Table Of Content

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INTRODUCTION Magician of the Beautiful As I came near, without thought or effort on my part they were, one after the other, molded as by the Magician of the Beautiful. —NEVILLE, THE SEARCH, 1946 The Barbados-born mystic Neville Goddard, who lived and worked in America for fifty years until his death in 1972, is one of the most extraordinary and unusual religious intellects of modern life. I will never forget the first time I heard his name. In the summer of 2003, I was interviewing major-league pitcher Barry Zito, who was then playing for the Oakland A’s. Barry’s father, Joe, taught him about Neville’s work, and the Cy Young Award winner used Neville’s ideas of mental creativity as part of his training regimen. Neville teaches that all reality is self-created—that your mind is God the Creator. This formed a vital part of Barry’s system of self- development at the time. Midway through our conversation he stopped and said, “You must really be into Neville.” The mystic wrote and spoke under his first name; I had never heard it. Barry was incredulous. After our talk, I got a copy of Neville’s 1966 book, Resurrection. I was enthralled with its ideas—and hooked ever after. I am often drawn to a teaching based on my perception of the teacher’s character and personage. Something about Neville’s persona gripped me, even before I had heard his clipped Anglican accent or seen his Romanesque image. Neville, to me, conveyed a kind of seriousness intermixed with the most radical proposition I had ever heard: Your imagination is God. Everything that you experience, including the words you are now reading, emerges from your own creative thoughts, of which the Jehovah of the Old and New Testaments is a symbolic pictogram. Everything is ultimately rooted in you, Neville taught, as you are rooted in God. This is the esoteric meaning behind Scripture, culminating in the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ and his self-realization of his own divinity. In Neville’s telling, the events of Scripture are not historical but are a mystical drama destined to play out in the life of every individual. “Every man is destined to discover that scripture is his autobiography,” Neville said in 1967. You are God—it is the kind of statement with which one immediately wants to argue. We can all recall incidents in life that do not bear the markings of our creative desires or wishes, a topic to which I will return. But Neville, across more than ten books and thousands of lectures, which he freely permitted to be tape-recorded by audience members—a foresightful act that secured his legacy in the digital age—argued with unfailing simplicity and elegance for the sacredness of the imagination. “The only God,” he told audiences, “is your own wonderful human imagination.” As you’ll discover in the selections that follow, Neville also taught that the secret meaning of existence is to discover your divine nature through the exercising of your mind’s causative abilities; this leads you into a series of mystical experiences that confirm your identity as the Creator. Neville was born to an English family on the island of Barbados in 1905. He was one of ten children: nine boys and a girl. In 1922, at the age of seventeen, Neville migrated to New York City to study theater. His youthful intrepidness marked a difference between his era and our own. Neville experienced some success, appearing in roles on Broadway and in silent films. In 1926, an entertainment columnist hailed the young actor’s “remarkable likeness to Rudolph Valentino.” He also toured internationally as part of a dance troupe. During his performing years, Neville encountered a wide range of mystical philosophies. In the early 1930s, the seeker dedicated himself to an intensive study of metaphysics, which by the end of the decade had laid the foundation for a new and unexpected career as a mystical writer and lecturer. In his talks, Neville credited his spiritual education to an enigmatic, turbaned black-Jewish man named Abdullah, who Neville said tutored him for five years in New York in Scripture, number mysticism, Kabbalah, Hebrew, and the laws of mental creativity. Neville’s teaching became not only the most occultic edge of positive-mind, or New Thought, metaphysics, but also the philosophy’s most intellectually stimulating expression. Neville artfully and compellingly expanded on the principle of how each of us is the Creator clothed in human flesh and slumbering to his own higher nature. We live, Neville said, within an infinite network of coexistent realities from which we select among a limitless potential of experiences through the exercise of our mental images, emotionalized thoughts, and expectations. The men and women you see about you are also branches of the Creator: we each crisscross through one another’s universe of formative thought systems until we experience the ultimate realization—symbolically told in Scripture as the crucifixion and resurrection—of our Godhood. Neville told listeners and readers that Creation clothed itself in human form in order to give men and women life; so deep and total is the Creator’s love for its offspring that it willingly entered into a state of total immersion and forgetfulness of its divinity. Embodied in this cosmic framework is the mystical drama of the individual sleeping, chrysalis-like, to his true nature, experiencing an educative life of joys and tragedies, triumphs and sufferings, and eventually coming into realization of the truth. With that, Creation awakens and returns to itself. If all this sounds somewhat head-spinning, rest assured: Neville conveyed his ideas with disarming simplicity and a frequent emphasis on using your mental powers to satisfy personal desires, which attracted people of varying levels of mystical interest and spiritual proclivity. Neville’s ideas are at once spiritually epic and workaday practical. He is one of the few modern spiritual thinkers for whom this is true. Neville has influenced me more than any other teacher. His image is tattooed on my left forearm. Personal experience has led me to believe in his ideas. And yet … I have also written that humanity lives under many laws and forces, including laws of physical decline and decay. To this, there has been no exception. For all the talk in New Thought circles and other mystical philosophies of each of us exiting life at precisely the appointed hour, something Neville occasionally referenced himself, many of us would give nearly anything for a healthy, extended stay, especially when faced with terminal or chronic illness, which seems to rob us of life’s potential. This is just one area where thoughtful seekers are prone to question Neville’s contention of absolute human divinity. So, how can I square my deep dedication to Neville’s work with my own questions? First, I am not entirely sure that I can—or that I ought to. Or that Neville would even want me to. The highest form of faith is critical in nature. I have no wish to create a closed-circuitry of belief. Such a system stifles the inner search and reduces personal questions and conflicts to the call-and-response of catechism. Paradox and inner friction are the price of any mature search. That said, let me at least make an effort to harmonize my questions with my fealty to Neville’s ideas. First, it is important to note that Neville’s philosophy represents one of the earliest—and probably the closest of—mystical analogs to quantum theory. Quantum theory posits a world where subatomic particles effectively react to the perspective and measurements of a conscious observer, and in which an infinite possibility of outcomes simultaneously exist. Neville’s capacity to offer parallel insights—decades before quantum theory became popularized—now look remarkable. In his posthumous book Five Lessons, Neville tells an audience in 1948: “Scientists will one day explain why there is a serial universe. But in practice, how you use this serial universe to change the future is more important.” He extrapolates further in the 1949 book Out of This World, reprinted in chapter five. How do we “use” this serial universe? We often do so fitfully and forgetfully. Neville contended that due to the natural time interval that occurs between thought and actualization, we frequently lose track of convictions, ideas, and mental pictures that we once harbored— and are later shocked to reencounter them in the tactile world. In our typical state of somnambulant half-awareness, Neville taught, we are strangers to what we produce. Indeed, I believe that we pass through much of our lives unaware, or marginally aware, of our most deeply held wishes, which we fail to acknowledge because we fear they are selfish, ignoble, or reflect poorly on how we believe we ought to appear to others. (Estrangement from one’s true desires is explored in the extraordinary Soviet-era Russian science-fiction movie Stalker, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, which is a remarkable viewing experience for anyone interested in Neville’s thought.) In his 1860 essay “Fate,” Ralph Waldo Emerson notes this process of forgetfulness and the passage of time: And the moral is that what we seek we shall find; what we flee from flees from us; as Goethe said, “what we wish for in youth, comes in heaps on us in old age,” too often cursed with the granting of our prayer: and hence the high caution, that, since we are sure of having what we wish, we must beware to ask only for high things. This gave rise to the popular adage: Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it. I believe that it is possible to go through all of life not only forgetful but oblivious toward what you want, habitually repeating to yourself what you think you should want (such as a nice family, a good home), but really harboring a different wish, one that you may deny even when it presses against the walls of your awareness. This produces a life of bitterness, unease, and alienation, which often gets vented on others. Neville’s philosophy, by contrast, places a demand on us, one that we may think we’ve risen to but in most cases have never tried: to reach an understanding of what we truly want. When we confront our inner wishes with fearless maturity and honesty we may be surprised by what we find. Realization is the dawn of actualization or at least the end of self-estrangement. It all begins with clarified desire. Neville taught that we live in a world in which all desires are possible because everything is mentally created. Yet, once more, I hit the wall of my own objections. It is impossible for thoughtful people to overlook the scale of tragedy and suffering in our world: civil wars that tear apart nations and kill or maim countless victims; tsunamis and earthquakes that decimate families and whole societies; famines and epidemics that cause mass death and suffering. Could any serious person contend that entire cultures or nations are, at varying times, creating their own catastrophes—or, just as daunting, that I, the individual-as-God, am creating it for them, or for myself? But that seeming conundrum may also hold a critical piece of the puzzle of existence. Within the framework we occupy—regardless of life’s ultimate basis in thought—we are compelled to experience things that mitigate or condition the apparent law of mental causality. Consider: a law, in order to be a law, must be consistent. But that does not mean that it is consistently felt. The law of gravity is ever operative; but you’re going to experience gravity differently on earth than on the moon or Jupiter. In the vacuum of space, you experience