth, his portfolio, and he watches it morning, noon, and night. And the first thing he does in the morning when he gets the morning paper, he turns to that section. And he reads it, as some ladies turn to the social section and they read it, as though it really mattered. But they do it. There are some who only read the obituaries and they make a living out of reading that and notifying all the people who are recorded as dead that he knew them.

I know that when my father-in-law died, he was a very prominent man in New York City. And when he died, why Mrs. Van Schmoose got unnumbered letters from people who claimed that they knew him and he had promised them so much and that he died before he could execute his desire.

Some even went so far as to print up all kinds of things and said he ordered these before he died – and then misspelled his name.

Printers will send you all kinds of personal cards, saying that Mr. Van Schmoose ordered these before he died. And when we saw them, why, the name was misspelled, and so her lawyer said, “just ignore it, just forget it. And ignore all these requests because people make a living reading the obituary column.”

You’d be surprised how many fall for it because in that emotional moment, they are carried away, well, if my husband did this, I wouldn’t want not to make good, and so they will send off the check for what he had ordered, which he didn’t tell me. And so they send off a nice hundred dollar or two-hundred-dollar check for these stupid cards. And her lawyer said, “Just simply forget them.” This happens every moment of time.

Well, you can hardly believe that people live that way, but they do. You can’t conceive of something in this world, that someone isn’t doing it. And all these things are done in our world, so I ask you to try it.

On this basis, imagining creates reality. That is my premise. And don’t think for one moment you can imagine idly because the record is there.

And so, as a man plants, so he’s going to reap. There isn’t a thing in this world that comes into your world that comes by accident.

But you don’t remember the moment in time when you actually did it. And so you can’t relate it to the natural effect. But the natural effect always has a spiritual cause and not a natural cause. The natural cause only seems. It is a delusion.

So don’t let anyone tell you that you can trace it to some physical cause. The physical cause, which is the natural cause, is not a cause. It’s only an effect. All causes are spiritual and by spiritual, I mean imaginal. For man is all imagination and God is man and exists in us and we in Him. The eternal body of man is the imagination and that is God Himself. And God is the only source. There is no other source.

In that 87th Psalm that I quoted tonight, “when this one was born there,” it ends in a very lovely note. “And the singers and the dancers alike said, you are our springs.” There is no other spring, no other source, no other cause. Whether you be the dancer or the singer of the world. You are our springs. We have no other source.

So the only source of all causation is found in man as man’s own wonderful human imagination.

So you take it to heart and then you never can pass the buck. You can’t blame anyone in this world for anything that happens to you. There isn’t one in the world you can turn to and say, “well now, you are the cause of it.” Don’t let anyone turn to you and say that. If they do, just ignore it. Because they’re bringing it into their own world by what they imagine morning, noon, and night.

So, one sits down to imagine unlovely things of another, unlovely things of a group, well then, they’re going to simply produce it. Not in the group, but in themselves.

So, you go home and live it. Live it as that lady, by her vision tells me she’s living it, because the little shaggy dog was in the water. Her faith is in the psychological knowledge of these stories. I only ask her not to just continue drinking water. As you’re told in the Book of Timothy, “Drink no longer water, but use a little wine for your stomach’s sake and your many infirmities.”

So, it’s good to know what to do but we are the operant power. And, therefore, we must do it, not just know what to do but we must do it. So when I do it, I stop drinking the water and I drink wine. Because the minute I begin to apply it, I’m using wine. But if I know what to do but don’t do it, well, I have the water but I’m not turning it into wine.

So, let everyone here, practice it and put it into a daily practice. And, may I tell you it cannot fail you. It cannot fail you.

Now let us go into the silence.

Audience Questions

Question: –a physical upset? Upset when something goes wrong?

Neville: Well, as far as I am concerned, my body is an emotional filter and bears the marks of my prevalent emotions. That’s what bodies are, they’re filters. Emotional filters. And so if you persist in a certain emotion, one of despondency, one of this, one of that, eventually it will take its toll and you’ll find it leaving its mark on these filters. For they are emotional filters. To know, first of all, to know that it is so. And then to stop or try to change these prevalent emotions. You know you have friends who, whenever you meet them, they complain, always complaining. Well, that is almost a permanent state with them. Now, discriminate between the state that they occupy and the occupant. The occupant is not that. But if they remain in a state long enough, they feel at home in that state. If you pull them out, they’ll feel ill at ease. They want to actually feel that no one understands them, that they are this, they are that. And they delight in feeling that they’re misunderstood. If you try to pull them out, they don’t want it. They revel in it. And there are people who live that way. Well, don’t you follow suit. Tell them what to do, and if they do it, they’ll come out of it. There are people who will call you on the phone and who will say, “Now look here, I want so and so.” Thank you, that’s enough. Oh no, but wait, “I must tell you the facts.” And they’ll hold you there, if you let them, for one solid half hour, giving you all the facts why it can’t be done. So they voiced what they wanted and then they proceed to tell you why it’s impossible. And so they live that way. They go through life that way.

Question: (Inaudible)

Neville: Well, I wouldn’t say they should not be in the Bible. We have 66 and it’s good enough. The 27 of the New and 39 of the Old, forming the 66 Books of the Bible, I find it quite complete. But the Gospel of Thomas is a marvelous Gospel, perfectly marvelous. But nothing is lost in scripture by not including it in the Cannon of Scripture. There are many glorious works that are not included in the Cannon. And you can buy them under one copy called the Apocrypha. Thomas is only recently discovered, but you can buy that as a single copy. But the Bible hasn’t lost anything by even the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. They’re beautiful, wonderful, dealing mostly with Isaiah, but it hasn’t changed anything in the Isaiah that we have, only confirms it. At one time, the Book of Hebrews was not included in our Bible. But it’s a glorious Book, but now it’s part of the Bible.

If you would know your future, study the story of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is the actual realisation of God’s prophetic blueprint for man’s redemption. Everything said of Jesus Christ will one day be said of you, individually. Everything that he ever experienced, you will experience. Jesus Christ is only the fulfillment of all that was told us in the Old Testament. The old is the plan, the plot, the purpose of God – and Jesus Christ is the fulfillment of that purpose. There is a rabinnical principle that what is not written in Scripture, is non-exisistant. Now, when they speak of Scripture, they meant only the Old Testament. There was no New Testament. The drama of Jesus was this principle. As I stand here tonight, I am speaking from experience. I make no claim to be any other than the man you know me to be. I do not differ from you at all – just a man with all the weaknesses and limitations of any man in this world. Yet, I know this story to be true, and I know it to be true from experience. The five words in the end of Luke could summarise the entire Gospel: “They told what had happened.” Moffit describes this phrase in Greek. As he translated it: “They related their own experience.” Tonight, I will relate my own experience, to tell you how true this is.

The entire drama of Christ Jesus took place in the fall of man. It did not take place on the surface, like this. It did not take place here at all. Therefore, no one believed him. At the very end of the journey a few – just a remnant – accepted it, and the rest rejected it because he could not share with the world what he had experienced in the depth of his own soul. The cue was given in the earliest of the gospels, Mark. Here, we are told the very first sign to appear: “Immediately the heavens opened and he saw the Spirit like a dove descending upon him” and then we hear the words – seemingly from out of space – “This is my beloved son with whom I am well pleased.”

Now it is said (if you read it carefully): no one experienced this but Jesus. It is recorded in scripture, but he must have told it, because no one saw the heavens open or saw the spirit like a dove descending upon him, but him upon whom it descended. If Mark records it as an experience, then it could only be an experience that was told him by the one who experienced it. The other gospels modify it somewhat and imply that John saw it, but they pull forcefully upon the earliest gospel, which is Mark. I can tell you my experience of that scene, and it is true. The same simple man, limited as I am, had that experience. No one saw it from this level. I can tell you, and you can either believe it or reject it.

You are told: “Immediately the heavens opened.” It does, suddenly, and you see nothing but infinity, translucence, infinite expansion– and hovering above you is a dove of a light beige color, and the dove is looking at you and you look at the dove unconcerned, and it is all anchored on you. It remains there over you, seemingly without effort on its part, and yet it is alive and looking at you. Then you automatically lift your hand (in my case it was my left hand) and it descended and perched on my index finger. I brought it down to my face, and it smothered me with kisses. I had the impulse to take it across my head, and it kissed and kissed me.

Then a woman on my left made this statement: “He loves you.” I heard no voice saying: “This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased.” I only heard the woman’s voice, and she said: “He loves you,” meaning the dove, symbolising the Holy Spirit. Then she said to me: “They (now using the plural, and speaking of birds) do not come near man,” And she gave me the reason: “To them, we are like a large bowel – a consuming bowel, and we give off to them a most offensive odor, so they try to avoid contact with man. But this one pierced this ring of odors and came through because of his love for you.” And the only sign of “I love you” was the demonstration – the actual physical demonstration – of a dove smothering me with kisses all over my head and ears and neck. So I know that story is true. I can share it with you only in words. You may believe it or disbelieve it. The choice is yours.

We are told in John 7:3-8: “So his brothers said to him, ‘Leave here and go to Judea, that your disciples may see the works you are doing. For no man works in secret if he seeks to be known openly. If you do these things, show yourself to the world.’ For even his brothers did not believe in him. Jesus said to them, ‘My time has not yet come, but your time is always here. The world cannot hate you, but it hates me because I testify of it that its works are evil… Go to the feast yourselves; I am not going up to the feast, for my time has not yet fully come.’” The disciples had not yet seen any demonstration of the power of which he spoke.

Our time is always here, and this time is curved, and we are moving on a circle that is a recurring circle, and we have a short memory and cannot remember the things that have happened; therefore we cannot foresee the things that are going to happen, for this is a wheel of recurrence. Our time is always here, but he has tasted of the power of the New Age and can only describe the satisfaction of that power of the New Age, but cannot demonstrate it to the satisfaction of anyone in this age. Here he speaks of this power and he knows, and tells them quite firmly: “You will experience it.” He knows everyone will experience it. It was on this level. In this age none believed it – it is too fantastic. He rises into a world completely subject to his imaginative power. Now, here is a sign: “And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me.” Bear in mind the symbol: this [the body] is the earth, and I, if I be lifted up from this garment called “earth,” I will call all men unto me.

I see in the audience tonight a gentleman who wrote me a letter last Saturday. His experience preceded mine. He is much younger than I am. He does not look any older than my son, who will be 39 in May of this year. In his letter he said it happened to him in 1940. In my case, it happened in 1941. I was coming through the Caribbean Sea on a freighter from Port-of-Spain, Trinidad to Mobile, Alabama. I retired early that night. Suddenly I am lifted up from this earth, and as I am lifted up, a heavenly chorus comes into view and they are singing: “Neville is risen, Neville is risen.” Here I am – I do not need the sun, or the moon, or the stars for light, for I am light unto myself. It is not brilliant, but it is luminous beyond the wildest dream – but it is a gentle light. Then I came upon an infinite sea of human imperfection – the blind, the withered, the halt. I had no human compassion, may I tell you.

As I walked by, there was not a shred of human compassion in me. I simply demonstrated this new power called, “the power of God.” As I walked by, I fed every one of the thousands waiting for my appearance. Not everyone wants meat or bread. I gave them their most urgent need. One wanted eyes, another wanted arms for empty sockets – and lovely eyes were molded into empty sockets and arms into empty sockets. Everything that was missing in the human body came into being as I walked by. As I came to the end and the last one was completely satisfied with whatever he needed, then this chorus exalted: “It is finished.” Then I – in a world of luminosity, of infinite expansion – contracted into this world of opacity, and reached the limit of this contraction called “earth,” which is the body I am now wearing. Here is this experience verifying the truth of that statement that “I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto me.”

These experiences are adventures of the soul. It did not take place on this level. To this day, in 1963, our most brilliant scholars, reading this ancient manuscript do not understand it, because you cannot grasp it without these experiences. And here is one who has had them, and I am going to say to you: I am confident that some of you present tonight must have it before you taste death. Of that I am convinced. This is the statement made in Mark 8:36: “For what does it profit a man, to gain the whole world and forfeit his life?” Then he said: “Truly, I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God come with power.” (Mark 9:1) I tell you: there are some seated here tonight that will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God come with power. It has all to do with the age to come, and you will taste of the power of that age to come. In other words, you will experience that power before you taste death, for all things in this world die. These are mortal garments and they all die. Who are you? No one knows – no, not the angels of heaven, only the Father. When the curtain begins to lift in him and Christ is in him, wherever he goes there is a remnant – whether ten, or a thousand, or a million – a remnant present will not taste death until they see the kingdom of God come with power. Who you are, I do not know. That is hidden from me.

Listen to these words: “The prophets who prophesied of the grace that was to be yours, searched and inquired about this salvation. They inquired what person of them was indicated by the Spirit of Christ within them when predicting the sufferings of Christ and the subsequent glory.” It was revealed to them that they were searching not themselves, but you. Not the things that are now announced to them by those who preach the good news – things unto which angels long to look; therefore, set your hope fully upon the grace that is coming to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ. Here are men organised by divine providence for spiritual communion, and from the depths of their soul Christ is speaking. Listen: “Christ in them predicts this.” Not Christ on the outside – there is no Christ on the outside. If any man tries to influence you to trust him as a leader, do not believe him. Christ in you is slowly being unveiled, the only Christ in the world. “The prophets who prophesied of the grace, that was to be yours,” meaning God’s gift of himself to man, unearned, unmerited – you cannot earn it. It is too good. No one could ever in this world earn it. It is given to you by God. You will receive it as an inheritance. God tells us “They shall have no inheritance; I AM their inheritance; and you shall give them no possession in Israel; I AM their possession.” (Ezekiel 44:28) You inherit God – you inherit his kingdom, for there cannot be a kingdom without a king. You inherit the whole as he slowly unveils himself in you, and the plot of his unveiling is described in the New Testament.

They searched the scripture (the Old Testament) and could not find the Christ of whom they were told. They searched it from beginning to end and could not find who he is. “What person of them was indicated by the Spirit of Christ in them when predicting the sufferings of Christ and his subsequent glory?” They could not find it. Have you ever had a toothache? Who suffered? Christ did. Have you ever been cut? Christ was cut. You witnessed a friend go through “the gate” and you wept? It is Christ weeping. Christ suffers. There is nothing but Christ, and he is your own wonderful human imagination. He suffers until the moment of that last day, when he begins to unveil himself in you as you.

And so, the prophetic blueprint for you, individually, is revealed to us in the New Testament. You cannot find it in the Old Testament until it begins to unfold itself in the New, and then you go back and see where the prophets have recorded it – but they could not understand it. Like all of us, they were looking for a person. Where will he come from? They asked a simple question. When Christ comes, no one knows where he comes from. The last words asked him by Pilate were: “Where do you come from?” He does not answer. If he answered he came from a certain area, he is not speaking of the outer garment, and he could not tell them because they would not understand it. So, that is the fulfilled scripture in the last book of the Old Testament.

Suddenly he appears in a temple, and no one knows where he comes from. Who appears? The Lord. He appears so suddenly in you that you do not have the slightest idea what is taking place. (Malachi 3) And suddenly you are in possession of a power no being on earth dreams of – greater than any power on earth. What power on earth could take unnumbered eyes and hands and arms and legs and mold them in perfect bodies? They cannot make a hair of your head. Here, a man walks by, unmoved by human compassion, and he could make anything appear that was urgently needed. He is exercising a power. Seeing this human imperfection, the question is asked: “Who sinned? This man, or his parents?” “Neither this man nor his parents, but that the works of God be made manifest.” What did I care who sinned, when I saw the blind and the lame and the halt made perfect! It is an entirely different world into which we are all moving.

Every being is moving into this world, and God’s will surely will be manifest, even by the cruel surgery of war. “He has made everything for its purpose – even the wicked for the day of trouble.” His purpose is to give us himself, that we may inherit God. We inherit God, that we may live and function as God in an entirely different age. But you do not change your identity. I have not changed my identity. From my own experience, there will be a radical discontinuity of form. The lady said to me: “We are to them (the birds – the symbol of the Holy Spirit) but large bowels giving off the most offensive odor to these beings of peace and gentility. The dove is not only the symbol of gentleness and peace, but the symbol of the creative power of God. When he is smothering you with kisses, he is transferring to you the creative power of his own being. Slowly the whole thing begins to unfold in symbols – actual mystical experience – and you will see that that offensive area of your body will be completely transformed. You cannot describe it to anyone. Identity remains; hands, feet remain, but what that large bowel is transformed into, I cannot tell you.

Look for the large bowel on the leaf in the cabbage patch and you see the caterpillar – but you cannot see the butterfly. Suddenly comes the state of the limit of contraction –or chrysalis – unmoved. Out of that seemingly dead state comes the butterfly. You could not have predicted it when you looked at the large bowel consuming the leaf. Something altogether different comes out. Hands, feet, legs remain, but what the transformed bowel is, is a power beyond the wildest dream of man. It creates without the divided image it sees. It does not need any transforming itself. It, in itself, is life. You are life in yourself and need nothing to sustain life – no food. I know on this level when one enjoys a good meal, it may not be the most desired anticipation. But in that age, you are life in yourself. No need of any substance from without. You will have these demonstrations of the power of the New Age. I am speaking from experience.

There is a strange reversal of order in these experiences. The first experience recorded in Mark is the descent of the dove. In my many mystical experiences, that has been my latest. It happened on the 1st of January of this year. So, I do not know. I will not speculate. He has nothing recorded earlier than that. How close to departure from this level, I have not the slightest idea. It makes no difference to me at all. The earliest recorded in Mark is my last experience. Those he recorded all the way down, coming to the end, were my earliest experiences. When he said: “I am the Light of the world,” I have had that experience. It happened when I had just turned twenty. An infinite sea of liquid light, and I am it. That comes late in the story as he unfolds it, and the one that comes first, is my latest. If this thing recorded for us in the scripture is by design or by accident, I do not know. If the evangelist recorded it by design and mixed the things up so you would not question as to how they would unfold, I do not know. It could be that the parchments were dislocated. We had no printers in those days. I only know: if I told you the story as it has unfolded in me, the order of arrangement would radically change, because we are all unique in God’s eyes, and the experiences would naturally come differently.

My friend who is here tonight had this experience in 1940. I do not think he could have been more than a boy in his teens. He was a scoutmaster. He was happy with the boys and felt delighted with their accomplishments. He went to bed feeling pleasure with the accomplishments of the day. This night, he too, was lifted up on high and heard this heavenly chorus. I heard the words: “Neville is risen.” In his letter to me, he used the pronoun “he.” Whether he heard that as recorded in scripture, or his own name called, I do not know. I heard my own name called over and over, and that was the theme of this heavenly chorus as it swelled through the heavens. But because we are different in God’s eyes, these eternal experiences would take on certain changes as we individually experience them. We could sit tonight in a concert and no two here would have heard the same thing. But I do hope you will hear and believe it. There are some seated here tonight who will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God come with power. One here tonight – and he has not left this garment of flesh – has tasted of this experience. There is always one, everywhere, who has tasted the unveiling of Christ. Everyone will be Christ-like without losing his distinctive individuality. Not one will fail, because God would fail, and that is an impossibility.

So I tell you: believe this prophetic blueprint of which I speak this night. It may not be to the satisfaction of those who want a bigger and better job tomorrow. But that is simple – all that is easy. You can have a plot and plan contrary to God’s purpose, and execute it. But you will not thwart God’s purpose. He is not concerned whether you are rich or poor, known or unknown. He does not care about these superficial values on this level. “What does it profit a man who would gain the whole vast world and forfeit his soul.” Yet, there are such men. I saw in this morning’s paper – and undoubtedly he has left hundreds of millions behind him – suddenly he fell back and is gone. The dust to dust returns from whence it was taken, and the spirit returns to God.

Don’t for one moment forget this, when people tell you they need not suffer. They predict the sufferings of Christ. Only through suffering can you turn into Christ. God is looking for the guileless heart, not the guileful heart. He does not care how you can out-trick any being in the world. He is looking for other than that. He is looking for the heart of the Israelite: only the pure in heart can see God. Nothing in this world matters but the unveiling of Christ, and Christ is buried in every being. “I have been crucified with Christ. It is not I who live but Christ lives in me and the life I now live in the flesh, I live by the faith of God who loved me and gave Himself for me.” He actually became me, and I did not know it. I went about my business between receiving the promise, and receiving that which was promised.

There is a vast difference between receiving the promise and receiving what is promised. When we receive the promise, we are recipients of the inheritance. We are declared recipients of the inheritance. When we receive what is promised we obtain the inheritance. And, between these two points, of receiving the promise that I will inherit God, and actually receiving what is promised – that is God Himself – lies the life of the individual.

And, so, we move from receiving the promise to receiving what is promised, and we pass through hell. That is the Hades through which Christ passes after the crucifixion. In the beginning we are crucified with God and then come all of these experiences. And then comes the end, and the end is an unveiling process. And everything said in the gospels about Christ Jesus will be one day experienced by you as your own personal experience, and then and only then, will you know who Christ Jesus is. Revelation is the unveiling of Jesus Christ in you. And when you are unveiled, then you resurrect.

Now let us go into the silence.

But what is this water that he is speaking of? Here we are told in the 2nd chapter, 13th verse of Jeremiah, “My people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns, that hold no water.” So here, he now defines himself as living water. In the 4th chapter, the 10th verse of John we are told, “If you only knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.” Here we find the same living water. He’s telling you he has the power to give you living water, which God defined as himself.

So what is the living water? Here, you listen to it carefully, for now we have the truth. And this is in the Book of Proverbs, the 27th chapter, the 19th verse, “As in water face answers to face, so the mind of man reflects the man.” Now we see what the water is: as in water face answers to face, so the mind of man reflects the man, not the mind. The mind is but a reflector—it reflects the man, the operant power. He has living water.

Blake, of whom I am very fond and speak about all the time, his first vision was that of a tree of angels, at the age of eight or nine. So he came into the family, and he told his parents he’d just seen a tree full of angels. His father, to make him a sensible boy, prepared to give him a sound thrashing. Fortunately for Blake, his mother interceded and saved him. Maybe that’s what mothers are for, to protect us from our violent fathers. Nevertheless, he wasn’t thrashed, but the father wanted to make him a reasonable, sound, solid citizen; and he was seeing angels in a tree. That’s the earliest thought we have of Blake, of anything said about Blake, and the last thought is said about a neighbor woman who was present at his deathbed. Then she went home, and she told her relatives she had just been at the death not of a man but a blessed angel. That’s what Blake taught all his life: “We become what we behold.” And here a neighbor could say she saw the death not of a man but a blessed angel.

No, he didn’t become it immediately. And undoubtedly there were unnumbered moments in his life in the seventy years that he lived where there were many, many an unangelic moment, if you read the story of Blake carefully; but in the end, he fulfilled what he beheld. All through his greatest poem, Jerusalem, that one thought permeates the entire hundred plates. “They become what they behold.” We do, every one of us. And so what is your concept of yourself today? Is your concept truly what it ought to be? A child of God or a child of Mrs. Brown? Sweet and lovely as Mrs. Brown is, sweet and lovely as your parents are in this world, it can’t compare to the concept you could hold of yourself, which is “I am the child of God.” If that truly is your concept of yourself, and you look into the mirror of your mind and behold such a concept of self, it may not appear immediately in your world, but it will appear. For by this law, we become what we behold.

I know that when I was seven, my first vision was that of water. It used to frighten me. It happened once a month until I reached the age of puberty. I could always tell when it was coming because of that mood that would build up in me during the day. And it always repeated itself. I would become an infinite ocean, and yet I was a wave moving upon the breast of that ocean. During that interval of the night, I was both ocean and wave. And as wave, I was tossed into the air and then received back unto myself on the bosom of that ocean. It was a frightening experience. But the ocean was a very angry ocean, a turbulent ocean. And then it passed when I reached the age of puberty.

Then it was taken over by another concept of an ocean; and this time, the ocean was living water. That was when I was in my early twenties, maybe twenty or twenty-one, in the city of Larchmont, in New York City. This night in question, as I faded from this world, I became one with an immensity—I had no circumference—and it was all liquid golden light. But not an angry light, it was a soft, pulsing light. The whole thing was soft and pulsing, and I was it and there was nothing but. There was no wave now; there was integration, complete integration. I was one pulsing, living, golden liquid light. It lasted through the night. For when I woke in the morning, my book that I was reading was on my chest, a very big heavy book, proving that I had not turned in my sleep. I must have been in trance. I must have gone into some cataleptic state sometime in the early evening, for the bed was practically unmoved, untouched. The sun was up, and the reading lamp was still lit. So I must have had eight or nine hours of a deep catalepsy, in this infinite ocean of golden, pulsing, liquid light.

But now, the mirror took on a different form. In such a mirror, you could see what you want to see. In such a mirror, it’s not a broken image, as when I was a boy of seven; that was a broken image. I couldn’t see anything in such a mirror; it was too turbulent. But then came that moment in time when I truly sought him. As we are told in Jeremiah, “If you seek me with all your heart, I shall be found by you… and then I will restore your fortunes” (Jeremiah 29:13). If you really seek me with all your heart, I’ll be found by you. Then all your fortunes that seem to have gone will all be restored. And so everyone can find him. Everyone will find him, when they’re thirsty to find him, for there’s a thirst that only an experience of God can quench. Nothing in the world can quench it but an experience of God.

So here tonight, this living water is your mind. You are not mind; you are God. God moves upon the face of the waters, and we are told in that 27th chapter, that 19th verse, which I just quoted, that as in water face answers face, so the mind of man reflects the man. And that man is a mind; the mind reflects the man. The man is God. God became man that man may become God. So when you look into the mind of self, what are you seeing yourself to be? Whatever you behold yourself to be, although it may not in the immediate present externalize itself in your world, if you are faithful to the vision, no power in this world can stop you from externalizing it within the world. But no power!

So in the words of Blake… and he was faithful to the divine vision in time of trouble. All the troubles of the world, the turbulent seas of the world, did not disturb the vision. He beheld the vision of an angel, a true angel. So they say he’s mad. I heard it here only recently. My wife said someone who came here asked one of the teachers in the city what he thought of Blake, and he replied, “Oh, well, that man was mad. He’s insane.” Now, Blake had all of the attributes of insanity, all the assets of insanity, but none of its liabilities, none. Would we were all as mad as he was mad. If we were as mad as he, then we would see what he saw. He wasn’t mad. He actually saw the twofold vision. He saw the threefold vision. He saw the fourfold vision.

The fourfold vision I will touch on Tuesday night, when I speak on the power, the wonder working power of attachment: for that’s the fourfold vision. But he was always twofold vision at all times. Nothing to him was simply what it appeared to the senses. A tree was not just a tree. That is what he called a single vision, Newton’s sleep, the sleep of the scientists, where, well, the moon is not a moon, the sun is only a sun, a burning body. To him it was simply angels proclaiming the glory of God. So he looked at a thistle—wasn’t only a thistle, “an old man gray.” No matter what he saw, he saw it doubly: everything had another image contained within it, until finally he could reach the fourfold vision, and that’s the perfect vision.

But here, when the mind you accept it not as some little thing that the outside world would train, just as a mirror; leave it just as a mirror, and you determine what you want to see yourself as you look into the mirror and conceive yourself to be one with God. And as you look into the mirror of your own mind, fully believing that you are he, like all mirrors, they won’t change the image, it will reflect it. And the day will come that you will be rewarded with actual experiences to prove to your own satisfaction that your image is true. You have all the experiences as recorded in scripture. For the mirror only reflects you. So if your concept of yourself is a little person, beaten, poor, and insecure, as you looked, you are going to get only confirmation of it.

Tonight you can give to yourself any gift in this world. If you only knew the gift of God and who it is, saying to you, “Give me a dream,” you would ask of him and he would give you living water. Not just water for which you would now thirst again but living water. If you really believe this is how it works, that you don’t need any being in this world, you have the mirror. Just steady it. As told in the 23rd Psalm, “He leads us beside still waters”—not stagnant water; it’s still and it can reflect. He restores my soul this way. So he leads me beside the still water. And so the mind is brought still. I’m not anxious, I’m not concerned, and I know if I look into my mind and see you as I would like to see you and convince myself and persuade myself of the reality of that image of you. I need do nothing to make it so; it becomes so. It unfolds in its own specified time, and then you conform to the image that I hold in my own mind’s eye concerning you. So the mirror only reflects the concepts I hold in myself. Not you, it’s my concept of you that I should be faithful to. If I hold the most noble concept of you and others in my world, and I remain faithful to my vision, there’s no power in the world that can stop it from externalizing itself in my world.

So here, this symbol of water is really very, very close to me. For I go back in time, the very first… we recapitulate all the things said in scripture, and the first image is water, and my first vision was that of water. I can’t tell you how frightening it was until I reached the age of puberty, and then it vanished. Then it returned as I turned into my twenties, but this time the water was not turbulent it was living, really living water. I was the only thing: I was it. And yet there was no world, there was nothing, just living, pulsing, glowing, golden light, infinite light. And then I knew, later on, that into this I could see anything that I wanted to see; and seeing it, no power in the world could stop it from coming to pass. And then because you’re not a wise man, you haven’t the scholastic background, you haven’t these things to support your claims, but no power can disturb it. For these experiences belong to a region that is much deeper and more real than that which the intellect inhabits. So all the arguments in the world that they throw up cannot disturb it, no matter what they tell you.

And so the eternal question, “Which came first, the chicken or the egg”? And so it has shattered the minds of unnumbered people trying to figure out which came first. For reason tells us you couldn’t have a chicken unless you have an egg, and how could you have an egg unless you had a chicken? So which came first? The eternal problem. You can resolve it in no time with Imagination. That’s a foolish question and any attempt on the part of man to answer it is a foolish answer. They came from each other. I came from God, and God came from me. I’m just like the egg. And God, from himself I fell. He caused me to fall as the hen causes the egg to fall. That’s the end of the doctrine of the fall, no other fall. And then from that state I simply rose, like a chicken out of the egg. And that’s the end of the doctrine of evolution: I am one with the very being in whom I was before I fell from him.

So we all fall, predetermined setup, as told us in the 1st chapter, the 4th verse of Ephesians, “And he chose me in himself before the foundation of the world.” Yes, he chose me in himself before the foundation of the world. And then when all things were prepared, just like a nest—for that’s what the world is, all these galaxies, just like a nest—he drops me. I fall upon God, right into the nest; and after incubation, I, by an effort within myself, come out. And so that eggshell is just like your skull. It’s sealed, just as your skull is sealed, and within it is all that was its seeming Creator, no more, no less. When it’s all complete, you will come out. When it comes out, you will be one with God, just like God, containing within itself the same power to beget itself and drop its own being into the galaxies and let gods appear.

And so only Imagination can bridge that gap between, which came first, the chicken or the egg? No, they are one; they come from each other. As told us in the 3rd chapter, the 16th verse of Galatians: And so out of man comes Christ… “and your offspring who is Christ.” I know the whole vast world teaches something other than that. But to me, religion begins in revelation, and then it falls into dogma, into ecclesiasticisms, into rituals, into all these outer things; and there remains bound. But that’s not the truth. The truth is vision. Tell the vision just as it was given to you. If it doesn’t make sense to those who hear it, tell it without distortion, tell it just as it came. If they don’t understand it, do not modify it that they may understand it. Tell it just as it came. And so this is exactly how it happened.

So just as you’re told, “We become what we behold,” I’m trying to encourage you to take an image this night. It may be that this image you will take tonight would need no more than, say, a day, a week, or a month to materialize. I do not know the interval of time. But take a lovely, noble concept of yourself where you are contributing to the world’s good. Where you really contribute and feel clean and wholesome in that contribution. What would it be like were it true? Well, now look into your mind’s eye and see yourself as that being who contributed. For you can conceive yourself as that being. If you can, look until actually you feel the thrill of being such a being. Now, in a way that no one knows it will hatch out because out of that very vision of yours will come all that it takes to externalize it in your world.

You can be anything in this world that you want to be if you know how to move upon the face of the waters, and the face of the waters is simply moving upon your own mind, that’s all. You don’t argue with anyone. You ask no one to help you. You simply look at your own being and conceive yourself to be the man, to be already that man or that woman that you want to be. And ask no one if it is possible. If it is wealth that you want, well then, let it be wealth. If it is recognition that you want, then let it be recognition. If it is an increase in talents that you’re now expressing, then an increase in talents. I don’t care what it is. Conceive yourself to be already the being that you would like to be, and conceiving it, look for confirmation.

Were there not a reflection in this world, no one would know what he looks like. So God creates a reflector right away. It’s a mind; it’s called water. But then it’s explained to us in Proverbs what he means by water, and he tells us, “As face in water answers itself, so the mind of man reflects the man” (27:19). Not reflects the mind but reflects the man. So what is that man to himself? Then look into his mind. As he looks into his own mind, you will see reflected in that mind—it’s only a mirror—what he is to himself, and by the law that all things become what they behold, he can’t help becoming such a man. He can’t help it! So I tell you, dream nobly, dream the most idealistic states in the world, and then remain faithful to your dream, just as though it were true. And if you do, it’ll come to pass without the help of any being in the world. You don’t need it. You need no one to assist you—you’ll become exactly what you imagined yourself to be.

So this living water is not some strange thing that he’s going to give you. He’ll give you the message, that’s what he’s going to give you. He’ll tell you all about yourself. If you are thirsty to be other than what you are, ask of him—he’s within you—and tell him. He will give you living water, something so alive that it reflects exactly what you are. Nothing turbulent; I went through the turbulent state. Undoubtedly, that’s exactly what man in his earlier stage went through, where he couldn’t see anything reflected. He only saw confusion and turbulence. Then came that moment in his time when he could steady the mind, and the mind took on a living quality and became living water. But you take primitive man: he can’t conceive that anything that he is doing is causative of things that are happening in his world. He can’t conceive because he can’t see any reflection in his mind; because the mind isn’t still, the mind is too turbulent. But when man controls that mind, he turns from that violent stormy sea, which I experienced as a boy of seven, into that living, pulsing but reflecting light where he sees himself as he looks into it.

Because, looking into it, the strangest things happen. One day, reading or contemplating a similar image that was in the book that I read that night when I fell asleep—for I was reading The Life of Buddha when this first happened to me. And then this night in question—not reading the book of Buddha but contemplating Buddha—as I did so, before my eyes came this huge big flint. And then without effort on my part, it broke into many small fragments, and then invisible hands molded it into the most beautiful meditating figure that was like a Buddha, meditating. As I came closer and looked at it, I was looking at myself. I was the thing that I’m contemplating. And the thrill that was mine! Here I saw this Eastern figure sitting in the same posture as you find a Buddha, the little statue of Buddha, made of this flint. As I looked at myself and saw I was the figure that I contemplated, it glowed and glowed and glowed. When it reached the intensity of light it exploded, and then I was back where I was before.

This mirror of the mind reflects perfectly what you do. And so I tell you, try it. Try it this night. Take a glorious concept of yourself; take it of a friend; take it of your father, your mother, and your child; and you remain faithful to the image you hold of them. Do it without their knowledge, do it without their consent, and just hold it in your mind’s eye until you can see it, see it clearly. You don’t have to do anything beyond that, just see it clearly in your mind’s eye, and then leave it. In a way that no one knows and you could not consciously devise the means to bring it to pass, it will come to pass.

Now, in the very end of the book, the 22nd chapter of Revelation, brings us back as it started the Book in Genesis. We were all invited to come, those who are thirsty, come and take it without price. Take what? Take this living water. So the entire sixty-six books are permeated with this living water. And when you come to the very last chapter, almost the last verse—it’s the 17th verse of the 22nd chapter of Revelation—once more he brings in the theme of this living water. So everyone is invited to come and drink without price, buy it without money, and take it. Anyone who hears me this night, you have it, so it will cost you nothing to try it. You need no more than a determination to be something other than what you are and something great, something noble, something wonderful. Then, in your mind’s eye, see yourself as that person.

A nice way to see yourself as that is to bring a friend into your mind’s eye and have your friend by his expression and the sound of his voice and what he is saying confirm that he sees in you such a being. Let him see you, and then in your mind’s eye, see his expression, one of complete satisfaction if he’s a true friend, no envy on his part if he’s a real friend but pride on his face because he has you as his friend and he’s so proud of your accomplishments. If you want to add to it, carry on a mental conversation with him from the premise that he actually sees and approves of this you that you have become. That will tell you what you would see if you didn’t have that to reflect against your mind, what you would see in the depths as yourself. You will see the same being that he is seeing. So take a friend and use a friend to confirm that image of yourself. And may I tell you, you will be surprised how it works. But you must want him. Even “he who seeks me with all his heart, he shall find me and I will restore all of his fortunes.” But you must seek him. But all… I must really want him with all my heart. When I want him, but really want him, I’ll find him.

Then you have that enormous satisfaction that it doesn’t really matter if all the wise men in the world rose in opposition, it would make no difference whatsoever. You’re not speaking of this sphere. Not speaking of something you can see with a telescope or a microscope; it can’t be seen by any instrument made by man. It’s something entirely outside of the range of telescopes and microscopes. So you simply look right in and see it. When you become it, reason will step in and try to justify it, and all the wise men will say, “But you know that it would have happened anyway. Look, you met so and so, and then he in turn introduced you to so and so, then you got the breaks. And because you got the breaks you’ll become it. But don’t expect someone else to do it.” And then they’ll always try to minimize the working of this wonderful power. But I tell you it never fails. It never fails.

Everyone is invited—the 55th chapter of Isaiah, the very 1st verse—“Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the water,” but everyone. No limitations, not just those who are of a certain race or who belong to a certain tribe but everyone who thirsts, come to the water. And there’s no price to it. Come and take it without money, without price. So everyone is invited if he’s so thirsty to come to this water. So throughout the entire sixty-six books, it’s permeated with this fantastic water, and the water is your own wonderful mind. The one who’s looking into it morning, noon, and night is the man that you really are—and that man is destined one day to awake to find himself God.

Yes, you fell, deliberately. God allowed you to fall, for the name Yod He Vau He, the verb He Vau He,…, means “to fall” or, causatively, “to cause to fall”; or “to blow the wind” or, causatively, “to make the wind blow, or make it move.” And so it was God, for that’s his name, Yod He Vau He, who like the chicken allowed the egg to fall. But in that egg which was fertilized by God is himself; and then after incubation, it from within makes an effort—for the plan is all there—and breaks it. Then it rises as [does] a chicken, capable of the same creative power, the same creation, that that which seemingly brought it into being, one with God, its own begetter.

So tonight, if you have a concordance and you want to pursue it beyond the hour, just take it and take the word water, and go through chapter after chapter and see what is said of this wonderful water. First of all, the argument in the 4th chapter of John, the minute he tells of this water, “Well, how can you do it? You have no bucket, no rope, and the well is deep. You mean the water you would give us is greater water than I can get from this well that our forefather Jacob dug for us?” And he tells you, “With this water you thirst again. The water that I’ll give you will be a newer well of water, springing up into everlasting life. It will never change.” But she couldn’t quite understand him, and then he revealed who he is to her.

The first miracle performed in the gospel of John is turning water into wine; in other words, into living water. From a turbulent state, you turn it into something alive, a living water. So we are told, in the first letter to Timothy, the fifth chapter, “Drink no more water; use a little wine for your stomach’s sake and your many afflictions” (verse 23). It hasn’t a thing to do with wine that you and I would enjoy with a good meal. But you stop simply absorbing what to do and you become a doer, and you do it. So stop drinking water: stop simply absorbing news morning, noon, and night as to what I should do to become what I would like to be; and then become a doer, and do it. So you turn water into wine.

So the first miracle performed in the gospel of John, which is in the second chapter, he filled stone jars with water and drew forth not water this time but wine, living water. For that’s what wine is. It’s something alive. And so he turned it into something that is really living in the life of man. So if anyone goes out of here tonight, using wine for your stomach’s sake and not simply absorbing the news, to hear what you heard this night and not do it, you are still drinking water. But if you go out and you never return here again because your pattern changes in the world and you go elsewhere, but you don’t forget what you heard, and not forgetting it you apply it, then you are drinking wine. You are putting it into practice no matter where you are in the world, and as you put it into practice, you’ll get the results to fulfill James’ statement to us, “Be ye doers of the word and not hearers only, deceiving yourself” (James 1:22).

So become a doer, and a doer is to put into practice what you heard this night. Start with a friend. Take any friend in your world who you think tonight could really be helped financially, socially, and physically. But can he be helped? You think he can be helped, well, then you help him. Bring him before your mind’s eye, represent him to yourself as he ought to be seen by the whole vast world, and you believe in the reality of that image of him. You’re moving like God upon the face of the waters, and you’re creating just as God created in the beginning. “And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters… and then God said, ‘Let there be light’ and there was light” (Genesis 1:3). But he did nothing until he moved upon the face of the water.

So you can walk the street and move on the face of the water, ride the bus and do it, sit quietly and do it. But still the mind. No matter what formerly he or she appeared to be, that’s a very disturbing thought if you must fight with it. No matter what they were, that’s like a stormy ocean if they aren’t pleasant, if things aren’t right for them. So you don’t try to do anything about it. You just bring them before your mind’s eye, as they ought to be seen by you and by the world and by themselves. And so you put that as the image to be reflected from this wonderful moving water, which is your own mind.

So you read it when you go home, “As in water face answers to face, so the mind of man reflects the man.” How can you get around that? The mind of man reflects the man. So a man is complaining that society is not kind to him, that the boss on the job is too cruel, and he’s not making enough money? He’s reflecting only the being that he conceives himself to be, and they in his world are only mirroring what he within himself has set up as a pattern. If he doesn’t like what is happening because they are only mirrors, well, then let him reshuffle the deck as it were and change the concept he holds of himself. Changing it, just let him be faithful. For remember that interval of time, as told us in the Book of Habakkuk, that second chapter: “Every vision has its own appointed hour; it ripens; it will flower. If it seems long then wait; it is sure and it will not be late” (2:3). So every egg has a different interval of time in which to hatch out: that of a chicken, three weeks; that of some other bird, maybe a shorter interval; another bird, a longer interval. The same is true of the eggs that bring men into the world, and sheep and cattle into the world. There are intervals in time. And so your image tonight of a friend or yourself will have its own appointed hour, and if you are faithful to it and not addle it, it will ripen and it will flower.

So I invite you to try it. And then you will know this mystery of the water; for I’ve told you the Bible is a mystery not to be kept secret, but a matter that is really mysterious in character. There’s no reason to think for one moment that it should be held as a secret just for a few of us; tell it to anyone in this world. But the Bible is not what as we’re told in that passage from Jeremiah, that 2nd chapter, when he said, “My people have committed two evils”—and then he states the first—“how they turned from him, the fountain of living water, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that hold no water” (verse 13). And these broken cisterns are simply all of the isms of the world, but all of them. They’re trying to get something out of this broken cistern and you can’t get it.

For the men who wrote our Bible… and no one knows the authors, no one. This one we quoted this night from Genesis, there isn’t a scholar worthy of the name who writes on this book that has any manuscript that is signed. There are three letters. One he speaks of as the J manuscript, the E manuscript, and the P manuscript; and that’s all they have to go by, completely unsigned. There is no identity to the authors. Who were they? How did they come into the world? Were they born as we were born? Did they really come as you and I came through the womb of woman? Or did they appear in our world, as I, one night many years ago, stepped into another world, without going through the womb of a woman in that world. I was just as real as this world, solidly real. And so stepping from my bed into that world and it wasn’t this earth, but a solid world just like this, with people clothed as you are clothed. And if anyone had arrested me there and compelled me to give a birth certificate or give an identification card that would be understood in that world, I could not have done it. So I was not there through any normal channel of physical birth. I returned here, without returning here in any known way.

So who is E and who is P and who is J? They give us symbols and letters, but we have no way of knowing who the author of Genesis is. As far back as we go, you can’t find any manuscript that these scholars would in any way catalog, save it’s the J manuscript, it’s an E manuscript, or it’s a P manuscript. So who are these fantastic authors? Because if you treat it even as literature, you wouldn’t find anything greater than Genesis. And as far as vision goes, where would we find something greater? But who are the authors? Completely unknown to mortal mind. But there it stands, those fifty wonderful chapters. And the whole thing is permeated with water. Our historians and teachers of the Bible try to convince us that water was such a precious item in the desert, so precious where this whole thing was laid, that’s why they made so much of water. Hasn’t a thing to do with that. Hasn’t a thing to do with it? So he comes into the desert to water his flock and the well was there and covered and he rolled away the stone and watered the flock. After he watered the flock, then he rolled the stone back and covered the well, Jacob’s well.

So we are the sheep of his pasture, are we not? And so we are watered by anyone who knows how to water it and to feed all the sheep until they are completely satisfied. And then it’s automatically rolled back. When one comes behind you and reads that same chapter, it’s just like a closed book. He picks up the book, he turns to the 29th chapter of Gensis, he reads the story of the rolling away of the stone and the watering of the flocks, and he wonders, What is it all about? If someone knows how to roll away the stone and how to actually take that water of psychological meaning and give it to the world, after he’s done it automatically the stone is rolled back. The one who comes behind him who reads the same chapter can’t interpret it. It’s always a sealed well.

But tonight, you’ve heard it, and I think that you will try it. So let me now clarify just in a few moments the water on which God moved—he said, “The Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters”—that water is your own mind. If tonight it’s too disturbed because you are too anxious, then that’s like a stormy sea, a turbulent sea. But wait a while; it will become quiet, still water. Still running, for it is alive, but still enough to reflect the being that you want to see. And then the way to see it is to assume that you are what you’d like to be. Having assumed it, look and see the world reflect that man that you are because they all see it. Having seen it reflected on the faces of your friends, drop it. Just drop it. And that’s the fall. That seed that came from you has its own appointed hour, and it will grow and come into this world.

So you try it. And may I tell you, after it happens—for it will happen—then share with me your good news by telling me how it worked that I, in turn, may tell it from this platform and let us all be mutually encouraged by our faith. If it works for you—which it will—then you tell me what you did and how it worked, and then I, in turn, will tell it to everyone present. They, in turn, will be encouraged to go on and be as faithful to their visions as Blake was, in spite of all the things that he went through in the interval. For his life, like the life of every great man, is really an allegory. Every person in the world, his life is really an allegory. People don’t quite realize it.

In Blake’s life… one of the outstanding things, this gentle, tender man who couldn’t hurt a fly, and returning to his garden one day, he saw a drunken soldier and took him bodily and led him down the road. Then the man brought action against him and accused him of insulting the king, which is a frightful offense in England, and it was more so then, in his day. This innocent man was accused because a drunken soldier wanted to get even. It was quite a trial in England. And then you see this wonderful story, a soldier is always a symbol of authority and a garden is always creativity, and here his garden. He was selling his soul at that time to a man who wanted him to become a portrait painter, and he didn’t want any part of it. So Blake was selling his soul, his creativity, to this man who had money because doing this work, well, then his financial status would be eased somewhat. But he was selling his creative power, and so here, in his garden was the drunken man of authority. For the one who employed him had the authority and the power.

And then he broke it and refused not to make any portraits and not have one model in the world. He never used a model. He saw what he wanted to paint, as clearly as any model could ever be in this world. When he wanted to draw the soul of a flea, he saw the soul of a flea, and it was man. For the flea is a blood-sucking insect, but men are also blood sucking. Those who employ without proper compensation, are they not taking the blood of others? They don’t care what happens to you when you go home. If you have a family of twelve and they’re not well fed, they don’t care once their profits are big enough. And if you saw them spiritually, just like fleas, for a flea is simply a blood-drinking insect. They are taking the blood of those without proper reward; they’re bloodsucking.

When Blake painted his wonderful flea, the soul of a flea, the ghost of a flea, you should see that monstrous thing, but it’s human. Everything is man in the world. And so the life of any great man, like a Blake, it’s an allegory. So when he put his garden back in form, then the soldier went up. Blake won the case eventually. They all knew the man was perjuring himself. Blake would not say anything against the crown, and it was proven. But meanwhile, he just went through hell to prove it. But that was the turning point in his life, like the great allegory of his life. But here, his first thought in the world, “a tree full of angels”; and the very last thought, “I was at the bedside this day not of a man when he died, I saw the death of a blessed angel.” So what he began as a vision, he fulfilled as a man: he saw an angel as a child, and he died as a blessed angel.

So tonight, you see a noble being. When you make your exit from this world, make your exit as it. But your true destiny is God, for we are one with God. He became you that you may become him.

Now let us go into the Silence.