A Mystical Expirience, Vortrag
Vortrag: A Mystical Expirience / Eine mystische Erfahrung
Vortrag von Neville Goddard 1960
Englisch: A Mystical Expirience
I accept literally the saying that all the world’s a stage, and I believe that God plays all the parts. The purpose of the play: to transform man, the created, into God, the creator. God loved man, his created, and became man in faith that this act of self-commission would transform man, the created, into God, the creator.
The play begins with the crucifixion of God, on man as man, and ends with the resurrection of man as God. God becomes as we are that we may become as He is. God becomes man that man may become first a living being and secondly a life-giving spirit. I live, yet not I but God lives in me. And the life I know I live in the flesh I live by the faith of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.
God took upon himself the form of man and became obedient unto death, even death on the cross of man, and is crucified on Golgotha, the skull of man. God himself enters death’s door—the human skull—and lays down in the grave of man to make man a living being. God’s mercy turned death into sleep, then began the prodigious and unthinkable metamorphosis of man: the transformation of man into God. No man unaided by the crucifixion of God could cross the threshold that admits to conscious life. But now we have union with God in his crucified self. He lives in us as our wonderful human imagination. Therefore, man is all imagination and God is man and exists in us and we in him. The eternal body of man is the imagination. That is God Himself. When he rises in us, we will be like him and he will be like us. Then all impossibilities will dissolve at the touch of exaltation, which his rising in us will impart to our nature.
Here is the secret of the world: God died to give man life and to set man free. For however clearly God is aware of his creation, it does not follow that man, imaginatively created, is aware of God. To work this miracle God had to die then rise again as man. And none has ever expressed it so clearly as Blake. Blake says—or rather has Jesus say—“Unless I die, thou canst not live; but if I die I shall arise again and thou with me. Wouldest thou love one who never died for thee, or ever die for one who had not died for thee? And if God dieth not for man and giveth not himself eternally for man, man could not exist.”
So God died. That is to say, God has freely given himself for man. Deliberately he has become man and has forgotten that he is God in the hope that man, thus created, will eventually rise as God. God has so completely offered his own self for man that he cries out on the cross of man, “My God! My God! Why hast thou forsaken me?” He has completely forgotten that he is God. But after God rises in one man, that man will say to his brothers: “Why stand we here trembling around calling on God for help and not ourselves in whom God dwells?” This first man that has been raised from the dead is known as Jesus, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep. For man, God died. Now by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead. Jesus resurrects his dead father by becoming him. In Adam, the universal man, God sleeps. In Jesus, the individualized God, God wakes. In waking, man the created has become God the Creator and can truly say, “Before the world was, I Am.”
Just as God in his love for man so completely identified himself with man that he forgot that he was God, so man in his love for God must so completely surrender himself to God that he lives the life of God and no longer that of man. God’s play, which transforms man into God, is revealed to us in the Bible. It is completely consistent in imagery and symbolism. The New Testament is hid in the Old Testament, and the Old is manifested in the New. The Bible is a vision. It is not a doctrine or a ritual. The Old Testament tells us of God’s promises, the New Testament tells us not how these promises were fulfilled but how they are fulfilled. The central theme of the Bible is the direct, individual, mystical experience of the birth of the child. That child of whom the prophet spoke: “To us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be upon his shoulder, and his name will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace, of the increase of his government and of peace there will be no end.”
When the child is revealed to us, we see it, we experience it, and the response to this revelation can be stated in the words of Job: “I had heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees thee.” The story of the incarnation is not fable, allegory, or some carefully reasoned formula to enslave the minds of men, but mystical fact. It is a personal mystical experience of the birth of oneself out of one’s own skull, symbolized in that of a child wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying on the floor. There is a distinction between hearing of this birth of a child from one’s own skull—a birth which no scientist or historian could ever possibly explain—and actually experiencing the birth, holding in your own hands and seeing with your own eyes this miraculous child: a child born from above, out of your own skull, a birth contrary to all the laws of nature. The event as it is recorded in the gospels actually takes place in man. But of that day or that hour when the time will come for the individual to be delivered, no one knows but the Father. Do not marvel that I say to you: you must be born from above. The wind blows where it wills, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know whence it comes or wither it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the spirit.
This revelation in the Gospel of John is true. Here is my experience of this birth from above. Like Paul I did not receive it from man, nor was I taught it, but it came through the actual mystical experience of being born from above. None can speak truly of this mystical birth from above but the one who has experienced it. I had no idea that this birth from above was literally true. For who before the experience could believe that the child—the Wonderful Counselor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace—was inwoven in his own skull? Who, before the experience, would understand that his Maker is his Husband and the Lord of Hosts is His Name? Who would believe that the creator went in unto his own creation, man, and knew it to be himself and that this entrance into the skull of man—this union of God and man—resulted in the birth of a son out of the skull of man; which birth gave to that man eternal life and union with his creator forever?
If I now tell what I experienced that night I do so not to impose my ideas on others but that I may give hope to those who, like Nicodemus, wonder how can a man be born when he is old? How can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born? How can this be? Well, this is how it happened to me.
A heavenly dream in which the arts flourished was suddenly interrupted by the most intense vibration centered at the base of my skull. Then a drama as real as those I experience when I am fully awake began to unfold. I felt myself within my skull trying to force my way out through its base. Something gave way and I felt myself move head downward through the base of my skull. I squeezed myself out, inch by inch. When I was almost out I held what I took to be the foot of the bed and pulled the remaining portion of me out of my skull. There on the floor I laid for a few seconds. Then I rose and looked at my body on the bed. It was lying on its back and tossing from side to side like one in recovery from a great ordeal. As I contemplated it, hoping that it would not fall off the bed, I became aware that the vibration which started the whole drama was not only in my head but now was also coming from the corner of the room. As I looked over to the corner I wondered if that vibration could be caused by a very high wind, a wind strong enough to vibrate the window. I could not believe that the vibration which I still felt within my head was related to that which seemed to be coming from the corner of the room.
Looking back to the bed, I discovered that my body was gone but in its place sat my three oldest brothers. My oldest brother sat where the head was. My second and third brothers sat where the feet were. None seemed to be aware of me, although I was aware of them and could discern their thoughts. I suddenly became aware of the reality of my own invisibility. I noticed that they, too, were disturbed by the vibration coming from the corner of the room. My third brother was the most disturbed and went over to investigate the cause of the disturbance. His attention was attracted by something on the floor and looking down he announced, “It is Neville’s baby.” My other two brothers, in most incredulous voices, asked, “How can Neville have a baby?”
My brother lifted the infant wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid him on the bed. I, then, with my invisible hands lifted the babe and asked him, “How is my sweetheart?” He looked into my eyes and smiled, and I awoke in this world—to ponder this greatest of my many mystical experiences.
One other vision I will tell because it bears out the truth of my assertion that the Bible is mystical fact—that everything written about the Promised Child is in the Law of Moses, and the prophets, and the Psalms, and it must be mystically experienced in the imagination of the individual. The child’s birth is a sign and a portent signaling the resurrection of the patriarchs in the imagination of him in whom the child is born. Six months after the birth of the child a vibration similar to the one which preceded his birth started in my head. This time its intensity was centered at the top of my head. Then came a sudden explosion and I found myself in a modestly furnished room. There, leaning against the side of an open door was my son David of Biblical fame. He was a lad about twelve years old. What struck me forcibly about him was the unusual beauty of his face and figure. He was—as he is described in the first book of Samuel—ruddy, with beautiful eyes and very handsome.
Not for one moment did I feel myself to be anyone other than Neville. Yet, I knew that this lad David was my son, and he knew that I was his father. As I sat there contemplating the beauty of my son, the vision faded and I awoke.
What conclusion can be reached from these mystical experiences? A chamber of man’s image, in man’s imagination, is engraved with every patriarch and character in the Old Testament, and that after the birth of a child out of the skull of man, signifying that man’s rebirth from above—there will begin the resurrection of the patriarchs. Each in his turn will be revealed as the son of the man who resurrects him. When all are resurrected from the dead, that man in whom they are resurrected will know himself to be of the Elohim: the God who became man that man may become God.