He dreams in me, Vortrag
Vortrag: He Dreams in Me / Er träumt in mir
Vortrag von Neville Goddard am 13.03.1967
Englisch: He Dreams in Me
Tonight’s subject is “He Dreams in Me.” The Old Testament calls upon God to awake; the New Testament calls upon man to awake. In the 44th Psalm you read, “Rouse thyself! Why sleepest thou, O Lord? Awake! Do not cast us off forever” (verse 23). Here we are hurled into time-space and the Dreamer is dreaming, and so we feel ourselves enslaved and cast off. The New Testament tells us that God became man that man may become God, and that he succeeded in awakening in man as man. So we are told in Ephesians, the fifth chapter, “Awake!”—calling upon man to wake—“Awake, rise from the dead, and Christ shall give you light” (verse 14). Here we are in the world of the dead, they confess, but one did succeed in rising from it, the one was God. So the Old calls upon God to awake and the New calls upon man to awake. So tonight, we will take the two and try to show you who this presence is: It’s your own wonderful human Imagination. That is God, calling upon man to awake. “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” (Blake, Ann. to Berkeley and Laocoon).
Now let me share with you a few letters that came in the past week. First, I will tell of one that happened last Tuesday morning. It was around eight and I wasn’t quite sure that my watch was right, in fact, it’s always losing time, and so I thought I’d better set it. So I thought, well, my watch tells me it’s five minutes to eight…and usually at eight o’clock they’ll give you the time on TV. So I turned on Channel 4, because they all have a certain break on the hour or the half-hour. So I turned on Channel 4 and here is a program called “Today” and the one who conducts it, the emcee, is Hugh Downs. Well, I could see…I’ve been on TV myself, so I knew that he was given a cue to ad-lib and to kill the next thirty seconds because it wasn’t quite long enough. I could see in his face when that cue was given, because it’s been given me when I was on TV. “You have thirty seconds, one minute, a minute and a half keep on talking,” because you just can’t break and have a blank. So said he, “Let me tell you of a strange dream of mine that I once had.” Now he didn’t say when he had it. He said, “I had this dream that I was viewing one of my tapes of one of my shows. I said to the producer, ‘You know, I don’t remember having seen any one of these people’ and the producer said to me, ‘Well, that’s natural, this show is to be taped next Friday.’ And, he said, it was. I do not recall seeing anyone that I now see before me, not on my show, and here he tells me it’s to be taped next Friday, and it was.” Now here is merging with the future by living an experience that he does not remember.
Now, here is one merging with the past, an actual past, and living an experience of long ago. The lady writes me, she said, “I am seventy-two years old…and here in my dream someone gives me an autograph book.” This is now a dream. “As was the custom, I’m getting all the verses dedicated to me…that was the custom. You receive an autograph book and you didn’t collect autographs, you collected verses, and they’re all dedicated to the owner of the book. I wanted my father, whom I admired greatly, I loved him, I adored him, I wanted him to write a verse in my book, but I knew that he would simply say no, he didn’t know a verse. So I selected a verse I wanted him to write and I committed this verse to memory. Then I went to him and as I expected, he said, ‘I don’t know any verse.’ So I recited the verse that I had memorized and he said to me, ‘That’s a beautiful verse, I like it.’ And so, I dictated the verse and he wrote that which I dictated. This is now in my dream…I am a girl ten or eleven years of age…and then the dream ends. I remember hazily that incident when I awake, but I could not for the life of me prior to the dream have told you one word in that verse, or the verse, or what it meant. But on waking, I recalled it in detail, every word.
“So I went over to my daughter’s house and I began to tell her of the dream. She completely recited the verse, for a few years before she asked me for the autograph book, she said she wanted it, she so loved everything in it.” Now, she said, “I know I must have been ten or eleven because in that book there is a verse and the autograph of my 5th grade teacher, so I must have been either ten or eleven. The one thing I regret is this. In the autograph book I had asked my father to draw something on the page and he said he couldn’t draw. So I ___(??) the draw and he drew a young boy on a farm, holding a basin as high as he possibly could, huge basin, over his head, as high as he could, and then a billy goat with horns down, in action, coming at him.” She said, “I could feel the impact the drawing was so good. But my father didn’t complete the drawing—he had left off the hind legs, with the promise he would do it tomorrow, and tomorrow never came to the unfinished, uncompleted drawing. But the verse, after having had the dream, I knew it in detail, and I swear if anyone asked me prior to the dream, I could not have quoted the verse, what it was all about, or anything about it. And I went back sixty-odd years.” Here, she merged in the actual past and relived an experience of long ago.
Now here is a little boy, a next-door neighbor of a friend of mine, who moved in last year. He came over, made himself quite at home, and told her that he’d always known her, always known her. And they would never, not in eternity, will they ever cease to know each other. One day, she said to him as he started to describe some incident of long ago…he’s only four years old. She said, “How long ago?” He said, looking through the window, “You see that bush?”—the bush is in full bloom, an enormous bush—and he said, “As many leaves as on that bush are the years. And I will know you when my head grows and reaches the sky.”
He comes over and tells her these stories, and this is one…this is now going into a future state. He started to laugh and she said, “What’s so funny? What’s wrong?” He said, “I had a dream (speaking of a dream), but it’s so silly that I won’t tell you.” Well, she coaxed him to tell the dream. “No, it’s too silly, it’s a silly dream.” Finally, he was coaxed to the point…he said, “Well, tell me, do you like to laugh?”—she said, yes, I do like to laugh—“because this is very funny.” He said, “I had a dream that everything is nothing.” Well, she said, “What do you mean by that?” He said, “Just that, everything is nothing. The toilet paper, nothing, the telephone, nothing, but everything is nothing.” So she said to him, “Do you see this right before your eyes?” and he said, “No, not right before my eyes, but it happened.” And she said to him, “What did it look like?” “Just nothing, everything is nothing.” So, later on in the day she said to him, trying to get something out of him, “So tell me, what did you dream last night?” He said, “I told you. That’s it.” And the book was closed. She said every day these things happen between this little boy of four and herself coming over and bringing these strange experiences of his dreams.
Modern man now proves the truth that the entire space-time history of the world is laid out and we only become aware of increasing portions of it, successively…that man can merge with a section of that which is past or future relative to this moment and actually experience that experience. It’s all there. He doesn’t realize he is now merged with a dream. He hasn’t the slightest idea that this is a dream. He wakes in the morning and said, “I had the most wonderful dream last night.” While he was dreaming, it was to him a reality. He wakes and he reflects and it isn’t real, it’s subjective, and this is real. He doesn’t realize he is now once more ___(??) and merged in this section of time. And so his dream is simply something that is subjective and unreal. While he was experiencing the dream it was objective and real.
If he would only realize the deep of his own being, which is his own wonderful human Imagination, is trying to instruct him, trying to persuade him, trying to get him aroused. And it is coming, as my friend’s dream of the other night, that it starts from the center and it’s working toward the surface. It takes a while for the dreamer in man to awake, to reach that surface. While he is moving towards the surface, he is influencing the surface, your being. When he arrives on the surface, you and he are one; there aren’t two, only one. But while he is moving towards the surface he is stirring man to question the reality of the world in which he lives.
If a lady can go back sixty-one years and so merge with the past that she has an experience of long ago in detail…and one moves forward in time like the fella on TV, who asked the producer, “Well, who are these people? I’ve never seen them before.” “That’s right, these are to be taped next Friday, next Friday’s show.” Well, where is next Friday’s show? Then I have one week from meeting the people that I’m going to have on tape that I must interview? I do not know them. My producer and director, they’ve gathered together the people. I greet them and carry on these conversations for two hours, five days a week; and so they’re getting all the different people to arrest the attention of the few. And he sees it one week in advance. So, he asks, “Then, what is it all about? Is the entire week done and I can simply tune in on a certain state?” Yes. I can modify my present dream, for this is a dream, or I can radically change it. I’m called upon to modify it every day of my life, modify it. Sometimes you radically change it, as everyone in what is called death….for this is death. We are as dead here as those we have said goodbye to this past week or month or year, who have gone through the gate called death. This is a state of death…we are no more alive here than those that we have gone to the cemetery and saw placed into the grave or the crematorium where they are burned into ashes. We are no more alive here than they are now. All is a state of death.
And we are dreaming. You and I in the beginning agreed to dream in concert. And no one here that I know of, not here anyway, but no one in the world has violated that agreement. There were those who did not come out, who would not agree to this cruel experiment. That is told us in the 15th chapter of the gospel of Luke in the form of a parable. He loves the second son. Yes, he loved Jacob and he hated Esau. He loved Isaac and he banished Ishmael. He wanted always the second son. So the second son goes into the world of death and becomes a slave, and he hungers; then he comes to his senses, he awakes, and remembers the father who had everything; and he returns to his father. The father gave him the ring, the robe and then killed the fatted calf, and had a huge feast for the one who had returned. And when the first one, who did not go out, complained, he said, “All that I have is yours. But this your brother was dead and he’s alive again; he was lost and he’s found” (Luke15:32). So you and I are the gods in the beginning who agreed to dream in concert. And I tell you we have not violated it.
Now let me share with you a vision of one who wrote me this last week, two. It’s unsigned, but I take it to be that of a lady…but it’s unsigned. I received many letters or my wife received them; this one was not signed. I hope you’re present. But in it you said, “This is not a dream. I was awake and looking at fish in a pond that we have, and here are the fish. I was thinking of nothing in particular. Then I heard a masculine voice and the voice said, ‘You have run the race, you have fought the good fight.’” Here, she is quoting now, not in the right person, but she’s quoting Paul’s letter, his 2nd letter to Timothy, the very end of the race: “You have run the race, you have fought the good fight, you have kept the faith” (4:7). “That night, as I was falling asleep, a voice came from within me and the pronoun is changed now, and the voice is saying from within me, “I have run the race, I have fought the good fight, I have kept the faith.” Certainly, you’ve kept the faith. And with that experience you are at the end of the journey. The faith is a faith we made in the beginning. Listen to these words, “Among you stands one whom you do not know.” The word translated “among” is the Greek ___(??), meaning literally “radiating from within.” So, radiating from within stands one whom you do not know. The word translated “stands” means “a covenant.” It stands in continual covenant. And you’ve kept the faith. You did not turn until you ran the race; you finished the race. And what a fight it has been!
So I tell you, we suffer because we are sharers in Creation’s cruel dream. But we began it…in the beginning you and I agreed to it. We agreed as the gods in scripture. We are the Elohim who came down into the world of death, and we entered death’s door, the human skull. We laid down in that grave of man and dreamed that we are men. We’re actually dreaming that we are men, assuming all the limitations of a man, all the weaknesses, everything concerning man. And one day we awake and we are man with the power that was ours prior to entering death’s door, the human skull.
Now here, you can try it. I ask you to experiment. You will die; there is no final death, none whatsoever. This is death. There is no final death. Forget it. You and I are heirs to the universe, all of us joint heirs with the being that we form as one being called the Lord. And there is no final death. So here I ask you to experiment and try it in this way. I said everything is. There isn’t a thing that you could imagine but what it is. “Eternity exists and all things in eternity independent of Creation.” Whatever you create, it all exists. And you do it by an adjustment. You do it by identifying yourself with that state that you want to dream into objective reality. And here, just as the lady did, she simply slipped into an actual section of her past and relived it, just as though it’s taking place for the first time. She’s dictating to her father and she doesn’t remember she ever did this before. She’s telling him word for word, just as she did sixty-odd years ago. There is no memory that she did it before until she awakes. She awakes here to remember she had done that before. She is still in the world of dreams, she’s now seventy-two, she’s still dreaming as you are dreaming and we’re all dreaming in this world until we awake.
So I say, advisedly, he dreams in us…your own wonderful human Imagination. “Rouse thyself!” said the Psalmist and this is the 44th Psalm and it’s a Maskil, which means a special instruction, something that is a very serious instruction. It is a Maskil of the sons of Korah and Korah means the one who really shaves himself, his head. In other words, he takes off the hair of his head, as some of our priests will do today, implying that they really have certain divine instructions that others do not possess. They’ll take it off the back. And then many a person in the Oriental world will shave the head, the mountain. So the word Maskil means one who actually does it to himself and it’s a special instruction. Korah is the one who does it to himself and Maskil is a special instruction. So here, “Rouse thyself! Why sleepest thou, O Lord? Awake! Do not cast us off for ever” (verse 23)…as though I’m cast off.
Now listen to the words of one who claims…I’ll go along with him 100 percent…that he did not write this poem. It was dictated by the brothers on high…those who preceded him in the waking, forming now the brothers who are waiting for everyone to return. He begins this poem in this manner—it’s called Jerusalem; the one of whom I speak is Blake—he said, “Awake! Awake, O sleepers of the land of shadows, wake! expand! I am in you and you in me, mutual in love divine. I am not a God far off, I am a brother and friend; within your own bosoms I reside and you reside in me: Lo! we are one, forgiving all evil, not seeking recompense” (Jer.,Chp.1,lns.6,18). Then he tells us that you and I turned down and turned away from the appeal and turned down the valleys dark. So they are called here…in the beginning of the poem he claims came through him what should have taken a lifetime, it came in no time flat, one hundred pages. You couldn’t buy the original today for any money that you may have. We speak of these paintings today bringing two million, three million, five million; you could not buy an original Blake for any money that you possess.
And here is this greatest poem, Jerusalem, calling upon man to awake. That it is not a God…“I am not,” (God is speaking), “I am not a God afar off, I’m a brother and friend. Within your bosom I reside and you reside in me.” I know it from my own personal experience, you and I are not two at all. Without loss of identity we are still one being. We are the brothers, collectively forming the Lord. “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord,” a compound unity, one made up of others. And as we move forward to the climax of this, which is he wakes in me, you will see it. There is a certain definite plan by which he awakes in man, and when he awakes in man, all are one. Only the one Lord: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God the Lord is one” (Deut.6:4). And that Lord is in us as our own wonderful human Imagination, dreaming this world in which we find ourselves.
Now here is one, it’s a precious one. This gentleman and I attended a concert this past week and during intermission he began to tell me his dream ’til something diverted him and the dream was unfinished, so he writes it to me. He teaches at UCLA. He said, “I had to pass through a certain hall often and here I encountered one that I have little or no respect for. But it was explained to me or revealed to me that he is a very great examiner and right there and then my entire attitude changed towards him, from apathy to one of warmth and great respect. So right there, and then I began to take the test, take the examination. As I began to take the examination, as I was coming to the end, I thought I must put the appropriate heading on this, my name, the day and the hour of the exam. So I wrote my name, I wrote Monday and then I wrote 5 PM. And something said to me, ‘Write the time that you started the exam,’ and so I wrote 4:10. As I wrote 4:10, a thrill ran right through me and I knew at that moment that the 4:10 had tremendous significance. Then, as I was waking from the dream I heard a deep masculine voice and it said to me, ‘Not every one who says ‘Lord, Lord’ enters in, but he who does the will of the Father who is in heaven.’” You’ll find that in the Sermon on the Mount, in the 7th chapter of Matthew (verse 21). Also in the 6th of Luke you’ll find it. Here, when one begins to hear the words of the Father…for he said, “The words that you hear are not my words but the words of my Father who sent me.” None of my words are my words…the words of my Father. Yet “I and my Father are one” (John10:30). He said, “For days I felt so elated that I had written down my name, that I had written down the hour and then a voice from the depths of my own soul is speaking these words, the words of the Father. I felt I am doing the Father’s will.”
Well, in the first chapter of John, we’re told that Andrew first found him. When Andrew found him he said, “Where do you live?” He said, “Come and see.” And so they went with him and they stayed with him because it was the tenth hour. Now in the mysteries, four whether it be AM or PM, is the 10th hour. We count the day beginning with six and go through to six, and count the night from six to six. You can break it into six what is known as watches of the day and night: Three in the day, four-hour watches, and three in the night, four-hour watches. Or you can take it by the hour and you start at six. At four o’clock you have the 10th hour.
Now, this is all symbolism. Ten does not mean it is four o’clock in the afternoon. It is that moment in time when the creative power of God is being explained. Ten is the letter that begins the name of God, Yod. It’s Yod He Vau He. Ten is the tenth letter, with the numerical value of ten, and the symbol of a hand, the creative hand of God. And so here, Yod means “the hand, the creative hand.” Man is separated from the entire world by reason of a hand. What looks like a hand in the monkey, the ape, is not a hand. It conveys food to the mouth and swings from limb to limb, but it can’t fashion, it can’t make, it can’t create. Remove a hand from man you have just an intelligent monkey. That’s all it would be. But give a man a hand and you have a creator. You have one formed in the image of his Father that is God.
And so here, the creative power is being revealed to you. It was the tenth hour when he began this test. And so, he didn’t like this being in the beginning. It’s only a symbol of what he didn’t like in this world. This is the world that I dislike. But it becomes now a great examiner. It tests my ability to overcome it. It tests my ability to modify it or to radically change it, all summarized in what I disliked as the examiner, one person. Not the being who was moving through the same place, who this one is, I don’t know. He may be also an instructor, a professor, a teacher, or maybe he’s a student, I do not know. He never told me. But he only symbolizes that which was something to him that he disliked. And now he finds in this world in which we live a great examiner. It challenges my ability to overcome it and to move it and modify it and change it…for here is the hand. When he began that work it was 4:10.
“Going over my notes, I recall that last October the 23rd in my dream at night I was teaching as I’m teaching here. Then I looked at my wristwatch to find it was 4:10. So I continued talking and completed the word of God. Then what seemed to me about an hour, I looked at my watch again, it was still 4:10, and I concluded that my watch had stopped. And then I awoke, to find I didn’t have my watch on me. It wasn’t 4:10 in the morning and my watch was elsewhere, but here was the vivid, vivid experience of a duplicate dream.” And we’re told in scripture, if the dream repeats itself it means that the thing is fixed and the Lord shall bring it to pass, and bring it to pass shortly.
So here, the creative power is unfolding in him. Now he knows his own wonderful human Imagination is this power. It is God. That is the grand I-am-ness in man, and all things are possible to God. Now the challenge is his. Let him take it now. Whatever he wants, he just simply is. Whatever you want is. The thing is now to adjust to it, to adjust to that state until the dream becomes so alive within you it objectifies itself in this world. For my subjective dream when I’m having it is objective. This…had I reflected upon this while I had a dream last night, this would have been subjective. When I awaken in this and I am once more merged in this section of the dream, this seems the only reality. I fall asleep and take this off and I am merged in another section of the dream and that seems the only reality. So what is the reality?
The whole vast world is all finished and you and I are merged in a dream, and we are waking from the dream. The day will come…I hope it isn’t far. I know in his case and in the lady’s case she’s finished the race, for she could not have heard these words. Here, it’s not even what is called the sleeping dream, this is the waking dream. She’s watching fish, the symbol of the Christians of the world. There were many fish and the fish has always symbolized Christians, those who accepted the gospel of salvation. So they are calling upon themselves to awaken, rather than calling upon a God other than themselves to awaken. So in the Old Testament (Ps.44:23) we have “Rouse thyself! Why sleepest thou, O God? Do not cast us off forever. Awake!” In the New, we find “Awake, you sleeper, and rise from the dead” (Eph.5:14). The address now is to man; in the Old it was to God. Now God becomes man that man may become God. So as man, the plea now is to man to awaken.
Well, you’ll find who he is. As you begin to test the creative power, you’ll find who you are. And with all of these passages of scripture coming to you in audible form, you’ll find yourself moving into the complete fulfillment of the story of Jesus Christ. Everyone will, because everyone here has kept the faith. No one walking the face of the earth has broken it. If you had broken it, you would not be here. But no one comes down and violates that agreement. You and I agreed in the beginning to dream in concert and we entered death’s door, the human skull, and came into the world of death. And here we remain in the world of death dreaming this dream of life. One day you will awaken. As the poet said, “He has awakened from the dream of life. ‘Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep with phantoms the unprofitable strife” (Shelley). So we are still lost in it until we awaken from the dream of life, which is in the world of death.
So here, he dreams in me and I can catch him any time if I am alert, for he steals into my conscious mind least disguised in the form of creative fancy. I sit down and I think of a friend and I catch this wonderful moving being acting in me, making mental images of my friend. And there I catch him, his creative act. For, the God of the universe is really one with your own wonderful human Imagination and he works in the depths of all of us, underlying all of our faculties, including perception. Then suddenly you find him moving into the surface mind in the form of creative fancy. When you actually think of someone and you’re going to paint what you see, yet you see it so vividly. And this is how you catch him and discover who God really is, all in you.
Now if I can take a mere wish tonight, just a wish, and if I can form it in my mind’s eye as the wish fulfilled, and then as I contemplate it, merge, merge with my wish fulfilled, and lose myself completely in it. And then while I am in it, it is taking on objective tones and all the sensory tones of reality so it seems now to be the only reality. Then I break it and return once more merged in this section of the dream, and reflect upon it. And then I know exactly what I did. Now, formerly, I would have said, oh well, that was just a wonderful vivid experience, like a dream or some grand hallucination. But having experienced how it works, I am confident that no power on earth or in the universe can stop it from objectifying. And so I rest in confidence it will objectify.
Now I keep the sabbath. I enter the seventh day. For that was my sixth day, my creative act, and when I come out knowing what I did, and I judged it good and very good, then I keep the sabbath. And, therefore, I do not labor to add to it or take from it. It’s going to happen just as I judged it as good and very good. When it comes into the world and once more forms itself within my present dream world, I will relate it to that experience. So I planted it in confidence, I have kept the sabbath, and then the whole thing appears in my world. For the sabbath is simply that moment when one does not make any effort to make it so, because you did it and you know it is so.
You try it. May I tell you, it’s the most thrilling experience to merge with the dream. It begins with a daydream. You merge with it and it ceases to be a daydream, it becomes an objective fact, it is real. I know this ___(??), trying, just waiting, and everything will seem to fall right into part of what you’re dreaming. You will merge with it. Something peculiar happens in you and you merge with it. But you’re finding who God really is. For if all things were made by him and without him was not anything made that was made, and suddenly I know what I did and then it’s made, then I come to the conclusion that what’s done flows from what’s dreamt…has to. For I only dreamt it in the beginning and then it becomes a fact, so what’s done must have actually moved and it flows from what’s dreamt. And so, then you tell it and someone else tells it. But you realize you are not alone, the other fella can do it too. Then he tells it. And then the other one tells it. You find you are finding the creative power of the universe…that it all stems from Imagination, that Imagination is the real man. That “Man is all Imagination and God is man, and he exists in us and we in him. The eternal body of man is the Imagination. That is God himself” (Blake).
So he is not a God afar off, he is a brother and friend. We are in the beginning brothers, the Elohim. We were not separated, we were not strangers together, but not all ventured as the parable tells us. We ventured or we wouldn’t be here. And failure is inconceivable, for the end is simply to awaken from the pre-eternal dream when you and I agreed to dream in concert, and we have dreamed it. If we suffer, as we do, we suffer because we are sharers in Creation’s cruel dream. The story is told us in the Book of Job. Everyone plays the part of Job. It’s a cruel experiment, but the end is so glorious that one forgets the pain, as told us in the 8th chapter of the Book of Romans: “I consider the sufferings of this present time not worth comparing with the glory to be revealed in us” (verse 18). So, no matter how we suffer we are sharers in the suffering because we are dreaming in concert and dreaming the most cruel dream. But it takes it all to awaken us and in the awakening we are greater than we were prior to the beginning of the dream. I know people speak of an absolute God and an absolute this. If God couldn’t expand, it would be simply eternal death. If God could not be more translucent than he is, eternal death. That’s static. God is a creator and is ever creating and ever transcending whatever he created prior to that moment that he made this commitment and entered the world of death to overcome death. That is the challenge. So here is a world of death and God entered it.
Now, in the Old: “Don’t caste me off forever. Come, awake!” If you awake, you’re redeemed. In the New, he did awake, and because he awoke he’s telling the world that man must awake now, because God became man. Stop calling upon God to awake and call upon man to awake, for man and God are one. God became man that man may become God. So no longer call upon a god out in some remote space and time, call upon man. And try to show man who he really is, show him the creative power. There’s only one creative power. For if he can create anything, then he finds out about his creative power. If I can start to imagine that things are as I desire them to be, though at the moment reason denies it, my senses deny it, and if I can lose myself in that end, just as though it were true, and feel the thrill of that accomplishment…and then rest in comfort and in confidence that it is done, then things quickly reshuffle themselves, and it is done. It projects itself on the screen of space and I see it in my world. Well, then I have found the one that they are talking about in scripture; for we’re told, “By him all things were made and without him was not anything made that was made” (John 1:3).
So, when we are told, “Among you stands one whom you do not know,” I find that this means that something is radiating from within me and I don’t know him. Well then, if it’s radiating from within me, I’ve got to find him. For the world now is simply radiating from within. Well, if something is radiating from within me, I’ve got to find that something. Now, it’s a person, we are told. For you’re told, “Among you stands one whom you do not know.” It’s not an impersonal force, it’s a person. Well, I must find the person in me. Well, then I experiment, and finally I find that he’s myself. This is not another. I am a person and I find what I do and I see what results are, well then, I have found him. So I found him of whom Moses and the law and the prophets wrote, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph. Found him…so he isn’t another at all. The Christ in you is the hope of glory. “Do you not realize that Jesus Christ is in you?” That’s what the apostle asks him, in the 13th chapter of 2nd Corinthians (verse 5): “Do you not realize that Jesus Christ is in you?”
Well, ask that of anyone in the world and if they’re brutally honest with themselves, the chances are, if they had not experienced it, they will tell you, “No, I don’t know that at all. I have read it in the Bible and I’ve heard it from the pulpit, but I’m quite sure my minister doesn’t know it, I’m quite sure that the so-called holy man doesn’t know him, and so why should I know him? I do not know that he’s in me at all.” Yet here are the words, a challenge, “Do you not realize that Jesus Christ is in you?” Well then, if he’s in me and this is the one spoken of, the one who radiates from within me of whom I am unaware, well then, let me find him. And if by him all things are made and without him not any thing made that is made, even the bad, and so I will find him…even if it’s the bad. Because the maker discovers himself even in what is made in some strange ugly manner. If I made it, I could find the maker. So make some horrible thing in my world and let me find the maker, for there’s only one maker. For if by him all things are made, well then, I’m going to find him.
And so, what caused my awful day, my awful month, my awful year? And let me be brutally honest with myself and search to find that all the things that happened are related to my imaginal act, it all comes back to myself, well then, I have found him. And because he’s a person and I’m a person, then I know exactly who he is and walk with my head up now, knowing that I learned from my mistakes. So from now on I will now try to imagine, to the best of my ability, the best, as I conceive the best, knowing that these things must project themselves in this world…until that end when I awaken completely and rejoin the brothers. For we are all brothers: “I am not a God afar off, I’m a brother and a friend; within your bosoms I reside and you reside in me: Lo! we are one, forgiving all evil and seeking no recompense” (Blake, Jer., Plt.4). For if we are one, why would I make an aspect of myself suffer by demanding recompense? Would I not forgive all? And then the cry on the cross, “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34).
So here, I tell you the God that men worship dreams in man as man’s own wonderful human Imagination. And test it…just put him to the test. Conceive a scene implying the fulfillment of your dream, and to the best of your ability merge with it, merge right in. If you succeed in merging, do you know it will become objective? Before it is seen in this section of time, it will become objective to you as though it were here. When you break the spell as it were, it will be to you as a vivid dream is. But you know what you did and you will wait in confidence and it will happen here, too, to be shared with others. They may believe you or not believe you. Does it really matter? You can tell them, because we are all one, so you’re simply telling everyone what you did. Some will believe it and some won’t believe it. That is the eternal story.
Now, let us go into the Silence.
- * *
___(??) and then from then on, it’s Monday and Friday for another month, closing the last Friday in April. Then we’ll be gone until September. So the next lecture is Monday. Now are there any questions, please?
Q: Neville, last Friday you told us about how you had taken appointments in New York, you’d take one case and then go to the next, did you have any specific technique other than what you’ve already taught us?
A: No, I find that if I would take any request, give my undivided attention to the one who is defining for me in words what he wants, and then assume to the best of my ability that he has what he desires; and then turn—instead of dwelling upon it, wondering how is it going to work after the horrible story that he told me about himself, then he tells me he wants this, that and the other, and I’m thinking of a thousand things and it’s all disturbing—by turning to another I drop him completely and pay no further attention to that state, then I am keeping the sabbath relative to him. For the sabbath is not a day of twenty-four hours. It is not any day or Saturday or Sunday or anything else that the churches keep alive. The sabbath is that moment of rest when the mind is undisturbed, having done the work. And so, he worked and judged everything good. It’s all subjective. So he saw everything that he had done and it was very good, and then the Lord rested. So the 7th day is the sabbath of the Lord and in it man should not do any work. But if God and man are one, well then, do it as the Lord does it. As you’re told, be imitators of God as dear children. Well, if this is how he does it, he calls a thing that is not seen as though it were and then the unseen becomes seen, well then, imitate him. But try to keep the sabbath. The sabbath is that interval of time where you are completely undisturbed.
I was thinking of this sabbath going to New York in May and thinking about two titles. I thought, well now, the word sabbath is not an appealing title for people because it means…well, they go to church on Sunday or they go to church on Saturday and so what. Who’s going to talk about the sabbath? I said to my wife, and I meant it at the moment, quite seriously, she thought it was a joke. I said, “No, I’m not kidding. You put down mystical pregnancy or a creative pregnancy, but get the word pregnancy in it ___(??).” It’s a pregnant state…so that you create, it’s a creative act, and the sabbath is part of the creative act. And so, I create it in my mind’s eye, I see it clearly, and get the emotional thrill, the explosion that comes with the creative act, only it’s done subjectively, and then you keep the sabbath. Well, the sabbath is that interval of pregnancy. And what do you do to aid pregnancy? Leave it alone. Any attempt on your part to aid it will bring about a mental miscarriage. Just leave it alone. It comes in its own good time into the world. So I simply call it a creative pregnancy. And so, if I just take it this way and then drop it completely, and then turn to another, and then drop it, in the same light vein, each then becomes a creative act.
I do not know anything else that I could tell you. I have no secrets. Every time I take the platform I give you all that I have for the moment. I have no special classes that I could give you more than I do for you to discuss. Some people come out of the nowhere, that you never thought of before or for the moment you’ve forgotten, but that doesn’t mean you have a secret. I tell it all.
Well, the time is up…I’ll have one more.
Q: Christ comes within, Christ comes within, you say. Also there are statements about him coming again without.
A: No, not without. He’ll return…they say the return of Christ; it doesn’t say from without. Man has said that, and man teaches that.
Q: It was in history, without.
A: No, Christ is a mystery. Paul, who tells it more beautifully than anyone else, uses the term no less than twenty times. “Christ in you is the hope of glory.” I tell you a mystery, he says. Then he tells us in his letter to Timothy, he said, “Great indeed is the mystery of our religion.” Well, it certainly isn’t history if it’s a mystery. There’s nothing mysterious about the most cruel events in history, in secular history, it’s all recorded. But when it comes a mystery, well then, it can’t be secular history. There is no secular history in the scriptures; it’s divine history. It’s completely and totally supernatural.
Q: You mean to tell me that Christ was not a human being?
A: Christ is the only human being.
Q: But I mean in our drama, the dream we’re in right now, he was a human being in history in our dream.
A: Well, if one wants to believe that a certain individual came in a unique way from a woman who did not know a man and was born in that manner, well, I say no. That is not the Christ of scripture. Christ in you—and there never was another Christ—Christ in you is the hope of glory. He has to awaken and be born in you…and he is. At the end of the journey where you can say—and the voice comes from the depth of your soul, you don’t say it consciously, I didn’t read it and repeat it consciously but when I’m hearing it coming from within me—“I have finished the race. I have kept the faith.”
Q: I’m not talking about a personal ___(??), I’m talking about a historical person who was crucified and…
A: No. The crucifixion is not that. I can tell you from my own personal experience it’s the most glorious experience in the world. It transcends all thrills that man has ever had… the crucifixion. I know it from experience and I’m not nailed to any cross. This [body] is the cross and when I was nailed to it, it was the most thrilling experience in the world. Vortices nailed me here…no iron nail or wooden peg but vortices, my hands, my feet, my head and my side. And what a thrill beyond the wildest dream of man!
And everyone has been nailed that way, but he’s forgotten it. This was the night of my remembering it; this was not the actual thing, this was the remembered. I actually went back and merged with that event in eternity. Here I was nailed as I was then, as you’re told in scripture, “We have been”—listen to the tense—“We have been crucified with Christ. If we have been united with him in a death like his”—that’s past; now comes the future—“we shall be united with him in a resurrection like his” (Rom. 6:5). But he’s called the first fruits…Christ to me is the Cosmic Christ, not a little individual. It’s the Cosmic Christ that is buried in every child born of woman. And out of one comes the first fruit of those who slept. But it doesn’t differ from the second and the third and the last, for he’s made to say, “I am the beginning and the end, I’m the first and the last, I’m the alpha and the omega.” So here, I speak only of the Cosmic Christ.
Q: You’re denying the historical process which is God’s creative way of doing it.
A: I’m not denying that historical process any more than I’m a man called Neville who has had the experience. But I am not…my historical life in the world of Caesar has not a thing to do the mysteries. That I was born where I was born, that I’ve gone through the mill as I’ve gone through the mill, that I’ve done the things that I’ve done, some of which I’m ashamed and some of which I am proud. This historical thing called Neville hasn’t a thing to do with the Christ of which I speak. I’m speaking of a Cosmic Christ buried in every man, and in every man the identical experiences as recorded in the gospels he experiences. But it hasn’t a thing to do with any little thing called Neville or a John Brown or any other person in the world.
These little masks mean nothing; what is taking place in us and it’s the Cosmic Christ unfolding and awakening in us. So the historical Jesus Christ…let the world believe it. But as the poet said “Truth embodied in a tale shall enter in at lowly doors,” so that it’s told in the form of a story to capture the Imagination of man; because man cannot think in these depths without a story. So it’s told in the form of a story. But may I tell you, “I am Mary and birth to God must give, if I in blessedness for now and evermore would live.”
Q: To me you don’t look like Mary.
A: But I am. You’re Mary too.
Q: Christ in me just doesn’t jibe.
A: The Mary of scripture is your own wonderful upper room as it were as told you so clearly in scripture. Read it in Paul’s letter to the Galatians. They are two: there’s the woman from below who bears us into slavery, and the one from above who bears into freedom. He names the two: one he calls “the Jerusalem above”, which is Sarah, and “the Jerusalem below,” which is Hagar. He tells you it is an allegory. Well, what is an allegory? An allegory is a tale which conveys a profound truth leaving the reader or the hearer of the allegory to discover the vehicle that is fiction and learn its meaning. Well, if it’s an allegory then how can I go back and read the story of Abraham and Sarah as secular when here the interpreter of the grand word tells us it’s an allegory? If Abraham and Sarah are allegories and they are in the genealogy of Jesus Christ, and they are allegories, what is Jesus Christ? If I take the genealogy as given us in two books of Matthew and Luke and I go back to the beginning and what is Abraham…