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The Man Who Awakened As God - The Neville Goddard Story — Transcript

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0:01For 13 years, in front of every audience
0:03he addressed, Neville insisted the
0:05statement was literal. The skull was a
0:07sealed tomb, and he was sealed inside
0:09it. He used the word tomb, then went
0:11back and specified an actual tomb, awake
0:13in the dark in a bone chamber with the
0:15walls close. Neville taught that the
0:18Bible is a blueprint rather than a
0:19history. Scripture in his reading
0:21records a psychological event that is
0:24yet to happen to most people, described
0:26in advance and in detail.
0:36Welcome to the reality revolution. I'm
0:39your host, Brian Scott, and boy oh boy,
0:42this episode is a long time coming cuz
0:43we're going to do the deepest of deep
0:45dives on Neville Goddard, something I've
0:47been working on for almost a decade.
0:50Neville Goddard changed my life. His
0:51teaching showed me the way to help me
0:54understand my place in the universe and
0:56how to create my reality. And I've done
0:58my best to share as much as I possibly
1:00could from his lectures and teachings,
1:03but I really haven't found a place that
1:05totally tells the story of Neville as he
1:08shared it. The complete and total story
1:11of the man who awakened as God.
1:16For 34 years, a man stood on platforms
1:19in New York and Los Angeles and told
1:22whoever came the same [music] three
1:24things. God is human imagination. Every
1:27person alive is God in the act of
1:29forgetting. And the Bible is a blueprint
1:31of an [music] experience each of us will
1:33undergo in our own body at our own hour
1:36on a date already fixed. His name was
1:39Neville Lancelot Goddard and he lectured
1:42under one word, Neville. 15 books carry
1:45that name. A Los Angeles television
1:47station handed him Sunday afternoons in
1:501955.
1:51Somewhere between five and 600 of his
1:54talks survive as text. and 136 as
1:58recordings of his actual voice because
2:01he let anybody in the room run a tape
2:03machine and asked for a share of exactly
2:06zero.
2:07He spoke without a note in sight, three
2:10nights a week for decades. Tickets were
2:1425 cents in New York in the '4s [music]
2:16and about $2 in Los Angeles in the '50s.
2:19200 people in a hall on West 49th Street
2:22in 1943, 4 to 500 by 1946. And he did it
2:26in a voice he built himself. A Barbadian
2:29boy's rounder Anglo Cararibbean accent
2:32sanded down over 40 years into something
2:35clipped and sonorous with the seam still
2:38audible in the earliest tapes. Millions
2:41of people have found Neville in the last
2:4310 years, almost entirely through short
2:45clips, almost entirely through the
2:48technique. My own route was slower. The
2:51internet has flattened Neville Goddard
2:53into a technique, formant, [music] a
2:55script, a formula for a car or an
2:57apartment or a person who has stopped
2:59answering. His life has stayed almost
3:02entirely untold and the life is the
3:05strangest thing about him. A boy raised
3:08on two rented acres of rock in Barbados.
3:09[music]
3:12a tango dancer on Broadway, a broke man
3:15in a basement on the Upper West Side,
3:17taught Hebrew and scripture [music] by a
3:20black Ethiopian rabbi who lived three
3:22blocks away, a private in a medical
3:25corps who walked out of the United
3:26States Army by going to sleep, and a man
3:30who said that at 4 in the morning in a
3:32San Francisco hotel room, he was born
3:34out of his own skull.
3:37Ahead of you are four experiences he
3:39dated to the day and then described in
3:41public for 13 years [music] in the same
3:44words every time. An auditorium in Los
3:46Angeles that emptied from 300 down to 30
3:49then down to 12 in 8 days while he kept
3:52talking. And a death that has been
3:54reported wrongly for more than 50 years
3:56until recently included by people who
3:59love him. [music] Three things almost
4:00everybody believes about Neville Goddard
4:02turned out to be wrong. each of them in
4:04a way that makes a better scene than the
4:06error [music] did. The first is a few
4:09minutes away. Neville spent 34 years
4:13teaching that the outer world is a
4:15shadow thrown by the inner one, that
4:17circumstances follow assumption
4:19reliably. Then he died in a house in
4:21West Hollywood of something physical,
4:23specific, and irreversible. And the
4:25death certificate names it in [music]
4:27three words. Margaret Renan studied with
4:30Neville in Los Angeles in the mid-50s
4:32and left the sharpest sentence anyone
4:34wrote about being in a [music] room with
4:35him. Nobody was really sure who he was
4:39or where he had come from. The past
4:41exists, registers, [music] manifests in
4:43court files in three counties, most of
4:46it read for the first time in the last 5
4:48years.
4:50Every frame of him in this video is a
4:53photograph, a document, a newspaper page
4:56or hall he stood in. Moving pictures of
4:58Neville Goddard have yet to surface
5:00anywhere on Earth. The 1955 kinoscopes
5:04are lost, and [music] so are the Joe
5:05Pine appearances. A thousand cataloged
5:08reels in a Long Island City warehouse
5:10are the last plausible hope. So, let me
5:13take you back.
5:15Fontabel sits on the coast just
5:17northwest of Bridgetown on the leeward
5:20side of Barbados where the sea goes flat
5:22and the town [music] begins.
5:25On 19th February 1905 in a house there
5:28will Ellis Goddard delivered her fourth
5:31child and fourth son. They named [music]
5:34him Neville Lancelot. 12 children were
5:38born into that family and 10 survived.
5:40Nine boys and one girl. The household
5:43was Anglican. Church on Sunday. The Book
5:46of Common Prayer, the King James Bible,
5:49read aloud at home by a father. [music]
5:51Every image in every lecture he ever
5:54came out of that book,
5:57learned in that house before he was 10
5:59years old. The brothers arrived at
6:02roughly one a year. Cecil in 1901,
6:05Victor in 1902, Lawrence in 1903, then
6:09Neville, then Herbert, Fred, and Bruce.
6:12Then the one girl Hilda in 1909, then
6:14Joseph, and the last one of all, John in
6:171919.
6:1914 years behind Neville, and the one who
6:22grew up to captain the West Indies,
6:25Cecil, Victor, and Lawrence return at
6:27the end of this in a room where Neville
6:29looks down at his own body on a bed, and
6:33every one of them looks straight through
6:34him. At about 7 years old, a woman told
6:37him he would one day do something so
6:40significant [music] that centuries
6:41afterward, three men would be remembered
6:44for what they gave humanity. And he
6:46would be one of the three. Her name is
6:48[music] gone. He repeated the story from
6:51a Los Angeles platform in 1954. At 49,
6:53[music]
6:56something began happening to him. At 7
6:58years old, he would find himself wide
7:01awake, experiencing himself as an
7:03immensity, an infinite ocean [music] in
7:06storm, edgeless, moving in every
7:08direction at once. While he went on
7:10standing where he stood, a small boy on
7:12a small island, [music] two things at
7:14one time, and he was both of them,
7:17roughly once a month for 5 years, at 12
7:20it stopped, and the sea stayed away for
7:23the rest of his life. He gave this
7:25account from the platform in a lecture
7:27called Esau and Jacob on the 13th of
7:30November 1959 at 54. The ocean was the
7:34first strange thing that had ever
7:35happened to him and it had happened 47
7:37years earlier.
7:39Barbados schooling in those years ran on
7:41scripture and the cane
7:45verses [music] were learned by heart and
7:47given back aloud and a master's arm
7:48settled who had them right. One morning
7:51the question came round to Neville.
7:52>> [music]
7:53>> The verse was the one where a man is
7:56told to take up his bed and walk. The
7:58boy gave the wording of it exactly
8:00because it had been read aloud in his
8:02father's house since before he could
8:03read it himself. [music] The headmaster
8:05told him to bring in the Bible that said
8:07so. 12 children were born into that
8:09family and the Bibles in it were
8:10accounted for along with everything
8:12else. The one the verse had come out of
8:15stayed in the house on the two acres
8:16where his father read it. In the
8:19evenings the boy went back to school
8:20with empty hands. The headmaster had a
8:23Bible of his own, opened the desk in
8:24front of him. His translation carried a
8:26different word. Or the boy had said bed.
8:29The headmaster book said couch.
8:32He was caneed for it and he bled from
8:35the buttocks to the knees. The walk home
8:37was made in that condition. His father
8:40looked at him, went out of the house and
8:42down the road after the headmaster, and
8:44the neighbors got between the two men
8:45and pulled him off. Parish schools in
8:48Barbados were small rooms in small
8:49districts. So whatever was said in that
8:51road was said in front of people who
8:53knew both families. Neville was out of
8:56the school by the following morning.
8:58Before the year was out, the headmaster
8:59shot himself. He told it from the
9:02platform in a lecture called the
9:03potter's house and again compressed
9:04[music] into a few sentences in Esau and
9:07Jacob on the 13th of November 1959. Both
9:10tellings turn on the same two words bed
9:12and couch. A child opened to the bone
9:16[music] for quoting a book correctly by
9:18a man holding one edition of it and sure
9:20of it. 50 years of platforms followed
9:23and the whole of them were about what
9:26that book is for. The received version
9:29says the Goddards were rich. A merchant
9:31dynasty of family practically owned an
9:34island. Neville's grandfather Joseph
9:37Josiah Goddard worked as a laborer at
9:40Newcastle Plantation in St. John's
9:42Parish, lending rum on the side and
9:44speculating in livestock. The family
9:46rented 2 acres of rocky land at $8 a
9:49year, and the road ended well short of
9:51them. They ate what they grew, yams,
9:54sweet potatoes,
9:56et corn, beans, peas, and kept whatever
10:00small livestock 2 acres of rock would
10:02carry. Neville's father walked out of
10:04St. John's boy school at 14 and went
10:07down to Bridgetown to find a wage. All
10:10of it traces back to one syndicated
10:12Hollywood gossip column, Jimmy Fiddler,
10:141955. An enormously wealthy family which
10:17owned a whole island. Everything since
10:20is a copy of a copy. The Goddard fortune
10:22is entirely real. It is one of the
10:24largest private built fortunes in the
10:26Caribbean and Neville left before it
10:28existed.
10:30Joseph Nathaniel Goddard was born on the
10:3224th of November 1874 at Clifton Hall
10:36Woods in the parish of St. John into
10:38precisely that poverty. By about 1890,
10:41he was in Bridgetown, 16 years old,
10:44looking for work. He married Wilhhamina
10:47Ellis [music] Hinson, daughter of John
10:49William Ellis Hinson. And in 1900, he
10:52went into a partnership with Norman
10:53Roach and company to run an ice house on
10:56Broad Street. Block ice cut from the
10:59lakes and rivers of North America in
11:01winter, [music] packed in sawdust,
11:03shipped south in insulated holds,
11:06sold across a counter in Bridgetown at
11:0812 cents a pound [music] on a tropical
11:10island in 1900. Ice was a luxury good.
11:14Hotels, ships, provisioning the houses
11:16of the merchant class, the man selling
11:18it, had been raised on 2 acres of rock.
11:21Joseph Nathaniel could look at a herd of
11:24animals and price it. A clerk once
11:25watched him assess 25 Venezuelan cattle
11:28at 19,000 lbs of meat. [music] After
11:31slaughter, the scales put him 100 pounds
11:33out. The business widened [music] into a
11:35ship chandelier. Grocery, liquor, and
11:38meat, provisioning vessels in and out of
11:41Bridgetown Harbor, so sea captains and
11:43ships officers ate at the Gddard table.
11:46At one of those dinners in 1919, the
11:48father put down his knife and told the
11:50room there would be another war in about
11:5320 years. Germany and Japan with America
11:56and [music] France on the same side it
11:58happened in 1939. 20 years to the year
12:02Neville told that story from a platform
12:03the 21st of June 1971
12:06and declined to call it a lucky guess.
12:09Every morning before he left for the
12:11stores, Joseph Nathaniel Goddard sat
12:13down and went through the day ahead of
12:15him. He brought each man he [music]
12:17would deal with that day before his
12:18mind's eye. Each of those men then said
12:21what he wanted them to say. [music] The
12:23whole exchange got settled in advance,
12:25the words, the order, the ending. Then
12:27he stood up and went into Bridgetown
12:29[music] and had those conversations. He
12:31worked it out on his own in a house with
12:3310 children in it and used it for 50
12:35years. Years later, after sitting in a
12:38New York hall and listening to his
12:39fourth son lecture, the old man
12:41explained the method to him. Neville put
12:44it into a lecture without dressing it
12:45up. How he got hold of this I do not
12:48know. He said in the order your
12:51conversations are right on the 30th of
12:52May. The house those conversations paid
12:55for held 10 children, a mother-in-law
12:58and servants on a merchants's margins,
13:00the brothers jostling over clothes and
13:03second helpings, and a father downstairs
13:05who had already settled how his day
13:06would go. The second son was Edward
13:08Victor Goddard, born the 2nd of June,
13:111902. Three years ahead of Neville and
13:14the business brain of the family, Victor
13:16got the education the family could
13:18afford for exactly one son, [music]
13:20Harrison College in Barbados, then
13:23business administration at the Ontario
13:25Business College in Belleville, Ontario.
13:28At 18, Victor walked to work and home
13:31again along the widest part of
13:33Bridgetown's main street. On that
13:35stretch stood a building that filled
13:37[music] an entire block. The sign on it
13:39read P and Roach and Company. twice a
13:42[music] day going out and coming back.
13:44Victor stopped and looked up at the
13:47sign. Every time he read a different one
13:49in his own mind, the letter said JN
13:52Goddard and Sons. He did that for 2
13:55years.
13:57Once he mentioned it to his mother, she
13:59discouraged him. The family was poor.
14:01The building was the largest on the
14:02street. The arithmetic spoke for itself.
14:052 years on, the business inside that
14:07building failed [music] and the block
14:08came up for sale. An acquaintance of the
14:11father offered to buy it for them, their
14:13signature as security. His own [music]
14:15lawyer sent in to bid so that rival
14:17biders would stay ignorant of who stood
14:19behind the offer. Terms reduced the
14:23principal over 10 years at 6%. The
14:25Goddards took the building. 20 years
14:28after Victor's death, the same stranger
14:30left Victor's side of [music] the family
14:31and estate in excess of a quarter a
14:34million dollars tax-free. And on the
14:3613th of October 1921, in a [music]
14:39Bridgetown side street, Joseph Nathaniel
14:42Goddard and his son Victor opened a
14:43grocery, meat, and ice shop and put the
14:46father's name over the door, JN Goddard
14:49and Sons. Most of the early money came
14:52from rum bottles Goddard's gold braid,
14:55the father's name on the label. Neville
14:57was [music] 16 and in the house on the
14:59day it opened.
15:02Within 12 months of that shop opening,
15:04Neville was gone. 3 years to the day
15:06after it opened, on the 13th of October,
15:09[music] 1924, the family bought the Ice
15:11House building on Broad Street, and
15:13opened the first refrigerated cold
15:15storage meat store [music] in
15:16Bridgetown, a bakery in 1939. Department
15:20stores and hotels in 1943, and the
15:22hotels led into airline catering, the
15:24core of everything else since. In 1962,
15:27they opened a supermarket at Fontabel,
15:29the district where Neville was born.
15:31[music] Today, the company trades on the
15:33Barbados Stock Exchange as Goddard
15:36Enterprises Limited from Canada in the
15:39north to Uruguay in the south. When the
15:41father died, he divided his estate into
15:4310 equal parts and gave Neville a full
15:45share, a son 4,000 mi away, who had put
15:49a single day into the business only by
15:51being born into it.
15:54On the 25th of September 1922, the SS
15:56Visari came into the [music] port of New
15:58York. Among the passengers was a
16:0017-year-old British subject out of
16:02[music] Barbados. A clerk wrote down
16:05what could be measured. Height 5'9.
16:07Marital status single. [music]
16:09Destination: His brother Elgard, 138A
16:13Dean Street, Brooklyn. That brother was
16:15Arthur Lawrence Goddard, 18, a year
16:17ahead of him, into America. Later, a
16:19doctor in Illinois. I arrived in New
16:22York in 1922. He stated in his lecture,
16:24I remember when he stayed one week at
16:28Dean Street, then went out on his own.
16:30Great mansions between Fifth and 7th
16:32Avenue, serving stables behind the
16:34houses, a 17-year-old from a rented 2
16:37acres on foot looking up at them.
16:40Clerk first, the word he wrote on his
16:43own marriage license, Macy's at $18 a
16:46week. Elevator operator, shipping clerk.
16:49on the New York State Census of the 1st
16:51of January 1925. He is recorded at 401
16:54West 57th Street in Hell's Kitchen,
16:57slaughter [music] houses, rail yards,
16:59and tenementss about a mile in an entire
17:01world from the mansions on Fifth.
17:03[music] 2 years to the day after the
17:06shop opened in Bridgetown on 13th of
17:08October 1923. Neville married Mildred
17:11Mary Hughes in Manhattan, certificate
17:14number 35968.
17:16>> [snorts]
17:16>> He was 18 and gave his occupation as
17:18clerk. She was [music] 22, English, born
17:21in Lancashire in 1901. License recorded
17:25them both as 20, which was wrong twice
17:28over. A deputy city clerk named
17:29McCormack performed it. Their son,
17:32Joseph Neville Goddard, was born on the
17:3519th of May, 1924.
17:37Across 500 surviving lectures, Neville
17:40mentions his son [music] Joseph Barely
17:42at all. a boy born in 1924, a witness at
17:45his father's second wedding in 1942, a
17:48marine at Guadal by 1943, and then
17:51silence from a man who used his own life
17:53as evidence three nights a week for 34
17:56years. The marriage was finished almost
17:58immediately by Neville's own summary
18:00they knew on the first day. Divorce in
18:03New York State required proving adultery
18:05in open court, so the two of them stayed
18:08apart. That marriage comes back into
18:10this as a courtroom, shoplifting charge,
18:13and the most surprising thing he ever
18:14did to another human being. In 1925, the
18:18Hippodromeome on 6th Avenue, the largest
18:20theater in the world, 5,200 seats,
18:23elephants and diving horses, and a water
18:25tank under the stage. Neville Goddard
18:28became a dancer. Inside the year, he was
18:31working Europe.
18:33Ciros in London, the winter garden in
18:35Berlin, the ambassador in Paris, build
18:38as half an act, Amarique and Neville,
18:43and build as stars of all three rooms.
18:45On the 26th of October 1925, the London
18:48Daily Sketch published photographs of
18:50him in performance costume, straps and
18:52sequins, dramatic [music] poses for a
18:55European Society readership. A
18:5720-year-old out of Fonttoell printed in
18:59a London newspaper wearing about 6 in of
19:01strap.
19:02Israel Regardi, who watched him dance
19:04and wrote him up 20 years later, said,
19:06"Power and repose, the effortless ease
19:09of the cat with its undisguised
19:11sensuality."
19:12By his own telling, he went from $18 a
19:15week at Macy's to 500 a week dancing,
19:18plus £100 a week for [music] 3 months in
19:20London. Mitch Horowitz reads the
19:22theatrical career as handtomouth propped
19:24up between engagements [music] by the
19:26elevator car in the shipping room. He
19:28came home aboard the SS America on the
19:3123rd of [music] December 1925. The
19:34certificate of arrival from that
19:36crossing number 13-14-3841
19:39made him an American 18 years later.
19:43Then the grind of a specialty dance act.
19:46Keith State Theater, New Brunswick,
19:48January 1926.
19:51Buffalo [music] the week after, the
19:52Aldine in Wilmington that August, a New
19:55Year's dance at the Shore Club and
19:57Mammaranic.
19:58In 1926 [music]
19:59at 21, he spent part of a season at a
20:02private club at Larchmont on the Sound
20:05in Westchester County, staying there
20:07with a friend who managed the place.
20:09There was dancing downstairs, a dancer
20:11by trade, with a whole evening of it in
20:14front of him. He went up to his room
20:16instead and took a book off the table.
20:18The book was Edwin Arnold's Delight of
20:20Asia, a long poem about the life of the
20:23Buddha. He read a page of it, possibly
20:26two. Edwin Arnold published it in 1879,
20:29eight books, a blank verse on the life
20:31of Sedartha, and is sold in the hundreds
20:33of thousands on both sides of the
20:34Atlantic. the sort of book that sits on
20:37a table in a club. Between 10 and 12
20:40hours later, he came [music] back into
20:42the room on the floor catalptic, the
20:45body stiff, and the book where it had
20:47fallen. What he said about the interval,
20:50he said the same way for the rest of his
20:52life. He had been in an infinite sea of
20:55light,
20:56vibrant, living liquid, and the whole of
21:00everything there was had been inside it.
21:0321 years old and Abdullah was 7 years in
21:07front of him. The first lecture was 14
21:09years off and the four dated experiences
21:12this film ends on were 33.
21:17Same year,
21:19a medium named Arthur Ford kept an
21:21apartment at 315 West 97th Street and
21:24ran seances out of it. Neville went to
21:26one. About 30 people sat down in the
21:28dark, chairs in a ring, the lamp off,
21:31the door shut, and a room full of adults
21:34agreeing to those terms before anything
21:36started. Lights began to move across the
21:39carpet, small, pale, drifting over the
21:41pile at ankle height. While the room
21:44followed them, Neville put his hand flat
21:47on one, it sparked under his fingers.
21:51phosphorus, a phosphorescent preparation
21:53suspended in oil, spread over the rug,
21:56glowing wherever the fibers were
21:57disturbed. A trick sold through the
21:59mediumship trade and worked in darkened
22:01rooms all over America. 21 years old, a
22:05dancer by occupation, and he had it on
22:06his fingers at the first sitting he ever
22:08attended. Agitation was the whole of the
22:10effect. A shoe across the pile, a hand,
22:13a drought under the door, and the glow
22:15came up. He said so out loud in the room
22:17with the lights up. Ford said he was
22:20tired.
22:2142 years on, Arthur Ford was the most
22:24famous psychic in America. Bishop James
22:27Pike of the Episcopal Diosis of
22:29California had lost a son and Ford
22:31undertook to put the father in touch
22:33with the boy. A seance between the two
22:35men went out on television and millions
22:37of people watched a bishop weep on
22:39camera. Pike wrote the whole business up
22:42in a book, The Other Side, and it sold
22:44in numbers. Ford had become the public
22:46face of American spiritualism and his
22:48word carried further than that of any
22:49clergyman arguing with him. On the 11th
22:52of November 1968 from a platform,
22:55Neville told a room what he had touched
22:56in 1926. He said the two of them had met
22:59again in New York in the years between
23:01that Ford presented himself as a
23:03reformed man and that the performance
23:05left him unconvinced. Ford died in 1973.
23:08A biography by Alan Spragg and William
23:11Rousher went through the private papers
23:12he had left behind and the advanced
23:14research on the Pike seance was sitting
23:16in them. The sitter's names, the family
23:18details, the particulars gathered before
23:20the broadcast and delivered during it in
23:23the voices of the dead. Neville had been
23:25right about it since 1926.
23:29The act went back to work. An 8week
23:32light opera season at the Erlinger
23:34Theater in Atlanta in the summer of
23:361927. The Pink Lady, The Red Mill, HMS
23:39Pinnhaphor, The Wildflower, PMP Pom,
23:42[snorts] and then on the 6th of October
23:441927, his name went into a Broadway
23:46program.
23:48My Princess at the Sam S. Schubert
23:50Theater on West 44th Street, act two
23:53carried one line, Tango, American
23:5816 days and closed on the 22nd of
24:01October, the whole of his Broadway life.
24:04printed in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle
24:07number seven October 1927.
24:11He got back there once, Keep It Clean at
24:13the Sellwin Theater on the 24th of June
24:15to July 6th on Broadway. 4 months after
24:19Keep It Clean closed, the market broke.
24:22The first thing a country stops paying
24:23for is a man who dances. From a platform
24:2640 years later, he put it flatly,
24:28"Entertainment by a dancer had gone out
24:29of reach." Lowe's Metropolitan in
24:32Brooklyn, March 1930. Broadway
24:35Personalities at the Majestic in
24:37Brooklyn over the last 3 days of
24:38December 1930. Lowe's Metropolitan again
24:42in March 1931. The RKO Prospect in July
24:461932. The Palace in Chicago 16 days
24:49after that, then longer and longer gaps.
24:53The 1930 census found him at 146 West
24:5649th Street and recorded him as a
24:58lodger. In 1933, he was in a basement
25:01apartment at 154 West 75th Street, out
25:04of work in the fourth year of the
25:06depression with an act the city had
25:08stopped booking. His last traceable
25:10dance engagement is dated the 27th of
25:12September 1935. The Hotel Bradford in
25:16Boston, a room called the Cascades with
25:18Huey Barrett's orchestra advertised as
25:21unique dance diversions. The Boston
25:23Globe notice still builds him as a star
25:25of Seros, the Winter Garden and the
25:27Ambassador 10 years after the fact.
25:3128 years old below street level on the
25:34Upper West Side with an act gone. The
25:36marriage over a son growing up somewhere
25:39in the same city and a family fortune
25:414,000 mi behind him getting larger every
25:44year without him in it. Three blocks
25:46south of that basement, 30 West 72nd
25:48Street, just off Central Park West, the
25:51first floor apartment of a house owned
25:53by the Morganthou family, an old black
25:56man in a turban was teaching Hebrew to a
25:58room of 12 or 20 people. He had been
26:01waiting 6 months. Four years before
26:03Barbados and 30 years before the morning
26:06the world knows him for, Nevillegard was
26:0924 years old and working as a dancer. In
26:12the summer of 1929, he was taken in
26:14spirit before a woman seated at a large
26:16ledger. She wrote in it. What she wrote
26:19was his name. Then an assembly which he
26:21called the mighty ones and at the center
26:23of it the risen Christ described by
26:25Neville as infinite love and in other
26:28tellings as the ancient of days. One
26:31question was put to him, what is the
26:34greatest thing in the world?
26:36He answered with Paul, faith, hope, and
26:39love. and the greatest of these is love.
26:42And that answer, he said, the two bodies
26:44fused into a single body of infinite
26:46love. A voice then went up across the
26:49assembly, down with the blue bloodoods,
26:52and he was sent back down with a
26:54commission two words long, time to act.
26:58There was a second figure in it, which
27:01he named infinite might, El Shadai, God
27:04Almighty, Proteian, communicating
27:06without speech. And the body behaved as
27:08it would behave in every later
27:10experience. Hands, head, side, and feet
27:12turning to vortices with the sensation
27:14reported as ecstasy. Something he called
27:17the crucifixion. He was 24 working as a
27:21dancer 3 months from the crash. The
27:24divine society, as he defined it from
27:26platforms decades afterwards, is a
27:28society of men in whom God is awake. The
27:31risen and the awakened, carrying on past
27:34death. Abdullah kept a shorter name for
27:36the same company, the brothers.
27:40Down with the blue buds, he glossed
27:42himself, and the gloss is the flattest
27:44statement of his whole position he ever
27:46gave. Down with every structure standing
27:48between a person and direct access to
27:51God. Ritual, creed, ceremony, church
27:55protocol, the paid intermediary, the
27:58sacrifice on the altar. His method for
28:01pulling them down was to withdraw
28:03attention and belief and leave them to
28:05starve. In 1961, he published the law
28:08and the promise. And he counted 1929
28:11among his major experiences. By the
28:13late60s, the count had hardened into
28:15four. The skull, David, the temple, the
28:18dove. And 1929 set outside the four as a
28:22prologue.
28:23He went on telling it anyway from
28:25platforms in 1966 and in 1968 to the end
28:29of his life dropped from the list and
28:31kept in the story
28:34and the arithmetic he attached to it
28:35reorganizes everything that comes after.
28:38Neville called the 1929 the graft and
28:411959 the fruit. The union happened in
28:45the summer he was 24. 30 years on in a
28:48hotel room in San Francisco it bore.
28:51Grafting was his own word for it. Used
28:53deliberately and used more than once. He
28:56puts the famous awakening of 1959 at the
28:59far end of a 30-year term, a delivery
29:02date rather than a beginning. 9 years
29:04separate that two-word order from the
29:07first hired room with his name on the
29:09door. Those nine years begin in a hall
29:13in Harlem.
29:15For half a year, a friend had been
29:17telling Neville to go up town and hear a
29:19man lecture on esoteric Christianity. He
29:22stayed away for a reason he was still
29:23confessing from platforms 40 years
29:25later. The friend was a Catholic priest
29:27careless with money, and a man careless
29:30with a dollar was to a dancer down to
29:32his last few careless with everything
29:33else. 6 months went by. Then on an
29:36evening in the early 30s, he went. He
29:39sat through the talk among 20 other
29:41people. The man who had given it stepped
29:43down off the platform, crossed the room,
29:45put out his hand and used his name.
29:47Neville, you are 6 months late.
29:50They had met 4 seconds earlier.
29:53Neville asked how the answer came back
29:56with the handshake still going. The
29:58brothers had said he was coming. Then
30:01the rest of it, the two of them together
30:02in China thousands of years ago. Neville
30:05agreeing to forget all of it, to play
30:07the part he had to play this time
30:09around. and one more thing stating I
30:13will remain until you have received all
30:14that I must give you. Everything
30:16Nevillegard put in front of an audience
30:18for the next 30 years came out of
30:20[music] that room. A photograph of
30:22Abdullah has yet to surface. Neville
30:24sits [music] in archives, the daily
30:26sketch pictures, the studio portraits,
30:28the naturalization papers. The man who
30:30made him survives as a voice 30 years on
30:32in rooms full of Californians. Neville's
30:35word for it and Neville's word alone. He
30:37was black. Neville said so in every
30:39telling with an emphasis the modern
30:41retelling sand off. He was a negro he
30:43said I tell you and once in the master
30:45class of 1948 in a phrase that belongs
30:48to 1948 black as the ace of spades. My
30:50old friend Abdullah with his turbed
30:52head. The turban went everywhere indoors
30:55and out. Neville put the two of them
30:57level on height 5'11. on age he was
31:00vagger late 80s at their first meeting
31:03in one 1964 lecture about 90 in another
31:06which carries Abdullah past 100 and 10
31:09by the last time they saw each other
31:11origin moved as well born in Ethiopia of
31:14the Jewish faith he told one audience in
31:171964 born in North Africa to Jewish
31:19parents he told a different audience the
31:21same year the Hebrew was the center of
31:24it and the direction matters rabbis came
31:26to him they climbed to the first floor
31:28apartment to study the letters with a
31:29turbaned old man who belonged to a
31:31congregation of one. Neville rated
31:33Abdullah's Christianity above any
31:35clergyman he ever met and put it down to
31:37the Hebrew in the Cabala. Abdullah
31:40rented that apartment at 30 West 72nd
31:42Street just off Central Park West in a
31:44house owned by the Morgan thou family a
31:46short walk from the Dakota with a small
31:48private library off the main room and a
31:50door in it. That door gets its own part
31:53in the story. large meals, several shots
31:55of whiskey, ale behind it, and a big
31:57bowl of ice cream to finish. Neville
32:00brought him two bottles from a voyage
32:02once, brandy and rum. And a week later,
32:04Neville asked how the long those had
32:06expected to last. They were already
32:08gone. He took Neville to his first
32:10opera, Parcel, on Good Friday, 5 hours
32:13in one seat. Abdullah bought orchestra
32:16seats at the theater and at the opera in
32:18a segregated city three decades before
32:20the civil rights act and walked down the
32:22aisle and sat in them. For 90 years,
32:25Abdullah had existed in one place in
32:27Neville's own voice on a platform
32:30decades after the fact. New York in the
32:3220s ran an economy of hired halls and
32:34rented teaching swamies, healers,
32:37reading rooms, 2-in notices brought by
32:39the column in the religious pages of
32:41daily papers. The 3rd of November 1928,
32:44the New York Times display columns carry
32:47a series of lectures on the soul of the
32:49soul to be given by GM Akmad Abdullah. A
32:52second notice runs on the 10th of
32:54November for a course called soul
32:56unfoldment. Both carry an address 30
32:59West [music] 72nd Street. That's the
33:02address Neville would name from
33:03platforms for the rest of his life
33:05printed in [music] the Times years
33:07before he said it out loud. sold by the
33:09column inch to the teacher who was
33:12hiring a room and wanted an audience.
33:15The trail from those notices leads
33:16toward a man named Dr. Modeste Abdullah
33:19Guom
33:21born [music] around 1871 in Alers, North
33:24African Jewish, a French citizen under
33:26the Cremu decree trained as a baritone.
33:29He taught singing in Atlantic City for
33:3115 years and around 1920 he turned to
33:34metaphysics classes on the mystery books
33:37of Moses. Sunday lectures on healing and
33:39prosperity. A 1935 society column has
33:42him teaching philosophy at his home in
33:44New York City and names his secretary
33:46Zeta Roberts.
33:48Neville named Zeta Roberts himself years
33:50later from a platform.
33:53All of this was recently discovered by
33:55Cool Wisdom Books. Be sure to check out
33:57my episode on Abdullah. I'm giving you
33:59information I've already given you from
34:01Cool Wisdom Books and I'm not introduced
34:04any new information. They're doing the
34:06best research on Abdullah that you can
34:07find. Five years. Day in and day out.
34:11Secondary accounts routinely say seven.
34:13The number Neville used from platforms
34:15over and over was five. A broke ex
34:18dancer of 28 comes up the basement steps
34:21at 154 West [music] 75th Street in an
34:24overcoat he bought when he was working
34:26and walks three blocks south to sit in a
34:28rented firstf flooror apartment and
34:30learn the Hebrew alphabet from an
34:32[music] old man who charges him $0 for
34:34it. The group ran to 12 or 20. Abdullah
34:38taught the language letter by letter and
34:40what the letters do when they assemble.
34:42The great mystery Neville called it of
34:44how the whole thing is put together. At
34:46Abdullah's request, Neville stood up in
34:48that room and interpreted the 14th
34:50chapter of John. One more student,
34:52Joseph Murphy, who had write the power
34:54of your subconscious mind, told a French
34:56interviewer in 1987 that he had studied
34:59in New York with a black Jewish teacher
35:01called Professor Abdullah. Murphy leaves
35:04Neville out of it and puts Abdullah in
35:06the New York metaphysical scene rather
35:08than in one man's private myth.
35:11Everything about this teacher gets
35:14softened
35:16in the retellings and the softening
35:18destroys him. Neville called him rude.
35:21He used the word insolence about the
35:23manner. Abdullah's instrument was
35:25refusal applied in three directions. He
35:27refused to explain himself. He refused
35:29to reopen a settled question. And the
35:31one that matters most, he refused to
35:33sympathize. Consolation was off the
35:36table [music] and encouragement with it.
35:38When Neville arrived unhappy, he got the
35:40doctrine again and a door. Neville kept
35:42a strict vegetarian discipline for 7
35:44years. And watching the old man work
35:46through steak and whiskey and ice cream,
35:48he raised the point. Abdullah's answer
35:50came in two parts. First, everything is
35:52God, the whole of it. And go and read
35:55Acts. And what Peter was told about what
35:58has been cleansed, then the diagnosis.
36:01You have quibbles, he says in Abdullah,
36:03how we got together Q&A from 1964.
36:06His verdict was that Neville's
36:08restrictions would poison him, the
36:11quibbles doing the poisoning rather than
36:12any fish. Called a colored man in
36:15company, Abdullah declined the euphemism
36:17and gave them the word he preferred. On
36:19the Sphinx, he was harder still. Whoever
36:22modeled that face modeled the face of a
36:24negro. And if the finest minds in Europe
36:27still lack an explanation for it, so
36:28much the better. I am very proud that I
36:31am a negro, he said. The pressure was
36:34the method. Sympathy tells a man his
36:36situation is real and his feelings about
36:38it are appropriate. And both messages
36:40are in Abdullah's system, the disease.
36:4210 years on, in a medical detachment in
36:45Louisiana, an army captain would be
36:48extremely kind to Neville about his age
36:50and his baby daughter and his son in the
36:51Pacific. And Neville would understand
36:53standing there that the kindness was the
36:56enemy. He learned that in a room on 72nd
36:58Street from a man who slammed a library
37:01door in his face.
37:04October 1933, Neville's 28, out of work
37:08four years into the depression, 12 years
37:10away from home, living below the
37:12pavement at 15475th Street, with the
37:14dancing gone and marriage gone and the
37:16bookings gone. He had a son of nine
37:19growing up somewhere in the same city, a
37:21wife he had been separated from for a
37:24decade. His act had been built at Ciros
37:26in London and the Ambassador [music] in
37:28Paris. The last New York booking traced
37:30him to a picture house in Brooklyn,
37:321932. That winter, a quarter of the
37:35American workforce was out of work, and
37:37Neville was inside the quarter. His
37:39parents had come to New York that autumn
37:40and asked him to sail back with them for
37:43Christmas. He turned them down, a proud,
37:46broke man in a borrowed suit, declining
37:48a favor. Then their ship left, and the
37:51wanting arrived. He put it to Abdullah
37:54in one sentence. I want to go to
37:55Barbados and not a thing stops me but a
37:57lack of money. Abdullah's reply came
38:00back flat and immediate. Four words. You
38:03are in Barbados.
38:06Neville argued the obvious. A room on
38:08West 72nd Street. An American October. A
38:11winter overcoat over his arm. Abdullah
38:13declined to argue back and gave an
38:15instruction instead. The whole teaching
38:17folded into a housekeeping detail. Sleep
38:20there. Sleeping about Barbados was
38:23worthless. To sleep in Barbados was the
38:26assignment. Abdullah taught that
38:28scripture is psychological drama rather
38:30than history. Abraham and Isaac and
38:32Moses and Jesus as states of
38:34consciousness a human being passes
38:37through written down as people so they
38:40could cross 3,000 years intact. God in
38:43that reading has an address and the
38:45address is the human imagination.
38:48Whatever you assume to be true and hold
38:50while the evidence in front of your eyes
38:52says otherwise [music] hardens into
38:54fact. The census report on a world
38:57already decided assumption comes first.
39:00The outer world catches up and the
39:02catching up looks afterward like luck.
39:05So you are in Barbados was to Abdullah a
39:08description rather than encouragement.
39:11And the work
39:13belonged to the night in a state
39:16bordering on sleep with senses off duty.
39:18Night after night in the basement,
39:20Neville put himself in his mother's
39:22house at Fontabel. The sunset that drops
39:25in 20 minutes. The sound of [music] the
39:28sea. The smell of a tropical night
39:30through an open window. The world seen
39:32out of that address alone. Then sleep in
39:35that bed 4,000 mi away [music] and a New
39:39York morning after it. He did it through
39:41the end of October and through November.
39:436 weeks,
39:4542 days in which the Outer Facts stayed
39:48where they were. His pockets were as
39:49empty in the last week of November as in
39:52the third week of October. Three times
39:54in that stretch, he went back to 72nd
39:56Street [music] to reopen the question.
39:57Abdullah refuses each time. With
40:00identical logic, how could they discuss
40:02how Neville was getting to Barbados when
40:04Neville was already in Barbados? The
40:07third attempt ended in the conversation
40:09for good. Abdullah turned his back on
40:11him mid-sentence, walked into his little
40:14library, and slammed the door hard
40:16enough that Neville stood in the room
40:19listening to it. His reason when Neville
40:21got it out of him later is the image the
40:24whole story is built on. There is no
40:26such thing as a little pregnancy.
40:30Either the thing was conceived or it was
40:31empty. Going back to ask about it was in
40:34his diagnosis a miscarriage carried out
40:36by hand. On the 3rd of December 1933,
40:40some telling say the 4th, some say 4
40:42days before the ship sailed, a letter
40:44arrived at the basement on 75th Street,
40:47unasked for from his brother, Victor,
40:50the same Victor who had [music] 18 had
40:52stood across a Bridgetown street twice a
40:54day for 2 years reading a sign that had
40:57yet to be painted. [music] Inside was a
40:59draft for $50. Victor wrote that the
41:02whole family would be together for
41:03Christmas, all of them in one house for
41:05the first time in their lives, and that
41:07the $50 was for whatever Neville needed
41:09for the trip. Neville's calibration for
41:12his audience is every time a suit ran
41:14about $12, 12. The enclosure was four
41:17suits or 2 months of a working man's
41:19rent from brother who had kept the whole
41:21plan to himself. He took it to the
41:23furnace with line offices. They offered
41:26him third class with access to first
41:28class facilities after St. Thomas.
41:30Excellent news for a man who had spent 6
41:32weeks with empty pockets and he went
41:34straight to 72nd Street with it.
41:36Abdullah listened to the account of the
41:38third class birth and St. Thomas
41:39arrangement then asked one question. Who
41:42told you you went third class? Neville
41:45went to Barbados, Abdullah said, and he
41:48went first class. Past tense both
41:50halves. Argument closed.
41:54On the 6th of December 1933 at the pier
41:56with his third class ticket in his hand,
41:58Neville was told that a first class
42:00passenger had canled. He sailed first
42:02class in a cabin shared with two other
42:04men the whole way down. The date, the
42:06line, the class, the cabin, the
42:08cancellation, and the price of a suit
42:10all survive.
42:11The ship's name stayed out of every
42:13version he told. 90 years of people
42:17retelling the story, and the vessel that
42:18carried him home is still anonymous. 10
42:21days out Christmas at his mother's house
42:23at Fontabel in a long stretch of it a
42:25month in some tellings three in others
42:27with the whole family in one place for
42:30the only time 10 days back before he
42:32sailed Abdullah had told him that when
42:34he came back from Barbados he would have
42:36died he came back eating meat the 5
42:40years ran out somewhere in the middle of
42:42the decade after that the traces thin to
42:44almost transparency
42:46in a Q&A in 1964 asked about his teacher
42:49Neville said in passing that the last
42:51time he met Abdullah was about 8 years
42:53earlier, which puts the two men in the
42:56room together one final time around
42:571956.
42:59That aside is [music] the last dated
43:00moment they share. Neville Goddard told
43:03hundreds of stories about his own life
43:05from platforms, three nights a week for
43:0734 years, dates, street addresses,
43:10dollar amounts, the hour on the clock,
43:12the color of a thing. He described his
43:14own mother dying, his own father's
43:15method, a courtroom in which his ex-wife
43:18stood charged with shoplifting, and
43:19being out of his own skull at 4 in the
43:21morning, the death of [music] Abdullah
43:23is absent from all of it. A deathbed, a
43:26funeral, a farewell, a last
43:28conversation, a date, and a grave. The
43:30corpus is missing every one [music] of
43:31them. A persistent report has the old
43:34man going to Ethiopia to die in 1957,
43:37and it lives outside the early lectures
43:39entirely. The most important man in
43:41Neville's life stops being mentioned in
43:43the present tense and the archive closes
43:46over him without a sound. Out of those 5
43:48years came a different man in the same
43:50body. A tango dancer who had crossed the
43:52Atlantic at 17 to be somebody [music] on
43:54a stage had learned Hebrew from a turban
43:57Algerian or Ethiopian. had come to
44:00believe that the Bible was a map of an
44:02experience he would personally undergo
44:05and had proved on one steamship that the
44:07world reorganizes itself [music] around
44:10an assumption. He had also stopped being
44:12able to dance for a living, which by
44:14then had ceased to matter. The date
44:16everybody gives for his first lecture is
44:18February 1938.
44:20A notice in the Rosacrruian Fellowship
44:22magazine puts him on [music] a platform
44:24in Cleveland in 1931.
44:27build as a visiting lecture from New
44:29York. Two talks, the study center's
44:32secretary wrote up his rich voice and
44:34his deep knowledge and had it printed.
44:37He was 26, speaking under Max Heindell's
44:40banner out in Ohio, but he was still
44:44walking three blocks a day down Columbus
44:46Avenue to sit on a folding chair and
44:48learn the Hebrew alphabet [music] for
44:49free. The Rosacrruian rooms in New York
44:52stood on West 72nd Street, a few doors
44:55along [music] from Abdullah's own front
44:57door, two circles, one street, and a
44:59young man moving between them. On the
45:022nd of February, 1938, in a hired room
45:05in New York, Neville Goddard walked out
45:07in front of an audience that had paid to
45:09hear him under his own name and under
45:11his own banner. The title was The Secret
45:15of the Sperm.
45:18On the 2nd February 1938, in a room he
45:20had hired and paid for himself, a former
45:23tango dancer stood up in front of
45:25strangers in New York and talked about
45:28the Bible for an hour. The title he
45:30chose was The Secret of the Sperm. His
45:33subject was the seed, an idea planted in
45:35a man, carried in the dark, delivered
45:37later as an event in [music] the world.
45:41He handed a New York audience the most
45:42physical word available and called it
45:44scripture. Within a few years, three
45:47nights a week at a chapel on West 49th
45:49Street theater, [music] people called
45:50the old actor's church. Admission a
45:53quarter, four and 500 in seats. Israel
45:56Regardi sat in those rooms. A dance of
45:58words, a dance of [music] mind, a dance
46:01of feeling.
46:03The dancer had found a different floor.
46:065 months after that first lecture on the
46:0925th of July 1938, [music]
46:11the New York Supreme Court granted
46:13Neville a divorce from Mildred Mary
46:15Hughes. They had married on the 13th of
46:18October 1923 [music] when he was 18 and
46:21she was 22. Their son Joseph arrived 7
46:23months later. By Neville's own account,
46:25the thing was finished inside a year.
46:28Then came 15 years of the only
46:30arrangement the state allowed them. The
46:32judgment went against the wife on
46:34grounds of adultery. She was served and
46:36she stayed away from the courtroom. His
46:38address on the file is Hotel Hargrave,
46:41112 West 72nd Street. Four lines in a
46:44docket book hold a 16-year marriage. The
46:47rest survives [music] because Neville
46:48made a lecture out of it and told it
46:50from platforms for 30 years. His version
46:52starts with a man in a hotel room on
46:54tour in love with a woman he intends to
46:57marry [music] and legally chained to a
46:59wife he has been separated from for
47:01years. The obstacle had a human author.
47:04Neville's dancing partner wanted the act
47:06to continue, told the aranged wife to
47:09make herself scarce, and the wife left
47:13the state. So Neville did the only thing
47:14he ever did. He began sleeping in that
47:16hotel room in an apartment he had yet to
47:18rent with the woman he meant to marry.
47:20[music] And he's careful about this
47:22every time, the two of them in separate
47:23beds. His own count is a week. Then the
47:27telephone be in a New York City court on
47:29Tuesday morning at 10:00. Mildred had
47:32been arrested for shoplifting [music]
47:33from a department store. He'd been
47:36handed precisely what he needed. A wife
47:37caught in a criminal act is a divorce.
47:40And any lawyer in Manhattan would have
47:42told him to sit still, say little, and
47:44let the state do the work. Instead,
47:45Neville stood up and spoke for her, to
47:48her character, to their son, to the
47:51woman he had married at 18 rather than
47:53the woman in the dock. The judge said
47:55afterward that an appeal of that kind
47:56was new to him. After all his years on
47:59the bench, Milder was given 6 months
48:01suspended. In the quarter outside, she
48:04settled in one sentence what 15 years of
48:06lawyers had failed to settle. Give me
48:08the subpoena and I will sign it. He
48:12served it himself.
48:14Why he told it? Most of his
48:16demonstration stories finish with the
48:18wish granted. This one ended somewhere
48:21else. He refused to condemn her because
48:23his own imaginal act had put her in the
48:26dock. Neville assumed to state the world
48:29rearranged itself to deliver it and a
48:32woman he had once married stood in a
48:33criminal court [music] as part of the
48:35delivery. That is the doctrine with the
48:37comfortable half removed. Assume a state
48:39and the world moves it to make it so,
48:41including the parts you would rather
48:43leave alone. Five or 6 hundred of
48:46Neville's lectures survive his text.
48:48Joseph Nevillegddard, born the 19th of
48:50May 1924, appears in perhaps one of
48:53them. And there he is, a fact produced
48:56by somebody else. An army captain
48:58listing reasons to feel sorry for a
49:00private. Across 34 years of talking
49:02about his father, his mother, his
49:04brother, Victor, his wife, his daughter,
49:05and a dead man in a turban, Neville left
49:08his son unmentioned. Joseph witnessed
49:10his father's second wedding at 17. Lived
49:13with him at Hotel Hargrave in 1941, went
49:15to Guadal Canal with Marines, and died
49:18[music]
49:18in New York in 1986 at 61.
49:23Whatever passed between those two men
49:24stayed between them.
49:27Katherine Willa Vanmoose was born in
49:31East Orange, New Jersey on the 2nd of
49:33February, 1907. [music] Smith College,
49:35an American family, six or seven
49:37generations settled in a house with
49:39eight fireplaces. Everybody called her
49:42Bill.
49:44Neville's account of meeting her ran
49:45[music] to one sentence, the same every
49:47time. The first time he met her, he knew
49:49she was going to be his wife. She
49:51designed costumes. Where she designed
49:53them is the part [music] 90 years of
49:55writing about Neville has left on the
49:57floor. Radio City Music Hall opened in
50:00December 1932. 6th Avenue at 50th
50:03Street, 5,960
50:05seats, the largest theater in the world
50:07and the most photographed stage in
50:08America. Katherine Vanmoose spent 11
50:12years in the music hall wardrobe, the
50:14Rockett, the Ernape Orchestra, the
50:18Vincente Minnelli stage shows, closed
50:20for the most looked at stage in [music]
50:22the country came out of the room she
50:24worked in. Her father ran the building.
50:26William G. Vanmoose took the managing
50:29director's chair in March 1933.
50:33He replaced Samuel Roshchefel, the
50:35showman called Roxy, the man the hall
50:38had been built around after the board
50:40pushed him out. Theater management was
50:42new to Vanmoose in 1934. He picked a
50:45young window dresser called Vincente
50:47Manelli to produce his stage shows and
50:49Minnelli opened that October. Vanmoose
50:51held the post 9 years until January 1942
50:55when he died. GS [music] isel took the
50:57chair after him. The 1930 census puts
51:00Neville in a lodging house at 146 West
51:0349th [music] Street. A few minutes east,
51:05the Rockefeller site was an open hole
51:08behind a hoarding. A broke tango dancer
51:11at the end of his career slept two
51:13streets from the ground the music hall
51:15came out of. [music] 3 years before the
51:17man who would run it was hired. 12 years
51:19later, he married that man's daughter.
51:22Vanmoose died in January 1942. [music]
51:25The license was issued on the 25th of
51:27February, 1942. The ceremony followed 2
51:30days later at 229 West 48th Street. And
51:33the certificate is numbered 4402. 5
51:36weeks. He gave his occupation as writer
51:39and lecturer. He was 37. She was 35. Two
51:43people signed his witnesses. One was the
51:45bride's mother, 5 weeks a widow. The
51:47other was JN Gddard, the groom's son, 17
51:50years old by the marriage that ended in
51:52that courtroom. 5,960
51:55seats stood a 10-minute walk away. The
51:58wedding got a rented room and two
52:00signatures. Neville said all of it from
52:03the platform. Audiences heard that his
52:05wife had designed costumes at the music
52:07hall for 11 years, that her father was
52:09the managing director of the music hall
52:11where she worked, that she [music] had
52:12gone to Smith, that the house had eight
52:14fireplaces. One word stayed out of it
52:16every time for 30 years, the name. So it
52:19sat inside his own lectures for half a
52:20century while the books about him
52:22printed two words costume designer and
52:24stopped. Music Hall wardrobe staff were
52:27house employees uncredited by policy. A
52:30woman who dressed that stage for 11
52:32years leaves a play bill record, a
52:34program record, and a screen record that
52:36were all blank. 4 months on June 1942,
52:40Bill gave birth to a daughter in New
52:42York City. They named her Victoria. Her
52:45father called her Vicki and said he
52:48loved her before she was born. The crib
52:50turns up again in Louisiana. 4 months
52:53and 15 days after his daughter was born,
52:55Neville was inducted into the Army of
52:56the United States at New York. Serial
52:58number 32.626.732.
53:02Private medical detachment 401th Armored
53:07Field Artillery Battalion destination
53:09Camp Poke, Louisiana. and then [music]
53:12the marital status box separated without
53:14dependence. He had been married 9
53:16months. His daughter was four months.
53:17[music] The paper that would have said
53:19otherwise was sitting in a queue.
53:21Neville and Catherine married on the
53:2327th of February 1942.
53:26Their certificate reached the New York
53:28City register on the 21st of October
53:301943, 20 months after the ceremony, 11
53:33months after the army took him in. So,
53:35on the morning of his induction, he had
53:37a wife and a four-month old daughter,
53:38and zero filed evidence of either. The
53:41strangest line in his enlistment papers
53:43turns out to be a clerk's backlog. The
53:45family existed. Its paperwork was in a
53:48pile on a desk in Manhattan, and
53:50Victoria was born on the 28th of June,
53:521942, 16 months before the state of New
53:55York recorded that her parents were
53:56married. The two people Neville acquired
53:59that year were absent from the document
54:01that decided where he went. Camp Poke
54:04set in Vernon Parish, West Central
54:06[music] Louisiana, pine country outside
54:08a town called Leville, thrown up in 1941
54:12for armored training. Tar papered huts,
54:15board floors, coal stoves, red mud
54:18through the winter, heat and insects
54:20through the [music] summer, 13 weeks of
54:22basic training. A private in a medical
54:25detachment learns litters, splints,
54:29dressings, and sanitation, and to keep
54:31up with a battalion that moves at the
54:33speed of its trucks. Around him were
54:35boys of 18 and 19, most of them outside
54:37their home state for the first time.
54:39Neville was 37, had crossed the Atlantic
54:42six times, danced at zeros, published a
54:44book, and spent 5 years learning Cabala
54:46from a man in his 80s. Now, he shaved
54:49and marched and answered to a number
54:50with the rest of them. He wanted out.
54:53The number of people he consulted about
54:55it was one himself.
54:58Neville made the ordinary application
54:59for discharge through channels on the
55:01correct form. Reason stated age, a wife,
55:04an infant daughter. [music] It came back
55:06inside 24 hours across the endorsement
55:08block in the colonel's hand, one word,
55:11disapproved.
55:12The colonel was Theodore Bilbo Jr., son
55:15of the senator from Mississippi. Then
55:18came the part Neville always [music]
55:19told with warmth. A captain sent for him
55:22and was kind to him. The captain went
55:25through item by item. You want to be
55:27home with your wife and your little
55:28girl. Your son is in the Pacific with
55:30the Marines at Guadal Canel. You're
55:32almost 38. All of it true. All of it
55:34understood. And the answer remains the
55:36answer. A decent man doing a decent
55:37thing in a warm room with the war on.
55:39Neville said every time he told this
55:41that the sympathy was worse than the
55:42refusal. It reaches back to a slammed
55:45library door on West 72nd Street.
55:48Abdullah had refused for 5 years to
55:50console him, encourage him, or soften
55:52anything, and when Neville reopened the
55:53Barbados question a third time, shut
55:55himself in his library. The rudeness was
55:57the instruction. Sympathy asked you to
56:00accept a fact and feel better about it.
56:02Neville had been trained by a teacher
56:04who would sooner slam a door than let it
56:06happen. The captain's kindness was the
56:08most dangerous thing in the room. It
56:10invited him to agree that he was a
56:11[music] private at Camp Poke with a
56:13refused application, the literal truth.
56:16At that moment he thanked the captain,
56:18walked back to the barracks and that
56:20night he stopped being at Camp Poke.
56:24Assumptions harden into fact. Neville
56:27called the practice sleeping in the
56:28assumption. And he meant [music] that
56:30literally. A man becomes what he assumes
56:33himself to be. And the drowsy state just
56:35before you go under is the one [music]
56:36moment in the day when the critical
56:38faculty stops arguing and an assumption
56:41goes [music] inhole. a barracks in
56:44Vernon Parish, Louisiana in the winter
56:46of 1942. Lights out. A private of 37
56:50lies down on an army cot and he goes
56:53home.
56:5432 Washington Square West, 7th floor,
56:57New York City. Two bedrooms, a big
56:59living room, a dining room, [music] a
57:00large kitchen, a foyer. You come into
57:02first. He walked those rooms in the dark
57:05every night and touched things. The
57:07furniture, the door frames. Then he went
57:10to the windows and looked out [music] at
57:11the holly apartments across the way,
57:13which is the view from the floor alone.
57:16He put his wife into her own bed, twin
57:18beds, and the twin beds are in every
57:20telling. Vicki went into her crib, 4
57:22[music] months old. Picturing your
57:24apartment is a thought about a place you
57:26are absent [music] from, and it confirms
57:27the absence every time. Neville slept
57:29there instead. Present tense. out of his
57:32own eyes as the man who lives at that
57:34address with Manhattan outside the
57:36window while his body lay in Louisiana
57:38in a room [music] full of sleeping boys.
57:40Every morning he woke at Camp Poke and
57:43did the day's duty. Each night he went
57:45back to Washington Square. [music] When
57:46I went to New York, that's one of the
57:47first places I went. It was so cool to
57:50see Washington Square and imagine what
57:52he was imagining.
57:53Nine nights at 4:00 in the morning, a
57:56sheet of paper came before him. He told
57:59it sometimes as a dream, sometimes as a
58:01waking vision, and declined to settle
58:03which the description stayed the same
58:05for 30 years, a sheet of army paper, his
58:08own application. A hand holding a pen
58:11came into the frame, and [music] the pen
58:13scratched out the word disapproved, and
58:15wrote it above the word approved. And
58:18then a voice, that which I have done,
58:20[music] I have done, do nothing. That
58:23instruction costs more than the 99.
58:26A private with a refused application, a
58:27colonel's word to cross it. A captain
58:29already gentle about it. The obvious
58:32move was to try again. Another officer,
58:33another form, another angle. Neville did
58:35the opposite. He got up, went to work,
58:38and left the thing entirely alone.
58:40That is the half of his teaching of
58:424-minute video cuts. The half he
58:44considered decisive, acting to secure a
58:47result, is a confession that the result
58:49is still outstanding. An assumption gets
58:52fed by an ordinary day that starved out
58:55by an anxious one. Then the colonel sent
58:58for him asked for a fresh application.
58:59He submitted it and it was proved that
59:01day on the 15th of March 1943. [music]
59:05Private Neville Goddard, serial number
59:0732.626.732
59:10was honorably discharged at Camp Poke,
59:12Louisiana, 4 months and 3 days after
59:15they took him. The stated reason reads,
59:17"Convenience of the government over 38
59:19years of age and to accept employment in
59:22essential war [music] industry."
59:24He had turned 38 3 weeks before that
59:27document was signed. The essential war
59:29industry was standing in a hall on West
59:3149th Street for 25 cents ahead telling
59:34200 people that they were God. A man of
59:3738 with a wife and an infant is exactly
59:40the case an army does eventually
59:41release. Neville knew that reading. His
59:44answer stayed the same for 34 years. The
59:46world supplies a reasonable mechanism
59:48and the mechanism is the shadow. He
59:50always told the story alongside its
59:52opposite. At Campoke, he had a friend in
59:54the identical situation, English, the
59:56same age, drafted the same year,
59:58stationed in Florida, a Freudian
1:00:00psychiatrist from New York, an
1:00:02intelligent, [music] serious man who
1:00:04wanted to go home. Neville wrote him a
1:00:06long letter stating precisely what he
1:00:08had done. The nine nights, the
1:00:10apartment, the twin beds, [music] the
1:00:12crib, the refusal to act otherwise, the
1:00:14entire method handed free to a
1:00:17professional student of the human mind
1:00:19sitting in a camp he wanted to leave.
1:00:21The friend read it and understood it.
1:00:23Neville insisted on that part. Every
1:00:25time the letter went unanswered, and the
1:00:27psychiatrist served three more years.
1:00:30Later, the man turned up at Neville's
1:00:31lectures in New York and remained
1:00:33unconvinced. Neville repeated his
1:00:35account of himself with affection. He
1:00:37preferred to press his feet into the
1:00:39carpet and grip the sides of his chair.
1:00:42Two men, a camp a piece, the same war,
1:00:44the same information. One slept in a
1:00:46room in New York for nine nights and
1:00:48went home in March of 1943. The other
1:00:51read the instructions and found them
1:00:52interesting, yet served until 1946. The
1:00:55technique is easy. The doing it is rare.
1:00:58Knowing a thing and using a thing are
1:01:00two separate acts, and the gap between
1:01:03them is where most of a life gets spent.
1:01:074 months after Louisiana,
1:01:09on July 28th, 1943, Neville filed a
1:01:13petition for naturalization.
1:01:16Residence 32 Washington Square [music]
1:01:18West, 7th floor, the same rooms he had
1:01:21been sleeping in from a,000 mi away. He
1:01:24had been eligible since 1922.
1:01:2721 years went by because the urge was
1:01:29absent, and the army supplied it. Then
1:01:32[music] a clerk filed in the physical
1:01:34description the only real portrait of
1:01:35the man that survives. Age 38, male,
1:01:38complexion medium, hair brown, eyes
1:01:41brown, height 5' 10 [music] in, weight
1:01:45155 lb. Distinguishing marks, birthark,
1:01:50right side, upper lip.
1:01:54a slight lean man just under six feet
1:01:57with a birth mark above the right corner
1:01:59of his mouth. That face is in every
1:02:02surviving photograph. On the 1st of
1:02:04September, 1943, he stopped being a
1:02:06British subject.
1:02:0910 days later, [music]
1:02:10on September 11th, 1943, The New Yorker
1:02:13ran a piece about him on page 64 titled
1:02:17A Blue Flame on the Forehead. Robert M.
1:02:20Coats wrote it. the magazine's art
1:02:22critic, the man who coined the phrase
1:02:25abstract expressionism.
1:02:27The piece was a survey of wartime New
1:02:29York's informal churches. EMTT Fox was
1:02:32filling the 4,000 seat Manhattan Opera
1:02:35House. Smaller operators were drawing 50
1:02:38and 60. Neville sat between them. The
1:02:40room was the Union Methodist Episcopal
1:02:43Church on West 48th Street. Neville had
1:02:45been married in that building 18 months
1:02:48earlier. Sunday 8:00 admission 25 cents.
1:02:52Coats paid his quarter and counted about
1:02:55200 people. Women outnumbering men
1:02:57roughly 6 to1. Dressed for the heat. Two
1:03:01middle-aged women, one thin and
1:03:03discontented, one plump young woman. He
1:03:06took for a restaurant hostesses. An old
1:03:09man with a lined face who kept nodding
1:03:11along. Neville came on in a brown tweed
1:03:15suit, a blue shirt,
1:03:17and a black and red striped tie. Coats
1:03:21guessed his age at 30. He was 38, tall,
1:03:24slender, black hair, a long face. Coats
1:03:27called slightly Latin, and then the
1:03:29comparison, a 1943 reader would catch
1:03:32instantly, the Valentino type. He
1:03:35started quiet and built. Then he squared
1:03:38himself on his feet, shut his eyes,
1:03:40flung his head sharply back, and went
1:03:43still. 200 heads went back with his,
1:03:47silently courting the touch of a thin
1:03:49blue flame on their foreheads. According
1:03:53to Robert M. Coats,
1:03:55the room went so quiet that traffic came
1:03:58in off the street.
1:04:00Coat sat down what the site did to him
1:04:03and kept all four things it did at once.
1:04:07touching, saddening, grotesque, and a
1:04:10little laughable, a staff writer for the
1:04:13best magazine in America sat in a narrow
1:04:15pew and was moved and embarrassed in the
1:04:17same minute. 11 months after the army
1:04:21had him down as an author with a
1:04:23dependent count of zero, a West Indian
1:04:26exancer teaching cabala in a Methodist
1:04:29hall was a New York curiosity worth a
1:04:32column.
1:04:33He told one story out of these years as
1:04:35a warning, and it placed around 1941,
1:04:38the year his mother died, a New York
1:04:41winter, dark by 4 in the afternoon.
1:04:44Neville went to bed one night, and for
1:04:46the pleasure of it, put himself under
1:04:48the palm tree at home in Barbados. He
1:04:52was explicit in every telling, frivolous
1:04:55escape from the weather, with travel the
1:04:57furthest thing from his mind. The next
1:05:00morning, a cable arrived from Barbados.
1:05:02His mother was dying.
1:05:06He sailed inside 48 hours at midnight in
1:05:09the middle of a war [music] across water
1:05:11where ships were going down that season
1:05:14and reached her in time to say goodbye
1:05:17in person. A three-dimensional goodbye
1:05:21in his phrase. The palm trees came and
1:05:24everything required to put him under
1:05:26them came too. An idol assumption is
1:05:29still an idol assumption.
1:05:31At your command in 1939,
1:05:34your faith is your fortune in 1941.
1:05:37Freedom for all in 1942, the year they
1:05:40drafted him. Feeling is the secret in
1:05:431944.
1:05:465,000 copies printed. He was preaching
1:05:50three nights a week in a Times Square
1:05:52church that seated a thousand.
1:05:55And the week the book came out, New York
1:05:58took 16 in of snow. 100 people in the
1:06:00room. 50 copies sold. 4,950
1:06:05stayed in the warehouse. In 1946, after
1:06:07something happened to him on a ship
1:06:09crossing the Atlantic, he took a
1:06:11finished manuscript of 300 pages his
1:06:13own, burned it, and published a booklet
1:06:16instead. A man teaching that assumptions
1:06:19harden into fact with the print run
1:06:21sitting in a warehouse and 300 of his
1:06:24own pages gone.
1:06:26Los Angeles, 1945.
1:06:29Ernest Holmes ran the Institute of
1:06:31Religious Science, the largest
1:06:33organization in American New Thought,
1:06:35and he had 500 of his own alumni in the
1:06:38hall waiting for Neville. Minutes before
1:06:41Neville went on, Holmes called him into
1:06:43an office and shut the door. Holmes
1:06:45wanted two things changed. Drop the
1:06:47teaching that scripture is psychological
1:06:50drama rather than history.
1:06:52and the money, $40 for a course of five
1:06:54talks against the $25 ceiling Holmes
1:06:58held for himself as head of the
1:06:59institution.
1:07:01Neville refused both, walked out of the
1:07:04office, went on and gave the lecture he
1:07:06had come [music] to give. Then he walked
1:07:08out of new thought and stayed out for
1:07:10the 27 years he had left.
1:07:13What was said in that office between two
1:07:15men minutes before 500 people stayed in
1:07:18that office? Every room he stood in from
1:07:211945 was a room he rented. The
1:07:24Wilshshire Eel, Scottish Wright Halls,
1:07:28hotel ballrooms, and he finished with an
1:07:30audience instead of an institution.
1:07:34He came west in 1948 for a master class.
1:07:38Five lessons in 5 days taken down in
1:07:41shorthand and printed and began at the
1:07:44Wilshire Eel Theater, his room for the
1:07:48rest of his life.
1:07:50In 1954, Los Angeles station put him on
1:07:53the air once and 5,000 letters came in.
1:07:57So KTV channel 11 gave him a weekly half
1:08:01hour, Sundays at 1:00, 26 programs of
1:08:05cobalistic Bible interpretation in the
1:08:08style of Neville.
1:08:10Now I remember this time there was like
1:08:12three channels or four channels. So
1:08:14there were four channels on and Neville
1:08:15was on one of them on Sundays.
1:08:20All 26 have vanished since one
1:08:23transcript came through in 1955. He
1:08:26moved west for good. 1025 Carroll Drive
1:08:30West Hollywood where he lived until the
1:08:33night he died.
1:08:36Neville at 50, a United States citizen,
1:08:3811 books out, three nights a week on Los
1:08:42Angeles platforms at $2 ahead, a wife, a
1:08:47daughter at school, and a good tailor.
1:08:50Four years on, at 4:00 in the morning in
1:08:53a hotel room in San Francisco,
1:08:56something happened to Neville that
1:08:59belonged to an entirely different order.
1:09:03And he began telling audiences about
1:09:04that instead.
1:09:09By 1955,
1:09:12Neville Goddard had moved west for good.
1:09:15A house at 1025 Carroll Drive in West
1:09:18Hollywood. Taken after 13 years and
1:09:21eight months in a single apartment on
1:09:23West 55th Street in Manhattan.
1:09:2650 years old that February, public
1:09:28lecturing since the 2nd of February,
1:09:301938 and teaching privately since the
1:09:33Barbados Voyage of 1933.
1:09:38The Wilshire Eel Theater had been taking
1:09:40him since 1948. Los Angeles gave him the
1:09:44Fox Wilshire, the Ritz, the Evil Club,
1:09:47the Women's University Club on South
1:09:49Catalina.
1:09:50San Francisco had a circuit of its own,
1:09:52the Scottish Wright Auditorium, the
1:09:54Palace Hotel, [music] and a hotel on the
1:09:57corner of Pal and Suffer called Sir
1:09:59Francis Drake.
1:10:01Through 1953 and 1954, he stood in for
1:10:04Dr. Frederick Bales on the radio while
1:10:06Bales took his vacations which put a
1:10:08Barbadian accent into a Southern
1:10:11California living room on a Sunday. Then
1:10:14television, a single halfhour telecast
1:10:17on KTV channel 11 in 1954. My channel
1:10:23brought in 5,000 letters and a [music]
1:10:26station that receives 5,000 letters
1:10:29gives a man a series. From 1955, he had
1:10:3226 half-hour programs. Sundays at 1:00,
1:10:35[music] talking straight into the camera
1:10:37about human imagination.
1:10:39The books rang alongside it. At Your
1:10:41Command in 1939, Your Faith Is Your
1:10:44Fortune in 1941,
1:10:47Freedom for All, Prayer, The Art of
1:10:50Believing, Out of This World in 1949,
1:10:54The Power of Awareness in 1952, Awakened
1:10:57Imagination in 1954, Seed Time and
1:11:00Harvest in 1956,
1:11:02Plain Beige Covers, Small Format Sold at
1:11:06the Back of the [music] Hall, and by
1:11:08mail order. The private interviews had
1:11:10run alongside all of it for 12 years, 9
1:11:13a day, 5 days a week, half an hour a
1:11:16piece at a fee of zero. Booking ran from
1:11:181:00 to half 5. And he said from the
1:11:21platform that it ate his whole
1:11:23afternoon. One argument had made all of
1:11:25it. Assume the feeling of the wish
1:11:27fulfilled. Construct the scene that
1:11:30would only exist if the thing were
1:11:32already yours. Enter it drowsy. Persist
1:11:35in it. And let the outer world catch up.
1:11:39He had tested it on a passage to
1:11:41Barbados in 1933 and on an army
1:11:44discharge in 1943.
1:11:46So the man in Los Angeles in 1958 was a
1:11:5053year-old professional lecturer with a
1:11:53television slate. 15 years of backlist,
1:11:56two or three engagements a week, an
1:11:58agent, a national mailing list, and a
1:12:00wife and a teenage daughter to keep.
1:12:02Rooms of three and 400 people paid about
1:12:05$2 ahead to hear him say that they could
1:12:09have what they wanted. Within 18 months,
1:12:13he begins telling those same rooms
1:12:15something else, and those rooms
1:12:18completely empty.
1:12:20He was in San Francisco on a lecture
1:12:22run, staying where he always stayed. On
1:12:26the evening of Sunday, July 19th, 1959,
1:12:30he ate dinner in the hotel restaurant,
1:12:32went up to his room, read Blake, and
1:12:35read the Bible, and went to bed around
1:12:3711:00.
1:12:39His subject that week was the law,
1:12:42assumption, technique, and [music]
1:12:43results. At about 4 in the morning, it
1:12:47started with a vibration in his head.
1:12:50The sensation arrived without precedent
1:12:52in his experience. an earthquake and a
1:12:55storm at once inside his skull. His
1:12:59first interpretation was medical, a
1:13:01massive cerebral hemorrhage and death
1:13:04within minutes.
1:13:06Saying in his lecture, the signs of the
1:13:08end, "A vibration is in my head that I
1:13:11have never felt before." The vibration
1:13:13resolved and he was awake, fully awake.
1:13:16By his own account, more awake than he
1:13:18had been at any point in his life. And
1:13:22somewhere other than the room, he was
1:13:24inside
1:13:26his own skull.
1:13:29For 13 years, in front of every audience
1:13:31he addressed, Neville insisted the
1:13:33statement was literal. The skull was a
1:13:36sealed tomb, and he was sealed inside
1:13:38it. He used the word tomb, then went
1:13:42back and specified an actual tomb, awake
1:13:45in the dark in a bone chamber with the
1:13:47walls close.
1:13:50I knew my skull to be a tomb. An actual
1:13:52tomb, he said in the same lecture.
1:13:57One impulse, and by his description, it
1:13:59was the whole of him. Get out.
1:14:01Curiosity was absent from it, and so was
1:14:04fear. It was like a baby in a womb.
1:14:08He put his hands to the base of the
1:14:10skull and pushed from the inside.
1:14:14The knowledge of where to push arrived
1:14:15with him. The instruction issued along
1:14:18with the situation. and something at the
1:14:19base gave way and rolled aside leaving a
1:14:23small opening.
1:14:25He stated in the same lecture, "It
1:14:27rolled away, leaving a little opening.
1:14:30Then he came out through it inch by
1:14:31inch." His phrase for it stayed
1:14:35identical across 100 tellings, exactly
1:14:37as a child is born from its mother's
1:14:40womb. Head first, slow,
1:14:44very tight. He was the one being born
1:14:48and he was also the one giving birth.
1:14:52This is crazy. Attendance was zero. As
1:14:55he was saying this, he came out of the
1:14:57base of his own head alone at 4 in the
1:15:01morning in a hotel room on Pal Street.
1:15:05As he emerged, a wind rose in the room.
1:15:09Something well past a drought.
1:15:13He described a roar, a hurricane sound
1:15:17in an enclosed hotel bedroom, and he
1:15:19later attached it to the strong driving
1:15:21[music] wind of the second chapter of
1:15:23Acts. Then he turned and looked at the
1:15:26bed. His body was on it, ghastly,
1:15:28[music] pale in his word, and the head
1:15:30was turning from side to side, back and
1:15:33forth repeatedly. In the 1966 telling,
1:15:36the movement of somebody surfacing from
1:15:38a great ordeal. He stood in the room and
1:15:41watched his own face do [music] that.
1:15:44When he looked a second time, the body
1:15:45had gone from the bed. Three men were in
1:15:48the room, symbolic of the three wise
1:15:50men. They were unable to see him
1:15:53standing there at the peak of alertness.
1:15:56He was invisible to them, inaudible,
1:15:58unaccounted for. They could hear the
1:15:59wind [music] and they had trouble
1:16:01explaining the wind. In the later
1:16:03tellings, the three are anonymous. The
1:16:04earlier ones name them. They are his own
1:16:07brothers. Cecil at the head, Victor at
1:16:10the right, [music] Lawrence at the left
1:16:11foot. Victor is the 18-year-old who
1:16:14stood across a Bridgetown street twice a
1:16:16day for two years reading a sign that
1:16:19had yet to be hung. Lawrence, the
1:16:21doctor, turns up again in a beach vision
1:16:23three decades later.
1:16:26Lawrence, the youngest of the three and
1:16:28the most agitated by the wind, found
1:16:30something on the floor. An infant
1:16:32wrapped in swaddling clothes. He picked
1:16:35it up, put it on the bed, and announced
1:16:37who was it was. It is Neville's baby, he
1:16:40says. Two of the three refused to accept
1:16:43that. One affirmed it. Neville noted the
1:16:46arithmetic later. The legal minimum of
1:16:48witnesses required under Deuteronomy
1:16:51with the descent already built into the
1:16:53scene. And then he crossed the room and
1:16:55picked up the child himself. How is my
1:16:58sweetheart?
1:16:59He said, Neville to the infant.
1:17:03Somnity is absent from it. The ordinary
1:17:06thing a father says over a cot in an
1:17:08ordinary voice to a baby on a hotel bed
1:17:10while three men who could see the baby
1:17:12looked past him. The infant smiled. He
1:17:15called it the heavenly smile and
1:17:17admitted every time that his description
1:17:19of it failed. The scene dissolved and he
1:17:22was back in the bed.
1:17:25The infant was the sign. The birth was
1:17:28his own. zero infants entered [music]
1:17:31the world on the 20th of July 1959.
1:17:35His claim was that he, Neville Lancelot
1:17:38Goddard, 54, of Carol Drive, West
1:17:41Hollywood, had been born out of his own
1:17:44skull and that the baby on the floor was
1:17:47the token handed to the witnesses so
1:17:49that the event could be attested.
1:17:52The pattern comes from the second
1:17:53chapter of Luke where shepherds are
1:17:56given a wrapped infant as a sign rather
1:17:58than an explanation. In April 1963, he
1:18:01put it in one line from the platform. No
1:18:04little child is born. That's only the
1:18:06signal. Neville in the lecture called
1:18:09the resurrection on the 12th of April
1:18:101963.
1:18:12He commemorated the 20th of July for the
1:18:15remainder of his life and called it his
1:18:17real birthday. in April 1971 from a Los
1:18:20Angeles stage. He described himself as
1:18:22approaching his 12th birthday since his
1:18:25birth from above. He was 66 years old
1:18:28and he was counting from a hotel room.
1:18:313 months after the hotel room, his
1:18:34father died in Barbados. Joseph
1:18:37Nathaniel Goddard was 85. He had walked
1:18:39out of St. John's boy's school at 14 and
1:18:43gone down to Bridgetown for a wage. And
1:18:46on the 13th of October 1921, he opened a
1:18:49grocery meat and ice shop in his side
1:18:51street with his own name over the door.
1:18:5438 years on, the thing he built out of
1:18:56that shop was divided 10 ways. A stock
1:18:59distribution in 1951 had already put
1:19:02about $667,000
1:19:06into the hands of each of the 10
1:19:07children. On the father's death, the
1:19:10figure came to roughly $2 million a
1:19:13piece.
1:19:15Neville was 54. From that October, he
1:19:18was a wealthy man, and he stayed one for
1:19:22the 13 years he had left. Everything
1:19:25visible about the working life stayed
1:19:27where it was. Three or four engagements
1:19:30a week, a rented hall, a table of beige
1:19:32paperbacks at the back of the room, $2
1:19:35ahead at the door. He went on doing the
1:19:37job of a man who needed the door money.
1:19:39And he did it [music] until the month he
1:19:41died. And the money stayed off the
1:19:44platform. 13 more years of lecturing,
1:19:46hundreds of surviving transcripts,
1:19:49thousands of hours of talk about money
1:19:51and desire and how a man gets what he
1:19:53wants. And the sum sitting in his own
1:19:55name went unmentioned in every hall for
1:19:57the rest of his life. Students who sat
1:20:00in front of him for a decade went on
1:20:01assuming the door money was the income.
1:20:05Two rented acres of rock in the parish
1:20:07of St. John at $8 a year. A grandson of
1:20:11that ground became a rich man in Los
1:20:13Angeles three months after telling a
1:20:15room he had been born out of his own
1:20:17head.
1:20:18So he was free. He wasn't worried about
1:20:21how successful his books would be or if
1:20:24he ever sold another book. He had been
1:20:26born [music] from above and he dedicated
1:20:28his life to it. Clearly when you read
1:20:30his lectures that's what's happening.
1:20:32Neville taught that the Bible is a
1:20:34blueprint rather than a history.
1:20:37EMTT Fox told him to stop talking about
1:20:39that.
1:20:41Scripture in his reading records [music]
1:20:43a psychological event that is yet to
1:20:46happen to most people described in
1:20:49advance [music] and in detail. Treating
1:20:52it as an account of things done to
1:20:54Jewish and Roman men in the first
1:20:55century is a category error that has
1:20:58cost the West 2,000 years. The
1:21:01crucifixion occurs in a human being
1:21:04rather than to one man outside
1:21:06Jerusalem. So does the resurrection.
1:21:09The crucifixion as he described it is
1:21:12the act of God burying himself inside a
1:21:15person, forgetting completely that he is
1:21:18God and wearing that person's life from
1:21:21the inside for its full length. Every
1:21:25human being alive is that burial which
1:21:28puts Golgtha where the name always said
1:21:30it was. The place of [music] the skull
1:21:32is the human skull. The tomb is the
1:21:35head. The stone at the mouth of the
1:21:37seuler is the base of the skull. And the
1:21:41resurrection is the sleeper waking up in
1:21:44there breaking out and discovering that
1:21:46[music] the being asleep inside a man
1:21:48for 60 years was God and is that man.
1:21:51It's the same imagery as Jesus when he
1:21:54comes back in the second coming out of
1:21:56his tomb.
1:21:58He is buried in the skull of man. That's
1:22:01where he is buried. Neville said [music]
1:22:03in his lecture, where is Golgatha?
1:22:06He called this the promise.
1:22:10And he said it against the law. The law
1:22:12is everything the first half of this
1:22:15video demonstrated. assumption,
1:22:17technique, the feeling of the wish
1:22:18fulfilled, held until circumstances
1:22:21rearrange itself around it.
1:22:24A basement on 75th Street becoming a
1:22:26first class cabin. A bunk in Louisiana
1:22:28becoming a seventh floor apartment on
1:22:31Washington Square. Meet its terms and it
1:22:35produces.
1:22:36The promise is unconditional.
1:22:40Merit stays irrelevant to it. effort
1:22:43fails to hurry it by a single day and
1:22:46the terms run identically for everybody.
1:22:49The cruel included, the indifferent
1:22:51included, the ones who died at 4 days
1:22:53old included. A destiny rather than a
1:22:56reward. [music] And when it comes, you
1:22:58are handed four signs in a fixed order
1:23:02so that you know what has happened to
1:23:03you. The law gets you what you want. The
1:23:06promise tells you who you are.
1:23:10He'd been teaching the law in public
1:23:11since February 1938.
1:23:1421 years of it, every book, every
1:23:16broadcast, every hall, every one of the
1:23:205,000 letters. And on the 20th of July,
1:23:241959, the other half arrived while he
1:23:27was in town teaching the first half. It
1:23:30came in his phrase out of the blue. The
1:23:33promise is what he had left.
1:23:36Four months and 16 days later in Los
1:23:39Angeles, the vibration came back.
1:23:42In July, it had been at the base of the
1:23:44skull. By December, it set at the crown,
1:23:48at the top of the head, and instead of
1:23:49resolving, it built. It built until, in
1:23:53his words, his head exploded. "I felt my
1:23:57head explode," Neville says in Signs of
1:23:59the End.
1:24:01"The setting was so ordinary," he
1:24:03stressed it every time he told it. A
1:24:05modestly furnished room, small and
1:24:07plain, a room in a house rather than a
1:24:08throne room.
1:24:10Leaning against the side of an open
1:24:12door, looking out at a pastoral scene,
1:24:14was a youth of about 13. Neville
1:24:18described him in the vocabulary of the
1:24:1916th chapter of First Samuel, ruddy with
1:24:23beautiful eyes and handsome. Then he
1:24:25told the room that the description had
1:24:27failed and that the beauty of the boy
1:24:28was beyond his power to convey. The
1:24:31recognition was instantaneous and it
1:24:33went both directions.
1:24:35He knew without argument or process
1:24:37[music] that the boy was David, that he
1:24:39himself was David's father. And he knew
1:24:42that the boy knew. Still a man in his
1:24:4550s, still Neville standing in a small
1:24:47room in Los Angeles looking at a
1:24:49teenager in a doorway. David addressed
1:24:51him, "My father."
1:24:55Scripture says, "The son calls God
1:24:57father." Neville's reading
1:25:01was the sentence works as a piece of
1:25:03identification. The moment David calls
1:25:06you father, you've been handed your own
1:25:08name [music]
1:25:09and the name of God turns out to be
1:25:10father. And the proof of fatherhood is
1:25:13the existence of a son. And who [music]
1:25:15is David? In his teaching, the name
1:25:17belongs to something other than a king
1:25:20of Israel. David is the accumulated
1:25:22experience of one human life. Everything
1:25:24a person has undergone, wanted,
1:25:26suffered, done, and been gathered into a
1:25:29single figure. Every man and woman alive
1:25:31is unknowingly fathering that son by the
1:25:34ordinary act of living through their
1:25:36days. Which means the boy in the doorway
1:25:38was Neville's own life, standing up and
1:25:41telling him what he was. In some
1:25:43instances, he would refer to David as
1:25:45all of humanity or humans.
1:25:47But in many, he would make the same
1:25:50declaration that is your life or one's
1:25:53own life.
1:25:544 months after David on the 8th of April
1:25:561960 out of a clear sky a bolt of
1:25:59lightning struck him and split him in
1:26:01two. The line of the split ran from the
1:26:04top of the skull to the base of the
1:26:06spine. The detail he kept returning to 8
1:26:09years on was tactile and specific rather
1:26:12than luminous. I felt every little
1:26:14vertebrae of my spine separate, he said
1:26:17in the great mystery. every individual
1:26:19bone of the spinal column coming [music]
1:26:21apart one by one felt from the inside.
1:26:25He identified the event immediately and
1:26:28identically for the rest of his life.
1:26:30This was the veil of the temple torn
1:26:32from top [music] to bottom the curtain
1:26:34that rips off at the moment of the
1:26:36crucifixion in the 15th chapter of Mark.
1:26:39The temple is the body. The veil is the
1:26:41body. The tearing is this. At the base
1:26:44of the spine, he saw a pool.
1:26:48Golden liquid living light gathering at
1:26:51the base of the spine moving and he knew
1:26:55what it was on site. The pool was
1:26:57himself. Everything he was in liquid
1:26:59form lying at the bottom of his own
1:27:01opened body. He contemplated it and then
1:27:04he fused with it. Fusion being a big
1:27:07part of Neville's teaching.
1:27:10And then he moved up in the spine in a
1:27:13spiral, a serpentine ascent, very much
1:27:17like a condundalini experience. His
1:27:19phrase was a bolt of spiral lightning,
1:27:22traveling the whole length of the split
1:27:24and entering the skull violently at the
1:27:26top. The head reverberated with thunder.
1:27:28Every bone in his body began to rattle.
1:27:31That is the sequence he called his
1:27:33death. [music] I died in 1960. And from
1:27:36that day on, I've revealed the secrets
1:27:39of God from within. In [music] his
1:27:42lecture, the great mystery, in 1968.
1:27:45In the same lecture, he told the room it
1:27:47had been 8 years since [music] God died
1:27:50and left the sentence there without
1:27:52comment.
1:27:54April 1960 is the hinge of a working
1:27:56life. Before it, Neville Goddard relayed
1:27:58a technique he had tested. after it he
1:28:01reported an event that had happened to
1:28:03him and claimed a different authority
1:28:05for that reporting teaching from within
1:28:08in his phrase rather than teaching from
1:28:10a book. 2 years and 9 months later on
1:28:14New Year's Day 1963 [music] the fourth
1:28:17one arrived and it was the gentlest. His
1:28:21head became translucent then luminous
1:28:23then it stopped having an edge at all
1:28:26stating there was no circumference.
1:28:29There was no limit. Complete luminosity.
1:28:31In his lecture, Signs of the End. The
1:28:34skull that had been a sealed bone tomb
1:28:36in July of 1959 was now transparent,
1:28:39[music] and then it was light without
1:28:41boundary. About 20 ft above him, a dove
1:28:44was floating. He was precise about two
1:28:47things. The dove was beige, light beige,
1:28:50and he corrected people who assumed
1:28:52white. And the wings were motionless. It
1:28:55held position in the air with zero beats
1:28:57of the wing.
1:28:58He raised his left hand and extended the
1:29:02index finger and the dove came down onto
1:29:05it slowly and settled there. Then he
1:29:08drew it to his face and it smothered him
1:29:11with kisses. His face, his head, his
1:29:15neck
1:29:16over and over. He told that part
1:29:20publicly one week after it happened in a
1:29:22lecture on the 8th of January, 1963. It
1:29:25smothered me with kisses," Neville
1:29:27[music] said in prophetic blueprints.
1:29:30A woman was present and she was the one
1:29:32who explained what he had just been
1:29:33shown. Her argument ran on ornithology.
1:29:37Birds keep away from human beings for a
1:29:38physical reason. To a bird a man carries
1:29:41an offensive odor, [music] and around
1:29:43every person there is a radius the bird
1:29:45declines to enter. She called it a ring
1:29:48of offense.
1:29:50That dove had crossed the ring on
1:29:51purpose against its own nature to
1:29:53demonstrate something and she put the
1:29:55demonstration into three words. He loves
1:29:58you.
1:30:01The fourth sign and by his reading a
1:30:03seal rather than a beginning the dove
1:30:05descends on Jesus at the baptism at the
1:30:09opening of the ministry. In Neville's
1:30:11sequence, it arrives at the end and it
1:30:13means the work is finished and accepted.
1:30:17Four experiences. The 20th July 1959,
1:30:21the 6th of December 1959, the 8th of
1:30:24April 1960,
1:30:26the 1st of January 1963, dated to the
1:30:30day told in the same order with the same
1:30:32details for the rest of his life. The
1:30:35order was important.
1:30:36>> [music]
1:30:36>> He found reference to every one of these
1:30:38events in the Bible and the sequence of
1:30:40events. He's relaying everything and
1:30:43clearly shows that the Bible is seeming
1:30:46to reference that you're going through
1:30:48these events around him. California was
1:30:52going at the same subject by another
1:30:53route. Aldis Huxley had published the
1:30:55doors of perception in 1954.
1:30:58One afternoon on measculine in a house
1:31:00above Los Angeles written up by the most
1:31:03respected English novelist alive. It
1:31:05became the best known case anybody had
1:31:07made for reaching God by chemistry.
1:31:09[music] And by the early 60s that case
1:31:11had a generation behind it with lysurgic
1:31:14acid, [music] the means of getting where
1:31:16mystics had spent whole lives sitting
1:31:18still. Neville tried LSD once. A doctor
1:31:22friend supplied the dose and Huxley sat
1:31:24in the room and watched. Los Angeles
1:31:27three men in a room, the novelist who
1:31:29had argued the case in print, [music] a
1:31:31physician with the bottle. His verdict
1:31:33came to two complaints. The drug
1:31:35distorted the senses and it left him
1:31:37with a 48-hour hangover. He said he
1:31:40would shun it and he did. A man who had
1:31:43come out of the base of his own skull at
1:31:454 in the morning took the drug an entire
1:31:47generation was taking to get there and
1:31:49came back calling it a hangover. He had
1:31:52had the thing itself and knew [music]
1:31:54the difference.
1:31:56Neville gave the interval between the
1:31:58skull and the dove as 1,260 days,
1:32:01[music] which is the title of one of his
1:32:02lectures. The time times and a half a
1:32:06time of Daniel and Revelation 3 and 1/2
1:32:09years. The traditional length of the
1:32:11ministry of Jesus from the 20th of July
1:32:141959 to the 1st of January 1963 is 1,261
1:32:19days [music] and he left the extra one
1:32:21where it fell. He also wrote his own
1:32:23canon in public. The law and the promise
1:32:26published in 1961.
1:32:29lists four experiences. The 1929 vision
1:32:32of a divine society, the skull, David,
1:32:36and the lightning. And from 1964 onward,
1:32:39the four [music] are the skull, David
1:32:41the Lightning, and the Dove with the
1:32:43Divine Society quietly moved to the back
1:32:46of the file.
1:32:48A woman called Marta lived at Lagona
1:32:50down the coast from Los Angeles, and she
1:32:53was exactly Neville's age. 6 months
1:32:55before she died, she told him she had
1:32:57seen
1:32:59He had arrived in a self-propelled
1:33:00carriage clothed in what she took for
1:33:02divine power. And she heard herself
1:33:05repeating one sentence over and over
1:33:07that he was Neville and that he was God.
1:33:10On the last Friday in June, she went to
1:33:12the Lagona Art Festival and afterwards
1:33:15to dinner with three friends, a Mexican
1:33:16meal, one beer she dropped dead at the
1:33:19table. Her companion that night was a
1:33:22woman named Marge. And Marge had a
1:33:24vision of her own. Neville in front of
1:33:27an enormous crowd drawn from every faith
1:33:29speaking with every person hearing him
1:33:31in their own language. He told both from
1:33:33a platform in the 18th of July 1968 and
1:33:36went on to the next thing. Jack Butler
1:33:39was Neville's secretary and something
1:33:41near a brother. dead at 50 of a massive
1:33:44coronary found on the floor at
1:33:46Haverstraw, New York, born Catholic and
1:33:49lapsed for decades. Neville bought him a
1:33:52Catholic funeral and a Catholic plot and
1:33:55paid for both. 6 months later, Neville
1:33:58said he found himself awake and
1:34:00deliberate in that other world and came
1:34:02upon Jack there. Also present was his
1:34:06wife's older sister, a woman called Al,
1:34:08who had spent her entire life arguing
1:34:10that the dead stay dead.
1:34:12Neville told Jack that he had died. Jack
1:34:15called the idea stupid, said he was
1:34:17alive, and then concealed the death. And
1:34:20then Neville did the thing that makes
1:34:22this the strangest scene. He reached
1:34:25across. He took hold of Jack Butler's
1:34:27thigh and squeezed it to find out
1:34:29whether it was solid. It was flesh and
1:34:31warm and pulsing back against the hand.
1:34:33Jack told him to take his hand off. Al
1:34:37stood and stared. a man who had spent 30
1:34:39years teaching that the dead are alive
1:34:41checking. I keep coming back to this
1:34:43myself. After my father died, I found my
1:34:47dad working in his veterinary hospital
1:34:49[music] when I went to the other side.
1:34:51There he was, young, happy, and he had
1:34:54no idea that he was dead. I know that
1:34:57other people have had a similar
1:34:58experience where [music] they've met
1:35:00somebody from their life that's passed
1:35:02on and that person doesn't know they're
1:35:04dead. The question is, are you dead and
1:35:06you don't know it? This is something
1:35:08that Neville talked about essentially
1:35:11saying that each life we begin again at
1:35:13the age of 20 starting over every time
1:35:17in a perfect state and you'd keep on
1:35:19doing it until you receive the promise.
1:35:22For 7 years, a woman in San Francisco
1:35:24had sponsored his meetings on the West
1:35:26Coast. She worked in an office, took the
1:35:28bookings, and sold his books at the back
1:35:30of the room. On the evening of the 12th
1:35:33of November 1963, she was driving west
1:35:35into a setting sun. A news stand went
1:35:37past on her right and the headline on
1:35:39the paper facing the street said that
1:35:41Kennedy had been shot. The paper was
1:35:43green. She had explained it away inside
1:35:46a few seconds. Sun straight into the
1:35:48eyes at that hour, headlights coming the
1:35:50other way, the racks half in the shadow.
1:35:52A trick of [music] the light on a street
1:35:54she drove every day. By the time she
1:35:55reached her own door, it had left her.
1:35:5710 days later, morning of the 22nd of
1:35:59November, a coworker walked over to her
1:36:02desk and put a newspaper down in front
1:36:03of her. Green newsprint again, the
1:36:06identical headline, word for word. And
1:36:08the evening on the road came back to her
1:36:11entirely. The following weekend, Neville
1:36:13was at dinner in San Francisco. Seven at
1:36:15the table, him, his wife, the woman,
1:36:18four friends, Parlway, though she told
1:36:22them what had happened on the 12th. The
1:36:25table was surprised for about as long as
1:36:27it takes to say so. Then the
1:36:28conversation moved to the motorcade and
1:36:30the route and the buildings along it and
1:36:32how the authorities ought to have kept
1:36:34the president alive. Neville sat through
1:36:36the rest of it. 3 weeks after the
1:36:38assassination, he told the story from a
1:36:39platform. The woman had read a headline
1:36:4210 days before it existed and described
1:36:45it to a room.
1:36:47He came back from San Francisco and told
1:36:49people that decision is the whole of the
1:36:51man. It was made against every
1:36:52professional instinct available. [music]
1:36:54somebody in his position. Neville had a
1:36:56week's run booked at the fine arts
1:36:58auditorium in Wilshire. He opened it by
1:37:00telling a full house that he'd been born
1:37:02out of his own skull [music] in a hotel
1:37:04room. A student named Freedom Barry was
1:37:07in the room and described what happened
1:37:09over the following 8 days in a lecture
1:37:11given in Cambria, California in
1:37:14September 1996.
1:37:17A man who had filled rooms for 21 years
1:37:19walks out on a Thursday and finds 9/10
1:37:22of his audience gone.
1:37:24He does the arithmetic from the stage
1:37:26because a lecturer always does. 270
1:37:29people who had paid to hear him on
1:37:31Monday made a decision about him during
1:37:33[music] the week. Then he comes back the
1:37:35following Monday and finds 12. 12 people
1:37:39in a hall built for hundreds
1:37:42in the city where his television program
1:37:44had run 4 days after [music] his 54th
1:37:47year of life had produced the only thing
1:37:49he considered worth reporting. They left
1:37:51because he had started describing what
1:37:53happened to him at 4 in the morning in a
1:37:55hotel in San Francisco. [music]
1:37:57His agent was a man named Freddy
1:37:59Messenger. And Freddy Messenger did what
1:38:02a competent agent does told Neville to
1:38:05stop telling the story. Every
1:38:07professional consideration was on the
1:38:08agent's side. The book sold on the law.
1:38:11Television had come from the law. The
1:38:13halls filled for the law. There was a
1:38:16working career underneath him. built
1:38:18over two decades from a basement
1:38:20apartment and one antidote about a skull
1:38:23was dismantling it inside a week. "Drop
1:38:26the story and the rooms will come back,"
1:38:27he said.
1:38:29On one side, a television slate, a
1:38:3115-year backlist, an agent, a national
1:38:34mailing list, a wife, a 17-year-old
1:38:37daughter, and the halls of 300 people
1:38:40who paid $2 each for the technique.
1:38:43against that an account of an event with
1:38:47one witness delivered in a Barbadian
1:38:49accent to Californians with a hurricane
1:38:51wind and swaddled baby in it and he
1:38:54understood perfectly well how it sounded
1:38:56and so from the platform he told it
1:38:58anyway. Neville Goddard 54 years old 37
1:39:02years out of bridged with the entire
1:39:05apparatus of a career assembled around a
1:39:07technique that worked answered him in
1:39:09eight words. Then I'll tell it to the
1:39:11bare walls," Neville said to his agent,
1:39:14Freddy Messenger.
1:39:16He was 54 when he said that. 13 years of
1:39:19life remained to him, and he spent them
1:39:21saying it anyway.
1:39:23The popular stories say that after 1959,
1:39:27Neville renounced the law, turned his
1:39:29back on manifestation, and taught only
1:39:31the promise. The transcripts of his
1:39:34final year say otherwise. On 31 of
1:39:36January 1972, he gives [music] newcomers
1:39:39a short portion of the law and two
1:39:41months later he opens an evening by
1:39:42promising both halves of it. Tonight we
1:39:45will take both the law and the promise,
1:39:47Neville said in justified [music]
1:39:48states.
1:39:50He demoted the law, kept it as the door
1:39:53and went on handing people the technique
1:39:56in the car and the apartment and the job
1:39:57for the same platform in the same hour
1:40:00for 13 more years.
1:40:02One more thing. Joseph Nathaniel Goddard
1:40:06died in 1959 aged 85 in Barbados. He
1:40:10left 10 children and he left each of
1:40:12them independently wealthy. Neville was
1:40:14careful with that word every time he
1:40:16said it from the platform.
1:40:18Go back to what that man did before
1:40:20breakfast. Every morning in a house on a
1:40:22small island, a merchant with an ice
1:40:24business and a 14-year-old's education
1:40:25sat down and went through the day ahead.
1:40:28He brought each man he would deal with
1:40:30before his mind's eye. settled the
1:40:32conversations in advance, [music] the
1:40:34words, the order, the ending. Then stood
1:40:36up, walked out into Bridgetown and had
1:40:39them. A teacher was absent from that
1:40:41practice, and so was a book, and so was
1:40:44any tradition he could name. Working it
1:40:46out alone took him one lifetime, and
1:40:49using it took him 50 years. And his
1:40:51fourth son said from a lecture platform
1:40:52in Los Angeles, that the source of it
1:40:56stayed a mystery to him. And in the year
1:40:58his father died, that son stood in an
1:41:00auditorium on Wilshire Boulevard [music]
1:41:03in front of 12 remaining people and told
1:41:05them that the entire world runs on what
1:41:08happened in that room before breakfast.
1:41:10Imagination is God. The outer world is a
1:41:14shadow thrown by the inner one reliably
1:41:16for everybody at every hour. Golgtha is
1:41:19happening inside their heads and so is
1:41:21the resurrection and a date has already
1:41:24been set for each of them. A father in
1:41:27Barbados decided how a day's
1:41:28conversations would go and his son 4,000
1:41:30mi away in 37 years later told an empty
1:41:34room that this is what reality is. In
1:41:39the middle of the 1960s, Neville Goddard
1:41:41went back on television on the Joe Pine
1:41:43show. These are supposed to be amazing.
1:41:45Pine broadcast out of LA and made his
1:41:48living on hostility, [music]
1:41:49interruption, ridicule, and a microphone
1:41:51out in the studio audience where members
1:41:53of the public queued up to have a go at
1:41:55the guest. Between 1965 and 1967,
1:42:00Neville was a frequent guest. 60 years
1:42:02old, silver-haired, the pinstriped suit,
1:42:05the sanded down Barbadian vows, a man
1:42:07who had spent three decades saying
1:42:10quietly that your imagination is God.
1:42:12sitting opposite a host whose whole
1:42:14trade was making the guest lose his
1:42:15footing. Every one of those broadcasts
1:42:17is missing. A thousand odd uncataloged
1:42:20reels from Pines's production company
1:42:22sit in a warehouse in Long Island City
1:42:25and they are the last plausible route to
1:42:28moving pictures of Neville Goddard.
1:42:31If you or anybody that you know [music]
1:42:33has any relationship to Pine's
1:42:36production company right now in this
1:42:38moment, we may have access to moving
1:42:41pictures of NevilleGD.
1:42:43I'm calling upon you if anybody knows
1:42:46about Pines's production company. Please
1:42:49find these and we can finally have the
1:42:51first moving picture of Neville Goddard.
1:42:56In 1966, he published Resurrection, the
1:42:58last fulllength book he wrote. Six more
1:43:01years of platform work followed, and the
1:43:04shelf closed there. From 1969 onward, he
1:43:07lectured at the Woman's University Club,
1:43:09540 South Catalina Street in Los
1:43:11Angeles, a club room rather than an
1:43:13auditorium. Chairs you unfolded, a
1:43:16lectturn, and along the front of the
1:43:18room, a row of student tape machines
1:43:20running because he let anyone record him
1:43:22[music] and asked for a share of exactly
1:43:24zero. Margaret Ruth Broom sat in those
1:43:27rooms for seven years
1:43:30and filled hundreds of cassettes. Her
1:43:32habit and the habit of a few dozen
1:43:34unnamed people beside her is the reason
1:43:36his voice exists today at all. By the
1:43:39end of the 60s, he was speaking twice a
1:43:41week to a club room that seated perhaps
1:43:43a hundred.
1:43:45And he did it for the rest of his life.
1:43:4613 years of smaller rooms.
1:43:48>> [music]
1:43:48>> The people in those chairs were mostly
1:43:51women, mostly middle-aged, many of them
1:43:53regulars who had followed him from the
1:43:55Wilshire Eel in the 50s. Broom wrote
1:43:58down what she saw from a folding chair,
1:44:00the gray pinstriped suit, scripture
1:44:03quoted verbatim at [music] length, with
1:44:05the book shut and his hand still, and
1:44:08one particular expression that crossed
1:44:09his fates, which he put into words this
1:44:11way. The smile the cat gets when he has
1:44:14swallowed the canary.
1:44:161971 ran to 34 dated talks roughly twice
1:44:21weekly through the 22nd of November. The
1:44:251972 calendar opens on the 28th of
1:44:28January and runs through the winter in
1:44:30the spring. What is man? On the 31st of
1:44:32January, justified states on the 3rd of
1:44:34April. Mitch Horowitz rates several from
1:44:38that final year among the strongest
1:44:40talks Neville ever gave. a man of 67 at
1:44:44the top of his powers in a club room
1:44:47twice a week. The last lecture anyone
1:44:50can put a date to was given on the 8th
1:44:52of May 1972.
1:44:55Its title is revelation.
1:44:58After that the date stopped. [music] He
1:45:01died on the 1st of October between those
1:45:03two days. Life 5 months with a venue of
1:45:06zero.
1:45:08an audience for zero of it in a single
1:45:10securely dated public appearance yet to
1:45:12surface anywhere. 5 months of silence at
1:45:15the end of 50 years of talking.
1:45:19Neville drank. He drank openly,
1:45:22habitually, and he said so from the
1:45:24platform whenever anybody raised it. In
1:45:271972, the year he died, he told a room
1:45:29that he had a full bottle of wine with
1:45:31cheese for lunch, and he had thoroughly
1:45:34enjoyed it. asked in 1968 how a man
1:45:37teaching what he taught could drink it
1:45:38all, he answered that he enjoyed it and
1:45:41left it there. God made the grain and
1:45:43the grape, he argued in the same
1:45:45lecture, and then gave human beings the
1:45:47intelligence to draw the alcohol out of
1:45:49both. So abstinence was a poor
1:45:51credential for anything. And he said in
1:45:53his own voice on a surviving tape that
1:45:55he could overdo anything in his world.
1:45:58The certificate names cerosis, a disease
1:46:01of duration rather than one evening.
1:46:04Across four decades of students,
1:46:06recorders, correspondents, [music] and
1:46:09memoirists, a description of Neville
1:46:11drunk slurring impaired or absent from a
1:46:13bookend lecture has yet to be produced
1:46:16by anybody. He told an audience about
1:46:19the bottle of wine in the same year his
1:46:21liver killed him, and he told them he
1:46:23enjoyed it.
1:46:25Frank Carter was Neville's driver, his
1:46:28friend, and his errand runner. He took
1:46:32him to social engagements, waited, ran
1:46:34errands while he waited, and in the last
1:46:36week of September 1972, drove him to the
1:46:39hospital to see his wife. When Carter
1:46:42began to speak about what he had seen,
1:46:44he lectured under the name,
1:46:47his mother's maiden name, and cited that
1:46:50name as his standing to speak at all.
1:46:53His age, his occupation, his address,
1:46:55the length of the friendship, the date
1:46:57of his own death, all of it is missing.
1:46:59And what survives of Frank Carter is his
1:47:01voice. In 1976,
1:47:04four years afterwards, he gave 11
1:47:06lectures about the night of the 30th of
1:47:08September 1972.
1:47:11All 11 survive as audio. Four were
1:47:13transcribed into a book. The other seven
1:47:15were left out because the tape quality
1:47:17was poor and they have stayed
1:47:18unpublished ever since. Seven recordings
1:47:21of a man describing the body of his
1:47:23friend sitting in an archive unheard by
1:47:25the people who wrote about his death.
1:47:27The first four came on consecutive
1:47:29Sundays that June, the 6th through the
1:47:3227th, in a small hired room in the first
1:47:35of them, he says flatly and more than
1:47:36once that he is positive he was the last
1:47:39person to see Neville alive.
1:47:43Catherine Goddard, Bill, the costume
1:47:46designer he had married in 1942, was in
1:47:48hospital that week. [music] Her illness
1:47:50went unrecorded by everyone. What Carter
1:47:53reports is Neville's mood about it, and
1:47:55the word he uses is happy. Bill was
1:47:58getting better. She was coming home.
1:48:00Neville told him she would soon be
1:48:01really well. On the Saturday, Carter
1:48:04says he practically spent the whole day
1:48:06with him. They drove to the hospital.
1:48:08Carter ran errands while Neville sat
1:48:10with his wife. They talked about the
1:48:12heat downtown, which was oppressive that
1:48:14week. At some point in it, Neville
1:48:17reached for Blake's word for ordinary
1:48:19earthly experience. Woodland. the
1:48:22generated world, the place a man walks
1:48:24through on his way somewhere else.
1:48:27There was a dinner party that evening
1:48:29early and Neville had accepted the
1:48:31invitation. Going meant leaving Bill in
1:48:34the hospital one more night. He went
1:48:36anyway, and Carter's explanation of why
1:48:38is a single anxious phrase. He was set
1:48:41on avoiding any disappointment to his
1:48:44hostess. The host has gone unnamed in
1:48:47every telling of this. the address
1:48:48unrecorded, the other guests around the
1:48:50table absent from the account entirely.
1:48:54But in many ways, it's written as if
1:48:57it's the last supper. The last person
1:48:59other than Frank Carter to see Neville
1:49:01Goddard alive was a woman whose name
1:49:03every single person present left
1:49:04unwritten.
1:49:07They arrived early. The first thing
1:49:08anyone wanted was a martini. Sometime
1:49:11before the meal, Neville handed Carter
1:49:14bread and cheese, and the words he used
1:49:16were, "For, "Here, Frank, take this."
1:49:19Then the hostess offered Carter a second
1:49:21martini, and Neville stopped her. "Wait
1:49:24here, Frank, take this."
1:49:27And he poured what was left in his own
1:49:29glass into Frank Carter's glass. Carter
1:49:31finished his drink for him. That is the
1:49:34last thing Neville Goddard gave anybody.
1:49:36bread, cheese, and wine out of his own
1:49:38cup, handed across a table to a friend
1:49:41at an early dinner in Los Angeles on a
1:49:43Saturday evening. Carter, telling it
1:49:45four years later, said he had little
1:49:47need to point out what had echoed. He
1:49:50left the parallel sitting where it was
1:49:52and went on with the rest of the night.
1:49:54After dinner, Neville stood up silently
1:49:56and said two words. We're going. And
1:49:59they left. Carter's account gives the
1:50:01drive home in one line. Back at
1:50:03Neville's place, the two of them agreed
1:50:05they had enough to drink for one night,
1:50:06talked a short while, and Carter went
1:50:09home. A goodbye at the door is absent
1:50:11from every telling.
1:50:14Carter went to bed early, and lay awake.
1:50:16There was a dog howling outside his
1:50:18window. He puts it in passing and moves
1:50:20along to the morning. Of everything
1:50:22anybody set down about NevilleGD's
1:50:24death, that dog is the only thing
1:50:26written while it was happening. In the
1:50:29morning, the telephone rang. It was
1:50:32Victoria Vicki, 30 years old, his
1:50:34daughter. She had driven over to collect
1:50:36her father so the two of them could go
1:50:38together and bring her mother home from
1:50:39the hospital. Frank, she said, I think
1:50:42daddy went during the night. Can you
1:50:45come over?
1:50:47He told her he was on his way. That is
1:50:50the fact sitting underneath the whole
1:50:51morning. A daughter drove across Los
1:50:53Angeles to reunite her parents and found
1:50:54her father dead. By the time Carter got
1:50:57there, the house was full of people.
1:51:00county officials, the authorities, the
1:51:01coroner, members of the family, friends
1:51:04of Victoria, moving through the rooms
1:51:06that had been quiet the night before,
1:51:09and the part of the house where Neville
1:51:12lay had been sealed off. The coroner
1:51:15found Carter in the hallway and asked
1:51:17him a question. Then he asked it again,
1:51:18and a third time after that, in the same
1:51:21words, standing in the same hallway
1:51:23while the house filled up around the two
1:51:25of them. Was Mr. Goddard a heavy
1:51:27drinker?
1:51:30Carter answered with the exact truth, as
1:51:32he had seen it with his own eyes the
1:51:34evening before. Neville had taken one
1:51:36martini and had left part of it in a
1:51:38glass. Carter knew precisely how much
1:51:40was left because he had drunk it
1:51:42himself. The two of them had gone home,
1:51:44agreed that that was sufficient, and
1:51:46gone to bed. His answer to the corner
1:51:48ran to five words. He didn't even have
1:51:50two. Carter then asked the corner why he
1:51:54wanted to know. The reply is long and it
1:51:57is the sentence around which the whole
1:51:59ending of the story turns. We can't
1:52:02[music] understand all the blood.
1:52:06Then the coroner took him past the seal
1:52:08and into the room. Neville was on his
1:52:10back, rigid, nude, his arms outstretched
1:52:14at either side
1:52:16as if crucified. A napkin [music] had
1:52:19been laid over his face. The coroner
1:52:21lifted the napkin. Underneath it was the
1:52:23expression of a man who had choked. The
1:52:25corner [music] lowered it and then
1:52:26lifted it a second time and showed
1:52:28Carter the face again. A second look in
1:52:30search of an explanation that the first
1:52:32look had failed to hand over. Then he
1:52:35told Carter what the room had told him.
1:52:36Apparently, he said the man had shed
1:52:38every drop of blood in his body. Two men
1:52:43from [music] Victoria's household
1:52:44cleaned it afterwards. They are the only
1:52:46other people who ever saw that room, and
1:52:48their names went unwritten as well.
1:52:50Frank Carter, standing in that doorway,
1:52:52looked at the position of the arms. He
1:52:54spent the next four years turning it
1:52:55over. Then he stood up in a room in Los
1:52:58Angeles and gave 11 lectures. And every
1:53:00one of them starts from that shape on
1:53:02the floor. The shape is available to
1:53:04anybody who's ever been inside a church.
1:53:07What it means comes later.
1:53:09For 50 years, [music] the answer to how
1:53:12Neville Goddard died has been a heart
1:53:14attack. In fact, in my earlier Neville
1:53:15Goddard episodes or videos, you'll hear
1:53:17me referred to Neville Goddard had died
1:53:20of a heart attack. I would look it up
1:53:21and that's what the original report was.
1:53:24In 2022, Mitch Horowitz obtained the
1:53:27California death certificate and
1:53:29reproduced [music] it. The immediate
1:53:30cause of death is rupture of the
1:53:32esophageal voraces
1:53:35with subsequent hemorrhage.
1:53:38The underlying cause is liver cerosis.
1:53:40The disposition is cremation. [music]
1:53:42Essophageal veraces are dilated veins
1:53:45running along the base of the throat
1:53:48above the stomach. Cerosis obstructs the
1:53:50flow of blood through the liver. The
1:53:52pressure backs up into those veins and a
1:53:54vessel wall a few cells thick gives way.
1:53:57The bleeding is fast and internal. A man
1:54:00can be at dinner table at 7:00 in the
1:54:02evening and dead by 2:00 in the morning
1:54:04and the room he dies in looks the way
1:54:06that room looked. That is the second of
1:54:08three corrections. It accounts for the
1:54:11volume of blood, for the choking
1:54:13expression, for the speed of it, and for
1:54:16a corner standing in a hallway asking a
1:54:19driver about drinking hours before
1:54:22anybody had examined delivered. The
1:54:24certificate gives a cause. It withholds
1:54:26the hour and it withholds the room. The
1:54:29family home from 1955 was 1025 Carroll
1:54:33Drive in West Hollywood and confirmation
1:54:35that he was still living there in 1972
1:54:38is yet to be produced. Popular accounts
1:54:40say apartment. Carter describes a house
1:54:42with a portion that could be sealed off.
1:54:45The following week, Carter was back in
1:54:47the house and found a handwritten note
1:54:49beside Neville's armchair. At the top of
1:54:51it sat a line from Isaiah 53:1 who has
1:54:55believed our report under that in
1:54:57Neville's hand two sentences. [music]
1:54:59This is my true experience of the last
1:55:01supper. Judas betrayed the messianic
1:55:03secret.
1:55:05Below those he had cited two further
1:55:07passages. Amos 8:11, "A famine in the
1:55:10land of hearing the words of the Lord,
1:55:12and Isaiah 22, the key of the house of
1:55:15David, the peg fastened in a sure place,
1:55:17and the burden hanging upon it, that
1:55:20will be cut down and fail." Carter
1:55:23called it a telegram from eternity. 3
1:55:26days later, the Los Angeles Times
1:55:27carried the obituary on the page C3. The
1:55:31headline runs to five words. Neville
1:55:33Goddard, religious topics author,
1:55:35speaker, a man who said he had been born
1:55:38out of his own skull,
1:55:41filed under religious topics. A second
1:55:44death notice ran a month afterwards on
1:55:47the 4th of November. The Barbados Press
1:55:50and the Metaphysical Journals of the
1:55:51period have yet to turn up a line about
1:55:53it.
1:55:54The body went to the Pierce brothers and
1:55:56from Pierce Brothers to the Chapel of
1:55:58the Pines Crematory in Los Angeles,
1:56:01which is the disposition the certificate
1:56:03specifies.
1:56:06And then the ashes went home.
1:56:08They were interred in the Garden Family
1:56:11Plot at Westbury Cemetery, Bridgetown,
1:56:13in [music] the parish of St. Michael,
1:56:15Barbados.
1:56:17Joseph Nathaniel Goddard, who decided
1:56:18each morning how that day's conversation
1:56:20would go, died in 1959 and lies in that
1:56:24plot. Will Helmina, who delivered a
1:56:26fourth son at Fontabel in February
1:56:27[music]
1:56:281905, died in 1941 and lies beside him.
1:56:32A headstone carries Neville's name and
1:56:34his dates. He had sailed out of
1:56:36Bridgetown on the 25th of September 1922
1:56:39aboard the SS Vasari. 17 years old,
1:56:435'9", single, bound for a brother's
1:56:45address in Brooklyn with a plan to
1:56:47become a dancer. 50 years later, he came
1:56:51back.
1:56:52Katherine Goddard, Bill to everyone who
1:56:54knew her, was in a hospital bed on the
1:56:57night her husband died. She had been
1:56:59getting better. Victoria was driving out
1:57:01on the Sunday morning to bring her home.
1:57:03Her last sight of Neville was a visitor
1:57:05in a ward on a Saturday afternoon,
1:57:07cheerful, certain she would soon be
1:57:09well, [music] who then left her there
1:57:11one more day to keep a dinner
1:57:12engagement.
1:57:14She was 65 years old, and she had 27
1:57:17months left. For all 27 of those months,
1:57:20whenever the subject came up, she used
1:57:23one word for what had happened to her
1:57:25husband, and [music] the word was his
1:57:27ascension.
1:57:28Frank Carter
1:57:31heard her say it more than once. [music]
1:57:33He let it pass every time she offered
1:57:36the way a person states a fact everyone
1:57:38in the room already has. The one time
1:57:40she'd added anything was February 1974
1:57:43in the middle of a conversation about
1:57:44something else. Oh, by the way, when I
1:57:47fused Neville,
1:57:50she said that much and moved on. 11
1:57:53months later on the 1st of January 1975,
1:57:56she died in Los Angeles at 67, the same
1:58:00age he [music] was. Frank Carter waited
1:58:03nearly 4 years. Then in June of 76 on
1:58:06four consecutive Sundays across more
1:58:08lectures into the following year, he
1:58:10stood in front of a small metaphysical
1:58:12meeting in Los Angeles and tried to
1:58:14explain what he had been shown on that
1:58:17floor. He used his mother's maiden name
1:58:19when he spoke, Yammen.
1:58:22What he built across those 11 lectures
1:58:23was scripture. Neville's name traced
1:58:25through Hebrew, through Greek, through
1:58:27Egyptian. Nefit, the cloud, Osiris and
1:58:29Assaar, the letters painted on a mummy
1:58:31case. Fileon, Moses, the sultry, the
1:58:35coriander seed, the dinner party as the
1:58:36last supper, the bread and the cheese as
1:58:39the bread, the poured martini as the
1:58:40cup, Judas as the one who reveals the
1:58:43secret rather than the one who sells the
1:58:45man. A death written into the book 3,000
1:58:48years before the lady reached the floor.
1:58:50read his history. Most of it comes apart
1:58:52on contact. Taken as grief, it's the
1:58:55most legible document in the whole
1:58:57archive.
1:58:59The alternative was one sentence. His
1:59:01closest friend, aged 67, had bled to
1:59:03death on the floor of a house on a
1:59:05Saturday night alone while Carter lay
1:59:07awake across the city, listening to a
1:59:09dog howl outside his window. The
1:59:12mystic's death and the medical death are
1:59:14built from one identical set of details.
1:59:16The bread and cheese, the poor drink,
1:59:18the sudden we're going, the dog, the
1:59:20sealed room, all of it.
1:59:22Both of them are inside that one man.
1:59:24Two deaths, one set of facts. I'm
1:59:27setting them aside, side by side,
1:59:29leaving them here. A year after the
1:59:31death, Carter was winding an antique
1:59:33clock in his own house. It stopped at
1:59:3410:00 while his hand was still on the
1:59:37key, and it stayed stopped. The same
1:59:39night, he said, Neville came into his
1:59:41dream, repeating two words. Bethany
1:59:43[music] 10. Bethany 10. This is Carter's
1:59:46account.
1:59:48By 1976, you could buy exactly two
1:59:51NevilleGddard titles. Your faith is your
1:59:53Fortune and Resurrection, Seed Time and
1:59:55Harvest had gone out of print and the
1:59:59rest of his list with it. 34 years of
2:00:01lecturing three nights a week in New
2:00:03York in Los Angeles in San Francisco, 15
2:00:06books, a weekly television series. Two
2:00:08books were left on a shelf. The Los
2:00:11Angeles Times had already filed the
2:00:12epitap on page C3 4 days later. Neville
2:00:16Goddard, religious topics, author
2:00:17speaker
2:00:19divorce and company kept whatever they
2:00:20kept in print for another 30 years in
2:00:22those beige covers unadvertised in
2:00:25garages and hall closets across Southern
2:00:27California set the other half of them.
2:00:30Hundreds of cassettes taped by students
2:00:32he had allowed to run their machines.
2:00:34The man was out of print. His voice was
2:00:36in boxes.
2:00:38Victoria Goddard was born in New York on
2:00:42the 28th of June 1942. 4 months later,
2:00:45her father was a private in a medical
2:00:47detachment in Camp Poke, Louisiana on an
2:00:50enlistment record that described him as
2:00:53separated without dependence. For 9
2:00:54months, he lay in an army cot in that
2:00:57hutman and slept by his own account on
2:00:59the seventh floor of a building on
2:01:01Washington Square. Walking the rooms,
2:01:03the dark, putting his hands on his own
2:01:05furniture, standing over his daughter in
2:01:07her crib. She was the reason a man in a
2:01:11bunk in Louisiana did that. And she was
2:01:13the four-month-old. Her father was
2:01:15honorably discharged on the 15th of
2:01:17March, 1943, and came home to that
2:01:20apartment [music] and to her. Then she
2:01:22grew up in a city her father had reached
2:01:24by ship in a family whose income came
2:01:26from telling strangers that the world
2:01:28obeys imagination. Westlake school for
2:01:31girls Russell Sage College English deans
2:01:34list class of 1964 then a working life
2:01:38and it ran in two long stretches.
2:01:41The first was television. She became
2:01:42director of auction at KCT the Los
2:01:46Angeles public station. the person who
2:01:48ran the on-air auction, the annual week
2:01:50in which a public channel sells donated
2:01:52goods [music] live to viewers to keep
2:01:54itself on the air another year. Her
2:01:56father's own television series had gone
2:01:59out 12 miles across town on channel 11
2:02:01in 1955, and every foot of it is lost.
2:02:05His daughter spent a career raising the
2:02:07money that keeps a television station
2:02:09alive. The second stretch was the school
2:02:11more than 25 years at Harvard Westlake
2:02:13in several roles at the institution she
2:02:16had attended herself when it was still
2:02:18Westlake. What her obituary says she
2:02:20cherished was the community service
2:02:22hours she spent with middle school
2:02:23children. Summers in Barbados her whole
2:02:26life and cousins on the island she kept
2:02:28up with to [music] the end. The dogs
2:02:30came through Pet orphans of Southern
2:02:32California and the memorial gifts at the
2:02:34end were directed there and to a
2:02:36scholarship endowment at the school. She
2:02:38stayed unmarried and childless. Her
2:02:41survivors are cousins and the great
2:02:42nieces and great nephews of the Goddard
2:02:44family and friends she had held on to
2:02:47since school. Joseph, her half-brother
2:02:49in Barbados, went [music] first. She was
2:02:51the one who drove out on the morning of
2:02:53the 1st of October, 1972 to bring her
2:02:56parents home. She was the one who found
2:02:58him. Across 52 years she lived. After
2:03:01that morning, her father's name stayed
2:03:02out of her mouth in public. Zero
2:03:05interviews, zero statements, zero
2:03:07forwards or remarks at a conference. Her
2:03:10own obituary written by people who loved
2:03:11her leaves his teaching unmentioned.
2:03:14Victoria Goddard died in Santa Monica on
2:03:17the 25th of September, 2024 at the age
2:03:21of 82. She carried whatever she knew for
2:03:2382 years and took every bit of it with
2:03:26her. Her death notice runs a few hundred
2:03:29words. The college is [music] in it and
2:03:31the station and the school and the dogs
2:03:32and the lawn bowling and the Dodgers and
2:03:35the summers on the island. Her father
2:03:37appears once and the sentence places him
2:03:40from Barbados. A man who stood in the
2:03:43halls in three cities for 34 years and
2:03:45told the people in them that they were
2:03:48God. His daughter's obituary calls him a
2:03:50man from Barbados. In 2005, a historian
2:03:54of American esoteric religion named
2:03:55Mitch Horowitz published searching for
2:03:57Neville Goddard in Science of Mind, the
2:04:00first serious journalism about the man
2:04:02since the New Yorker in September of
2:04:041943.
2:04:06Transcripts started appearing online
2:04:08free. The cassettes his students had
2:04:10recorded in folding chairs went up on
2:04:12the internet archive. Then the platforms
2:04:14did the rest. A man who emptied a 300
2:04:17seat auditorium down to 12 people now
2:04:20reaches millions of them. His voice
2:04:22plays in cars and kitchens and gyms and
2:04:24countries he had yet to hear of. The
2:04:27books are back in print in a dozen
2:04:29competing editions.
2:04:31His widow died 27 months after him. His
2:04:34daughter stayed silent for 52 years. His
2:04:37son in Barbados preferred other names,
2:04:40and a claim on the estate of any of them
2:04:42has yet to surface. The books and the
2:04:44tapes drifted into an ownerless commons,
2:04:47copied endlessly by anyone with a
2:04:49scanner. The material that emptied that
2:04:51room is the material that lifted the
2:04:54internet.
2:04:55136 recordings of his voice survived.
2:04:58Roughly 110 hours, nearly all taped by
2:05:01students who brought a machine.
2:05:04A man
2:05:06went out live on Los Angeles television
2:05:08every Sunday for 26 weeks in 1955. In
2:05:11every foot of that tape is gone. His
2:05:15voice is what remains. and machine-made
2:05:18copies of it circulate with AI versions
2:05:20every day on the same platforms. So,
2:05:22anything you hear attributed to him
2:05:23deserves a source older than 2020.
2:05:28God is human imagination.
2:05:31Every person alive is God in the act of
2:05:34forgetting. The Bible is a blueprint of
2:05:37an experience rather than a history of
2:05:39one. Its characters are states a person
2:05:43passes through its geography. The human
2:05:46body and Golgatha, the place of the
2:05:48skull is inside of your head. The law is
2:05:51how you get what you want. The promise
2:05:53is what happens to you regardless of
2:05:56what you want. Four experiences in a
2:05:58fixed order on a date already set. The
2:06:00skull, the sun, the splitting of the
2:06:03temple, the dove. He said he was an
2:06:06ordinary man who happened to be early.
2:06:10The whole of it rests on one instruction
2:06:13testable tonight at zero [music] cost.
2:06:15Assume the feeling of your wish
2:06:17fulfilled.
2:06:19Assume the feeling of the wish fulfilled
2:06:22and stay faithful to that assumption.
2:06:24[music]
2:06:25That is what he taught.
2:06:2934 years, three nights a week from
2:06:31memory without a note in his hand.
2:06:34For 34 years, he taught that the outer
2:06:38world [music] is a shadow cast by the
2:06:40inner one. He died of a vein, a liver,
2:06:43and a volume of blood.
2:06:46I've carried both of those throughout
2:06:48this episode, and I'm putting them down
2:06:51together, unreconciled.
2:06:54There's no need for us to apologize for
2:06:56it. a tidy version has to throw away
2:06:58either the certificate or the man and
2:07:02both of them are real. I don't think it
2:07:04undermines his credibility that he drank
2:07:07a lot or that he was an alcoholic
2:07:11and he would have an answer to it. I
2:07:13think we can accurately guess because he
2:07:16gave it from a platform in November of
2:07:181969,
2:07:203 years ahead of time. The body is a
2:07:24garment.
2:07:26His own began in 1905 and was departing
2:07:29in its 60s. He told them so while he was
2:07:32still standing up in front of them. And
2:07:35then there's the last picture and
2:07:38everything in this episode has pointed
2:07:39[music] at it from the first minute. A
2:07:43house in West Hollywood on a Sunday
2:07:45morning. A room sealed off by a county
2:07:46corner. A man of 67 on his back on the
2:07:50floor, nude with a napkin over his face.
2:07:53every drop of blood gone out of him,
2:07:56arms outstretched.
2:07:58Frank Carter actually had this vision
2:08:00before Neville died and went to Neville
2:08:03and told Neville of this vision. When
2:08:05Neville heard the vision, Neville said,
2:08:06"You saw me as Judas."
2:08:09There is a section in the Bible where
2:08:10Judas dies and [music]
2:08:12all the blood goes out of him or there's
2:08:14a reference to blood. And Neville would
2:08:17always say that I am Judas, the one who
2:08:19betrays the messianic secrets, that he
2:08:22was revealing the secrets of the
2:08:24Messiah.
2:08:27Frank Carter saw that shape and spent 11
2:08:31years lecturing on it.
2:08:34I'm going to leave [music] it exactly
2:08:35where it is. Let you make what you will
2:08:38of it.
2:08:40In September
2:08:421922, a 17-year-old boy left Barbados on
2:08:45the SS Visari with a brother's Brooklyn
2:08:48address written on a manifest and a plan
2:08:50to become a dancer. 50 years later,
2:08:53[music] he came back in an urn to a
2:08:56family plot in Westbury Cemetery in
2:08:58Bridgetown in the same parish as the two
2:09:00rented acres of rock his family held at
2:09:03$8 a [music] year. He is home. His voice
2:09:08is everywhere else.
2:09:11Neville has had an incredible effect on
2:09:13my life. His teachings have taught me
2:09:16the nature of who I am and how to create
2:09:20my world. I've utilized his teachings
2:09:22and have taught them and have seen
2:09:25incredible success by simply imagining
2:09:29[music] my reality and then watching it
2:09:31out picture around me.
2:09:33Nobody taught it better than Neville.
2:09:37And Neville went beyond that teaching
2:09:39saying that this ability, this unique
2:09:41power that we have of imagining
2:09:43something in our mind and it becoming
2:09:45reality is just a part of who you are
2:09:48because you are God. Every single one of
2:09:51you that's listening is God crucified in
2:09:54your body, forgotten who you are.
2:09:58The sleeping gods, that's who we are.
2:10:01And each and every one of us carry this
2:10:04within ourselves.
2:10:07And he was at the forefront. He was the
2:10:08beginning. The person that said, "You,
2:10:11you are God and you will awaken." And he
2:10:15explained the way it happened to him.
2:10:18You don't necessarily have to believe
2:10:20it. If you've experienced the promise, I
2:10:23would love for you to put it in the
2:10:24comments.
2:10:26He would claim people that came to his
2:10:28audience had gone through the promise
2:10:29and he could predict almost by the day
2:10:32when they would have the experience. He
2:10:34would say the dove is coming in six days
2:10:36and it [music] would happen. So it was
2:10:38really amazing to watch.
2:10:41He is home.
2:10:44I know this has been a long one. I just
2:10:45want you to hear the whole story. You've
2:10:48heard many lectures and you see a lot of
2:10:50AI Neville out there, but this is the
2:10:52complete story taken from all his
2:10:53lectures. As best as I could put it
2:10:55together, there's still so much more to
2:10:58know about Neville. And maybe someday
2:11:00we're going to see this on Netflix or
2:11:02Amazon Prime. Somebody will actually
2:11:04have the balls to totally film the
2:11:06complete movie, The Man Awakened as God.
2:11:12Maybe it will be a movie for 12 people
2:11:14in the back of the room, but it still
2:11:16has something profound and powerful
2:11:18within it.
2:11:20Before I go, I want to invite you to
2:11:22join the Reality Revolution community.
2:11:24You can find the link in the
2:11:24description. We have weekly group
2:11:26coaching sessions, and you're going to
2:11:27find a lot of unique and exclusive
2:11:29content that you used to be able to find
2:11:31the channel, but can't find anymore. So,
2:11:33be sure to click on the link if you want
2:11:34to join us. I'm sending all my light,
2:11:37all my love to everyone listening. Thank
2:11:38you for sticking through all the way to
2:11:40the end of this one because Neville's
2:11:42story is your story. Each of our
2:11:44stories, we are all awakening as God.
2:11:48For now, we live in the world of the law
2:11:50and we focus on imagining and watching
2:11:52the world around us change. The promise
2:11:54comes. There's no need for us to worry
2:11:56about it for it will come for all of us.
2:11:59At least that's what Neville says.
2:12:02You can find all episodes of the reality
2:12:05revolution at there
2:12:07realityrevolution.com.
2:12:11You are cordially invited to join me
2:12:13[music] in Nashville
2:12:18on January [music] 29th through the 31st
2:12:21where you can undergo a powerful process
2:12:24that [music] I've developed over the
2:12:26last decade. This is the new science of
2:12:29manifestation. Everything you ever
2:12:31wanted, all your dreams can come true.
2:12:33You can live in the greatest life you
2:12:35can imagine by undergoing this process.
2:12:38I take you through 10 sessions where we
2:12:40quantum jump into your greatest
2:12:42timeline. You experience profound love,
2:12:45healing, and unlimited [music]
2:12:47prosperity. By undergoing this process
2:12:50over 3 days, you meet the version of you
2:12:53that's living the very best life that
2:12:55you could live. You meet them, you
2:12:57entangle with them, and they merge with
2:12:59you. And people are coming out of these
2:13:01events completely changed. Their
2:13:03identity shifted and the whole world
2:13:05starts to rearrange around them. This is
2:13:07lightning in a bottle. It's one of the
2:13:09most exciting things that we have
2:13:11discovered [music] and I'm inviting you
2:13:13to join me in this powerful experience.
2:13:16You can find the link for tickets below
2:13:18at www.brianscottlive.com/nashville.
2:13:24Welcome to the reality revolution.
2:13:28>> [music]
2:13:33[music]
2:13:36>> We return you now to your local
2:13:38announcement.

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