Neville Goddard: A Cosmic Philosopher

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BY MITCH HOROWITZ

Wikipedia took down its page for Neville Goddard (1905-1972) in 2016 (to date it has not been restored). Neville is one of the most important and influential New Thought voices of the past century. I felt it important that there be a reliable biography of Neville online. The following article focuses only partially on the linear details of Neville’s life and more on the growth and meaning of his message. This essay is available in print in TarcherPerigee’s reissue of Neville’s first book, At Your Command. 

The words of spiritual writer and lecturer Neville Goddard retain their power to electrify more than forty years after his death. In a sonorous, clipped tone that was preserved on thousands of tape recordings made during his lifetime, and now widely circulated online, Neville asserted with complete ease what many would find fantastical: The human imagination is God – and our thoughts create our world, in the most literal sense.

Neville cosmic 1
Neville from the frontispiece of The Search, 1946.

Neville Goddard was perhaps the last century’s most intellectually substantive and charismatic purveyor of the philosophy generally called New Thought. He wrote more than ten books under the solitary pen name Neville, and was a popular speaker on metaphysical themes from the late 1930s until his death in 1972.

Possessed of a self-educated and uncommonly sharp intellect, Neville espoused a spiritual vision that was bold and total: Everything you see and experience, including other people, is the result of your own thoughts and emotional states. Each of us dreams into existence an infinitude of realities and outcomes. When you realize this, Neville taught, you will discover yourself to be a slumbering branch of the Creator clothed in human form, and at the helm of limitless possibilities.

Neville’s thought system influenced a wide range of spiritual thinkers and writers, from bestselling author Joseph Murphy to mystical iconoclast Carlos Castaneda. He now has an ardent online following, connected by the proliferation of his digitized lectures and books. More still, Neville’s reputation is growing as his mystical teachings are found to comport with key issues in today’s quantum physics debate.

Yet little is known about this spiritual teacher who exerted so unusual a pull on the American spiritual scene of latter twentieth century. Neville cultivated an air of mystery, which has contributed to the intrigue and questions around his ideas – and where they came from.

 A Philosopher Born

Neville Lancelot Goddard was born on February 19, 1905 on the then British-protectorate of Barbados in the town of St. Michael to an Anglican family of nine sons and one daughter. A 1950s gossip column described the young Neville as “enormously wealthy,” his family possessing “a whole island in the West Indies.”

The truth was far more modest. Neville depicted his own English childhood home as happy, but threadbare. There was constant jostling among his brothers for clothes and second-helpings at the dinner table. Neville came to New York City at the age of seventeen to study theater – a move that led to a successful career as a vaudeville dancer and Broadway actor. He toured America and England with dance troupes. But Neville’s theater life was hand-to-mouth; he supplemented his income by working as an elevator operator and shipping clerk.

The young performer’s ambition for the stage began to fade as he encountered an alluring range of spiritual ideas – first with self-styled occult groups, and later with the help of a life-transforming mentor. In his lectures, Neville described studying with a turbaned, Ethiopian-born rabbi named Abdullah. Their initial meeting, Neville said, had an air of kismet:

When I first met my friend Abdullah back in 1931 I entered a room where he was speaking and when the speech was ended he came over, extended his hand and said: “Neville, you are six months late.” I had never seen the man before, so I said: “I am six months late? How do you know me?” and he replied: “The brothers told me that you were coming and you are six months late.”

According to Neville, the two studied Hebrew, Scripture, and Kabbalah together for five years – planting the seeds of Neville’s philosophy of mental creativity.

Neville 2 Botta
Neville in Barbados by Tim Botta.

Neville said that his first understanding of the power of creative thought came while he was living in a rented room on Manhattan’s Upper West Side during the winter of 1933. The young man was depressed: his theatrical career had stalled and his pockets were empty. “After twelve years in America, I was a failure in my own eyes,” he later said. “I was in the theater and made money one year and spent it the next month.” The 28-year-old ached to spend Christmas with his family in Barbados; but he couldn’t afford to travel.

“Live as though you are there,” Abdullah told him, “and that you shall be.” Wandering the streets of New York City, Neville thought from his aim – as he would later urge his listeners – and adopted the feeling that he was really and truly at home on his native island. “Abdullah taught me the importance of remaining faithful to an idea and not compromising,” he recalled. “I wavered, but he remained faithful to the assumption that I was in Barbados and had traveled first class.”

One December morning before the last ship was to depart New York that year for Barbados, Neville received a letter from a long out-of-touch brother: In it was $50 and a ticket to sail. His experiment, it seemed, had worked.

Neville discovered what eventually became the hallmark of his philosophy: It is imperative to assume the feeling that one’s goal has already been attained. “It is not what you want that you attract,” he wrote. “You attract what you believe to be true.”

 Feeling is the Secret

Neville apartment
Neville’s Greenwich Village home overlooking Washington Square Park.

Neville grew convinced that Scripture was rife with this idea that man had to think from the end. He called it the state of “I AM” – this being a mystical translation of the name of God. Man could attain any goal, he reasoned, provided he adopted the feeling of it in the present. Neville reinterpreted each episode in Scripture as a psychological parable of this truth. In an example from his 1941 book Your Faith Is Your Fortune he took a fresh sounding of the tale of Lot’s wife, who turns into a pillar of salt after looking back upon the city of Sodom: “Not knowing that consciousness is ever out-picturing itself in conditions round about you, like Lot’s wife you continually look back upon your problem and again become hypnotized by its seeming naturalness.”

In his eyes, all of Scripture was nothing other than a blueprint for man’s development. “The Bible has no reference at all to any person who ever existed, or any event that ever occurred upon earth,” Neville told audiences. “All the stories of the Bible unfold in the minds of the individual man.” Neville depicted Christ not as a living figure but, rather, as a mythical master psychologist whose miracles and parables demonstrate the power of creative thought.

 Real Magic

Neville draft card 2
Neville’s draft card signed Neville Lancelot Goddard.

In public talks, Neville often made extravagant claims – such as his use of mental visualizations to win an honorable discharge from the U.S. Army after being drafted at the height of World War II. In actuality, such a sudden discharge did occur.

Neville entered the army on November 12, 1942, obligated to serve for the duration of the war. But military records show that four months later, in March 1943, the mystic was “discharged from service to accept employment in an essential wartime industry.”

Neville resumed his “essential wartime” job as a metaphysical lecturer in New York’s Greenwich Village. A profile in The New Yorker of September 11, 1943, described the handsome speaker back at the lectern before swooning (and often female) New York audiences.

It is unclear why Neville, a lithe man in perfect health, would have been released from the military at the peak of the war. “Unfortunately,” an Army public affairs officer said. “Mr. Goddard’s records were destroyed in the 1973 fire at the National Personnel Records Center.”

Neville also made bold claims about the eventual – and highly prosperous – rise of his family’s food service and retail businesses in Barbados. These claims likewise conform to public records.

Even Neville’s tales about the mysterious teacher Abdullah are far from dismissible.

Hidden Masters

 Neville’s description of training under a turbaned spiritual adept had a certain pedigree in America’s alternative spiritual culture. It was a concept that the Russian mystic Madame H.P. Blavatsky ignited in the minds of Western seekers with her late-nineteenth century accounts of her mentorship to unseen Mahatmas, or Great Souls. Blavatsky aroused a hope that invisible help was out there; that guidance could be sought from a difficult-to-place master of wisdom, someone who might arrive from an exotic land, or another plane of existence, and who could dispense illumined knowledge.

Indeed, the Abdullah story as told by Neville might be brushed aside as a tale borrowed and retouched from Blavatsky – except for another, better-known figure in the positive-thinking tradition who, toward the end of his life, made his own claims of mentorship under Abdullah.

The Irish emigrant writer Joseph Murphy arrived in New York City in the early 1920s with a degree in chemistry and a passion to study metaphysics. Murphy is widely remembered for his 1963 mega-seller The Power of Your Subconscious Mind. The book remains one of the most engaging and popular works of positive-mind metaphysics. Shortly before his death in 1981, Murphy, in a little-known series of interviews published by a French press in Quebec, described his own encounter with the mysterious Abdullah. Interviewer Bernard Cantin recounted the tale in his 1987 book of dialogues with Murphy:

It was in New York that Joseph Murphy also met the professor Abdullah, a Jewish man of black ancestry, a native of Israel, who knew, in every detail, all the symbolism of each of the verses of the Old and the New Testaments. This meeting was one of the most significant in Dr. Murphy’s spiritual evolution. In fact, Abdullah, who had never seen nor known the Murphy family, said flatly that Murphy came from a family of six children, and not five, as Murphy himself had believed. Later on, Murphy, intrigued, questioned his mother and learned that, indeed, he had had another brother who had died a few hours after his birth, and was never spoken of again.

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Neville in Los Angeles in 1951.

By the mid-1950s Neville’s story of tutelage under a secretive teacher exerted a pull on a budding writer whose own memoirs of mystic discovery later made him a near-household name: Carlos Castaneda.

Castaneda wove his own tales of mentorship to shadowy instructor, in his case a Native American sorcerer named Don Juan. Castaneda first discovered Neville through an early love interest in Los Angeles, Margaret Runyon, who was among Neville’s most dedicated students. A cousin of American storyteller Damon Runyon, Margaret wooed the Latin art student at a friend’s house, slipping Carlos a slender Neville volume called The Search, in which she had inscribed her name and phone number. The two became lovers and later husband and wife.

Runyon spoke frequently to Castaneda about her mystical teacher Neville, but he responded with little more than mild interest – with one exception. In her memoirs, Runyon recalled Castaneda growing fascinated when the conversation turned to Neville’s discipleship under an exotic teacher:

…it was more than the message that attracted Carlos, it was Neville himself. He was so mysterious. Nobody was really sure who he was or where he had come from. There were vague references to Barbados in the West Indies and his being the son of an ultra-rich plantation family, but nobody knew for sure. They couldn’t even be sure about this Abdullah business, his Indian teacher, who was always way back there in the jungle, or someplace. The only thing you really knew was that Neville was here and that he might be back next week, but then again…

“There was,” she concluded, “a certain power in that position, an appealing kind of freedom in the lack of past and Carlos knew it.”

The Master Revealed?

Was there a real esoteric teacher named Abdullah who taught Neville and Joseph Murphy? A plausible candidate exists. He is found in the figure of a 1920s and 30s-era black-nationalist mystic named Arnold Josiah Ford. Like Neville, Ford was born in Barbados, in 1877, the son of an itinerant preacher. Ford arrived in Harlem around 1910 and established himself as a leading voice in the Ethiopianism movement, a precursor to Jamaican Rastafarianism.

Neville Josiah Ford
Neville’s Abdullah? Mystic Arthur Josiah Ford

Both movements held that the East African nation of Ethiopia was home to a lost Israelite tribe that had preserved the teachings of a mystical African belief system. Ford considered himself an original Israelite, and a man of authentic Judaic descent. Like Abdullah, Ford was considered an “Ethiopian rabbi.” Surviving photographs show Ford as a dignified, somewhat severe-looking man with a set jaw and penetrating gaze, wearing a turban, just like Neville’s Abdullah. Ford himself cultivated an air of mystery, attracting “much apocryphal and often contradictory speculation,” noted Randall K. Burkett, a historian of black-nationalist movements.

Ford lived in New York City at the same time that Neville began his discipleship with Abdullah. Neville recalled his and Abdullah’s first meeting in 1931; and U.S. Census records show Ford was living in Harlem on West 131st Street in 1930. (He was also at the same address in 1920, shortly before Joseph Murphy arrived.) Historian Howard Brotz, in a study of the Black Jewish movement in Harlem, wrote of Ford: “It is certain that he studied Hebrew with some immigrant teacher and was a key link” in communicating “approximations of Talmudic Judaism” from within the Ethiopianism movement.  This would fit Neville’s depiction of Abdullah tutoring him in Hebrew and Kabbalah. (It should be noted that early twentieth-century occultists often loosely used the term Kabbalah to denote any kind of Judaic study.)

More still, Ford’s philosophy of Ethiopianism possessed a mental metaphysics. “The philosophy,” noted historian Jill Watts, “…contained an element of mind-power, for many adherents of Ethiopianism subscribed to mental healing and believed that material circumstances could be altered through God’s power. Such notions closely paralleled tenets of New Thought…” Ford was also an early supporter of black-nationalist pioneer Marcus Garvey and served as the musical director of Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association. Garvey had also suffused his movement with New Thought metaphysics and phraseology.

The commonalities between Ford and Abdullah are striking: the black rabbi, the turban, the study of Hebrew, mind-power metaphysics, the Barbados connection, and the time frame. All suggest Ford as a viable candidate for the elusive Abdullah.

Yet there are too many gaps in both Neville’s and Ford’s backgrounds to allow for a conclusive leap. Records of Ford’s life grow thinner after 1931, the year he departed New York and migrated to Ethiopia. Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie, after his coronation in 1930, offered land grants to any African-American willing to relocate to the East African nation. Ford accepted the offer. The timing of Ford’s departure is the biggest single blow to the Abdullah-Ford theory. Neville said that he and his teacher had studied together for five years. This obviously would not have been possible with Ford, who had apparently left New York in 1931, the same year Neville said that he and Abdullah first met.

In a coda to Ford’s career, he journeyed to Africa, along with several other American followers of Ethiopianism, to accept the land grants offered by Haile Selassie. Yet Ford’s life in the Ethiopian countryside, a period so sadly sparse of records, could only have been a difficult existence for the urbane musician.  Here was a man uprooted from metropolitan surroundings at an advanced age to settle into a new and unfamiliar agricultural landscape. All the while, Ethiopia was facing the threat of invasion by fascist Italy. Ford died in Ethiopia in September 1935, a few weeks before Mussolini’s troops crossed the border.

While Ford’s migration runs counter to Neville’s timeline, there are other ways in which Ford may fit into the Abdullah mythos. Neville could have extrapolated Abdullah from Ford’s character after spending a briefer time with Ford. Or Abdullah may have been a metaphorical composite of several contemporaneous figures, perhaps including Ford.* Or, finally, Abdullah may have been Neville’s invention, though this scenario doesn’t account for Joseph Murphy’s record.

The full story may never be knowable, but the notion of two young metaphysical seekers, Neville and Murphy, living in pre-war New York and studying under an African-American esoteric teacher, whether Ford or another, is wholly plausible. The crisscrossing currents of the mind-power movement in the first half of the twentieth century produced collaborations among a wide range of spiritual travelers, who traversed the metaphysical landscape with a passion for personal development and self-reinvention.

Does it Work?  

If one considers Neville’s philosophy, what emerges seems almost too good to be true: Believe that you already possess your goal, and so you will. “Man moves in a world that is nothing more or less than his consciousness objectified,” he concluded. If that’s true, one might ask, why has this principle been discovered by so relatively few?

In a little-known book from 1946, the occult philosopher Israel Regardie took measure of the burgeoning creative-mind movements, including Unity, Christian Science, and Science of Mind. Regardie paid special attention to the case of Neville, whose teaching, he felt, reflected both the hopes and pitfalls of New Thought philosophy. Regardie believed that Neville possessed profound and truthful ideas; yet he felt these ideas were proffered without sufficient attention to training or practice. Could the everyday person really control his thoughts and moods in the way Neville prescribed? In The Romance of Metaphysics, Regardie wrote:

Neville’s method is sound enough. But the difficulty is that few people are able to muster up this emotional exaltation or this intellectual concentration which are the royal approaches to the citadel of the Unconscious. As a result of this definite lack of training or technique, the mind wanders all over the place, and a thousand and one things totally unrelated to ‘I AM’ are ever before their attention.

Neville 60s
Neville circa early 1960s.

Neville offered his listeners and readers simple meditative techniques, such as using the practice of visualization before going to sleep, or the repeat reenactment of a small, idealized imaginal drama symbolizing one’s success, like receiving an award or a congratulatory handshake. But Regardie reasoned that, as a dancer and actor, Neville possessed a unique control over his mind and body which his audience did not share: “Neville knows the art of relaxation instinctively. He is a dancer, and a dancer must, of necessity, relax. Hence I believe he does not fully and consciously realize that the average person in his audience does not know the mechanism of relaxation, does know how to ‘let go.’”

“Of all the metaphysical systems with which I am acquainted,” Regardie concluded, “Neville’s is the most evidently magical. But being the most magical, it requires for that very reason, a systematized training on the part of those who would approach and enter its portals.” Absent this training, Regardie wrote, “His system is in reality strictly personal.” It may work for him, the journalist suspected, but not others.

 Living in the Material World

Is Regardie’s a fair criticism? Certainly testimony exists to the contrary. In his 1961 book The Law and the Promise Neville supplied a plethora of letters from people who said they achieved success using his methods. As one reads these passages, however, another impression emerges. Student after student is concerned with ardently material goals: a new house, a new car, a new suit, cash in the pocket. But this was not Neville’s ultimate aim.

In a lecture from 1967, Neville drew an intriguing contrast:

What would be good for you? Tell me, because in the end every conflict will resolve itself as the world is simply mirroring the being you are assuming that you are. One day you will be so saturated with wealth, so saturated with power in the world of Caesar, you will turn your back on it all and go in search of the word of God … I do believe that one must completely saturate himself with the things of Caesar before he is hungry for the word of God.This passage sounds a note that resonates through various esoteric traditions: One cannot renounce what one has not attained. To move beyond the material world, or its wealth, one must know that wealth. But to Neville – and this became the cornerstone of his philosophy – material attainment was merely a step toward the realization of a much greater and ultimate truth.

In the last twelve years of his life, the teacher took his philosophy in a radically new direction – one that cost him some of his popularity on the positive-thinking circuit. Neville told of a jarring mystical experience he had in 1959 in which he was reborn as a child from within his skull, which opened as a womb. (In the Bible, Golgotha translates as skull). In a complex interweaving of Scripture and personal experience, Neville told of “the Promise:” that each of us is Christ waiting to be liberated through metaphysical rebirth; this is the true symbolic meaning of the crucifixion in which God became man so that man could one day know himself as God. Our imagination, Neville taught, is the God-seed. He saw literal and final truth in Psalm 82:6, “Ye are gods.”

Neville with student
Neville later in life with student Margaret Ruth Broome.

Neville’s lecture audiences, however, seemed to prefer the earlier message of affirmative-mind success, or what he called “Imaginism.” Many listeners, the mystic lamented, “are not at all interested in its framework of faith, a faith leading to the fulfillment of God’s promise,” as experienced in his vision of rebirth. Audiences drifted away. Urged by his speaking agent to abandon this theme, “or you’ll have no audience at all,” a student recalled Neville replying, “Then I’ll tell it to the bare walls.”

When the teacher died of heart failure at his West Hollywood home on October 1, 1972, his passing was marked only by a short obituary in The Los Angeles Times and a hastily arranged memorial service. The Age of Aquarius, it seemed, had limited interest in this silver-haired seer who spoke of the human imagination as God.

Resurrection

In the early twenty-first century Neville’s name would seem to be a relic.  But the mystical philosopher has instead experienced a renaissance of attention.

Neville’s work is extolled by some of today’s bestselling New Age writers, such as Wayne Dyer and Rhonda Byrne. As a result, his books have ridden a new wave of popularity. What’s more, Neville’s message, perhaps more than that of any other New Thought writer, has prefigured and coalesced with current debates in quantum physics.

Physics journals today routinely discuss what is called the “quantum measurement problem.” Many people have heard of some version of it. In essence, more than eighty years of laboratory experiments show that atomic-scale particles appear in a given place only when a measurement is made. Quantum theory holds that no measurement means no precise and localized object, at least on the atomic scale.

In a challenge to our deepest conceptions of reality, quantum data shows that a subatomic particle literally occupies an infinite number of places (a state called “superposition”) until observation manifests it in one place. In quantum mechanics, an observer’s conscious decision to look or not look actually determines what will be there.

For example, quantum experiments demonstrate that if you project an atom at a pair of boxes interference patterns prove that the atom was at one point in both boxes. The particle existed in a wave-state, which means that the location of the particle in space-time is known only probabilistically; it has no properties in this state, just potentialities. The wave became localized in one box only after someone looked. Neville described man’s power of creation similarly: Thought, he said, does not so much manifest the outcome as select it from an infinite universe of already-existing possibilities.

Quantum theory grows still closer to Neville’s outlook when dealing with the thought experiment called “Schrodinger’s cat.” In 1935 the physicist Erwin Schrodinger sought to impel his colleagues to deal with the logical conclusions of their own data – through a purposely absurdist thought experiment. A version goes like this:

A cat is placed into one of a pair of boxes. Along with the cat is what Schrodinger called a “diabolical device.” The device, if exposed to an atom, releases a deadly poison. An observer then fires an atom at the boxes. The observer subsequently uses some form of measurement to check on which box the atom is in: the empty one, or the one with the cat and the poisoning device. When the observer goes to check, the wave function of the atom – i.e., the state in which it exists in both boxes – collapses into a particle function – i.e., the state in which it is localized to one box. Once the observer takes his measurement, convention says that the cat will be discovered to be dead or alive. But Schrodinger reasoned that quantum physics describes an outcome in which the cat is both dead and alive. This is because the atom, in its wave function, was, at one time, in either box, and either outcome is real.

Neville likewise taught that the mind creates multiple and coexistent realities. Everything already exists in potential, he said, and through our thoughts and feelings we select which outcome we ultimately experience. Indeed, Neville saw man as some quantum theorists see the observer taking measurements in the particle lab, effectively determining where a subatomic particle will actually appear as a localized object. Moreover, Neville wrote that everything and everyone that we experience is rooted in us, as we are ultimately rooted in God. Man exists in an infinite cosmic interweaving of endless dreams of reality – until the ultimate realization of one’s identity as Christ.

In an almost prophetic observation in 1948, he told listeners: “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.” More than any other spiritual teacher, Neville created a mystical correlate to quantum physics.

* * *

During his lifetime, Neville never achieved the fame or reputation of his better-known contemporaries, such as Ernest Holmes and Joseph Murphy. Some of his more radical theories cost him segments of his audience. But it was his intellectual bravery, and the elegant congruity of his ideas, that has resulted in his recognition today as one of modern spirituality’s most pioneering and foresightful theorists.

This self-taught, unfettered journeyer into the cosmic is likely to emerge as the positive-mind movement’s most enduring voice.

* Neville may have hinted as much, especially in light of his love for Hebrew symbolism. He affectionately called Abdullah “Ab” for short – a variant of the Hebrew abba for “father.” Neville may have fashioned a mythical “father mentor” from various teachers.

__________________

Mitch new shot

A popular writer, speaker, and narrator, Mitch Horowitz is also a PEN-Awarding-winning historian. Mitch is the author of Occult America and One Simple Idea, a history and analysis of the positive-mind movement. His latest consideration of Neville’s work and its importance to New Thought is in his book Daydream Believer. He has written on alternative spirituality for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. Mitch is also the voice of popular audiobooks, including Alcoholics Anonymous. Visit him at MitchHorowitz.com.

To see all the articles about Neville Goddard on HarvBishop.com (by Mitch and Katherine Jegede) check out our Manifestation topics page.

For more about Neville by Mitch Horowitz:

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This book has the print version of the above essay:

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Katherine Jegede’s book below is one of the best contemporary accounts of using Neville’s practices. Mitch edited the book.

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53 Comments

  1. Thank you for the wonderful write up! But your ending statement I disagree he is Not the only person who figured this all out , I also figured it out as soon as I started reading about quantum physics,, I was raised. Christian Science, but as a adult I quit the church, and searched myself for How this metaphysics worked !
    Although I have not programed myself to be such a wonderful speaker, I’ve known sense childhood it’s all Mind,, yet delighted the thought when he said imagine is God ! YES !

    1. Thanks, Jeanne. I wasn’t saying that Neville was the only figure whose thought intersected with quantum physics, but I do feel he that brought the most complete and elegant spiritual correlate to the table. Very best, m

      1. Thanks for the very good history and life story. I first found his books in the 1970’s and still have many of them. I cant say I have used the technique much but at times yes and I am experimenting more with it now in the context of the calm mind or relaxation. We shall see! Thanks
        Michael Kirton

    2. I too was raised in Christian Science, and came to Joel Goldsmith, The I AM Discourses, Abraham Hicks, and finally Neville Goddard. It is an easy transition to make, having had the Christian Science background. I agree with what you included in your comments about Quantum Physics as well. Thank you for sharing!! All the best 🙂

    3. It’s one thing to figure it out it’s a completely different thing to actually clear yourself out close all the carmic cycles and reprogram yourself from the scratch all while still being anchored in the physical and having to support yourself and survive. People talk about it but to achieve such mastery – ascended mastery that will not be achieved by many in this lifetime or even the next.

  2. Hi Mitch- what a treat to find your article on Neville/Abdullah tonight- I recently discovered Neville’s background and want to know more about Abdullah- I am wondering since there are historical records of a certain Israeli tribe having gone to Ethiopia (w/ the Ark of the Cov??) would there be any evidence of this mystic there? I also see articles referring to him as an Israeli not an Ethiopian… Since this Neville/Ab story goes back to the 30’s NYC- I wonder if a good genealogist cd back track Abdullah starting in NYC and then back to Ethiopia. He was a renter in the Morgenstein home- maybe something there.. Do you know if there is anything in the Jos Murphy works ? I am going to see what I can come up with from my research here in California. Thanks for the article!

    1. How could Mr. Ford above be the Abdullah of Dr. Murphy & Neville if he was said to be in his 90’s in the 1930’s?? Doesn’t make any sense to me.

    2. Surely Neville’s teachings magical. But sincerely in this world,where a lot of information exist, many things to where our mind can roam, it’s really a tag of war to discipline our mind to the extent of of letting our minds accept our suggestions.but Joseph Murphy and Neville really teach the same thing,implying a possibility of them having been taught by the same teacher.

  3. This is a great article!
    Neville had nothing to lose by telling what he personally experienced. His admission prices covered the rental of the facilities in which he lectured, not much else. He stated often that very few would believe him completely. Those that believe will “tell it” and spread the message.
    The first time I heard one of his recorded lectures, I was emotionally moved by the message. I waited my 49 years to hear it! The Bible interpretation appears to be the hardest for people to digest- to me it
    makes perfect sense to something I’d previously struggled with.
    I still have questions, those are decreasing the more I read and listen to Neville’s teaching.

  4. Loved reading this. Thank you. Especially the part about Abdullah was very interesting and knowing that his stories about leaving the army and about his family’s business are provable is great.

  5. I listened to Neville voraciously in 2016 and begin to understand more and more of what he was saying when I listened to the his speeches over and over again. Recently, I have been studying Buddhism a little bit and I realized that “The Promise” that Neville experienced was what the Buddhists call “nirvana”. The golden light that Neville saw is the yellow colored chakra energy at the base of the spine that rises when one becomes enlightened. I even started listening to Christie Marie Sheldon who has the gift of seeing energy fields around people but even what she teaches confirms everything that Neville taught. I have been on a spiritual journey for a long time but it has been devastating events in the past three years that led me to Neville. But because I listened to him first, the other “stuff” that I had no clue about makes sense because of him. He was the best hands down.

    1. Thank you – so many un named people in this world, read and dig for writings etc from the realization of thoughtful and mystical teachers, are on a path to Know the Self.
      Having been a reader of Emmet Fox and listener of Joel Goldsmith lectures and Stuart Wilde, I recently found Neville.
      I have been hunting to find out about this Abdullah character- was he real, who was he etc.
      I believe among us walk many God Realized, Christ awakened beings.
      The truth is each of us must awaken to the heroic journey of the Promise.
      Finding Neville and this article is guidance as I journey.
      Never give up Emmet said.
      Thank you

      1. There is a book by published in 1921 – Walter Lanyon, who also knew Abdullah. It is assumed this is the same Abdullah who taught Neville. The book is called Abd Allah, Teacher, Healer by Walter C. Lanyon. It is along out of print but I got a scanned copy from Stanford Library where is was scanned. You can try to search for it online.

        1. Thank you so much, Maggie! One may find it under books.google titledas “Abo Allah, Teacher, Healer”, same author as above. It’s a pity one can’t read the whole book, yet what ye can read is really amazing.

          Greez, Horst

    2. Thank you for your story. It resonates with me.
      I have had almost a duplicate of your own experience. I, too, am so happy to have found
      Neville; his teachings are the most important to
      me. God speed to everyone studying Mr Goddard’s works.

  6. I’ve both listened and read much of Neville’s work and found much similarities with that of many mystical/occult and religious teachings except that he basically stripped it bare of all the religious stuff.
    I am aware that he used the bible as a guide but he did not do so religiously. I consider Neville to be a genuine modern day mystic. Its quite understandable why many of his followers dropped off when he began teaching the deeper meaning in the scriptures as most people just aren’t ready for such things because like most seekers who come across his teachings they’re concerned with day to day living and how to consciously create in a positive way, which brings me to why I disagree with Regardie’s statement because we’re all experts at using our imaginations except many of us are experts at using it negatively and it takes both awareness and practice to use it in a way that would bring us positive results, but we all can do this its not just for the gifted or trained professionals or students of occultism. remember in Regardie’s time many occult teachings were still more or less hidden from the public.
    Its a shame that when mystics like Neville pass on and according to Freedom Barry ( Neville’s student) who continued his teachings until his death some time in the 1980’s) Neville died and was found the next day by his daughter, there was supposedly some talk about a ruptured aneurysm as there was blood everywhere but they said he probably got a heart attack, just as Neville said people would say when he died. But as I was saying its a shame that when such people pass on that much of their teachings are hijacked and rearranged by other authors with the aim of making a mint, In a YT video one student of Neville told a story where Neville said ” Keep your money, I don’t your money. anyone who claims to be able to teach you the secrets of health,wealth and happiness and wants your money is a fraud.
    The secrets is in practice and more practice until you get it right.

  7. Some of Neville’s listeners abandoned him in his later years due to what he was teaching? Sounds a lot like what happened to Paul in the New Testament.

    I’ve been reading through Neville’s books and find them fascinating.

  8. This was an in depth write up. Thank you. Having said that is was very complete, respectfully the facts of Neville’s life, are ultimately insignificant. To be sure, our need to verify and claim as factually correct the history of everything, as if someone’s self stated history being true or false has any relation to the efficacy of the formulas they teach, really make it irresistible to do fact checking. Yes, apparently Abdullah was a real guy who had subject mastery. And, if you look on the web at Goddard enterprises, you may indeed find a website of a conglomerate of successful business interests operating in the Carribean and central/south america. What this has to do with Neville’s teaching is particularly irrelevant in practice, although it satisfies our conditioned need to verify everything and make sure it all passes some kind of mental test. Tell me if I am wrong?

    Neville could have been speaking the truth or making it all up, as Neville might say the Bible itself is not to be taken literally, but the characters in it all represent states of man’s development.

    In the same way, Neville’s personal history is of little consequence to those, like us, who are practicing the techniques. Regardie’s input was particularly noteworthy. From this article, it’s apparent that Regardie (whose own book on Western Ceremonial Magic) has a keen understanding of the training it takes to approach at will the state of self-suggestability, while steeped in the mix of mainstream society and it’s powerful influences. After all, all media is (by design) achieving the same goals. Critique television, movies, music, advertising for the essential elements of suggestion. Makes you want to turn off the television and just imagine your stuff instead right? Am I wrong again?

    Regardie gives the nod to Neville’s teachings, but also we could extrapolate this nod to nearly every positive self-help speaker. They tell you “it” is possible. That “you” can do it. They don’t, however, all approach the idea of how much training it takes to enter the suggestive state as a way of life, but don’t really put an emphasis on how much training it may take. Most of them take for granted (as Neville did with his training to perform dance well) that relaxation and the basic properties of self suggestion come naturally. Even Anthony Robbins said you have to “advertise in your own mind, because if you don’t, there are (other interests) that pay millions (or billions ) of dollars to advertise in your mind for you.”

    I believe that right when you are at the crossroads here, life will seem at its most mentally and emotionally confusing. I am at such a place, and writing this is my attempt to steer myself back. Its a painful time, by the way, and its easy to cry uncle and resign to being the “Old Man.”

    For most of this, this will involve solitude. I’ve tried to do it while dealing with people who are not aware of this stuff and it’s very difficult. Essentially I have had to create a life, a living, and habits that allow me to stop whatever I am doing as soon as i drop out of the right feelings. Try doing that….if you can. I believe that’s why people who shun social and normal economic earning capacities are shunned by the mainstream. They are labelled as weird. I think because they know that mainstream society depends upon many people feeling and visualizing the same things. Doesn’t this make sense.

    I have had special training. As a collegiate athlete 25 years ago, I took advantage of special training in college on biofeedback and meditation. As skilled as I am at this, so called “real-life” interferes with the process. I think that’s why wealthy people seek seclusion. It’s not so much that we, or they, hate average or poor people, we just don’t want our thinking hijacked to poverty, pain, ill health, etc. And the wealthy people Im speaking about would be the enlightened ones that know they’ve attained their wealth via application of Goddard-style principles. Not necessarily inherited wealth or otherwise wealth gained without using Goddard principles.

    So it is the formula of Neville Goddard that is significant. It operates with or without your awareness. Just like gravity in a sense.

    The key is to find ways to master it, to keep practicing it like a tennis serve or a basketball first step until your skill is outstanding, and basically automatic, a default habit that serves you in all times including times of excessive stress. Mainstream society seeks to let you work for it’s goals, using your incredible mental and emotional energy for the means that attract your desire is very much downplayed and almost illegal in a certain reality.

    To do what Neville say probably requires 1. You constantly convince yourself of its efficacy via experiment and ongoing research. 2. You apply the skill of it until most of your life is satisfactory, and you constantly condition it so that you are not swayed by the outer influences that represent your “Old Man”. Remember…..”put on the New Man” and rejoice in the world you can truly call of your own making.

    I hope this blurb helps anyone who is experiencing the dissonance that I am right now. It’s mostly pain, but in this pain I seek quiet and solitude, and focus on the feelings and outcomes that I know are right for me. Unfortunately, it has necessitated a total break from routine, and as it coudln’t be any other way, at at time when performing a routine are particularly pressing in my life right now. To me that is a great indication that there are two forces sort of at war with each other, and falling back into the old ways can be very seductive in times of trouble.

    So, as Neville would say, in writing this I reach out to a friend 10,000 miles away. And I send power to the parched lips of his being. Knowing that all in this state receive my feelings of joy and mastery.

    Thank you.

    1. Good Morning William
      Thank you for reaching out and your Inspiration and Insight.

      you were reaching out to a friend 10,000 miles away,Greetings from my lovely island Barbados.

      Hope we can connect or link up some how

      thanks once again for sharing your thoughts

      Kind Regards
      Pat

      1. Greetings from Los Angeles, Pat come and visit..and we shall do the same at Barbados.
        Do you know much about Neville and His family’s fortune in Barbados?

    2. Dear William,

      Although I can sympathise with the challenges of this New Way of thought, But, being afraid of #thoughthijacking is not the Neville way. Of course hiding in the mountains and blocking the reality/tv/media hijack your new way of focusing would be ideal, it will also be cowardly and un-creator like. This is why Neville paved the way of a family man, who relied solely on speaking engagements, living in a very fastpaste city…was able to master this gift. I hope my stern words come as a slap to snap out -of you pity and a friendly reminder to NOT loose hope. (reminder to myself as well)
      -Sending Love from Los Angeles

    3. Reading this in 2021 with prayers and knowledge that you created the need to get away and created the pain to compel yourself to die to yourself. I have faith that the new wine of your life now just couldn’t even consider living in the old skin. That said, your writing was so wonderful for me to read. Thank you so much for sharing this. A lot of great points that make today and living in to my creations and living in my “assumptions that command the universe” easier. Thank you!

  9. I wonder why neville Goddard didn’t imagine a long and healthy life for himself instead of dying at just 67

    1. That he died of heart failure suggests that perhaps the rejection of the new direction he was taking his “ministry” was more than he could stand. That the audiences who once gathered faithfully were.”… not at all interested in its framework of faith, a faith leading to the fulfillment of God’s promise,” may have been a great disappointment to Goddard and quite possibly cost him his health and eventually, his life.

      I believe that in a similar way, Wayne Dyer died of heart break – the loss of his marriage in the latter years of his life. And so while they (and others) in many ways had the keys to resolving some of life’s most challenging obstacles; there were some mountains in their own lives that remained insurmountable – even for them.

      For those that believe in reincarnation of some sort – or that energy never really dies, but is repurposed in another form – they (or their messages) will return and be presented in slightly new ways to new generations.

      This was a super read!
      Thanks Mitch!

      1. Neville died because it was time for him to go. Nothing else! Neville quoted Ecclesiastes 3 often. His work was done in this segment of time. Also, Neville did not believe in reincarnation. Some people, including Wayne Dyer, tried to copy his teaching for their own, say, selfish gains. They will be forgotten but Neville’s teaching will live on for a long, long time.

        Mitch, in my quest I came across your post. Thank you for the mini biography of Neville. I am still hungry and constantly searching for the truth. Joseph Murphy’s work and Stuart Wilde’s affirmations have helped me in manifestation but I always come back Neville’s teaching about who I AM and the Promise.

        God speaks to us in dreams. If we are hungry enough and willing to listen / learn, mysteries will be unfolded unto us. I have encountered Neville several times in my dreams teaching about the power of imagination.

        A food for thought….isn’t it better to live short yet fully satisfied life than a long unfulfilled life full of misery?

  10. Neville Goddard is the real deal. I have experienced his visions long before I have encountered about his lectures. I have also experienced the Promise, not the completion though. I am still waiting for the last two mystical events.

    1. Wow, Thank you for sharing your thoughts everyone!

      This was a good write up! Thank you Mitch!

      I found Nevilles teaching in July of 2017. At first it was a little much, but I found myself hungry for the message, and quickly became hooked. The authority he conveyed was felt!! I’ve listened to a lot of his lectures on Youtube, read many letures and found them all to be extraordinary! After I completed the audios I decided to listen to them again and Wow! The message resonates so much deeper and clearer!
      I had a few of the foreshadowing, and its awesome to see that someone else has experienced the same!!!

      Thank you!!!

  11. Mitch, I would like to ask something that has often intrigued me.
    When Neville gives his talk he terms it CABALA and not Kabbalah. I spoke to a few Kabbalists (if they actually are) about this and they all said the Kabbalah is Jewish (Old Testament), whereas Cabala is Old and the new fulfilling the old. IF this is true then it is in line with Neville extensive use of the New testament.

    I know you have studied and have much more knowledge on the topic than me, could you please reply as to the differences between the two. I really would like the answer even if it is just for interests sake.
    Also if so, could this be the reason as to why we cant trace Abdullah. I don’t very seriously that AB is made up, sorry to disagree on that point.

  12. Been looking for something like this for years.
    Thank you
    ““Of all the metaphysical systems with which I am acquainted,” Regardie concluded, “Neville’s is the most evidently magical. But being the most magical, it requires for that very reason, a systematized training on the part of those who would approach and enter its portals.” Absent this training, Regardie wrote, “His system is in reality strictly personal.” It may work for him, the journalist suspected, but not others.”

    Alas you have to dig deep to find Neville’s thoughts on the need for practice. but without such an acceptance and application teachings cannot bear fruit.

    1. I totally agree with you Stan. 1st Regardie requests that #magic has to be systematized lol, then he flops to #strickly personal.
      Here is a system for your = it’s a system of strictly personal magic 😉

  13. Hi Mitch,
    I enjoyed reading your article. It’s very informative. I could notice the effort you’ve invested into researching.
    I found Neville, seemingly by accident, in 2016 via his book ‘Prayer: The Art of Believing’, and I can agree that he is the real deal.

    I’m curious to whether during your fact-finding you came upon any information concerning the friend who introduced Neville to Abdullah.

    Neville mentioned a friend named Dave in one of his lectures I recently listened to.
    Dave told Neville that he had met a man whom Neville would like to meet and who conversely would like to meet Neville. Dave thought that they had much in common.
    In the lecture Neville confesses that the reason for him being ‘late’ in meeting with Abdulla was that he had been judging from appearances.

    Neville explains that Dave was just one year short of graduating from Fordham university as a catholic priest when he lost his entire inheritance of 2 million dollars in one year on wall street. As a consequence of which he had to sleep on park benches.
    Because he did that, he had no trust in Dave’s judgement of anything. And considered him a failure. So, he thought of many excuses not to go with him to the meetings.

    Due to the parallels I see in the description of their situation, I have been wondering whether this is the same Dave [David Bentley] as mentioned in John McDonald’s book, The Message of a Master (1929).

    Looking forward to your insights.

    Best,

    Jermain.

    1. Jermain, thank you for the book suggestion, do you remember what Neville lecture he mentioned Dave in? Many thanks, T

  14. In Neville I feel like I found the treasure Jesus spoke, about the merchant that sold everything he had that he could buy it. I guess I just been born again the moment I hungered for his every lecture. His faith and his desire to impart his experience teleports me to Jesus himself when he, Jesus desired and took it upon himself to save humanity by telling us ” know yourself” and that is freedom. With the teaching of Neville, imagination gives us freedom of all conditioning of the worldly state.
    I am at spirituality doors for decades and I was inspired by voices in my head that I attributed to Jesus, to write a book in 2010 which is a free download at http://www.puzzleoflife.net and since then I grew more and more in my search for more understanding but as the saying goes “when the student is ready the teacher appears”; when I found Neville he walked me to those doors with gentle authority.
    I found your article wonderful and I usually do not leave any comments but I am strongly prompted from my core to tell you that you made justice to Neville and I love all the comments readers like me made.
    I am not a church goer and the bible didn’t mean much to me save Jesus messages but since I found Neville I got an understanding of some of the distorsions in the bible’s stories.
    To tell that I am exalted is un understatment. I love your article and I thank you for writing it. It made my day!

    With love to all of us that search for understanding of not just a material world but also of a world of spirit,
    Mirela

  15. Thank you for sharing this article with us. I enjoyed it so much. I liked reading the comments also. Time and space seems to be a big problem for some. I think Mr Goddard would agree that it is his massage that we should focus on and not his life story as interesting as it was. His message is not a new one. It has been told over and over again throughout history. This teaching is all over the place! I do not see how anyone could miss it! It is real, it is very powerful, it works and is life changing! That is why lieapedia took the article of Mr Goddard off their website. Lieapedia has many articles of what I would say are kind of meaningless to most people but you have this man Mr Goddard with a real story behind him and suddenly there is no room to even mention his name, Time, space, emotion (not motion,) the Kabbalah. Interesting stuff. I wonder how many people will ever put it all to the test? I am looking forward to reading more of your writings.

  16. Hi Mitch
    Thanks for the additional insight on Abdullah and Ford. Neville’s teaching has had a profound effect on many people’s view of spirituality and metaphysics. I like to put out a very important thought I came across while reading his books..here is it:
    Question: Why do some of us die young?
    Answer: Our lives are not, in retrospect, measured by years but by the content of those years. I’m sure this is enough information to handle for life.

    Kwalu Lagani
    Papua New Guinea

  17. Neville’s definitely among the best on the topic and, despite Regardie’s misgivings, I don’t think many have been able to present this information in a manner as lucid and simple as Neville. Yes, there are times when his writings are particularly cryptic or contradictory but one must understand that some things cannot be described or explained effectively (because it is beyond the defining capacity of the rational/limited mind) and also that Neville’s clarity evolved into “higher and higher things” as he’d put it.
    As for the elusive Abdullah, some people tend to be secretive or private on esoteric matters and that, despite our relatively open and free world, is often wise. There were times when disclosing such things could have been very detrimental. It is also possible that Abdullah was formally trained, i.e. via some esoteric order, in such things and had an obligation to remain silent.

    Thanks for the excellent writeup.

  18. Thanks Mitch, I can’t remember the last time I’ve read an article so intently, especially the part about Abdullah. As a side note Harriet Tubman also thought of herself as an Israelite.
    Thank you.

    1. Check of any Mitch’s books on Neville listed below the article. He shares his personal experiences with Neville’s teachings in those books. He also talks about his experience with Neville’s teachings in his new book The Miracle Habits.

  19. Mitch,

    Thank you for the fascinating write up on Neville. I personally am deeply interested in the histories of others, and Neville is no exception! Neville still is such a mysterious figure, yet commanded so much attention. I only wish that a video recording of his lectures existed somewhere, it would be amazing to see how he lectured, his expressions, movements, reactions from the audience, etc.

    You bring an interesting point that I have not yet come across in other message boards and websites that discuss Neville, in that he was an actor and dancer and had already known how to relax himself in an instant, and how that could be used to his advantage when trying to practice the Law. Just from his lectures, he does seem to command a confidence in himself, in God, and in the teachings that many wish to aspire to, and that no doubt would have helped on his spiritual journey.

    One concept Neville discussed that I am still working to understand is his concept of death, not unlike your Schrodinger’s cat example. In several lectures he mentions the concept of people dying, but not being dead as no one is dead. He mentions even speaking to these people, seeing them and telling them they are dead, only for them to dismiss it. I would love to read your analysis on this subject, if you have not written on it already.

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