THE FLOOD IS STILL UPON US
Neville Lecture
#455 Neville Goddard
Date: None
Dare to Assume Lectures and Workshops
I think you're all aware that this is the most dramatic week in Christendom and yet
I dare say that not an nth part of one percent of those who call themselves Christians really
understand what it is all about. It's the story of the fulfillment of God's purpose. That's the
week, the triumphant march into Jerusalem, the crucifixion and then the resurrection. And it's
told as though it took place on earth. That's how the story is told. For as Tennyson said,
"Truth embodied in a tale shall enter in at lowly doors." So, man cannot think abstractly so
it's told in the form of a story. And man has mistaken the story for the reality. Let us now
look to see who the one is spoken of in scripture. They say his name is Jesus. You may not
believe me but I'll tell you who Jesus is. Say, "I Am," that's Jesus. Don't say, I am man or
John or Peter or anything, just I Am. That's Jesus. That's God. That's the Lord God Jehovah. The
crucifixion is already over. It was in the beginning of time, a deliberate act on the part of
God - all over. The resurrection took place and is taking place and will continue until everyone
is awake. So, you say, "I Am," that's Jesus.
Now, it begins with the march. Mark tells us that He took the twelve and then He walked ahead of
them. The way Mark states it, it is as if he were one whom a dream had possessed and who went
forward to fulfill all that the prophets had foretold. For he said, "I have come to fulfill
scripture." The only purpose. Now, not a man on the outside fulfilling scripture. This one, which
is God, is buried in you when you say, "I am." You may not be aware of it aside from dreaming the
dream of life which is this. He also is dreaming the fulfillment of His purpose. And the day will
come, you are going to reproduce within yourself all that is said in scripture concerning Jesus.
Then you will know who Jesus is. It is said that he told them, "we're going up to Jerusalem, and
all that was written of the son of man by the prophets will be accomplished." And the evangelist
adds, "They understood none of these things." This saying was hid from them and they did not grasp
what was said. Only the Risen Lord can interpret scripture. Only His finger could trace the
ambiguous phrases of scripture and extract their heavenly meaning. It's a pattern in scripture.
That only when He rises in you as you, can you take the Old Testament and simply follow the
pattern. You know what the pattern is because you've experienced it. And the whole thing unfolds
and the whole thing is told you in the Old Testament. But it's a pattern. It's told you as though
it's history, ancient history. It's divine history and that history, not page after page, but a
pattern goes through the entire thing and then that pattern unfolds within you. And when it unfolds
within you, you actually gain that certainty that, "I Am He." There is no other way you'll ever
know it until it unfolds within you.
Now, God came and comes into human history. And now we're going to give Him a name - in the person
of Jesus, but the Jesus in you, in me, in every child born of woman. That's the only Jesus in
eternity. I Am that Jesus. Well, now He's a father. When God is born within you, for that's the
beginning of it all, you first awaken within you and you do not know you are God. You only know
that you have awakened from the most profound sleep ever and it seemed like eternity. You did not
awake on the bed where you fell asleep the night before. You awoke in a tomb and the tomb is your
skull. And you awake within your skull and you're all alone with no one present. But you have a
built-in innate knowledge what to do. And you do it and you come out of your skull as a child comes
out of the womb of woman. But you're coming out of your own skull and you pull yourself out of your
own skull. And the imagery of scripture concerning the birth of God surrounds you, including the
little babe wrapped in swaddling clothes and three witnesses to the event. So, you're told, "When
they came, they saw the heavenly being but Him they did not see." It's the birth of God. God
actually took upon Himself the limit of contraction, which is man. Now He is born, the birth being
an expansion. There is no limit to expansion. God is forever expanding and then, at a moment of
expansion, He then has a new venture of contraction. Then He expands beyond what He was. Then He
contracts. Then He expands beyond what He was and that is God's play. There is no limit to
expansion. He puts a limit to contraction. The limit is man.
So, when you break the tomb, you come out and you are God. Therefore, no one can see you. The
heavenly hosts who were present to witness the event can't see you, for you are spirit; you are
God. But you see them and you see the babe and you see everything round about you just as described
in Luke and Matthew. But you do not know that you are God. That comes later, and you'll not in
eternity know you are God until God's son calls you Father. And God's son, the Christ of Scripture,
is not Jesus. It's David. Jesus is the Lord. Jesus is the Lord God Jehovah in you when you say, "I
Am." That's Jesus. That's not David. Who then is Christ? The Son of God. David then comes and when
David comes, there is no uncertainty as to who you are. For he calls you Father. And before he
utters the word Father, you know you are his Father. And he knows he is your son. And this
relationship is now what every heart is aching for. When this is established by an actual
experience, the drama is over. Everything is over that you came to perform - to find the son who,
in turn, will reveal you as God the Father. For He is sound asleep in humanity and man doesn't know
that he is God. And when he is born from above, he still doesn't know he is God. And not in
eternity can he find out who he is until the son appears.
So, we are told in Scripture, "No one knows who the son is except the Father and no one knows who
the Father is except the Son and anyone to whom He chooses to reveal Him." So, people will say, "I
know Jesus is the Son of God." And you ask them, "Do you really know that?" I've had people say to
me, "Oh, yes, I've seen Him and He is the Son of God." And you say to them quite honestly and
simply, "Well then you must be God." Well, no one has slapped me so far. The impulse was there to
put me in my place and yet here is Scripture. They say they've seen Jesus and Jesus is the Son of
God. And Scripture teaches that no one has ever seen God but the Son. And no one knows who the
Father is but the Son. And if you know the Son, well, then you've seen the Son and if you saw the
Son, then you know you are God. For only God sees the Son. Only the Father knows the Son. So, don't
tell me you know the Son and do not know, at the same time, that you are God. For you cannot know
the Son and not know the Father. So, when they kill you, you're told, and put you out of the
synagogue and think they do God a favor, they do it because "They know neither my Father nor Me.
Had they known my Father, they would have known me also. But they know neither My Father nor Me."
So, you find, you've got to actually feel between the words. For He's speaking one moment as Father
and then speaking, in another moment as Son. It's a mystery and how are you going to tell it unless
you tell it in the form of a story that it may enter in at lowly doors.
But man, hearing the story, learns to feel behind the story and feel what it's trying to convey.
But when you actually experience the story, then you know the mystery. It's the mystery that
everyone one day will unfold within himself and he'll know that he is God. So this is what
confronts man this week as it's dramatized but not told. For they do not know it. They do not know
the story. Let me turn now to the 55th Chapter of Isaiah. "I will make a covenant with you." Now
he's speaking to all of us, "I will make a covenant with you," and this is his covenant, "my
steadfast, sure love for David - I have made him a witness to the peoples." That is my witness to
the peoples. Now what is he going to witness? The truth of God's word. So God's word is Scripture
and the Scripture spoken of was the Old Testament, "and the word is truth," I make him now a
witness to the people and He has my steadfast and sure love forever. Now, "That is my covenant with
you," said the Lord to us. We turn now to the trial, and here we find one called Jesus standing
before Pilot, and he turns to Pilot and he said, "For this I was born. And for this I came into the
world to bear witness to the truth," Now He tells you He is not of this world, "unless you are born
form above, you cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven." He's not speaking of the birth from the womb
of a woman in spite of all the priesthoods of the world. He is speaking of an entirely different
birth, "born not of blood nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God." He
said, "I am from above, you are from below." Now, He's not speaking to you, the being who is God.
He is speaking to this body here. This is from below. This came out of the womb of my mother. But
there is that in me which is "I Am" that no woman can bear. That must be born from above. It is now
entombed in my skull, entombed in your skull. But the skull of which I speak is a divine skull
containing all of us. That is the skull. And it is said in the 87th Psalm, "And this one was born
here and that one was born there."
All within the one grand skull and it's called Zion - another name for Jerusalem.
So, when Paul said, "The Jerusalem from above is our mother and she bears children into
liberty." The Jerusalem from below bears them into slavery. Well, my physical mother bearing her
ten children that she raised, she wove garments of flesh. And these garments of flesh came from
below, from her womb into slavery. For we're all slaves of the bodies that we wear. But housed
within that, from above, there is another Jerusalem and she is our mother who bears us into
liberty, into freedom. You come out of your own skull, that divine skull. And you're set free.
Well, then you come into this world to bear witness to what? To the truth. So, "I made him a
witness to all the peoples." Well, what is he going to witness now? The truth of Scripture, that
God is a Father and that He did say to me, "I will tell of the decree of the lord," said David
in the 2nd Psalm. "He said unto me, thou art my Son. Today I have begotten thee." If Scripture
cannot be broken, what other Son are you holding up now before me that I may see? You may see
all the hallucinations in the world as artists have painted dozens and dozens of different
portraits of one they call Jesus. And they said they saw him. Ask the artist, "When you saw him
in your imagination and you painted on the canvass or you sculpted, did you know then you're
looking at the Son of God." If they say, "yes," well then you must know that you are God.
Because no one can see the Son but the Father and no one knows the Son but the Father.
Therefore, if you are looking at the Son of God and only God can see the Son, well then you must
be God. What are they going to say to that? And Scripture cannot be broken. Read it in the 11th
Chapter of the Book of Matthew. "No one knows who the Son is except the Father and no one knows
who the Father is except the Son and anyone to whom He chooses to reveal Him.
So, I know in my own case, raised in the Christian faith as I was, and I call myself a Christian
from my own personal experience of this great mystery, but I did not know from my mother's knee or
in my school (because we had Bible reading and Bible study when I was a child, it was part of our
schooling). We had to go to Sunday School. I was taught the Bible, raised with the Bible. And there
it is but I didn't see it and my teachers didn't see it. My mother didn't see it; my father didn't
see it, and no one that I ever met ever saw it, so I didn't know it until it happened. It happened
in me and then I could not then make it fit in with what they taught me. I had to go back and
re-read Scripture and there the whole pattern was there all along but only the Risen Christ can
interpret Scripture. Only when David rises within me and calls me Father. Now, listen to the words,
"When the time had fully come, God sent forth the spirit of his Son into our hearts crying Father."
What time has fully come? When you have borne the great fardel, the great load, the burden the
allotted span. Not before you've borne it the allotted span can He come. And when you get to the
end of the road and you've borne that burden, then the spirit of His Son comes into you and here he
rises in you. You resurrect your own son and that son is God's Son; therefore, you are God.
That's when you gain the certainty that you are God. Yet, while you wear the little garment, you
are still in a straight jacket. And all you can do while you wear it is to tell it. Try to clarify
the atmosphere and scrape off the barnacles from the ship that gathers them over the centuries. Far
from belittling Jesus, I have placed Him where He actually is. He is God. He is not the Son of God.
He is God. He is the Lord, a symbol of God, that you may say, but He wasn't born of any woman. The
only woman of whom He was born, "I Am." That's the Jerusalem from above. "I am Mary and birth to
Christ must give if I in blessedness for now and ever more would live." So each must bring forth
the Son and it's the same Son. Only one Son. And when you look at Him, no uncertainty; no one need
tell you anything. There you are, looking at your Son as though memory has now returned and you
have suffered from total amnesia up to this moment in time and suddenly, your memory returns and
you know who you are. You're God, the Father.
It's going to happen to every child born of woman. Not one will be lost. Not one. I don't care if
you're a moron today, if you're brainless. That's only a temporary experience in this world. That
brain that you have really, the true brain, is not really addled at all. That's only some distorted
aspect of life for a little while. Maybe you'll go through life, spending fifty, sixty years in
some distorted brain, but it's still not the brain of which I speak. Not that divine brain. If your
child is not a balanced child, a demented child, I know it's a hard thing to bring up and a hard
thing to face in life, but that's not your responsibility. That little thing there that you call
your child that is demented, behind it all, behind that mask it is part of the burden that it
bears, is the perfect being that is Jesus and that Jesus in there is, "I Am." It was never
tarnished. It was never soiled, no matter what it has done in the world, it was never soiled. And
one day, it will awake. And when it awakes, it comes out of the tomb. So Paul could say, "I am
crucified with Christ; nevertheless I live, not I. Christ lives in me and the life I now live in
the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me." And that Son is
David.
Listen to the words, "I have found in David, the Son of Jesse, a man after my own heart who will do
all my will." Well, the word "Jesse" means "Jehovah exists." That's what the word means. So Jesse
is the Father. Whose Father? David's Father. And who is Jesse? Jehovah. And who is Jesus? Jehovah.
He is the Lord. But no one can say Jesus is Lord except by the Holy Spirit. And who is the Holy
Spirit? The Remembrancer. When the Son stands before you and memory returns and you are his Father
and He is your Son, then only by this return of memory will you ever know. And so, no one can say
that Jesus is Lord and Jesus is the Father. For in spirit, David called him, "my Lord." Why did he
call him, my Lord? Well, that's a title of Father. So he called Jesus, My Lord. He is the I Am in
you, the I Am in every being in this world. So, we'll go up to Jerusalem and all that was actually
written about the son of man, which is the title that he used of self, will now be accomplished.
So, I'm going up to Jerusalem, because everything is going to happen in the skull. That's where
Jerusalem is, the Jerusalem above. I'm going up to Jerusalem, not down. And all things said of the
Son of man will now be accomplished. So, he goes up and the whole thing unfolds within the
skull.
That's where you awake. That's where you explode. When David comes out, it's an explosion in your
head as though you had put some dynamite to your head and the whole thing explodes. And when it all
settles, here stands David before you. He was buried in you. And when he said to me, "I laid myself
down within you to sleep," who said that? The depths of my own soul, the Lord said that. "I laid
myself down within you to sleep and as I slept I dreamed a dream. I dreamed, and I knew exactly
what he was dreaming. He's dreaming that He's I. And when the dream is over, we aren't two. We are
one. No longer will he simply treat me as something on the outside, an emanation of His. No more
the emanation, He cleaves to me and we become one being. So when a man leaves this world, his
father, his mother, and cleaves to his wife, and this is the wife, the emanation of God. Yet,
though His emanation, it's his wife until the dream is over. When the sleep is over, we aren't two.
We're one. And I know that when I awoke within me, I wondered, "How did I get here? Who put me
here?" For this is a tomb. This s a sepulcher and only one who thought me dead could have put me
here. For this is a tomb and only the dead are placed in tombs. So someone, I didn't realize then,
that it was a deliberate act on my own part.
So, you're told in the 10th Chapter of John, "No one takes away my life, I lay it down myself. I
have the power to lay it down and the power to take it up again." And yet, over the centuries, we
have condemned a race of people for taking away the life of one who never, as an individual, walked
the face of this earth. He is in man or you couldn't even breathe. He's not on the outside of man
that someone can take his life. He is in man. He's the breath of man, the spirit of man, the I
Amness of man, man's own wonderful human imagination. That is Jesus. That's God. And so to blame a
race of people for doing what no one ever did, listen to the Bible, the 10th Chapter, "No one takes
away my life. I lay it down myself. I have the power to lay it down and the power to take it up
again. For I am the resurrection and the life." So he entered death's door, the human skull, and
laid down in the grave of man and there he dreams the dream of life, and this is the dream of life.
And one day, it comes to the end and he awakes. Where? In the tomb where he entered to find himself
there. It was a long dream, thousands and thousands of years he has been dreaming this dream. You
didn't begin in your mother's womb seventy years ago or whatever year you may be. That's only a
garment woven for you. You are eternal. You have no beginning and you have no end.
Never was there a time when you were not. Nor shall there ever come a time when you shall cease to
be. Beginnings and ends are all dreams. It seems so real, but they're all dreams. But you have no
beginning, no end. You are and that being is called in Scripture, God the Father.
But, may I tell you something, you will not actually feel, I am Jesus, I am Father. That's not what
you feel. You don't feel Jesus. You don't feel God. You don't feel Jehovah. These are names given
by man. But what you do feel is Father. So the great revelation of the New Testament is God is
Father. That is the foundation of the entire thing. If you were not a father, then there is no
child. So the relationship of father/son is fundamental to the Christian faith. Without the Son,
there would not be a Father. And if there is a Father, there must be a Son. And it's a search for
the Son. And when the Son is found, the Father knows who He is. But not until the Son is
resurrected. So, in the Old Testament, in the 2nd Psalm, the 16th Psalm, and the 110th Psalm, they
are identified with resurrection. In the 16th Psalm, David is speaking and is made to say, "Thou
wouldst not leave my soul in Hell." In confidence, he knows he would not be left in Hell, that he
would be raised up. Because, "I will not take my steadfast, sure love from David." That's my
covenant with the peoples. I have made him a witness to all the peoples. I will not take my love
from him. So, he dies and is buried but I will raise him up. And when the Father raises up the Son
then the smile is on his face because his Son has returned from the grave. And David is the eternal
Son of God, the resultant state of all the experiences that you, as a man, which is God as man,
experience in this world. So God became as I am that I may be as He is.
This is the story of scripture and it's all in the Old Testament but not understood. There it is, a
blueprint. It's an adumbration. The New interprets the Old, not the other way around. And when it
happens in you, well, what a joy. I can't tell anyone the emotion that possesses you and then you
really are like one possessed. You walk in the dream of what happened and you can't think of
anything but, really. You may be diverted for a little while, a small party. A big one would bore
you. A few friends, yes. A large crowd, no. It doesn't interest you. A dinner party of a few chosen
friends, yes. But to have an enormous crowd, no that's nothing more than noise. Everyone is trying
to, well, monopolize the entire picture. But a few chosen friends for a party, a delightful evening
with words where you are discussing reality, wonderful. But after it happens to you, may I tell
you, you can't think of anything but. And your dreams are not dreams any more. Your nights are not
what they were prior to that waking. You wake and it's entirely different. And I can't explain to
anyone who wakes every day of their life after a night of good sleep, that that waking in the
morning doesn't compare to this. It's something entirely different, as though you had never
awakened before in your life. That's what actually you feel like. Something entirely different. And
you look at all these things round about you and here, a thousand years, two thousand years, three
thousand years ago, it was written there and it was all about you and you didn't know it.
So we're going to go up now to Jerusalem, said he, "and all that is written of the Son of man by
the prophets will be fulfilled." All will be accomplished. Then he began to explain to them
Scripture and said, "Beginning with Moses and the Law and all the prophets and the Psalms, he
interpreted to them in all the Scriptures, the things concerning Himself." Now this coming Friday,
if you do go to part of the service, you will hear the words on the cross. Every one is taken from
the Old Testament. And you will know who you are in that sense. They are the words of David. For
David is going to commit himself now to his Father. "Into thy hands, I commit my spirit." This is
now the 31st Psalm. "Thou hast redeemed me, Oh Lord, Faithful God," yet that is the final cry on
the cross when you read it in this little Book of Luke. "Into thy hands I commit my spirit." And he
commits it into the hands of the Father. He calls him now Father, "Father, into thy hands I commit
my spirit." And these are the identical words of David in the 31st Psalm. Now here, the entire
thing unfolds within man.
But, something was said to me just before I took the platform by a very dear friend of mine who is
here tonight although he will admit to me and to everyone in the world, he is one hundred and one
percent American but he cannot deny the fact that he has one hundred and one percent of the Irish
background in him too. So, he gave me the definition of an Irishman. An Irishman is one who does
not know what he wants and there will be no peace on earth until he finds it. Not exactly his
words; he told it much better than that, but that's the essence of it. He does not know what he
wants and there will be no peace on earth until he finds it. Well, that's the whole vast world.
Ask, what do you want. He doesn't really know what he wants because what everyone wants is to find
the Father and you can't find the Father without the Son. Basically, we're trying to find the cause
of the phenomenon of life. What makes things happen in my world? He told me, "You know, years ago,"
before he met me, "he had these sorts of daydreams of, well, talking to a crowd - maybe going on
radio, maybe on T.V." Here out of the blue, someone came into his restaurant in Ojai and offered
him a series of lectures here, in New Mexico, possibly sending him into Arizona. She can arrange
other things for him, and the whole thing is done. But he remembered these daydreams.
Most of us don't remember and when we are confronted with our own harvest, we deny it's our
harvest. So, I tell you there is no such thing as an accident in this world. No. There is no such
thing as a natural cause. Every natural effect has a spiritual cause, that is, an imaginal cause
and not a natural. A natural only seems. It is a delusion of our fading memory. We can't remember
when we set it in motion. He remembers that long before he met me in San Francisco, that this
happened back East, this daydream of his. And now, suddenly out of the nowhere a seeming stranger
comes into his world, listening to him in his restaurant, carried away with what he had to say and
the way he said it and is moved to arrange this thing for him. He doesn't have to lift a finger to
do it. It all will be done for him.
So, I say, dream noble dreams, wonderful dreams. If they don't come to pass tonight, tomorrow, or
next week, you keep on dreaming them. But try to put yourself into the dream as though it's taking
place and try to live in it. Be possessed by the dream and see the whole thing unfold within you in
this world of Caesar, always bearing in mind, the real dream. It must come to an end only when it's
fulfilled. And the story is the fulfillment when you awake. For resurrection is waking. It's not
gathering dead bones together and putting flesh on it. It's simply awakening. You are sound asleep
and you awaken like a man out of a deep, deep sleep to find yourself in a tomb. But you have the
strength to break the bonds of that tomb and to come out of that tomb. And when they come to search
for the body, they have taken away the body. They only knew you by reason of the body that you wore
and that's taken away and they can't see you. "Him they could not see." But he was fully aware of
everyone round about him. And, here, all the symbolism of Scripture is unfolding before him. And he
is the central character in the entire drama. They're talking about him. They aren't talking about
Jesus. They're talking about you. You are individualized and you tend forever and forever toward
ever greater individualization. They didn't call me by any other name. They didn't call me God.
Didn't call me Lord, didn't call me Jesus. They spoke of me as Neville. It's Neville's baby. I was
aware of being "I." No loss of identify whatsoever. But then when David comes, here is Neville. In
this century I was born, the year 1905. Here we have a recorded, so-called history, of one born
1000 years B.C. and he stands before me and I know I'm his father. And here we have words put into
his mouth that the Lord said to him, "You are my son." And I know that I am his Father and only
then did I gain the certainty as to whom I am.
So, you will not lose your identity, yet you are God the Father. It is Father that is being
revealed, the sweetest name there is in Scripture. He is a loving Father, may I tell you, in spite
of all the pain you've gone through and all the horrors of the world. For this is a nightmare.
Can't confine it only to the night; it's a daymare too with most people. So, I tell you, at the end
- it's not a reward - it's simply victory. You have plotted and planned the whole thing before you
entered the tomb. You prepared a way for your own return to whom? To yourself. I came out from the
Father and I came into the world. Again, I am leaving the world and I'm returning to the father.
And that's the story of this week. So as far as Friday goes, Good Friday, save your tears. The
crucifixion is over. And it was a voluntary act on your part, which is God's part. You laid
yourself down in a tomb for the purpose of dreaming the dream of life. And in that dream, you
suffered. You knew you would. As you're told in the 24th Chapter of the Book of Luke, again you're
told it in the 18th, for that matter. But the 24th,"Oh foolish men and slow of heart to understand
all that the prophets have written and said about the Christ. Was it not necessary that Christ
suffer these things and then enter into his glory?" It's part of the training. These are the
furnaces. "I tried you in the furnaces of affliction." Why? For my own sake. "For my own sake I do
it, for how should my name be profaned? My glory I will not give to another." And my name is
Father. That's my name. That's my name. That's the name truly that is God's name in the world. And
so the word "God" which makes the mind jump on the outside is not truly the name. You take the word
"Elohim" and we translate it "God." Take the word, "Jod He Vau He" and translate that "Lord." But
the name that is revealed is Father. That's who this being is. This creative being is Father. And
everyone is in search of the Father.
And one day, He's going to find the only one who can reveal Him as Father. And when He finds Him,
He finds His own Son David. Now that will come as an awful shock to the majority of people in the
world. And I would not take back one little iota. It's true. I'm not speculating. I'm telling you
exactly what I have experienced. It's not theory with me. This is all that I know from my own
personal experience. It was always there in that Book called the Bible but I had not experienced it
so I couldn't see it. "You have eyes and you see not. And you have ears and you hear not." Because
they're not yet bored. And it takes the furnaces to bore these eyes for you and to bore the mouth
for you, to bore the ears for you that you may experience Scripture and then the whole thing
unfolds within you.
It's all about you because it's all about God and you are God asleep. And the day is coming and may
it not be too long when He will awake in you as you. And then you will find your Son that Scripture
claims to be God's Son. And because Scripture claims it is God's Son and you know it's your Son,
then you must be God. That's the story of the Bible.
Now let us go into the silence.
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