The Man Who Awakened As God - The Neville Goddard Story

For 13 years, in front of every audience he addressed, Neville insisted the statement was literal. The skull was a sealed tomb and he was sealed inside it. He used the word tomb, then went back and specified an actual tomb. Awake in the dark in a bone chamber with the walls close. Neville taught that the Bible is a blueprint rather than a history. Scripture, in his reading, records a psychological event that is yet to happen to most people, described in advance and in detail. Welcome to the Reality Revolution. I'm your host, Brian Scott. And boy, oh boy, this episode is a long time coming because we're going to do the deepest of deep dives on Neville Goddard, something I've been working on for almost a decade. Neville Goddard changed my life. His teaching showed me the way to help me understand my place in the universe and how to create my reality. And I've done my best to share as much as I possibly could from his lectures and teachings But I really haven't found a place that totally tells the story of Neville as he shared it, the complete and total story of the man who awakened as God. For 34 years, a man stood on platforms in New York and Los Angeles and told whoever came the same 3 things: God is human imagination, every person alive is God in the act of forgetting, And the Bible is a blueprint of an experience each of us will undergo in our own body, at our own hour, on a date already fixed. His name was Neville Lancelot Goddard, and he lectured under one word: Neville. 15 books carry that name. A Los Angeles television station handed him Sunday afternoons in 1955. Somewhere between 500 and 600 of his talks survive as text. And 136 as recordings of his actual voice, because he let anybody in the room run a tape machine and asked for a share of exactly zero. He spoke without a note in sight, 3 nights a week for decades. Tickets were 25 cents in New York in the '40s and about $2 in Los Angeles in the '50s. 200 people in a hall on West 49th Street in 1943. 400 to 500 by 1946. And he did it in a voice he built himself, a Barbadian boy's rounder Anglo-Caribbean accent sanded down over 40 years into something clipped and sonorous, with the seams still audible in the earliest tapes. Millions of people have found Neville in the last 10 years, almost entirely through short clips, almost entirely through the technique, my own route. Was slower. The internet has flattened Neville Goddard into a technique, a formant, a script, a formula for a car or an apartment or a person who has stopped answering. His life has stayed almost entirely untold, and the life is the strangest thing about him. A boy raised on 2 rented acres of rock in Barbados. A tango dancer on Broadway. A broke man in a basement on the Upper West Side. Taught Hebrew and scripture by a Black Ethiopian rabbi who lived 3 blocks away. A private in the Medical Corps who walked out of the United States Army by going to sleep. And a man who said that at 4 in the morning in a San Francisco hotel room, he was born out of his own skull. Ahead of you are 4 experiences he dated to the day and then described in public for 13 years. In the same words every time. An auditorium in Los Angeles that emptied from 300 down to 30, and then down to 12, in 8 days while he kept talking. And a death that has been reported wrongly for more than 50 years, until recently, including by people who love him. 3 things almost everybody believes about Neville Goddard turned out to be wrong, each of them in a way that makes a better scene than the error did. The first is a few minutes away. Neville spent 34 years teaching that the outer world is a shadow thrown by the inner one, that circumstances follow assumption reliably. Then he died in a house in West Hollywood of something physical, specific, and irreversible, and the death certificate names it in 3 words. Margaret Runyon studied with Neville in Los Angeles in the mid-'50s and left the sharpest sentence anyone wrote about being in a room with him. Nobody was really sure who he was or where he had come from. The past exists— registers, manifests, and court files in 3 counties— most of it read for the first time in the last 5 years. Every frame of him in this video is a photograph, a document, a newspaper page, or a hall he stood in. Moving pictures of Neville Goddard have yet to surface anywhere on Earth. The 1955 kinescopes are lost, and so are the Joe Pyne appearances. 1,000 cataloged reels in a Long Island City warehouse are the last plausible hope. So let me take you back. Fontabelle sits on the coast just northwest of Bridgetown, on the leeward side of Barbados, where the sea goes flat and the town begins. On 19 February 1905, in a house there, Wilhelmina Ellis Goddard delivered her 4th child and 4th son. They named him Neville Lancelot. 12 children were born into that family and 10 survived— 9 boys and 1 girl. The household was Anglican— church on Sunday, the Book of Common Prayer, the King James Bible read aloud at home by a father. Every image in every lecture he ever Came out of that book, learned in that house before he was 10 years old. The brothers arrived at roughly one a year. Cecil in 1901, Victor in 1902, Lawrence in 1903, then Neville, then Herbert, Fred, and Bruce, then the one girl Hilda in 1909, then Joseph, and last one of all John in 1919. 14 years behind Neville. And the one who grew up to captain the West Indies. Cecil, Victor, and Lawrence return at the end of this in a room where Neville looks down at his own body on a bed, and every one of them looks straight through him. At about 7 years old, a woman told him he would one day do something so significant that centuries afterward, 3 men would be remembered for what they gave humanity, and he would be one of the 3. Her name has gone. He repeated the story from a Los Angeles platform in 1954 at 49. Something began happening to him at 7 years old. He would find himself wide awake, experiencing himself as an immensity, an infinite ocean in storm, edgeless, moving in every direction at once, while he went on standing where he stood, a small boy on a small island. 2 things at one time, and he was both of them. Roughly once a month for 5 years. At 12, it stopped, and the sea stayed away for the rest of his life. He gave this account from the platform in a lecture called Esau and Jacob on the 13th of November, 1959, at 54. The ocean was the first strange thing that had ever happened to him, and it had happened 47 years earlier. Barbados schooling in those years ran on scripture and the cane. Verses were learned by heart and given back aloud, and a master's arm settled who had them right. One morning the question came around to Neville. The verse was the one where a man is told to take up his bed and walk. The boy gave the wording of it exactly because it had been read aloud in his father's house since before he could read it himself. The headmaster told him to bring in the Bible that said so. 12 children were born into that family, and the Bibles in it were accounted for along with everything else. The one the verse had come out of stayed in the house on the 2 acres where his father read it in the evenings. The boy went back to school with empty hands. The headmaster had a Bible of his own, opened the desk in front of him. His translation carried a different word. Where the boy had said bed, the headmaster's book said couch. He was caned for it, and he bled from the buttocks to the knees. The walk home was made in that condition. His father looked at him, went out of the house and down the road after the headmaster, and the neighbors got between the two men and pulled him off. Parish schools in Barbados were small rooms in small districts, so whatever was said in that road was said in front of people who knew both families. Neville was out of the school by the following morning. Before the year was out, the headmaster shot himself. He told it from the platform in a lecture called The Potter's House, and again compressed into a few sentences in Esau and Jacob on the 13th of November, 1959. Both tellings turn on the same two words: bed and couch. A child opened to the bone for quoting a book correctly by a man holding one edition of it and sure of it. 50 years of platforms followed, and the whole of them Or about what that book is for. The received version says the Goddards were rich, a merchant dynasty, a family practically owned an island. Neville's grandfather, Joseph Josiah Goddard, worked as a laborer at Newcastle Plantation in St. John's Parish, blending rum on the side and speculating in livestock. The family rented 2 acres of rocky land at $8 a year, and the road ended well short of them. They ate what they grew— yams, sweet potatoes, etos, corn, beans, peas— and kept whatever small livestock 2 acres of rock would carry. Neville's father walked out of St. John's Boys' School at 14 and went down to Bridgetown to find a wage. All of it traces back to one syndicated Hollywood gossip column, Jimmy Fiddler, 1955. An enormously wealthy family which owned a whole island. Everything since is a copy of a copy. The Goddard fortune is entirely real. It is one of the largest private-built fortunes in the Caribbean, and Neville left before it existed. Joseph Nathaniel Goddard was born on the 24th of November, 1874, at Clifton Hall Woods in the parish of St. John, into precisely that poverty. By about 1890, he was in Bridgetown, 16 years old, looking for work. He married Wilhelmina Ellis Hinkson, daughter of John William Ellis Hinkson. And in 1900, he went into a partnership with Norman Roach and Company to run an ice house on Broad Street. Block ice cut from the lakes and rivers of North America in winter, packed in sawdust, shipped south in insulated holds, sold across a counter in Bridgetown at 12 cents a pound. On a tropical island in 1900, ice was a luxury good. Hotels, ships, provisioning the houses of the merchant class. The man selling it had been raised on 2 acres of rock. Joseph Nathaniel could look at a herd of animals and price it. A clerk once watched him assess 25 Venezuelan cattle at 19,000 pounds of meat. After slaughter, the scales put him 100 pounds out. The business widened into a ship chandlery, grocery, liquor, and meat provisioning vessels in and out of Bridgetown Harbour. So sea captains and ship's officers ate at the Goddard table. At one of those dinners in 1919, the father put down his knife and told the room there would be another war in about 20 years— Germany and Japan with America and France on the same side. It happened in 1939, 20 years to the year. Neville told that story from a platform the 21st of June, 1971, and declined to call it a lucky guess. Every morning before he left for the stores, Joseph Nathaniel Goddard sat down and went through the day ahead of him. He brought each man he would deal with that day before his mind's eye. Each of those men then said what he wanted them to say. The whole exchange got settled in advance— the words, the order, the ending. Then he stood up and went into Bridgetown and had those conversations. He worked it out on his own in a house with 10 children in it and used it for 50 years. Years later, after sitting in a New York hall and listening to his 4th son lecture, the old man explained the method to Neville put it into a lecture without dressing it up. How he got hold of this I do not know, he said, in the order your conversations are right, on the 30th of May. The house those conversations paid for held 10 children, a mother-in-law and servants on a merchant's margins, the brothers jostling over clothes and second helpings, and a father downstairs who had already settled how his day would go. The second son was Edward Victor Goddard, Born the 2nd of June, 1902, 3 years ahead of Neville, and the business brain of the family. Victor got the education the family could afford for exactly one son— Harrison College in Barbados, then business administration at the Ontario Business College in Belleville, Ontario. At 18, Victor walked to work and home again along the widest part of Bridgetown's Main Street. On that stretch stood a building that filled an entire block. The sign on it read P.N. Roach and Company. Twice a day, going out and coming back, Victor stopped and looked up at the sign. Every time he read a different one. In his own mind, the letters said J.N. Goddard and Sons. He did that for 2 years. Once he mentioned it to his mother, she discouraged him. The family was poor. The building was the largest on the street. The arithmetic spoke for itself. 2 years on, the business inside that building failed and the block came up for sale. An acquaintance of the father offered to buy it for them, their signature as security. His own lawyer sent in to bid so that rival bidders would stay ignorant of who stood behind the offer. Terms: reduce the principal over 10 years at 6%. The Goddards took the building. 20 years after Victor's death, the same stranger left Victor's side of the family an estate in excess of a quarter million dollars tax-free. And on the 13th of October, 1921, in a Bridgetown side street, Joseph Nathaniel Goddard and his son Victor opened a grocery, meat, and ice shop and put the father's name over the door: J.N. Goddard and Sons. Most of the early money came from rum. Bottles Goddard's Gold Braid, the father's name on the label. Neville was 16 and in the house on the day it opened. Within 12 months of that shop opening, Neville was gone. 3 years to the day after it opened, on the 13th of October, 1924, the family bought the icehouse building on Broad Street and opened the first refrigerated cold storage meat store in Bridgetown, a bakery in 1939, department stores and hotels in 1943, and the hotels led into airline catering, the core of everything else since. In 1962, they opened a supermarket at Fontebelle, the district where Neville was born. Today, the company trades on the Barbados Stock Exchange as Goddard Enterprises Limited. From Canada in the north to Uruguay in the south. When the father died, he divided his estate into 10 equal parts and gave Neville a full share. A son, 4,000 miles away, who had put a single day into the business only by being born into it. On the 25th of September, 1922, the SS Fasari came into the port of New York. Among the passengers was a 17-year-old British subject out of Barbados. A clerk wrote down what could be measured. Height: 5 feet 9. Marital status: single. Destination: his brother, Al Goddard. 138A Dean Street, Brooklyn. That brother was Arthur Lawrence Goddard, 18, a year ahead of him into America, later a doctor in Illinois. I arrived in New York in 1922, he stated in his lecture I Remember When. He stayed one week at Dean Street, then went out on his own. Great mansions between 5th and 7th Avenue, servants' stables behind the houses. A 17-year-old from a rented 2 acres On foot, looking up at them. Clerk first. The word he wrote on his own marriage license. Macy's at $18 a week. Elevator operator. Shipping clerk. On the New York State Census of the 1st of January, 1925, he is recorded at 401 West 57th Street in Hell's Kitchen. Slaughterhouses, rail yards, and tenements about a mile and an entire world from the mansions on Fifth. 2 years to the day after the shop opened in Bridgetown, on October 13th, 1923, Neville married Mildred Mary Hughes in Manhattan. Certificate number 35968. He was 18 and gave his occupation as clerk. She was 22, English, born in Lancashire in 1901. The license recorded them both as 20, which was wrong twice over. A deputy city clerk named McCormick performed it. Their son, Joseph Neville Goddard, was born on the 19th of May, 1924. Across 500 surviving lectures, Neville mentions his son Joseph barely at all. A boy born in 1924, a witness at his father's second wedding in 1942, a Marine at Guadalcanal by 1943, and then silence from a man who used his own life as evidence 3 nights a week for 34 years. The marriage was finished almost immediately. By Neville's own summary, they knew on the first day. Divorce in New York State required proving adultery in open court, so the two of them stayed apart. That marriage comes back into this as a courtroom shoplifting charge and the most surprising thing he ever did to another human being. In 1925, the Hippodrome on 6th Avenue— the largest theater in the world, 5,200 seats, elephants, And diving horses in a water tank under the stage. Neville Goddard became a dancer. Inside the year he was working Europe, Ciro's in London, the Winter Garden in Berlin, the Ambassador in Paris, billed as Half an Act, Amérique and Neville, and billed as stars of all 3 rooms. On the 26th of October 1925, the London Daily Sketch published photographs of him in performance costume. straps and sequins, dramatic poses for a European society readership. A 20-year-old out of Fontainebleau printed in a London newspaper wearing about 6 inches of strap. Israel Regardie, who watched him dance and wrote him up 20 years later, said, power in repose, the effortless ease of the cat with its undisguised sensuality. By his own telling, he went from $18 a week at Macy's to $500 a week dancing, plus £100 a week for 3 months in London. Mitch Horowitz reads, the theatrical career as hand-to-mouth, propped up between engagements by the elevator car and the shipping room. He came home aboard the SS America on the 23rd of December, 1925. The certificate of arrival from that crossing, number 13-14-3841, made him an American 18 years later. Then the grind of a specialty dance act. Keith State Theater, New Brunswick, January 1926. Buffalo the week after. The Aldine in Wilmington that August. A New Year's dance at the Shore Club in Mamaroneck. In 1926, at 21, he spent part of a season at a private club at Larchmont on the Sound in Westchester County, staying there with a friend who managed the place. There was dancing downstairs. A dancer by trade, with a whole evening of it in in front of him. He went up to his room instead and took a book off the table. The book was Edwin Arnold's The Light of Asia, a long poem about the life of the Buddha. He read a page of it, possibly 2. Edwin Arnold published it in 1879, 8 books of blank verse on the life of Siddhartha, and it sold in the hundreds of thousands on both sides of the Atlantic. The sort of book that sits on a table in a club. Between 10 and 12 hours later, He came back into the room on the floor cataleptic, the body stiff, and the book where it had fallen. What he said about the interval he said the same way for the rest of his life. He had been in an infinite sea of light, vibrant, living liquid, and the whole of everything there was had been inside it. 21 years old, and Abdullah was 7 years in front of him. The first lecture was 14 years off, and the 4 dated experiences this film ends on were 33. Same year. A medium named Arthur Ford kept an apartment at 315 West 97th Street and ran séances out of it. Neville went to one. About 30 people sat down in the dark, chairs in a ring, the lamp off, the door shut, and a room full of adults agreeing to those terms before anything started. Lights began to move across the carpet, small, pale, drifting over the pile at ankle height while the room followed them. Neville put his hand flat on one. It sparked under his fingers. Phosphorus. A phosphorescent preparation suspended in oil spread over the rug, glowing wherever the fibers were disturbed. A trick sold to the mediumship trade and worked in darkened rooms all over America. 21 years old, a dancer by occupation, and he had it on his fingers at the first sitting he ever attended. Agitation was the whole of the effect— a shoe across the pile, a hand, a drought under the door— and the glow came up. He said so out loud in the room with the lights up. Ford said he was tired. 42 years on, Arthur Ford was the most famous psychic in America. Bishop James Pike of the Episcopal Diocese of California had lost a son, and Ford undertook to put the father in touch with the boy. A séance between the two men went out on television, and millions of people watched a bishop weep on camera. Pike wrote the whole business up in a book, The Other Side, and it sold in numbers. Ford had become the public face of American spiritualism, and his word carried further than that of any clergyman arguing with him. On the 11th of November, 1968, from a platform, Neville told a room what he had touched in 1926. He said the two of them had met again in New York in the years between that Ford presented himself as a reformed man and that the performance left him unconvinced. Ford died in 1973. A biography by Alan Spraggett and William Rauscher went through the private papers he had left behind, and the advanced research on the Pike séance was sitting in them— the sitters' names, the family details, the particulars gathered before the broadcast and delivered during it in the voices of the dead. Neville had been right about it since 1926. The act went back to work. An 8-week light opera season at the Erlanger Theater in Atlanta in the summer of 1927. The Pink Lady, The Red Mill, HMS Pinafore, The Wildflower, Pom-Pom. And then on the 6th of October, 1927, his name went into a Broadway program. My Princess at the Sam S. Shubert Theater on West 44th Street. Act 2 carried one line. Tango, Americ and Neville. The show ran 16 days and closed on the 22nd of October. The whole of his Broadway life printed in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, number 7, October 1927. He got back there once, Keep It Clean, at the Selwyn Theatre on the 24th of June to July 6th on Broadway. 4 months after Keep It Clean closed, the market broke. The first thing a country stops paying for is a man who dances. From a platform 40 years later, he put it flatly: entertainment by a dancer had gone out of reach. Loew's Metropolitan in Brooklyn, March 1930. Broadway personalities at the Majestic in Brooklyn over the last 3 days of December 1930. Loew's Metropolitan again in March 1931. The RKO Prospect in July 1932. The Palace In Chicago 16 days after that, then longer and longer gaps. The 1930 census found him at 146 West 49th Street and recorded him as a lodger. In 1933, he was in a basement apartment at 154 West 75th Street, out of work. In the 4th year of the Depression, with an act the city had stopped booking. His last traceable dance engagement is dated the 27th of September, 1935. The Hotel Bradford in Boston, a room called the Cascades with Huey Barrett's Orchestra advertised as unique dance diversions. The Boston Globe notice still bills him as a star of Ciro's, the Winter Garden, and the Ambassador, 10 years after the fact. 28 years old, below street level on the Upper West Side, with an act gone, the marriage over, a son growing up somewhere in the same city, and a family fortune 4,000 miles behind him getting larger every year without him in it. 3 blocks south of that basement, 30 West 72nd Street, just off Central Park West, the first-floor apartment of a house owned by the Morgenthau family, an old Black man in a turban was teaching Hebrew to a room of 12 or 20 people. He had been waiting 6 months. 4 years before Barbados and 30 years before the morning the world knows him for, Neville Goddard was 24 years old and working as a dancer. In the summer of 1929, he was taken in spirit before a woman seated at a large ledger. She wrote in it. What she wrote was his name, then an assembly which he called the Mighty Ones, and at the center of it, the risen Christ, described by Neville as Infinite Love and in other tellings as the Ancient of Days. One question was put to him: What is the greatest thing in the world? He answered: Faith, hope, and love, and the greatest of these is love. And at that answer, he said, the 2 bodies fused into a single body of infinite love. A voice then went up across the assembly, down with the blue bloods! And he was sent back down with a commission 2 words long: time to act. There was a second figure in it, which he named Infinite Might, El Shaddai. God Almighty, Protean, communicating without speech. And the body behaved as it would behave in every later experience— hands, head, side, and feet turning to vortices with the sensation reported as ecstasy, something he called the crucifixion. He was 24, working as a dancer, 3 months from the crash. The Divine Society, as he defined it from platforms decades afterwards, is a society of men in whom God is awake. The risen and the awakened carrying on past death. Abdullah kept a shorter name for the same company: the Brothers. Down with the bluebuds, he glossed himself, and the gloss is the flattest statement of his whole position he ever gave. Down with every structure standing between a person and direct access to God— ritual, creed, ceremony, church protocol, the paid intermediary, The sacrifice on the altar. His method for pulling them down was to withdraw attention and belief and leave them to starve. In 1961, he published The Law and the Promise, and he counted 1929 among his major experiences. By the late '60s, the count had hardened into 4: the skull, David, the temple, the dove. And 1929 sat outside the 4 as a prologue. He went on telling it anyway, from platforms in 1966 and in 1968 to the end of his life. Dropped from the list and kept in the story. And the arithmetic he attached to it reorganizes everything that comes after. Neville called 1929 the graft and 1959 the fruit. The union happened in the summer he was 24. 30 years on, in a hotel room in San Francisco, it bore. Grafting was his own word for it, used deliberately and used more than once. He puts the famous awakening of 1959 at the far end of a 30-year term, a delivery date rather than a beginning. 9 years separate that 2-word order from the first hired room with his name on the door. Those 9 years begin in a hall in Harlem. For half a year, a friend had been telling Neville to go uptown. and hear a man lecture on esoteric Christianity. He stayed away for a reason he was still confessing from platforms 40 years later. The friend was a Catholic priest, careless with money, and a man careless with a dollar was, to a dancer down to his last few, careless with everything else. 6 months went by. Then, on an evening in the early '30s, he went. He sat through the talk among 20 other people. The man who had given it stepped down off the platform, crossed the room, put out his hand, and used his name. Neville. You are 6 months late. They had met 4 seconds earlier. How? The answer came back with the handshake still going. The brothers had said he was coming. Then the rest of it— the two of them together in China thousands of years ago. Neville agreeing to forget all of it, to play the part he had to play this time around. And one more thing, stating, I will remain until you have received all that I must give you. Everything Neville Goddard put in front of an audience for the next 30 years came out of that room. A photograph of Abdullah has yet to surface. Neville's sits in archives— the daily sketch pictures, the studio portraits, the naturalization papers. The man who made him survives as a voice 30 years on in rooms full of Californians. Neville's word for it, and Neville's word alone. He was Black. Neville said so in every telling, with an emphasis the modern retellings sand off. He was a Negro, he said, I tell you. And once in the Master Class of 1948, in a phrase that belongs to 1948, black as the ace of spades, my old friend Abdullah with his turbaned head. The turban went everywhere, indoors and out. Neville put the two of them level in height, 5 foot 11. On age, he was vaguer— late 80s at their first meeting in one 1964 lecture, about 90 in another, which carries Abdullah past 100. and 10 by the last time they saw each other. Origen moved as well. Born in Ethiopia of the Jewish faith, he told one audience in 1964. Born in North Africa to Jewish parents, he told a different audience the same year. The Hebrew was the center of it, and the direction matters. Rabbis came to him. They climbed to the first-floor apartment to study the letters with the turbaned old man who belonged to a congregation of one. Neville rated Abdullah's Christianity above any clergyman's he ever met. And put it down to the Hebrew and the Kabbalah. Abdullah rented that apartment at 30 West 72nd Street, just off Central Park West, in a house owned by the Morgenthau family, a short walk from the Dakota, with a small private library off the main room and a door in it. That door gets its own part in the story. Large meals, several shots of whiskey ale behind it, and a big bowl of ice cream to finish. Neville brought him 2 bottles from a voyage once, brandy and rum, and a week later Neville asked how long the Those had expected to last, they were already gone. He took Neville to his first opera, Parsifal, on Good Friday. 5 hours in one seat. Abdullah bought orchestra seats at the theater and at the opera in a segregated city 3 decades before the Civil Rights Act and walked down the aisle and sat in them. For 90 years, Abdullah had existed in one place, in Neville's own voice, on a platform. Decades after the fact. New York in the '20s ran an economy of hired halls and rented teachings, swamis, healers, reading rooms, 2-inch notices brought by the column in the religious pages of daily papers. The 3rd of November, 1928, the New York Times display columns carry a series of lectures on the soul of the soul to be given by G.M. Ahmad Abdullah. A second notice runs on the 10th of November for a course called Soul Unfoldment. Both carry an address: 30 West 72nd Street. That's the address Neville would name from platforms for the rest of his life, printed in the Times years before he said it out loud, sold by the column Inch to the Teacher, who was hiring a room and wanted an audience. The trail from those notices leads toward a man named Dr. Modeste Abdallah Guillaume, born around 1879. Born in Algiers, North African Jewish, a French citizen under the Crémieux Decree. Trained as a baritone, he taught singing in Atlantic City for 15 years, and around 1920 he turned to metaphysics classes on the mystery books of Moses, Sunday lectures on healing and prosperity. A 1935 Society column has him teaching philosophy at his home in New York City and names his secretary Zeta Roberts. Neville named Zeta Roberts himself years later from a platform. All of this was recently discovered by Cool Wisdom Books. Be sure to check out my episode on Abdullah. I'm giving you information I've already given you from Cool Wisdom Books, and I have not introduced any new information. They're doing the best research on Abdullah that you can find. 5 years, day in and day out. Secondary accounts routinely say 7. The number Neville used from platforms over and over was 5. A broke ex-dancer of 28 comes up the basement steps at 154 West 75th Street in an overcoat he bought when he was working and walks 3 blocks south to sit in a rented first-floor apartment and learn the Hebrew alphabet from an old man who charges him $0 for it. The group ran to 12 or 20. Abdullah taught the language letter by letter and what the letters do when they assemble, the great mystery Neville called it, of how the whole thing is put together. At Abdullah's request, Neville stood up in that room and interpreted the 14th chapter of John. One more student, Joseph Murphy, who would write The Power of Your Subconscious Mind, told a French interviewer in 1987 that he had studied in New York with a Black Jewish teacher called Professor Abdullah. Murphy leaves Neville out of it and puts Abdullah in the New York metaphysical scene rather than in one man's private myth. Everything about this teacher gets softened in the retellings, and the softening destroys him. Neville called him rude, used the word insolence about the manner. Abdullah's instrument was refusal applied in 3 directions. He refused to explain himself, he refused to reopen a settled question, and the one that matters most, he refused to sympathize. Consolation was off the table. And encouragement with it. When Neville arrived unhappy, he got the doctrine again and a door. Neville kept a strict vegetarian discipline for seven years, and watching the old man work through steak and whiskey and ice cream, he raised the point. Abdullah's answer came in two parts. First, everything is God, the whole of it, and go and read Acts and what Peter was told about what has been cleansed. Then the diagnosis: You have quibbles, he says. In Abdullah: How We Got Together, Q&A from 1964, his verdict was that Neville's restrictions would poison him, the quibbles doing the poisoning rather than any fish. Called a colored man in company, Abdullah declined the euphemism and gave them the word he preferred. On the Sphinx, he was harder still. Whoever modeled that face modeled the face of a Negro. And if the finest minds in Europe still lack an explanation for it, so much the better. I am very proud that I am a Negro, he said. The pressure was the method. Sympathy tells a man his situation is real and his feelings about it are appropriate, and both messages are in Abdullah's system the disease. 10 years on, in a medical detachment in Louisiana, an army captain would be extremely kind to Neville about his age and his baby daughter and his son in the Pacific, and Neville would understand standing there that the kindness was the enemy. He learned that in a room on 72nd Street from a man who slammed a library door in his face. October 1933. Neville's 28, out of work, 4 years into the Depression, 12 years away from home, living below the pavement at 154 75th Street, with the dancing gone and marriage gone and the bookings gone. He had a son of 9 growing up somewhere in the same city, a wife He had been separated from for a decade. His act had been billed at Ciro's in London and the Ambassador in Paris. The last New York booking traced him to a picture house in Brooklyn, 1932. That winter, a quarter of the American workforce was out of work, and Neville was inside the quarter. His parents had come to New York that autumn and asked him to sail back with them for Christmas. He turned them down. A proud broke man in a borrowed suit declining a favor. Then their ship left, and the wanting arrived. He put it to Abdullah in one sentence: I want to go to Barbados, and not a thing stops me but a lack of money. Abdullah's reply came back flat and immediate. 4 words: You are in Barbados. Neville argued the obvious: a room on West 72nd Street, an American October, a winter overcoat over his arm. Abdullah declined to argue back and gave an instruction instead. The whole teaching folded into a housekeeping detail: sleep there. Sleeping about Barbados was worthless. To sleep in Barbados was the assignment. Abdullah taught that scripture is psychological drama rather than history. Abraham and Isaac and Moses and Jesus as states of consciousness a human being passes through, written down as people so they could cross 3,000 years intact. God in that reading has an address, and the address is the human imagination. Whatever you assume to be true and hold while the evidence in front of your eyes says otherwise hardens into fact. The senses report on a world already decided. Assumption comes first, the outer world catches up, and the catching up looks afterward like luck. So, you are in Barbados was to Abdullah a description rather than encouragement. And the work belonged to the night, in a state bordering on sleep, with senses off duty. Night after night, in the basement, Neville put himself in his mother's house at Fontainebleau. The sunset that drops in 20 minutes, the sound of the sea, the smell of a tropical night through an open window, the world seen out of that address alone. Then sleep in that bed. 4,000 miles away, and a New York morning after it. He did it through the end of October and through November. 6 weeks, 42 days in which the outer facts stayed where they were. His pockets were as empty in the last week of November as in the third week of October. 3 times in that stretch, he went back to 72nd Street to reopen the question. Abdullah refuses each time with identical logic. How could they discuss how Neville was getting to Barbados when Neville was already in Barbados. The third attempt ended the conversation for good. Abdullah turned his back on him mid-sentence, walked into his little library, and slammed the door hard enough that Neville stood in the room listening to it. His reason, when Neville got it out of him later, is the image the whole story is built on: there is no such thing as a little pregnancy. Either the thing was conceived or it was empty. Going back to ask about it was, in his diagnosis, a miscarriage carried out by hand. On the 3rd of December, 1933— some tellings say the 4th, some say 4 days before the ship sailed— a letter arrived at the basement on 75th Street, unasked for, from his brother Victor. The same Victor who, at 18, had stood across a Bridgetown street twice a day for 2 years reading a sign that had yet to be painted. Inside was a draft for $50. Victor wrote that the whole family would be together for Christmas, all of them in one house for the first time in their lives, and that the $50 was for whatever Neville needed for the trip. Neville's calibration for his audiences every time: a suit ran about $12, $12.50. The enclosure was 4 suits or 2 months of a working man's rent from a brother who had kept the whole plan to himself. He took it to the Furnace-Withy Line offices. They offered him third class with access to first-class facilities after St. Thomas. Excellent news for a man who had spent 6 weeks with empty pockets, and he went straight to 72nd Street with it. Abdullah listened to the account of the third-class berth and St. Thomas arrangement, then asked one question. Who told you you went third class? Neville went to Barbados, Abdullah said, and he went first class. Past tense. Both Abs. Argument closed. On the 6th of December, 1933, at the pier, with his third-class ticket in his hand, Neville was told that a first-class passenger had canceled. He sailed first class in a cabin shared with 2 other men the whole way down. The date, the line, the class, the cabin, the cancellation, and the price of a suit all survived. The ship's name stayed out of every version. He told 90 years Of people retelling the story, and the vessel that carried him home is still anonymous. 10 days out, Christmas at his mother's house at Fontebelle, and a long stretch of it— a month in some tellings, 3 in others— with the whole family in one place for the only time. 10 days back, before he sailed, Abdullah had told him that when he came back from Barbados, he would have died. He came back eating meat. The 5 years ran out somewhere in the middle of the decade. After that, the traces thinned to almost transparency. In a Q&A in 1964, asked about his teacher, Neville said in passing that the last time he met Abdullah was about 8 years earlier, which puts the 2 men in the room together one final time around 1956. That aside is the last dated moment they share. Neville Goddard told hundreds of stories about his own life from platforms 3 nights a week for 34 years. Dates, Street addresses, dollar amounts, the hour on the clock, the color of a thing. He described his own mother dying, his own father's method, a courtroom in which his ex-wife stood charged with shoplifting, and being out of his own skull at 4 in the morning. The death of Abdullah is absent from all of it. A deathbed, a funeral, a farewell, a last conversation, a date, and a grave. The corpus is missing every one of them. A persistent report has the old man going to Ethiopia to die, In 1957, and it lives outside the early lectures entirely. The most important man in Neville's life stops being mentioned in the present tense, and the archive closes over him without a sound. Out of those 5 years came a different man in the same body. A tango dancer who had crossed the Atlantic at 17 to be somebody on a stage had learned Hebrew from a turbaned Algerian or Ethiopian, had come to believe that the Bible was a map Of an experience he would personally undergo and had proved on one steamship that the world reorganizes itself around an assumption. He had also stopped being able to dance for a living, which by then had ceased to matter. The date everybody gives for his first lecture is February 1938. A notice in the Rosicrucian Fellowship magazine puts him on a platform in Cleveland in 1931. Billed as a visiting lecturer from New York, 2 talks. The study center's secretary wrote up his rich voice and his deep knowledge and had it printed. He was 26, speaking under Max Heindel's banner out in Ohio, but he was still walking 3 blocks a day down Columbus Avenue to sit on a folding chair and learn the Hebrew alphabet for free. The Rosicrucian rooms in New York stood on West 72nd Street. A few doors along from Abdullah's own front door. 2 circles, one street, and a young man moving between them. On the 2nd of February, 1938, in a hired room in New York, Neville Goddard walked out in front of an audience that had paid to hear him under his own name and under his own banner. The title was The Secret of the Sperm. On the 2nd of February, 1938, in a room he had hired and paid for himself, A former tango dancer stood up in front of strangers in New York and talked about the Bible for an hour. The title he chose was The Secret of the Sperm. His subject was the seed, an idea planted in a man, carried in the dark, delivered later as an event in the world. He handed a New York audience the most physical word available and called it scripture. Within a few years, 3 nights a week at a chapel on West 49th Street Theater, People called the Old Actors Church. Admission a quarter. 400 and 500 in seats. Israel Regardie sat in those rooms. A dance of words, a dance of mind, a dance of feeling. The dancer had found a different floor. 5 months after that first lecture, on the 25th of July, 1938, the New York Supreme Court granted Neville a divorce from Mildred Mary Hughes. They had married on the 13th of October, 1923, when he was 18 and she was 22. Their son Joseph arrived 7 months later. By Neville's own account, the thing was finished inside a year. Then came 15 years of the only arrangement the state allowed them. The judgment went against the wife on grounds of adultery. She was served, and she stayed away from the courtroom. His address on the file is Hotel Hargrave, 112 West 72nd Street. 4 lines in a docket book hold a 16-year marriage. The rest survives because Neville made a lecture out of it and told it from platforms for 30 years. His version starts with a man in a hotel room on tour, in love with a woman he intends to marry and legally chained to a wife he's been separated from for years. The obstacle had a human author. Neville's dancing partner wanted the act to continue, told the estranged wife to make herself scarce, and the wife left the state. So Neville did the only thing he ever did. He began sleeping in that hotel room, in an apartment he had yet to rent, with the woman he meant to marry. And he's careful about this every time— the two of them in separate beds. His own count is a week. Then the telephone: be in a New York City court on Tuesday morning at 10. Mildred had been arrested for shoplifting from a department store. He'd been handed precisely what he needed. A wife caught in a criminal act is a divorce. And any lawyer in Manhattan would have told him to sit still, say little, and let the state do the work. Instead, Neville stood up and spoke for her. To her character. To their son. To the woman he had married at 18 rather than the woman in the dock. The judge said afterward that an appeal of that kind was new to him, after all his years on the bench. Mildred was given 6 months suspended. In the corridor outside, she settled in one sentence what 15 years of lawyers had failed to settle: Give me the subpoena and I will sign it. He served it himself. Why he told it. Most of his demonstration stories finish with the wish granted. This one ended somewhere else. He refused to condemn her because his own imaginal act had put her in the dock. Neville assumed a state The world rearranged itself to deliver it, and a woman he had once married stood in a criminal court as part of the delivery. That is the doctrine with the comfortable half removed. Assume a state and the world moves to make it so, including the parts you had rather leave alone. 500 or 600 of Neville's lectures survive as text. Joseph Neville Goddard, born May 19th, 1924, appears in perhaps one of them. There he is. A fact produced by somebody else. An Army captain listing reasons to feel sorry for a private. Across 34 years of talking about his father, his mother, his brother Victor, his wife, his daughter, and a dead man in a turban, Neville left his son unmentioned. Joseph witnessed his father's second wedding at 17, lived with him at Hotel Hargrave in 1941, went to Guadalcanal with Marines, and died in New York in 1986. At 61. Whatever passed between those 2 men stayed between them. Catherine Willa Van Schmuse was born in East Orange, New Jersey, on the 2nd of February, 1907. Smith College. An American family, 6 or 7 generations settled in a house with 8 fireplaces. Everybody called her Bill. Neville's account of meeting her ran to one sentence: the same every time. The first time he met her, he knew she was going to be his wife. She designed costumes. Where she designed them is the part 90 years of writing about Neville has left on the floor. Radio City Music Hall opened in December 1932. 6th Avenue at 50th Street. 5,960 seats. The largest theater in the world and the most photographed stage in America. Spent 11 years in the Music Hall wardrobe. The Rockettes, the Erna Rappe Orchestra, the Vincente Minnelli stage shows— clothes for the most looked-at stage in the country came out of the room she worked in. Her father ran the building. William G. Van Schmuse took the managing director's chair in March 1933. He replaced Samuel Rochefell, the showman called Roxy, the man the hall had been built around, after The board pushed him out. Theater management was new to Van Schmuse. In 1934, he picked a young window dresser called Vincente Minnelli to produce his stage shows, and Minnelli opened that October. Van Schmuse held the post 9 years, until January 1942, when he died. G.S. Iselt took the chair after him. The 1930 census puts Neville in a lodging house at 146 West 49th Street. A few minutes east, The Rockefeller site was an open hole behind a hoarding. A broke tango dancer at the end of his career slept 2 streets from the ground the music hall came out of, 3 years before the man who would run it was hired. 12 years later, he married that man's daughter. Van Schmousse died in January 1942. The license was issued on the 25th of February, 1942. The ceremony followed 2 days later at 229 West 48th Street. And their certificate is numbered 4402. 5 weeks. He gave his occupation as writer and lecturer. He was 37. She was 35. 2 people signed as witnesses. One was the bride's mother, 5 weeks a widow. The other was J.N. Goddard, the groom's son, 17 years old by the marriage that ended in that courtroom. 5,960 seats stood a 10-minute walk away. The wedding got a rented room. And 2 signatures. Neville said all of it from the platform. Audiences heard that his wife had designed costumes at the music hall for 11 years, that her father was the managing director of the music hall where she worked, that she had gone to Smith, that the house had 8 fireplaces. One word stayed out of it every time for 30 years: the name. So it sat inside his own lectures for half a century while the books about him printed 2 words, costume designer, and stopped. Music hall wardrobe staff were house employees, uncredited by policy. A woman who dressed that stage for 11 years leaves a playbill record, a program record, and a screen record that were all blank. 4 months on, June 1942, Bill gave birth to a daughter in New York City. They named her Victoria. Her father called her Vicki and said he loved her before she was born. The crib turns up again. in Louisiana. 4 months and 15 days after his daughter was born, Neville was inducted into the Army of the United States at New York. Serial number: 32.626.732. Private. Medical detachment, 4011th Armored Field Artillery Battalion. Destination: Camp Polk, Louisiana. And then, the marital status box: separated without dependents. He'd been married 9 months. His daughter was 4 months. The paper that would have said otherwise was sitting in a queue. Neville and Catherine married on the 27th of February, 1942. Their certificate reached the New York City Register on the 21st of October, 1943— 20 months after the ceremony, 11 months after the Army took him in. So, on the morning of his induction, he had a wife and a 4-month-old daughter and zero filed evidence of either. The strangest line in his enlistment papers turns out to be a clerk's backlog. the family existed. Its paperwork was in a pile on a desk in Manhattan, and Victoria was born on the 28th of June, 1942, 16 months before the state of New York recorded that her parents were married. The 2 people Neville acquired that year were absent from the document that decided where he went. Camp Polk, set in Vernon Parish, west-central Louisiana, pine country outside a town called Leesville, thrown up in 1941 for armored training. Tar-papered huts, board floors, coal stoves, red mud through the winter, heat and insects through the summer. 13 weeks of basic training. A private in a medical detachment learns litters, splints, dressings, and sanitation, and to keep up with a battalion that moves at the speed of its trucks. Around him were boys of 18 and 19, most of them outside their home state for the first time. Neville was 37, had crossed the Atlantic 6 times, danced at Ciro's, published a book, and spent 5 years learning Kabbalah from a man in his 80s. Now he shaved and marched and answered to a number with the rest of them. He wanted out. The number of people he consulted about it was one— himself. Neville made the ordinary application for discharge through channels on the correct form. Reason stated: age, a wife, an infant daughter. It came back inside 24 hours. Across the endorsement block, in the Colonel's hand, one word: Disapproved. The Colonel was Theodore Bilbo Jr., son of the Senator from Mississippi. Then came the part Neville always told with warmth. A Captain sent for him and was kind to him. The Captain went through it item by item. You want to be home with your wife and your little girl. Your son is in the Pacific with the Marines at Guadalcanal. You're almost 38. All of it true, all of it understood, and the answer remains the answer: a decent man doing a decent thing in a warm room with the war on. Neville said every time he told this that the sympathy was worse than the refusal. It reaches back to a slammed library door on West 72nd Street. Abdullah had refused for 5 years to console him, encourage him, or soften anything, and when Neville reopened the Barbados question a 3rd time, shut himself in his library. The rudeness was the instruction. Sympathy asks you to accept a fact and feel better about it. Neville had been trained by a teacher who would sooner slam a door than let it happen. The captain's kindness was the most dangerous thing in the room. It invited him to agree that he was a private at Camp Polk with a refused application— the literal truth at that moment. He thanked the captain, walked back to the barracks, and that night he stopped being at Camp Polk. Assumptions harden into fact. Neville called the practice sleeping in the assumption, and he meant that literally. A man becomes what he assumes himself to be, and the drowsy state just before you go under is the one moment in the day when the critical faculty stops arguing and an assumption goes in whole. A barracks in Vernon Parish, Louisiana, in the winter of 1942. Lights out. A private 37 lies down on an army cot and he goes home. 32 Washington Square West, 7th floor, New York City. 2 bedrooms, a big living room, a dining room, a large kitchen, a foyer you come into first. He walked those rooms in the dark every night and touched things— the furniture, the door frames. Then he went to the windows and looked out at the Hawley Apartments across the way, which is the view from the Floor alone. He put his wife into her own bed. Twin beds. And the twin beds are in every telling. Vicki went into her crib, 4 months old. Picturing your apartment is a thought about a place you are absent from, and it confirms the absence every time. Neville slept there instead. Present tense. Out of his own eyes, as the man who lives at that address with Manhattan outside the window while his body lay in Louisiana in a room full of sleeping boys. Every morning he woke at Camp Polk And did the day's duty. Each night he went back to Washington Square. When I went to New York, that's one of the first places I went. It was so cool to see Washington Square and imagine what he was imagining. 9 nights at 4 o'clock in the morning, a sheet of paper came before him. He told it sometimes as a dream, sometimes as a waking vision, and declined to settle which. The description stayed the same for 30 years: a sheet of army paper. His own application. A hand holding a pen came into the frame, and the pen scratched out the word disapproved and wrote it above the word approved. And then a voice: That which I have done, I have done. Do nothing. That instruction cost more than the 9/9ths did. A private with a refused application, a colonel's word across it, a captain already gentle about it. The obvious move was to try again. Another officer, another form, another angle. Neville did the opposite. He got up, went to work, and left the thing entirely alone. That is, the half of his teaching of 4-minute video cuts, the half he considered decisive— acting to secure a result— is a confession that the result is still outstanding. An assumption gets fed by an ordinary day that's starved out by an anxious one. Then the colonel sent for him, asked for a fresh application. He submitted it. And it was proved that day. On the 15th of March, 1943, Private Neville Goddard, serial number 32.626.732, was honorably discharged at Camp Polk, Louisiana, 4 months and 3 days after they took him. The stated reason reads, convenience of the government, over 38 years of age, and to accept employment in essential war industry. He had turned 38 3 weeks before that document was signed. The essential war industry was standing in a hall on West 49th Street for 25 cents a head, telling 200 people that they were God. A man of 38 with a wife and an infant is exactly the case an army does eventually release. Neville knew that reading. His answer stayed the same for 34 years: the world supplies a reasonable mechanism, and the mechanism is the shadow. He always told the story alongside its opposite. At Camp Polk, he had a friend In the identical situation— English, the same age, drafted the same year, stationed in Florida, a Freudian psychiatrist from New York, an intelligent, serious man who wanted to go home. Neville wrote him a long letter stating precisely what he had done— the 9 nights, the apartment, the twin beds, the crib, the refusal to act otherwise— the entire method handed free to a professional student of the human mind sitting in a camp He wanted to leave. The friend read it and understood it. Neville insisted on that part every time. The letter went unanswered, and the psychiatrist served 3 more years. Later, the man turned up at Neville's lectures in New York and remained unconvinced. Neville repeated his account of himself with affection. He preferred to press his feet into the carpet and grip the sides of his chair. 2 men, a camp apiece, the same war, the same information. One slept in a room in New York for 9 nights, and went home in March of 1943. The other read the instructions and found them interesting, yet served until 1946. The technique is easy. The doing it is rare. Knowing a thing and using a thing are 2 separate acts, and the gap between them is where most of a life gets spent. 4 months after Louisiana, on July 28th, 1943, Neville filed a petition for naturalization. Residence: 32 Washington Square West, 7th floor. The same rooms he had been sleeping in from 1,000 miles away. He had been eligible since 1922. 21 years went by because the urge was absent and the Army supplied it. Then a clerk filed in the physical description the only real portrait of the man that survives. Age: 38. Male. Complexion: medium. Hair: brown. Eyes: brown. Height 5 feet 10 inches. Weight 155 pounds. Distinguishing marks: birthmark right side upper lip. A slight, lean man just under 6 feet with a birthmark above the right corner of his mouth. That face is in every surviving photograph. On the 1st of September, 1943, he stopped being a British Subject. 10 days later, on September 11th, 1943, The New Yorker ran a piece about him on page 64 titled A Blue Flame on the Forehead. Robert M. Coates wrote it, the magazine's art critic, the man who coined the phrase Abstract Expressionism. The piece was a survey of wartime New York's informal churches. Emmett Fox was filling the 4,000-seat Manhattan Opera House. Smaller operators were drawing 50 and 60. Neville sat between them. The room was the Union Methodist Episcopal Church on West 48th Street. Neville had been married in that building 18 months earlier. Sunday, 8 o'clock, admission 25 cents. Coates paid his quarter and counted about 200 people— women outnumbering men roughly 6 to 1— dressed for the heat. 2 middle-aged women, one thin and discontented, one plump young woman he took for a restaurant hostess, an old man with a lined face who kept nodding along. Neville came on in a brown tweed suit, a blue shirt, and a black and red striped tie. Coates guessed his age at 30. He was 38. Tall, slender, black hair, a long face Coates called slightly Latin. And then the comparison a 1943 reader would catch instantly— the Valentino type. He started quiet and built. Then he squared himself on his feet, shut his eyes, flung his head sharply back, and went still. 200 heads went back with his, silently courting the touch of a thin blue flame on their foreheads, according to Robert M. Coates. The room went so quiet that traffic came in off the street. Coates set down what the sight did to him and kept all 4 things it did at once: touching, saddening, grotesque, and a little laughable. A staff writer for the best magazine in America sat in a narrow pew and was moved and embarrassed in the same minute. 11 months after the Army had him Down as an author with a dependent count of zero, a West Indian ex-dancer teaching Kabbalah in a Methodist hall was a New York curiosity worth a column. He told one story out of these years as a warning, and it placed around 1941, the year his mother died. A New York winter, dark by 4 in the afternoon. Neville went to bed one night and, for the pleasure of it, put himself under The palm tree at home in Barbados. He was explicit in every telling, frivolous escape from the weather, with travel the furthest thing from his mind. The next morning, a cable arrived from Barbados. His mother was dying. He sailed inside 48 hours at midnight in the middle of a war, across water where ships were going down that season, and reached her in time To say goodbye in person. A 3-dimensional goodbye, in his phrase. The palm trees came, and everything required to put him under them came too. An idle assumption is still an idle assumption. At your command in 1939. Your faith is your fortune in 1941. Freedom for all in 1942, the year they drafted him. Feeling Is the Secret in 1944. 5,000 copies printed. He was preaching 3 nights a week in a Times Square church that seated 1,000. And the week the book came out, New York took 16 inches of snow. 100 people in the room. 50 copies sold. 4,950 stayed in the warehouse. In 1946, after something happened to him on a ship crossing the Atlantic, He took a finished manuscript of 300 pages— his own— burned it, and published a booklet instead. A man teaching that assumptions harden into fact with the print run sitting in a warehouse and 300 of his own pages gone. Los Angeles, 1945. Ernest Holmes ran the Institute of Religious Science, the largest organization in American New Thought. And he had 500 of his own alumni in the hall waiting for Neville. Minutes before Neville went on, Holmes called him into an office and shut the door. Holmes wanted 2 things changed: drop the teaching that scripture is psychological drama rather than history, and the money— $40 for a course of 5 talks against the $25 ceiling Holmes held for himself as head of the institution. Neville refused both, walked out of the office, went on and gave the lecture he had come to give. Then he walked out of New Thought and stayed out for the 27 years he had left. What was said in that office between 2 men minutes before— 500 people stayed in that office. Every room he stood in from 1945 was a room he rented. The Wilshire Ebell, Scottish Rite halls, Hotel ballrooms, and he finished with an audience instead of an institution. He came west in 1948 for a master class, 5 lessons in 5 days, taken down in shorthand and printed, and began at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre, his room for the rest of his life. In 1954, Los Angeles station put him on the air. Once, and 5,000 letters came in. So KTTV Channel 11 gave him a weekly half hour Sundays at 1 o'clock, 26 programs of Kabbalistic Bible interpretation in the style of Neville. Now I remember this time there was like 3 channels or 4 channels, so there were 4 channels on and Neville was on one of them on Sundays. All 26 have vanished since. One transcript came through in 1955. He moved west for good, 1025 Carroll Drive, West Hollywood, where he lived until the night he died. Neville, at 50, a United States citizen, 11 books out, 3 nights a week on Los Angeles platforms at $2 a head. A wife, a daughter at school, and a good tailor. 4 years on, at 4 o'clock in the morning in a hotel room in San Francisco, something happened to Neville that belonged to an entirely different order, and he began telling audiences about that instead. By 1955, Neville Goddard had moved west for good. A house at 1025 Carroll Drive in West Hollywood, taken after 13 years and 8 months in a single apartment on West 55th Street in Manhattan. 50 years old that February, public lecturing since the 2nd of February, 1938, and teaching privately since the Barbados voyage of 1933. The Wilshire Ebell Theater had been taking him since 1948. Los Angeles gave him the Fox Wilshire, the Ritz, the Ebell Club, the Women's University Club on South Catalina. San Francisco had a circuit of its own: the Scottish Rite Auditorium, the Palace Hotel, and a hotel on the corner of Powell and Sutter called Sir Francis Drake. Through 1953 and 1954, he stood in for Dr. Frederick Bales on the radio while Bales took his vacations. Which put a Barbadian accent into a Southern California living room on a Sunday. Then television. A single half-hour telecast on KTTV Channel 11 in 1954— my channel— brought in 5,000 letters. And a station that receives 5,000 letters gives a man a series. From 1955, he had 26 half-hour programs. Sundays at 1 o'clock, talking straight into the camera about human imagination. The books rang alongside it: At Your Command in 1939, Your Faith Is Your Fortune in 1941, Freedom for All, Prayer: The Art of Believing, Out of This World in 1949, The Power of Awareness in 1952, Awakened Imagination in 1954, Seedtime and Harvest in 1956, Plain beige covers, small format, sold at the back of the hall and by mail order. The private interviews had run alongside all of it for 12 years, 9 a day, 5 days a week, half an hour apiece, at a fee of zero. Booking ran from 1 o'clock to half past 5, and he said from the platform that it ate his whole afternoon. One argument had made all of it: assume the feeling of the wish Fulfilled. Construct the scene that would only exist if the thing were already yours. Enter it drowsy, persist in it, and let the outer world catch up. He had tested it on a passage to Barbados in 1933 and on an army discharge in 1943. So the man in Los Angeles in 1958 was a 53-year-old professional lecturer With a television slate, 15 years of backlist, 2 or 3 engagements a week, an agent, a national mailing list, and a wife and a teenage daughter to keep. Rooms of 300 and 400 people paid about $2 a head to hear him say that they could have what they wanted. Within 18 months, he begins telling those same rooms something else, and those rooms completely empty. He was in San Francisco on a lecture run, staying where he always stayed. On the evening of Sunday, July 19th, 1959, he ate dinner in the hotel restaurant, went up to his room, read Blake and read the Bible, and went to bed around 11 o'clock. His subject that week was The Law: Assumption, Technique, and Results. At about 4 in the morning, it started with a vibration in his head. The sensation arrived without precedent in his experience— an earthquake and a storm at once, inside his skull. His first interpretation was medical— a massive cerebral hemorrhage and death within minutes. Saying in his lecture, The Signs of the End, a vibration is in my head, that I have never felt before. The vibration resolved and he was awake, fully awake. By his own account, more awake than he had been at any point in his life. And somewhere other than the room, he was inside his own skull. For 13 years, in front of every audience he addressed, Neville insisted the statement was literal. The skull was a sealed tomb, and he was sealed inside it. He used the word tomb, then went back and specified an actual tomb. Awake in the dark in a bone chamber with the walls close. I knew my skull to be a tomb, an actual tomb, he said in the same lecture. One impulse, and by his description it was the whole of him: get out. Curiosity was absent from it. And so was fear. It was like a baby in a womb. He put his hands to the base of the skull and pushed from the inside. The knowledge of where to push arrived with him. The instruction issued along with the situation. Something at the base gave way and rolled aside, leaving a small opening. He stated in the same lecture, it rolled away, leaving a little opening. Then he came out through it inch by inch. His phrase for it stayed identical across 100 tellings. Exactly as a child is born from its mother's womb. Headfirst. Slow. Very tight. He was the one being born, and he was also the one giving birth. This is crazy. Attendance was zero. As he was saying this, he came out of the base of his own head, alone at 4 in the morning in a hotel room on Powell Street. As he emerged, a wind rose in the room, something well past a drought. He described a roar, a hurricane sound, in an enclosed hotel bedroom, and he later attached it to the strong driving wind of the 2nd chapter of Acts. Then he turned and looked at the bed. His body was on it, ghastly pale, in his word, and the head was turning from side to side, back and forth repeatedly. In the 1966 telling, the movement of somebody surfacing from a great ordeal. He stood in the room and watched his own face do that. When he looked a second time, the body had gone from the bed. 3 men were in the room, symbolic of the 3 wise men. They were unable to see him standing there at the peak of alertness. He was invisible to them, inaudible, unaccounted for. They could hear the wind, and they had trouble explaining the wind. In the later tellings, the 3 are anonymous. The earlier ones name them. They are his own brothers: Cecil at the head, Victor at the right, Lawrence at the left foot. Victor is the 18-year-old who stood across a Bridgetown street twice a day for 2 years reading a sign that had yet to be hung. Lawrence, the doctor, turns up again in a beach vision 3 decades later. Lawrence, the youngest of the 3 and the most agitated by the wind, found something on the floor. An infant wrapped in swaddling clothes. He picked it up, put it on the bed, and announced who it was. It is Neville's baby, he says. 2 of the 3 refused to accept that. One affirmed it. Neville noted the arithmetic later— the legal minimum of witnesses required under Deuteronomy, with the dissent already built into the scene. And then he crossed the room and picked up the child himself. How is my sweetheart? he said, Neville, to the infant. Solemnity is absent from it. The ordinary thing a father says over a cot in an ordinary voice to a baby on a hotel bed while 3 men who could see the baby looked past him. The infant smiled. He called it the heavenly smile and admitted every time that his description of it failed. The scene dissolved and he was back in the bed. The infant was the sign. The birth was his own. Zero infants entered the world On the 20th of July, 1959. His claim was that he, Neville Lancelot Goddard, 54, of Carroll Drive, West Hollywood, had been born out of his own skull, and that the baby on the floor was the token handed to the witnesses so that the event could be attested. The pattern comes from the 2nd chapter of Luke, where shepherds are given a wrapped infant as a sign rather than an explanation. In April 1963, he put it in one line from the platform: No little child is born. That's only the signal. Neville, in the lecture called The Resurrection on the 12th of April, 1963. He commemorated the 20th of July for the remainder of his life and called it his real birthday. In April 1971, from a Los Angeles stage, he described himself as approaching his 12th birthday since his birth from above. He was 66 years old and he was counting from a hotel room. 3 months after the hotel room, his father died in Barbados. Joseph Nathaniel Goddard was 85. He had walked out of St. John's Boys' School at 14 and gone down to Bridgetown for a wage, and on the 13th of October, 1921, he opened a grocery, meat, and ice shop in a side street with his own name over the door. 38 years on, the thing he built out of that shop was divided 10 ways. A stock distribution in 1951 had already put about $667,000 into the hands of each of the 10 children. On the father's death, the figure came to roughly $2 million apiece. Neville was 54. From that October, he was a wealthy man. And he stayed one for the 13 years he had left. Everything visible about the working life stayed where it was. 3 or 4 engagements a week, a rented hall, a table of beige paperbacks at the back of the room, $2 a head at the door. He went on doing the job of a man who needed the door money, and he did it until the month he died. And the money stayed off the platform. 13 more years of lecturing, hundreds of surviving transcripts, thousands of hours of talk about money and desire and how a man gets what he wants, and the sum sitting in his own name went unmentioned in every hall for the rest of his life. Students who sat in front of him for a decade went on assuming the door money was the income. 2 rented acres of rock in the parish of St. John at $8 a year. A grandson of that ground became a rich man in Los Angeles 3 months after telling a room he had been born out of his own head. So he was free. He wasn't worried about how successful his books would be or if he ever sold another book. He had been born from above and he dedicated his life to it. Clearly, when you read his lectures, that's what's happening. Neville taught that the Bible is a blueprint Rather than a history. Emmet Fox told him to stop talking about that. Scripture, in his reading, records a psychological event that is yet to happen to most people, described in advance and in detail. Treating it as an account of things done to Jewish and Roman men in the 1st century is a category error that has cost the West 2,000 years. The crucifixion occurs in a human being rather than to one man outside Jerusalem. So does the resurrection. The crucifixion, as he described it, is the act of God burying himself inside a person, forgetting completely that he is God, and wearing that person's life from the inside for its full length. Every human being alive Is that burial, which puts Golgotha where the name always said it was. The place of the skull is the human skull. The tomb is the head. The stone at the mouth of the sepulcher is the base of the skull. And the resurrection is the sleeper waking up in there, breaking out, and discovering that the being asleep inside a man for 60 years was God and is that man. It's the same imagery as Jesus When he comes back in the second coming, coming out of his tomb, he is buried in the skull of man. That's where he is buried. Neville said in his lecture, "Where is Golgotha?" He called this the promise, and he said it against the law. The law is everything the first half of this video demonstrated: assumption, technique, the feeling of the wish fulfilled. Held until circumstances rearrange itself around it. A basement on 75th Street becoming a first-class cabin. A bunk in Louisiana becoming a 7th-floor apartment on Washington Square. Meet its terms and it produces. The promise is unconditional. Merit stays irrelevant to it. Effort fails to hurry it. By a single day, and the terms run identically for everybody. The cruel included, the indifferent included, the ones who died at 4 days old included. A destiny rather than a reward. And when it comes, you are handed 4 signs in a fixed order so that you know what has happened to you. The law gets you what you want. The promise tells you who you are. He'd been teaching the Law in public since February 1938. 21 years of it. Every book, every broadcast, every hall. Every one of the 5,000 letters. And on the 20th of July, 1959, the other half arrived while he was in town teaching the first half. It came, in his phrase, out of the blue. The Promise is what he had left. 4 months and 16 days later in Los Angeles, the vibration came back. In July, it had been at the base of the skull. By December, it sat at the crown, at the top of the head. And instead of resolving, it built. It built until, in his words, his head exploded. I felt my head explode, Neville says in Signs of the End. The setting was so ordinary, he stressed it every time he told it. A modestly furnished room, small and plain, a room in a house rather than a throne room. Leaning against the side of an open door, looking out at a pastoral scene, was a youth of about 13. Neville described him in the vocabulary of the 16th chapter of 1 Samuel— ruddy, with beautiful eyes, and handsome. Then he told the room that the description had failed and that the beauty of the boy was beyond his power to convey. The recognition was instantaneous, and it went both directions. He knew without argument or process that the boy was David, that he himself was David's father, and he knew that the boy knew. Still a man in his 50s, still Neville, standing in a small room in Los Angeles looking at a teenager in a doorway, David addressed him, my father. Scripture says The son calls God Father. Neville's reading was, the sentence works as a piece of identification. The moment David calls you Father, you've been handed your own name, and the name of God turns out to be Father. And the proof of fatherhood is the existence of a son. And who is David? In his teaching, the name belongs to something other than a king of Israel. David is the accumulated experience of one human life. Everything a person has undergone, wanted, suffered, done, and been gathered into a single figure. Every man and woman alive is unknowingly fathering that son by the ordinary act of living through their days, which means the boy in the doorway was Neville's own life standing up and telling him what he was. In some instances, he would refer to David as all of humanity or humans, but in many— He would make the same declaration, that is, your life or one's own life. 4 months after David, on the 8th of April, 1960, out of a clear sky, a bolt of lightning struck him and split him in 2. The line of the split ran from the top of the skull to the base of the spine. The detail he kept returning to 8 years on was tactile and specific rather than luminous. I felt every little vertebra of my spine separate, he said, in the great mystery. Every individual bone of the spinal column coming apart one by one, felt from the inside. He identified the event immediately and identically for the rest of his life. This was the veil of the temple torn from top to bottom, the curtain that rips up at the moment of the crucifixion in the 15th chapter of Mark. The temple is the body. The veil is the body. The tearing is this: at the base of the spine, he saw a pool, golden liquid living light gathering at the base of the spine, moving. And he knew what it was on sight. The pool was himself, everything he was in liquid form, lying at the bottom of his own opened body. He contemplated it, and then he fused with it. Fusion being A big part of Neville's teaching. And then he moved up in the spine in a spiral, a serpentine ascent, very much like a Kundalini experience. His phrase was a bolt of spiral lightning traveling the whole length of the split and entering the skull violently at the top. The head reverberated with thunder. Every bone in his body began to rattle. That is the sequence he called His death. I died in 1960, and from that day on I've revealed the secrets of God from within. In his lecture The Great Mystery in 1968. In the same lecture, he told the room it had been 8 years since God died and left the sentence there without comment. April 1960 is the hinge of a working life. Before it, Neville Goddard relayed a technique he had tested. After it, he reported an event that had happened to him and claimed a different authority for that reporting— teaching from within, in his phrase, rather than teaching from a book. 2 years and 9 months later, on New Year's Day 1963, the 4th one arrived, and it was the gentlest. His head became translucent, then luminous, then it stopped having an edge at all. Stating there was no circumference, there was no limit, complete luminosity. In his lecture Signs of the End, the skull that had been a sealed bone tomb in July of 1959 was now transparent, and then it was light without boundary. About 20 feet above him, a dove was floating. He was precise about 2 things: the dove was beige, light beige, and he corrected people Who assumed white, and the wings were motionless. It held position in the air with zero beats of the wing. He raised his left hand and extended the index finger, and the dove came down onto it slowly and settled there. Then he drew it to his face, and it smothered him with kisses— his face, his head, his neck— over and over. He told that part publicly one week after it happened in a lecture on the 8th of January, 1963. It smothered me with kisses, Neville said in Prophetic Blueprints. A woman was present, and she was the one who explained what he had just been shown. Her argument ran on ornithology. Birds keep away from human beings for a physical reason. To a bird, a man carries an offensive odor, and around every person there is a radius the bird declines to enter. She called it a ring of offense. That dove had crossed the ring on purpose, against its own nature, to demonstrate something, and she put the demonstration into 3 words: he loves you. The 4th sign, and by his reading a seal rather than a beginning, the dove descends on Jesus at the baptism, at the opening of the ministry. In Neville's sequence, it arrives at the end, and it means the work is finished and accepted. 4 experiences: the 20th of July, 1959; the 6th of December, 1959; the 8th of April, 1960; the 1st of January, 1963. Dated to the day, told in the same order with the same details for the rest of his life. The order was important. He found reference to every one of these events in the Bible and the sequence of events. He's relaying everything and clearly shows that the Bible is seeming to reference that you're going through these events. Around him, California was going at the same subject by another route. Aldous Huxley had published The Doors of Perception in 1954. One afternoon on mescaline in a house above Los Angeles, Written up by the most respected English novelist alive, it became the best-known case anybody had made for reaching God by chemistry. And by the early '60s, that case had a generation behind it, with lysergic acid the means of getting where mystics had spent whole lives sitting still. Tried LSD once. A doctor friend supplied the dose, and Huxley sat in the room and watched. Los Angeles, 3 men in a room, the novelist who had argued the case in print. A physician with the bottle. His verdict came to 2 complaints: the drug distorted the senses, and it left him with a 48-hour hangover. He said he would shun it, and he did. A man who had come out of the base of his own skull at 4 in the morning took the drug an entire generation was taking to get there and came back calling it a hangover. He had had the thing itself and knew the difference. Neville gave the interval between the skull and the dove as 1,260 days, which is the title of one of his lectures. The time, times and a half a time of Daniel and Revelation, 3 and a half years. The traditional length of the ministry of Jesus from the 20th of July 1959 to the 1st of January 1963 is 1,261 days. And he left the extra one where it fell. He also wrote his own canon in public. The Law and the Promise, published in 1961, lists 4 experiences: the 1929 vision of a divine society, the skull, David, and the lightning. And from 1964 onward, the 4 are the skull, David, the lightning, and the dove, with the divine society quietly moved To the back of the file, a woman called Marta lived at Laguna down the coast from Los Angeles, and she was exactly Neville's age. Six months before she died, she told him she had seen he had arrived in a self-propelled carriage, clothed in what she took for divine power, and she heard herself repeating one sentence over and over: that he was Neville, and that he was God. On the last Friday in June. She went to the Laguna Art Festival and afterwards to dinner with 3 friends. A Mexican meal, one beer, she dropped dead at the table. Her companion that night was a woman named Marge, and Marge had a vision of her own: Neville in front of an enormous crowd drawn from every faith, speaking with every person, hearing him in their own language. He told both from a platform on the 18th of July, 1968, and went on to the next thing. Jack Butler was Neville's secretary and something near a brother. Dead at 50 of a massive coronary, found on the floor at Haverstraw, New York. Born Catholic and lapsed for decades, Neville bought him a Catholic funeral and a Catholic plot and paid for both. 6 months later, Neville said he found himself awake and deliberate in that other world and came upon Jack there. Also present was his wife's older sister, a woman called Al, who had spent her entire life arguing that the dead stay dead. Neville told Jack that he had died. Jack called the idea stupid, said he was alive, and then concealed the death. And then Neville did the thing that makes this the strangest scene. He reached across. He took hold of Jack Butler's thigh and squeezed it to find out whether it was solid. It was flesh and warm and pulsing back against the hand. Jack told him to take his hand off. Al stood and stared. A man who had spent 30 years teaching that the dead are alive, checking. I keep coming back to this myself. After my father died, I found my dad working in his veterinary hospital. When I went to the other side, there he was, young, happy, and he had no idea that he was dead. I know that other people have had a similar experience where they've met somebody from their life that's passed on, and that person doesn't know they're dead. The question is, are you dead and you don't know it? This is something that Neville talked about, essentially saying that each life we begin again at the age of 20, starting over every time in a perfect state, and you'd keep on doing it until you receive the promise. For 7 years, a woman in San Francisco had sponsored his meetings on the West Coast. She worked in an office, took the bookings, and sold his books at the back of the room. On the evening of the 12th of November, 1963, she was driving west into a setting sun. A newsstand went past on her right, and the headline on the paper facing the street said that Kennedy had been shot. The paper was green. She had explained it away inside a few seconds. Sun straight into the eyes at that hour, headlights coming the other way, the racks half in the shadow. A trick of the light on a street she drove every day. By the time she reached her own door, it had left her. 10 days later, the morning of the 22nd of November, a coworker walked over to her desk and put a newspaper down in front of her. Green newsprint again, the identical headline word for word, and the evening on the road came back to her entirely. The following weekend, Neville was at dinner in San Francisco. 7 at the table: him, his wife, the woman, 4 friends parlayed, though she told them what had happened on the 12th. The table was surprised for about as long as it takes to say so. Then the conversation moved to the motorcade and the route and the buildings along it and how the authorities ought to have kept the president alive. Neville sat through the rest of it. 3 weeks after the assassination, he told the story from a platform. The woman had read a headline 10 days before it existed. And ascribed it to a room. He came back from San Francisco and told people, that decision is the whole of the man. It was made against every professional instinct available to somebody in his position. Neville had a week's run booked at the Fine Arts Auditorium in Wilshire. He opened it by telling a full house that he'd been born out of his own skull in a hotel room. A student named Freedom Berry was in the room and described what happened over the following 8 days in a lecture given in Cambria, California, in September 1996. A man who had filled rooms for 21 years walks out on a Thursday and finds 9/10 of his audience gone. He does the arithmetic from the stage because a lecturer always does. 270 people who had paid to hear him on Monday made a decision about him during the week. Then he comes back the following Monday and finds 12. 12 people in a hall built for hundreds in the city where his television program had run 4 days after his 54th year of life had produced the only thing he considered worth reporting. They left because he had started describing what happened to him at 4 in the morning in a hotel in San Francisco. His agent was a man named Freddie Messenger, and Freddie Messenger did what a competent agent does. told Neville to stop telling the story. Every professional consideration was on the agent's side. The books sold on the law. Television had come from the law. The halls filled for the law. There was a working career underneath him, built over 2 decades from a basement apartment, and one anecdote about a skull was dismantling it inside a week. Drop the story and the rooms will come back, he said. On one side, a television slate, a 15-year backlist, an agent, a national mailing list, a wife, a 17-year-old daughter, and the halls of 300 people who paid $2 each for the technique. Against that, an account of an event with one witness delivered in a Barbadian accent to Californians with a hurricane wind and swaddled baby in it. And he understood perfectly Well, how it sounded. And so from the platform he told it anyway. Neville Goddard, 54 years old, 37 years out of Bridgeton, with the entire apparatus of a career assembled around a technique that worked, answered him in 8 words. Then I'll tell it to the bare walls, Neville said to his agent Freddie Messenger. He was 54 when he said that. 13 years of life remained to him, and he spent them saying it anyway. The popular stories say that after 1959, Neville renounced the law, turned his back on manifestation, and taught only the promise. The transcripts of his final year say otherwise. On 31st of January 1972, he gives newcomers a short portion of the law, and 2 months later he opens an evening by promising both halves of it. Tonight we will take both the law and the promise, Neville said in justification. States. He demoted the law, kept it as the door, and went on handing people the technique in the car, in the apartment, in the job, for the same platform, in the same hour, for 13 more years. One more thing: Joseph Nathaniel Goddard died in 1959, aged 85, in Barbados. He left 10 children. He left each of them independently wealthy. Neville was careful with that word every time he said it from the platform. Go back to what that man did before breakfast every morning in a house on a small island. A merchant with an ice business and a 14-year-old's education sat down and went through the day ahead. He brought each man he would deal with before his mind's eye, settled the conversations in advance— the words, the order, the ending— then stood up, walked out into Bridgetown And had them. A teacher was absent from that practice, and so was a book, and so was any tradition he could name. Working it out alone took him one lifetime, and using it took him 50 years. And his 4th son said from a lecture platform in Los Angeles that the source of it stayed a mystery to him. And in the year his father died, that son stood in an auditorium on Wilshire Boulevard in front of 12 remaining people and told them That the entire world runs on what happened in that room before breakfast. Imagination is God. The outer world is a shadow thrown by the inner one. Reliably, for everybody at every hour, Golgotha is happening inside their heads, and so is the resurrection. And a date has already been set for each of them. A father in Barbados decided how a day's conversations would go, and his son 4,000 miles away And 37 years later, told an empty room that this is what reality is. In the middle of the 1960s, Neville Goddard went back on television on the Joe Pyne Show. These are supposed to be amazing. Pyne broadcast out of LA and made his living on hostility, interruption, ridicule, and a microphone out in the studio audience where members of the public queued up to have a go at the guest. Here's Between 1965 and 1967, Neville was a frequent guest. 60 years old, silver-haired, the pinstriped suit, the sanded-down Barbadian vowels. A man who had spent 3 decades saying quietly that your imagination is God, sitting opposite a host whose whole trade was making the guest lose his footing. Every one of those broadcasts is missing. 1,000-odd uncatalogued reels from Pines Production Company sit in a warehouse in Long Island City, And they are the last plausible route to moving pictures of Neville Goddard. So if you or anybody that you know has any relationship to Pines Production Company right now in this moment, we may have access to moving pictures of Neville Goddard. I'm calling upon you, if anybody knows about Pines Production Company, please find these and we can finally have The first moving picture of Neville Goddard. In 1966, he published Resurrection, the last full-length book he wrote. 6 more years of platform work followed, and the shelf closed there. From 1969 onward, he lectured at the Women's University Club, 540 South Catalina Street in Los Angeles. A club room rather than an auditorium, chairs you unfolded, a lectern And along the front of the room, a row of student tape machines running because he let anyone record him and asked for a share of exactly zero. Margaret Ruth Broome sat in those rooms for 7 years and filled hundreds of cassettes. Her habit, and the habit of a few dozen unnamed people beside her, is the reason his voice exists today at all. By the end of the '60s, he was speaking twice a week to a club room. That seated perhaps 100. And he did it for the rest of his life, 13 years of smaller rooms. The people in those chairs were mostly women, mostly middle-aged, many of them regulars who had followed him from the Wilshire Ebell in the '50s. Broome wrote down what she saw from a folding chair: the gray pinstriped suit, scripture quoted verbatim at length with the book shut and his hands still, and one particular expression that crossed his face which he put into words this way: the smile the cat gets when he has swallowed the canary. 1971 ran to 34 dated talks, roughly twice weekly, through the 22nd of November. The 1972 calendar opens on the 28th of January and runs through the winter and the spring. What Is Man? on the 31st of January. Justified States on the 3rd of April. Mitch Horowitz Rates several from that final year among the strongest talks Neville ever gave. A man of 67 at the top of his powers in a club room twice a week. The last lecture anyone can put a date to was given on the 8th of May, 1972. Its title is Revelation. After that, the dates stop. He died on the 1st of October. Between those 2 days lie 5 months with a venue of zero, an audience for zero of it, and a single securely dated public appearance yet to surface anywhere. 5 months of silence at the end of 50 years of talking. Neville drank. He drank openly, habitually, and he said so from the platform whenever anybody raised it. In 1972, The year he died, he told a room that he had a full bottle of wine with cheese for lunch, and he had thoroughly enjoyed it. Asked in 1968 how a man teaching what he taught could drink at all, he answered that he enjoyed it and left it there. God made the grain and the grape, he argued in the same lecture, and then gave human beings the intelligence to draw the alcohol out of both. So abstinence was a poor credential for anything, and he said in his own voice on a surviving tape. that he could overdo anything in his world. The certificate names cirrhosis, a disease of duration rather than one evening. Across 4 decades of students, recorders, correspondents, and memoirists, a description of Neville drunk, slurring, impaired, or absent from a bookend lecture has yet to be produced by anybody. He told an audience about the bottle of wine in the same year his liver killed him. And he told them he enjoyed it. Frank Carter was Neville's driver, his friend, and his errand runner. He took him to social engagements, waited, ran errands while he waited, and in the last week of September 1972 drove him to the hospital to see his wife. When Carter began to speak about what he had seen, he lectured under the name Iaman. His mother's maiden name, and cited that name as his standing to speak at all. His age, his occupation, his address, the length of the friendship, the date of his own death—all of it is missing, and what survives of Frank Carter is his voice. In 1976, four years afterwards, he gave eleven lectures about the night of the 30th of September, 1972. All eleven survive as audio. Four were transcribed into a book. The other 7 were left out because the tape quality was poor, and they have stayed unpublished ever since. 7 recordings of a man describing the body of his friend, sitting in an archive, unheard by the people who wrote about his death. The first 4 came on consecutive Sundays that June, the 6th through the 27th, in a small hired room. In the first of them, he says flatly and more than once that he is positive he was the last person To see Neville alive. Catherine Goddard— Bill, the costume designer he had married in 1942— was in hospital that week. Her illness went unrecorded by everyone. What Carter reports is Neville's mood about it, and the word he uses is happy. Bill was getting better. She was coming home. Neville told him she would soon be really well. On the Saturday, Carter says he practically spent the whole day with him. They drove to the hospital. Carter ran errands while Neville sat with his wife. They talked about the heat downtown, which was oppressive that week. At some point in it, Neville reached for Blake's word for ordinary earthly experience: woodland. The generated world. The place a man walks through on his way somewhere else. There was a dinner party that evening, early, and Neville had accepted the invitation. Going meant leaving Bill in the hospital one more night. He went anyway. And Carter's explanation of why is a single, anxious phrase: he was set on avoiding any disappointment to his hostess. The host has gone unnamed in every telling of this, the address unrecorded, the other guests around the table absent from the account entirely. But in many ways, it's written as if it's the Last Supper. The last person other than Frank Carter to see Neville Goddard alive was a woman whose name every single person present left unwritten. They arrived early. The first thing anyone wanted was a martini. Sometime before the meal, Neville handed Carter bread and cheese, and the words he used were, for— here, Frank, take this. Then the hostess offered Carter a second martini, and Neville stopped her. Wait here, Frank. Take this. And he poured what was left in his own glass into Frank Carter's glass. Carter finished his drink for him. That is the last thing Neville Goddard gave anybody— bread, cheese, and wine out of his own cup, handed across the table to a friend at an early dinner in Los Angeles on a Saturday evening. Carter, telling it 4 years later, said he had little need to point out what it echoed. He left the parallel sitting where it was and went on with the rest of the night. After dinner, Neville stood up silently and said 2 words: We're going. And they left. Carter's account gives the drive home in one line. Back at Neville's place, the 2 of them agreed they had enough to drink for one night, talked a short while, and Carter went home. A goodbye at the door is absent from every telling. Carter went to bed early. And lay awake. There was a dog howling outside his window. He puts it in passing and moves along to the morning. Of everything anybody set down about Neville Goddard's death, that dog is the only thing written while it was happening. In the morning, the telephone rang. It was Victoria, Vicki, 30 years old, his daughter. She had driven over to collect her father so the two of them could go together and bring her mother home from the hospital. Frank, I think Daddy went during the night. Can you come over? He told her he was on his way. That is the fact sitting underneath the whole morning. A daughter drove across Los Angeles to reunite her parents and found her father dead. By the time Carter got there, the house was full of people— county officials, the authorities, the coroner, members of the family, friends of Victoria— moving through the rooms that had been quiet the night before. And the part of the house where Neville lay had been sealed off. The coroner found Carter in the hallway and asked him a question. Then he asked it again, and a third time after that, in the same words, standing in the same hallway while the house filled up around the two of them. Was Mr. Goddard a heavy drinker? Carter answered with the exact truth, as he had seen it with his own eyes the evening before. Neville had taken one martini and had left part of it in a glass. Carter knew precisely how much was left because he had drunk it himself. The two of them had gone home, agreed that that was sufficient, and gone to bed. His answer to the coroner ran to 5 words. He didn't even have 2. Carter then asked the coroner why he wanted to know. The reply is long, and it is the sentence around which the whole ending of this story turns. We can't understand all the blood. Then the coroner took him past the seal and into the room. Neville was on his back, rigid, nude, his arms outstretched at either side as if crucified. A napkin had been laid over his face. The coroner lifted the napkin. Underneath it was the expression of a man who had choked. The coroner lowered it and then lifted it a second time and showed Carter the face again, a second look in search of an explanation that the first look had failed to hand over. Then he told Carter what the room had told him. Apparently, he said, the man had shed every drop of blood in his body. 2 men from Victoria's household cleaned it afterwards. They are the only other people who ever saw that room, and their names went unwritten as well. Frank Carter, standing in that doorway, looked at the position of the arms. He spent the next 4 years turning it over. Then he stood up in a room in Los Angeles and gave 11 lectures, and every one of them starts from that shape on the floor. The shape is available to anybody who's ever been inside a church. What it means comes later. For 50 years, the answer to how Neville Goddard died has been a heart attack. In fact, in my earlier Neville Goddard episodes or videos, you'll hear me refer to Neville Goddard had died of a heart attack. I would look it up and That's what the original report was. In 2022, Mitch Horowitz obtained the California death certificate and reproduced it. The immediate cause of death is rupture of the esophageal varices with subsequent hemorrhage. The underlying cause is liver cirrhosis. The disposition is cremation. Esophageal varices are dilated veins running along the base of the throat. Above the stomach. Cirrhosis obstructs the flow of blood through the liver. The pressure backs up into those veins, and a vessel wall a few cells thick gives way. The bleeding is fast and internal. A man can be at dinner table at 7 in the evening and dead by 2 in the morning, and the room he dies in looks the way that room looked. That is the second of 3 corrections. It accounts for the volume of blood, for the choking expression, for the speed of it. And for a coroner standing in a hallway asking a driver about drinking hours before anybody had examined a liver. The certificate gives a cause. It withholds the hour and it withholds the room. The family home from 1955 was 1025 Carroll Drive in West Hollywood, and confirmation that he was still living there in 1972 has yet to be produced. Popular accounts say apartment Carter describes a house with a portion that could be sealed off. The following week, Carter was back in the house and found a handwritten note beside Neville's armchair. At the top of it sat a line from Isaiah 53:1, who has believed our report? Under that, in Neville's hand, 2 sentences: This is my true experience of the Last Supper. Judas betrayed the Messianic secret. Below those, he had cited 2 further passages. Amos 8:11, a famine in the land of hearing the words of the Lord, and Isaiah 22, the key of the house of David, the peg fastened in a sure place, and the burden hanging upon it that will be cut down and fail. Carter called it a telegram from eternity. 3 days later, the Los Angeles Times carried the obituary on page C3. The headline runs to 5 words: Neville Goddard, religious Topics, author, speaker. A man who said he had been born out of his own skull, filed under religious topics. A second death notice ran a month afterwards on the 4th of November. The Barbados press and the metaphysical journals of the period have yet to turn up a line about it. The body went to the Pierce Brothers, and from Pierce Brothers to the Chapel of the Pines crematory in Los Angeles, which is the disposition The certificate specifies. And then the ashes went home. They were interred in the Garden family plot at Westbury Cemetery, Bridgetown, in the parish of St. Michael, Barbados. Joseph Nathaniel Goddard, who decided each morning how that day's conversation would go, died in 1959 and lies in that plot. Wilhelmina, who delivered a 4th son at Fontabelle in February 1905, died in 1941 and lies beside him. A headstone carries Neville's name and his dates. He had sailed out of Bridgetown on the 25th of September, 1922, aboard the SS Vasari. 17 years old, 5 foot 9, single, bound for a brother's address in Brooklyn with a plan to become a dancer. 50 years later, he came back. Bill, to everyone who knew her, was In a hospital bed on the night her husband died. She had been getting better. Victoria was driving out on the Sunday morning to bring her home. Her last sight of Neville was a visitor in a ward on a Saturday afternoon, cheerful, certain she would soon be well, who then left her there one more day to keep a dinner engagement. She was 65 years old, and she had 27 months left. For all 27 of those months, whenever the subject came up, She used one word for what had happened to her husband, and the word was his ascension. Frank Carter heard her say it more than once. He let it pass every time she offered, the way a person states a fact everyone in the room already has. The one time she'd added anything was February 1974, in the middle of a conversation about something else. Oh, by the way, when I fused Neville She said that much and moved on. 11 months later, on the 1st of January, 1975, she died in Los Angeles at 67, the same age he was. Frank Carter waited nearly 4 years. Then in June of '76, on 4 consecutive Sundays across more lectures into the following year, he stood in front of a small metaphysical meeting in Los Angeles and tried to explain What he had been shown on that floor. He used his mother's maiden name when he spoke: Iaman. What he built across those eleven lectures was scripture: Neville's name traced through Hebrew, through Greek, through Egyptian; Nefit, the cloud, Osiris, and Asar; the letters painted on a mummy case; Philemon, Moses, the psaltery, the coriander seed, the dinner party as the Last Supper, the bread and the cheese as the bread, the poured martini as the cup, Judas as the one. Who reveals the secret rather than the one who sells the man. A death written into the book, 3,000 years before the lady reached the floor. Read as history, most of it comes apart on contact. Taken as grief, it's the most legible document in the whole archive. The alternative was one sentence: his closest friend, aged 67, had bled to death on the floor of a house on a Saturday night, alone, while Carter lay awake across the city listening to a dog howl outside his window. The mystic's death and the medical death are built from one identical set of details. The bread and cheese, the poured drink, the sudden we're going, the dog, the sealed room, all of it. Both of them are inside that one man. 2 deaths, one set of facts. I'm setting them aside, side by side, leaving them here. A year after the death, Carter was winding an antique clock in his own house. It stopped at 10 o'clock while his hand was still on the key. And his stage stopped the same night. He said Neville came into his dream repeating 2 words: Bethany 10, Bethany 10. This is Carter's account. By 1976, you could buy exactly 2 Neville Goddard titles: Your Faith Is Your Fortune and Resurrection. Seedtime and Harvest had gone out of print, and the rest of his list with it. 34 years of lecturing 3 nights a week in New York and Los Angeles San Francisco, 15 books, a weekly television series. 2 books were left on a shelf. The Los Angeles Times had already filed the epitaph on page C3 4 days later: Neville Goddard, religious topics, author, speaker. DeVores and company kept whatever they kept in print for another 30 years in those beige covers, unadvertised, in garages and hall closets across Southern California. Set the other half of them Hundreds of cassettes taped by students he had allowed to run their machines. The man was out of print. His voice was in boxes. Victoria Goddard was born in New York on the 28th of June, 1942. 4 months later, her father was a private in a medical detachment in Camp Polk, Louisiana, on an enlistment record that described him as separated without dependents. For 9 months, he lay on an army cot In that hutment and slept, by his own account, on the 7th floor of a building on Washington Square, walking the rooms in the dark, putting his hands on his own furniture, standing over his daughter in her crib. She was the reason a man in a bunk in Louisiana did that, and she was the 4-month-old. Her father was honorably discharged on the 15th of March, 1943, and came home to that apartment and to her. Then she grew up in a city her father had reached by ship, in a family whose income came from telling strangers that the world obeys imagination. Westlake School for Girls, Russell Sage College, English, Dean's List, class of 1964. Then a working life, and it ran in 2 long stretches. The first was television. She became director of auction at KCET, the Los Angeles public station. The person who ran the on-air auction, the annual week in which a public channel sells donated goods live to viewers to keep itself on the air another year. Her father's own television series had gone out 12 miles across town on Channel 11 in 1955, and every foot of it is lost. His daughter spent a career raising the money that keeps a television station alive. The second stretch was the school, more than 25 years at Harvard-Westlake. in several roles at the institution she had attended herself when it was still Westlake. What her obituary says she cherished was the community service hours she spent with middle school children, summers in Barbados her whole life, and cousins on the island she kept up with to the end. The dogs came through Pet Orphans of Southern California, and the memorial gifts at the end were directed there and to a scholarship endowment at the school. She stayed unmarried, And childless. Her survivors are cousins and the great-nieces and great-nephews of the Goddard family and friends she had held on to since school. Joseph, her half-brother in Barbados, went first. She was the one who drove out on the morning of the 1st of October, 1972, to bring her parents home. She was the one who found him. Across 52 years she lived after that morning, her father's name stayed out of her mouth in public. Zero interviews. Zero statements. Zero forewords or remarks at a conference. Her own obituary, written by people who loved her, leaves his teaching unmentioned. Victoria Goddard died in Santa Monica on the 25th of September, 2024, at the age of 82. She carried whatever she knew for 82 years and took every bit of it with her. Her death notice runs a few hundred words. The college is in it, and the station, and the school, and the dogs, and the lawn bowling, and the Dodgers. years, and the summers on the island, her father appears once, and the sentence places him: from Barbados. A man who stood in the halls in 3 cities for 34 years and told the people in them that they were God— his daughter's obituary calls him a man from Barbados. In 2005, a historian of American esoteric religion named Mitch Horowitz published Searching for Neville Goddard in Science of Mind, the first serious journalism about the man since The New Yorker in September of 1943. Transcripts started appearing online free. The cassettes his students had recorded in folding chairs went up on the Internet Archive. Then the platforms did the rest. A man who emptied a 300-seat auditorium down to 12 people now reaches millions of them. His voice plays in cars and kitchens and gyms and countries he had yet hear of. The books are back in print in a dozen competing editions. His widow died 27 months after him. His daughter stayed silent for 52 years. His son in Barbados preferred other names, and a claim on the estate of any of them has yet to surface. The books and the tapes drifted into an ownerless commons, copied endlessly by anyone with a scanner. The material that emptied that room is the material that lifted the internet. 136 recordings of his voice survive, roughly 110 hours, nearly all taped by students who brought a machine. A man went out live on Los Angeles television every Sunday for 26 weeks in 1955, and every foot of that tape is gone. His voice is what remains, and machine-made copies of it circulate With AI versions every day on the same platforms. So anything you hear attributed to him deserves a source older than 2020. God is human imagination. Every person alive is God in the act of forgetting. The Bible is a blueprint of an experience rather than a history of one. Its characters are states a person passes through. Its geography, the human body, and Golgotha, the place of the skull, is inside of your head. The Law is how you get what you want. The Promise is what happens to you regardless of what you want. 4 experiences in a fixed order on a date already set: the skull, the sun, the splitting of the temple, the dove. He said he was an ordinary man who happened to be early. The whole of it rests on one instruction, testable tonight at zero cost: assume the feeling of your wish fulfilled. Assume the feeling of the wish fulfilled and stay faithful to that assumption. That is what he taught 34 years, 3 nights a week, from memory, without a note in his hand. For 34 years. He taught that the outer world is a shadow cast by the inner one. He died of a vein, a liver, and a volume of blood. I've carried both of those throughout this episode, and I'm putting them down together, unreconciled. There's no need for us to apologize for it. A tidy version has to throw away either the certificate or the man. And both of them are real. I don't think it undermines his credibility that he drank a lot or that he was an alcoholic. And he would have an answer to it. I think we can accurately guess because he gave it from a platform in November of 1969, 3 years ahead of time. The body is a garment. His own began in 1905 and was departing in his 60s. He told them so while he was still standing up in front of them. And then there's the last picture, and everything in this episode has pointed at it from the first minute. A house in West Hollywood on a Sunday morning, a room sealed off by a county coroner, a man of 67 on his back on the floor, nude, with a napkin over his face. Every drop of blood gone out of him, arms outstretched. Frank Carter actually had this vision before Neville died and went to Neville and told Neville of this vision. When Neville heard the vision, Neville said, you saw me as Judas. There is a section in the Bible where Judas dies and all the blood goes out of him, or there's a reference to blood. And Neville would always say that I am Judas, the one who betrays the Messianic secrets, that he was revealing the secrets of the Messiah. Frank Carter saw that shape and spent 11 years lecturing on it. I'm going to leave it exactly where it is and let you make what you will of it. In September 1922, a 17-year-old boy left Barbados on the SS Vasari with the brothers Brooklyn address written on a manifest and a plan to become a dancer. 50 years later, he came back in an urn to a family plot in Westbury Cemetery in Bridgetown, in the same parish as the 2 rented acres of rock his family held at $8 a year. He is home. His voice is everywhere else. Neville has had an incredible effect on my life. His teachings have taught me the nature of who I am and how to create my world. I've utilized his teachings and have taught them and have seen incredible success by simply imagining my reality and then watching it out-picture around me. Nobody taught it better than Neville. And Neville went beyond that teaching, saying that this ability, this unique power that we have of imagining something in our mind and it becoming reality is just a part of who you are, because you are God. Every single one of you that's listening is God crucified in your body, forgotten who you are. The sleeping gods, that's who we are, and each and every one of us carry this within ourselves. And he was at the forefront. He was the beginning, the person that said, you, you are God and you will awaken. And he explained the way it happened to him. You don't necessarily have to believe it. If you've experienced the promise, I would love for you to put it in the comments. He would claim people that came to his audience had gone through the promise, and he could predict almost by the day when they would have the experience. He would say the dove is coming in 6 days and it would happen. So it was really amazing to watch. He is home. I know this has been a long one. I just want you to hear the whole story. You've heard many lectures and you see a lot of AI Neville out there, but this is the complete story taken from all of his lectures as best as I could put it together. There's still so much more to know about Neville, and maybe someday We're going to see this on Netflix or Amazon Prime. Somebody will actually have the balls to totally film the complete movie, The Man Awakened as God. Maybe it will be a movie for 12 people in the back of the room, but it still has something profound and powerful within it. Before I go, I want to invite you to join the Reality Revolution community. You can find the link in the description. We have weekly group coaching sessions, and you're going to find a lot of unique and exclusive content that you used to be able to find on the channel but can't find anymore. So be sure to click on the link if you want to join us. I'm sending all my light, all my love to everyone listening. Thank you for sticking through all the way to the end of this one, because Neville's story is your story. Each of our stories— we are all awakening as God. For now, we live in the world of the law, and we focus on imagining And watching the world around us change. The promise comes. There's no need for us to worry about it, for it will come for all of us. At least that's what Neville says. You can find all episodes of The Reality Revolution at therealityrevolution.com. You are cordially invited to join me in Nashville. On January 29th through the 31st, where you can undergo a powerful process that I've developed over the last decade. This is the new science of manifestation. Everything you ever wanted, all your dreams can come true. You can live in the greatest life you can imagine by undergoing this process. I take you through 10 sessions where we quantum jump into your greatest timeline. You experience profound transformation. By undergoing this process over 3 days, you meet the version of you that's living the very best life that you could live. You meet them, you entangle with them, and they merge with you. And people are coming out of these events completely changed, their identity shifted, and the whole world starts to rearrange around them. This is lightning in a bottle. It's one of the most exciting things I've ever been a part of. I'm so excited. Things that we have discovered, and I'm inviting you to join me in this powerful experience. You can find the link for tickets below at www.brianscottlive.com/nashville. Welcome to the Reality Revolution.

We return you now to your local announcer.