Missing Neville
by Michael Braunstein
Neville Goddard was a man who spent too brief a time here on planet Earth. Had he remained just a few hundred days more, perhaps I would have met him when I moved from Omaha to Los Angeles in 1974. As it happened, Goddard transitioned out of this world in October of 1972. For decades previous to that moment, he lived in West Hollywood and lectured each week to overflow audiences at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre.There was never a fee and people lined up circling the block along Wilshire Boulevard. By the time of his demise, Goddard had published over a dozen books and had lectured around the world.
Neville Goddard was born in Barbados in 1905 and was generally known by the single given name Neville. By 1926, Neville’s interest in metaphysics led him to the Rosicrucian Society, the Qabalah and the Hebrew text Bible. There he found the underpinnings for what is described as the law of consciousness.
Neville viewed the Bible much like a hologram. A hologram is a three-dimensional image that takes on a different appearance when viewed from different aspects. But the innate essence of the hologram never changes. In the scriptures, Neville found a recurring theme. Neville saw that stories and parables throughout both Old and New Testament appear as an extended metaphor for the power of mind, the reality of consciousness.
Seen through modern psychology, with terms like conscious and subconscious awareness, biblical references held true to the theme of the inner world of mind creating the outer world of form. Through the 1930s and ‘40s, Neville traveled the country delivering his message as he found it in the Bible.
In 1946, Neville published his first writing, a modest 18-page treatise titled The Search, no more than a thread-bound pamphlet. But the die was cast. His teaching summed up on page 13: “… life moulds the outer world to reflect the inner arrangement of our minds. It is to our own consciousness that we must turn as to the only reality, the only foundation on which all phenomena can be explained.”
Thought creates form. The physical universe is but a veneer over something unseen. Physics teaches we are not solid matter but energy. And thought is a profound though not yet fully understood wavelength of energy. Even thousands of years ago, great thinkers credited thought with creating the universe.
In Timeaus, Plato dialogues a cosmology that thought lies at the core of creation. Modern scientific “brane theory” contends that reality — stars, planets, black holes, human bodies, empty space and so on — is but a thin membrane over a vast, yet physically unperceived universe.
In brane theory, our physical universe is like a thin veneer of scum on top of an infinitely deep pond. The unaware persons experience only that scummy top layer. What goes on in the rest of creation is but a hint or whisper of undercurrent deep within the pond. That pond is a huge unseen sump of cosmic energy. Tapping the abstraction of it requires using the only abstract tool we have: the subconscious. That’s the part of the mind that doesn’t think. It feels.
Neville was not the first to see that thought creates all. Indeed, much of his message is that the Bible serves as a guide to the use of mind, imagination and feeling to harmonize our higher selves with this physical universe. In Feeling is the Secret, Neville teaches the key to tapping that energy and illuminates the timeless message in the Bible when viewed with the discernment of knowledge.
Out of This World Western civilization could use a Neville right about now. More than any other time in human experience, people have become driven by the material world. America in particular has become increasingly secular. This is not surprising when one considers the allure of technology. Presented by the most powerful marketing and information schemes in history, the sway is relentless. Bear in mind that the opposite of “secular” does not necessarily mean “religious.” Let this not be interpreted as a call to religion but rather the recognition that human awareness has turned away from recognizing the existence of something beyond the ephemeral, beyond that based in the physical. Without at least recognizing that such a reality exists, one cannot meld with it and accept the benefit of such a relationship whether one chooses to call that next-level consciousness God, Cosmic Consciousness, the Universal Mind, Intuition or Barking Pumpkin. Whatever one calls it, it bears well to connect with it. It takes a special kind of ignorance to ignore that if even just to make the temporal world better, such a reliance on that consciousness is well advised.
Neville wrote a short book in 1949 titled Out of This World. The opening is also a summation of sorts. It reads:
“Many persons, myself included, have observed events before they occurred; that is before they occurred in the world of three dimensions. Since man can observe an event before it occurs in the three dimensions of space, life on earth must proceed according to plan, and this plan must exist elsewhere in another dimension and be slowly moving through our space.
“If the occurring events were not in this world when they were observed, then, to be perfectly logical, they must have been out of this world. And whatever is there to be seen before it occurs here must be ‘predetermined’ from the point of view of man awake in a three-dimensional world.”
Got that? Just read some Neville to get it clear, since you’ve missed those lectures at the Wilshire Ebell.
Be well.
Heartland Healing is a metaphysically based polemic describing alternatives to conventional methods of healing the body, mind and planet. It is provided as information and entertainment, certainly not medical advice. Important to remember and pass on to others: for a weekly dose of Heartland Healing, visit HeartlandHealing.com.
2020.12.01