1/19/68

In the Book of Job, the 33rd chapter, we read, “God speaks in one way, and in two, but man does not perceive it.” Then he states the two ways: the first, in a dream; the second, “In a vision of the night when deep sleep falls upon men, while they slumber on their beds, then he openeth up the ears of men, and sealeth their instruction” (verse 14). Now man thinks that he’s never had a vision. He’s had a dream, yes, but never had a vision. If I told you this whole vast world is vision—this is vision when you find yourself in another world; a world terrestrial just like this, and you terrestrial just like you are, it’s this world, a real world… maybe another section of Time but real just like this. When you return here with the memory of what has happened, you speak of it as an experience, and you will say that was a vision. Well, this is vision. This is the vision of scripture. You are dreaming this. Man won’t believe this is your dream. You and I agreed to dream in concert, and we are dreaming in concert, and we have to complete the dream.

The end of it is the “turn around” and it will still be a series of visions. The entire Old Testament lays out the dream interspersed with the vision. The New Testament is the “return.” We speak in the New of a trinity and it confuses men. In fact, Bishop Pike resigned. He said the Trinity to him confuses him and he will not accept it. You can go no higher in the Episcopal Church than Pike went. He’s as high in that church as any cardinal is in the Catholic Church…but he cannot grasp it. And he said, as far as the Virgin birth is concerned, that’s out. He doesn’t have it, he doesn’t understand it. If you say it in a simple way: God the Father, the abiding Father; the proceeding Son; the returning Holy Spirit; and the three are one. They aren’t two or three, they are one. The dreamer in man is God and there’s only God, nothing but God…but you proceeded out for an experience in your dream.

Where are you dreaming? If I go into a world and the world is just as real as this and I remember where I was when it started, I know exactly where it was, and it is not this world where I find myself. I know exactly where what I call self, the body, is lying on a bed in a certain city, and I know exactly where it is; and I can’t get back. There’s no road back, none whatsoever. But I remember how I once did it and that was to feel. So I begin to feel myself on the bed that I know so well. Then finally I feel myself on that bed and the body is cataleptic, can’t move it. I can’t open the eyes, can’t move a finger, and there I remain how long I couldn’t say…maybe not more than thirty, forty seconds, but it could be longer, but I have no way to time it. It seemed long because it’s uncomfortable to find yourself in a body that is dead. That’s what you feel like, the body is dead, but you are alive. Then suddenly you can move a finger, you can move the elbow, you can feel the warmth of your wife on this double bed, and then you can pry open the eye and the familiar objects are on the wall, on the bureau, and you are back.

Now, are you back? Are you not dreaming this as much as you dreamed that? But where are you? Man can’t remember where he laid himself down to dream this. If he did, he’d get back there too. Just as I found myself in a world like this but remembered where I placed this and then felt myself back into it, but with the memory of what I had done. I met people just like you, I talked with them, and they answered. They were dressed, they were real, everything was real and it was terrestrial. Then I came back. But now I said, “Now I’m back,” as though I have no other area where I’m really dreaming this. If that was a vision, this is just as much a vision, for it does not differ from this. So he has two ways of speaking to man, but man does not perceive it.

Now, here is a dream. All of us are past masters at misinterpreting dreams. A friend gave it to me on Monday (he’s here tonight). “The first time,” said he, “that I have seen you in one of my dreams.” Now a dream has one central jet of truth. Don’t try to interpret every little aspect of the dream, because they’re insignificant. It’s like trying to interpret every little word in the letter. A letter conveys a thought, but you don’t have to take every little word apart…it’s what it conveys. Well, in this it starts off like a dream: “It’s my birthday, and there are two cakes because the party is so big, the crowd is so large. Aside from my birthday, I’m going to have at the same time a lecture. I’m going to give a lecture. Jan was present, Bud was present,” and said he, “I’m not quite sure whether it was Bud or the gentleman who sits down front in the second row on your left, and therefore, that would be Ray…but one or the other…they were there and many of them who are here. Jan was adamant on what she wanted on her cake, and she was very firm in telling all the others they must not repeat this design on the other cakes. She was firm about it.”

Well, that’s not significant to the dream. That’s part…that’s getting the dream started, building a story. He goes off to find planes, blue and green for the cake. When he returns one cake is gone, and he thinks, well now, maybe this party is over and he hasn’t heard Neville, and that was the reason not only for the party but, really, to hear him. Then he finds himself on the beach, and now it is either Ray or Bud on the beach and he turns to one or the other and said, “Where is everybody?” He points away out to sea to a rock and he said, “There they are, away beyond vision practically, away out to sea, a huge rock and they’re all on the rock.” Then beyond it, a smaller rock, and one person on it, either a child or a little girl, and she’s a little bit anxious and afraid because she’s alone. So he turns to one of these two gentlemen and he said, “How did they get out there?” and he answered, “Mentally.” Then this one said, “It’s easy, no problem” and then he said, “I’ll take the child by my hand.” He takes the child in his hand mentally and then they’re on the big rock with this man. He takes this man by the hand, too. This gentleman who wrote the letter takes him by the hand and they’re on the rock. Now he said, “You had just finished the lecture. It was a place not unlike this University Club, with this exception—in the middle of the stage there was a stairway and you were greeting all the people. You held out your hands, extended them to me, and I took your hands, both of them, and then you said to me, ‘I’m glad you made it, Chosen Son.’” Or, he said, “It could have been ‘Chosen One.’ And so, I woke.”

Well now, it’s a very significant dream. It’s not the party, it’s not a birthday, not cakes…but the language of scripture will reveal it. Here is a rock—that’s the important thing—out to sea and the only way there is in my Imagination. I make the journey mentally, but find myself on the rock. In the Bible, the 32nd chapter of Deuteronomy, we are told “You are unmindful of the Rock that begot you and you have forgotten the God who gave you birth” (verse 18). So here, Rock is equated with God. In the New Testament we are told in the first letter to the Corinthians, you’ll find it in the 10th chapter, “And they drank from the supernatural Rock that followed them, and the Rock was Christ” (verse 4). So here, he has reached the Rock, he is standing on the Rock. He conjured me from within himself, for all dreams are egocentric. He conjured everyone in that dream out of himself, for man contains the whole vast world. We are called automatically, without our knowledge, without our consent, to play the part that he wrote for himself. He has reached that foundation stone. If you do not build on the Rock, when winds come, the rumors, they’ll simply take any structure you have and knock it down if you build on the shifting sand. One must build only on the Rock, and the Rock is Christ, and Christ is God, and God is your own wonderful human Imagination. That is God, when you say “I am,” that’s God. So the central figure of Christianity is human Imagination. When man accepts this as the first principle of religion, well then, all the dogmas, all the rituals, all the external worship, will have heard the trumpets of Joshua. And you know what happens when they are heard, they all fall, all the buildings that are on any structure other than that Rock that is God…and God is your own wonderful human Imagination.

So here, he had a wonderful experience, he is on the Rock. But he may move from it…he may turn his back and forget that the cause of all the phenomena of his life is his own wonderful human Imagination. For there’s only one source of all creation: “By him all things were made and without him was not anything made that was made” (John 1:3). So if anything comes into his world, there’s no place to look as to the cause of it save his own wonderful human Imagination. Well, he’s found it and God in himself. When I speak of God in scripture, it’s the God in man speaking, the dreamer in man is doing it, and that dreamer in him is his Imagination and it conjures out of the nowhere. What artist could in one single night have conjured that scene and built it as he did? Did it perfectly to reveal to himself where he stands that night in the hope he will continue on that Rock. For he is the Chosen One, the Chosen Son, he is calling himself that, for God calls himself. For here, he is the Father, he is the Son and he is the Holy Spirit, and the three are one.

There three agree, as we are told in the epistle of John, the first epistle, the fifth chapter, and he calls it by three different names: the Spirit, the water and the blood, same three. The Spirit, the water of Truth, for he calls himself “living water”: “If you had asked of me I would have given you living water from which you would never thirst” (1John 5:7). Well, what is that living water that I would never thirst again?—the Truth. For if I experience Truth, well then, you can’t send a famine upon me that will make me hungry. “I will send a famine upon the world. It will not be a famine for bread or a thirst for water by for the hearing of the Word of God” (Amos 8:11). Well, so he’s found it. He has found that Word of God, and no one’s going to turn him away. He’ll turn himself away…if he listens to all rumors or anything on the outside, he himself could be turned away from his own great Truth that he’s found…he’s found the Rock.

Now, when someone can have a dream like this, for instance (and she is here tonight), she finds herself early in the day beastly sleepy, and so she throws herself on the couch, and instantly the dream starts. She goes to her own back door…it’s more like a waking state, like a vision more than a dream…it was her own back door. She opens the door, she hears a knock, and here is a young gentleman, good looking gentleman, but obviously hungry. He seems to be a gentleman, he seems to be kind, he seems to be polite, a real gentleman. He asks for a little food, even, well, a few crackers or even Corn Flakes said he. So she invited him in. It seemed to her…“It’s about 5:30 and my husband should be returning home. How will I explain the presence of this man to my husband when I’m feeding him in his house? At that moment, before I could do something for him, my little daughter is shaking me to wake me up, because it is only the wee hours of the morning. It’s eleven in the morning. No time to be sleeping, for I slept through the night. But after I woke, I remembered the man and I didn’t feed him, so in my Imagination I fed him.”

That’s what I mean. You carry it to the extreme point, and treat the whole vast world there or here in the same manner. She didn’t feed him in that vision so she fed him…in her Imagination she gave him food and fed him. And who did she feed—she fed Christ, she fed herself. “So when you did it unto the least among one of these, you do it unto me. And when you did not do it unto one of the least among one of these, you did not do it unto me. So I was hungry and you fed me not.” When?—when you didn’t do it. So she has learned her lesson. She is a way at the very end of the journey, this lady. So she’s carried it so far that even when she came back and here she has a vivid memory of what had happened that she hadn’t fed him. She intended feeding him, so she carries through her intention, and she fed him in her Imagination, and he was fed.

Now, all of this seems insane to the world if they don’t understand this great mystery. But everything here is vision, everything is a mystery…it’s all a mystery. In 1946 I wrote a little booklet called The Search and I ended that book on this note—and in the interval not a thing has happened to me to persuade me to alter one word of it—I said in the very end, the last paragraph, “This world that we study with such care is a dream, and we the dreamers of the dream, eternal dreamers dreaming non-eternal dreams. One day like Nebuchadnezzar we will awaken from our nightmare in which we fought with demons, and we will discover that we have never really left our eternal home, we were never born, we have never died save in our dream.” Well, nothing has happened in any way to influence me to change one word of it. For my nights are just like this. My moments of, I would call it, meditation, when I sit down and close my eyes, a little dream like any dream. Some times you go out and it ceases to be the dream and it’s a world just like this. The being that is really dreaming…one day I will awaken there. When I awaken there I will be enhanced beyond the wildest dream because I had the experience. By descending in consciousness—I don’t descend in body—I descend only in consciousness in my dream into a world that is called “eternal death”; this world where things appear, they wax, they wane, they vanish, therefore, we say they die. Yet I’m dreaming it all. One day I will find myself there and I will not have gone any place save in my dream.

This past weekend I was talking with a doctor and his wife and other friends, and they’re still hipped on this anthropology. He said, “When I come again, if I ever come back again, I’m going to be an anthropologist. It’s the most exciting thing in the world, because, Neville, in spite of what you say we go back millions and millions of years.” I said, “Are you very proud of the fact that your ancestor was an ape? Well, my ancestor was and is God. That’s my origin, and all fruits are in keeping with their origins. So if my ancestor was an ape no matter how wise, I’m still a wise ape. But my origin is God. I come out here and assume this for a purpose, this limitation, and I took upon myself this little weakness for a purpose.” “But,” he said, “Neville, this little thing has its way-back origin in that of an ape.” I said, “Well, I haven’t read that. I am told they can’t find the missing link. I am told the apes are still with us, aren’t they? Well, I can’t see any relationship…the ape is still with us. You mean after millions and millions and millions of years you’re going to take me back to all these Miocene and Pliocene and all these ages and tell me that we still have them here?” I said, “Did it ever occur to you…I’m not saying that I know this from any experience of mine or any vision…we know that man suddenly appeared, and that doesn’t make sense to any scientist. He suddenly appeared. By sudden I don’t mean you press a button and here came man out of the sky, but I mean not any time of evolution at all. He suddenly appears in just, say, a generation. Well, how could that be?” He said because he believes, like all scientists, that changes are all gradual and it takes unnumbered eons of time.

I said to him, no, changes are not all gradual. There could be a culmination in a sudden mutation. Now, just speculate for a moment, I said, just think of it…just think that a few important mutations took place among the members of a certain colony of apes, and they continued to breed and multiply and transfer this new feature as a result of mutation. Well, you would have in just one generation man. He would suddenly appear. He wouldn’t have to have a long line of millions of years behind him. God is a Creator. He could take the root if you call it a root or the branch if you call it a branch, and by a few important mutations among members of a certain colony of apes, let them continue to multiply, and all of a sudden what have you if they can transfer the new feature. So they transferred the new feature and you have a new kind. And so you’re told, and all mystics teach it, man suddenly appears. Because to a man who thinks in terms of millions and millions of years, one generation is more instantaneous than an nth part of a second if you’re going to measure time. “Never thought of that!”

Well, I’m not saying that this is true, I told him. I’ve just given you something to think about. I am not saying I have any vision to support that. I am just suggesting it that you may simply dwell upon it, and then you’ll change your idea about having an ape as an ancestor. You came down to a certain level of consciousness, which is the level called Man. When you reach this level you have really died, for the simple reason you started the dream. The dream started and the dream of Adam. Adam is generic Man, it’s humanity. The dream of Adam is the death of God. So God died when man was made a living soul and could dream. And so, he comes down; but he’s one with what he takes upon himself. And he had the dream and the dream is pre-determined. It’s a horrible dream, and yet the results transcend the wildest dream of man. So the story of Jesus Christ is the story of what Man has to dream and when he dreams it, he finds himself enacting it in vision in a three-dimensional world. You’ll bring it back, one after the other.

Now, why do I use the word “mutation”? I did it with him and I did it tonight for a purpose. In the very end, you’re told “In the twinkle of an eye…”—what will happen?—“he’ll change our lowly body to be of one form with his glorious body” (Phil. 3:21). It’s not going to take time. At a certain moment when you are embraced by the risen God, you’re instantly transformed, transfigured, and it’s an entirely different body. It’s a body of light, it’s a body of power, it’s a body of wisdom…for Christ is the power and wisdom of God (1Cor.1:24).

These bodies of flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God. It needs an entirely different body to function in a different age, and that body is completely, it’s, alright, a mutation call it but it’s sudden. When I stood in the presence of the risen Christ and answered his question, a simple question, “What is the greatest thing in the world?” I answered in the words of Paul, “Faith, hope and love, these three, but the greatest of these is love!” and then he embraced me. As he embraced me we fused and became one body and I was at that moment infinite love. You can’t describe it. There is no power in the world comparable to love; all other powers fade into nothing.

I’m not speaking of love as the world knows it here…all these silly little things we think of as love. No, it’s something entirely different, it’s a creative power and it’s love. From that moment on, that’s my body. Yet I must continue the dream to the very end. When I continue to the very end and this aspect of myself is called dead, then I wear that body, for the dream is over. You can say of me then what Shelley said of one who departed, “He has awakened from the dream of life; ‘tis we who lost in stormy visions are now in this dream of life.” Every one of us will awaken completely from it and we will be God. There is only God, nothing but God. So the most horrible being in the world is God and the most so-called glorious being, that’s God. And there is nothing but God, everyone is God. In the end, when the curtain comes down and we, collectively forming one man, one Spirit, one body, will know why we conceived it and why we played it. The results are beyond the wildest concepts of man on this level, for we will have expanded. We will have a further existence as a result of this experience coming down into the world of eternal death.

So I know when I come back, I’ve got to ask myself “Where, oh where did I originally start the dream?” For it is there that I must ultimately awaken. I can awaken here and come back from the visit into another world, but when I come back I know that that was as real as this, and now on reflection if I tell the story, the world will say, “That was a wonderful dream you had, Neville.” But if I said, “No, it wasn’t a dream, it was an experience just like this,” they can’t follow you and they still insist it was a dream. Well, I know it wasn’t, any more than this. If that is a dream, I said, then this too is, so I’d go along with you, yes, it was a dream. Therefore, admit with me now will you, this is a dream. “Oh no, this is not a dream.” Well then, if this is not a dream, that’s not a dream. But if that is a dream and it’s just as real as this, then this is a dream. The difference is when I was there I remembered where I put this one down; but now I don’t remember when I started to dream this, where I laid down. If I could now remember and use the same technique of feeling and feel myself once more the being that I was before I started the dream, I’d vanish. I’d vanish from sight, and I would awaken there.

I know my body is already awaiting me, because I wore that body in the year 1929, in the summer of ’29, when I was embraced by the risen Lord. Not a thing has caused me to feel that we are divorced. We became one and that one is forever. So there is “Only one body, one Spirit, one Lord, one God and Father of all, who though above all is still through all and in all” (Eph. 4:4). There he dreams. So that night when I heard it distinctly, “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 going to say…he’s dreaming that he’s Neville. That’s what he’s dreaming, dreaming that he’s Neville. One day he will awake and his dream will be true: I am he, and the whole vast world is myself made visible, all pushed out. So whether I call this real it is no more real than my visions of the night, or the visions of the day for that matter. Therefore, I know that I cannot encounter people here that are strangers to me no matter what part they play in my drama. They could be instruments, they could be helpful, they could be hurtful, but they can only play that which I am playing within me.

Many of us go berserk. Imagination can run amok and it does. Look at the war today…look at the conflicts in the world today. All this shows us that Imagination can and does run amok. But it’s the only creative power in the world. When man sees it and abides by it…as the lady did who fed the stranger at the door…as my friend who wrote me the letter found the Rock and not getting off for one second remains on that Rock and builds the foundation on it. That’s the foundation. Build your house on it. No matter what happens tomorrow, do not turn to blame anyone. It has to come right back to that Rock; for Christ is the only cause of the phenomena of life, and he is your own wonderful human Imagination. So when you hear it and believe it and accept it, you have a firm, firm foundation and it doesn’t matter about the entire outer world, it just doesn’t exist. If you dwell upon it, far from frightening you, may I tell you, it will be helpful beyond the wildest dream. To know such power is resident within you, that you do not need the assistance of anyone in this world; that anyone who can play a part to aid the birth of what you’re entertaining must play that part, and you do not have to consult them, they’ll play it. They will come and play it.

Dream nobly. Assume that you are the man, that you are the woman that you want to be. Dare to walk in that assumption as though it were true, and then if it takes a thousand people to aid the birth of that, it will take a thousand people and they’ll play it. They do not know why they do what they do, because they have to play it. You don’t have to get their permission, their consent, they play their part. As I’ll play my part, as I did in his dream. That was the occasion for a festive day and then a lecture. Then comes the real significance of the dream, the Rock. The Rock that Man, the whole vast world, has forgotten. He has forgotten the God who gave him birth, and of the Rock that really brought you into this world you are unmindful (Deut. 32:18). So man turns to an outside Christ and prays to an outside Jesus, and there isn’t any. He prays to an outside God and there is no outside God. Moses revealed the true God: I AM, and he hadn’t gone more than a matter of moments when Israel once more turned to make a golden calf and worships it as the cause of their good fortune and misfortune. So they started worshiping something made with human hands in violation of the second Commandment: “Make no graven image unto me” (Ex. 20:4)…so whether you make it with your hands or whether you make it in your mind.

If I said do you believe in Jesus Christ to a Christian and they will say, “Oh yes,” well, instantly they have a mental picture of someone other than themselves, then they have a false Christ. Everyone in the world who calls himself a Christian, should I say, “Do you believe in Christ?” he would say, “Oh, I certainly do.” And without asking him to give me a word picture of his Christ or her Christ, he has a mental picture based upon what he saw in a shop. Next to all the great churches of our city you’ll find these little shops next door selling all kinds of condolences…so you can go in and buy the kind of Christ you want to satisfy you. You want a nice blond one they have a blond one. You want a dark haired one you can get a dark haired one. You want a little darker skin, a little darker skin. And all these are so-called Christs. You take them home…I know when I was in vaudeville, there were two girls and we were constantly on the bill together. How we were booked, I do not know. One had a little so-called Madonna and she kissed it before every show to bring good luck. Well, unfortunately it didn’t…but it was red with lipstick. She wouldn’t go on without kissing her little Madonna for good luck. And that was her Madonna that was her Holy Virgin. She also had the crucifix with the figure and she’d kiss it. That was her concept of Christ plus other things on the wall. So she is not alone, there are hundreds of millions like her.

But when you find the Rock and start to build on it, let the rumors come, let the arguments come, they cannot knock your house down. You build on the sand as that is on sand, and then all these things blow it down. But if you go out of here building your home on one foundation that your own wonderful human Imagination is Jesus Christ, that that is the Christ that is dreaming in you and dreaming this world, then you will start dreaming noble dreams. You will not feed him with ignoble thoughts. You will become selective and dare to assume something noble about yourself…and not all of this nonsense that we read in the papers. Here, tonight’s headlines, tomorrow’s headlines, so they’re going to do another transplant of this, transplant of that, and they’re all adding years to life. No one thinks of adding life to years. If you take Schubert who gave us a thousand pieces of music, how poor we’d be without him and he died as he turned thirty or thirty-one; without the works of Keats and he died at twenty-six, I think. So many of the great poets died young but look at what they gave us. Well, they didn’t add years to their life; they added life to years and crowded into twenty-six years what others who are now trying transplants to live to be a hundred and vegetate. This poor man…they’re doing to him what they do to dogs and monkeys and rats. First came the heart, then came the gall bladder, then came the stomach because it was bleeding, so tonight the spleen, and now tomorrow morning something else. The poor man is there just being acted on as you do in the labs on dogs.

Well, that’s not what we’re here for; we’re here to dream nobly. Then at the end of a certain interval of time let it depart. You still continue the dream because you don’t die, nothing dies, because you cannot go to eternal death in that which can’t ever die; and you are God, the God of the living, therefore you can never die, not really. But you can dream of death, dream of birth, dream of all these things…but you cannot really. And, you never really ever left home, not in eternity, so the descent is only in consciousness. You never left.

Now, let us go into the Silence.

* * *

Now, may we have questions? Any questions, please? Well, first of all, I want to thank you for your letters and please let them continue coming. They’re very helpful to all who hear them. When you know he speaks through dream and speaks through vision, what else should one listen to? I haven’t heard from my lady although I did write her, so she may respond. When she does I will share it with you.

Q: I’d like to ask you what you mean by human Imagination. Would this be the same as consciousness?

A: Yes, I would say consciousness. But if I use Imagination, which I’ve been using, it conveys more to the average person. My very first book and my very first chapter of Your Faith is Your Fortune I used it, and I have no reason to change it. I said, “Unconditioned consciousness became conditioned by imagining itself to be something, and then becoming that which it imagined itself to be, so did Creation begin.” I started it that way when I wrote the book in 1940, published it in ’41. Well, since 1940 when I wrote the book, I’ve had no experiences to change it. Observing my own, I know that I imagined certain states and they come to pass…and if God creates all things and I know what I did, well then, he is my Imagination. So I get it over to people when they’re concerned, to watch their Imagination. So all day long Man will imagine the unlovely things and think, oh well, that is not creative and just it’s idle fancy. But there is no idle fancy; that’s creating too!

Well, until the next time. Thank you.