Though I’d heard his name, I didn’t give much consideration to Neville Goddard until finding Wayne Dyer’s work — very much recommended — Wishes Fulfilled. Dyer quoted Neville Goddard frequently in Wishes Fulfilled and Neville, as he was often referred to, was clearly a big influence on Dyer. Even after completing Wishes Fulfilled however I still didn’t seek Neville’s teachings out, in part because Wayne Dyer seemed to suggest that Neville’s message wasn’t easy to comprehend.
Eventually, for whatever reason (divine guidance perhaps), I did seek out Neville’s teachings. I personally did not find Neville’s message difficult to comprehend aside from his writing style on occasion and his somewhat unusual speaking accent, no doubt influenced by his Barbados upbringing. The essential teachings though were clear and I also found these teachings quite interesting, and they also resonated with me.
The essence of Neville’s teachings are that we, all of us, are the ultimate divine presence personified. To put this another way, and even more directly and also dramatically, we are each of us God. Neville goes on to claim that most of us have completely lost touch with our God presence, that we are in a state of amnesia or dreaming that has led us to identify with the material world, including our bodies, our thoughts and emotions, and the roles we play.
While Neville’s claim that we are God may seem offensive or blasphemous to some, or just difficult to believe, it is by no means an outlook original to him. The notion that people are actually a divine presence, or God if one prefers that label, has been espoused by spiritualists for eons and continues to be expressed today.
What may be even more controversial than Neville’s God personified claims are his claims that the Christian Bible is not a work of history, as many of the Christian faith believe, but is a fictional symbolic work and the symbolism represents humans cut off from their God source, and how this God source can be reclaimed. The events of the Bible didn’t really occur, according to Neville, but are representative of the internal struggle of humans losing and then regaining their God nature.
Part of this God nature, Neville says, is the capacity to create something — and in fact anything — from nothing. That is, to manifest whatever one desires to manifest. This notion will sound familiar to those aware of the so-called Law of Attraction, though Law of Attraction advocates typically don’t describe the mechanism in the ways Neville does.
Critics of Neville come from different sides: those of religious faith, Christians in particular perhaps, may accuse Neville of blasphemy; those who consider themselves practical may accuse Neville of being absurd because he claims humans can manifest anything within the physical world. Judging his words, Neville didn’t care about negative opinions one way or another. But those of us without a dog in the fight, so to speak, can consider Neville’s teachings in a neutral way and then judge their validity for ourselves.
Neville passed in 1972 but his teachings definitely live on. I recommend reading a five part teaching Neville conducted as an informative, and quite interesting, starting point into Neville’s insights. You can find that teaching Here.
