Rediscovering Neville’s Greatest Work

BY MITCH HOROWITZ

I  had the privilege to narrate the first authorized audio edition of Neville Goddard’s final, and some feel greatest, book: Resurrection. The book’s closing essay, for which it is named, maps out Neville’s overarching spiritual vision more fully than any of his other writings. What follows is my preface to the new audio edition, which explores the book’s distinctiveness in Neville’s body of written work.

Of the more than ten books that Neville wrote, Resurrection is named by many of his admirers as their personal favorite. The anthology was Neville’s last published book, and it provides the full scope of the teacher’s mystical and psychological insight. The book culminates in a complete spiritual system, in which Neville illuminates his vision of life and human purpose.

Four of the five works collected in Resurrection are deeply practical pamphlets and short studies that Neville published in the 1940s, when he came into his voice as a mystic and teacher. But he named the collection for its closing work, Resurrection, an essay he wrote in 1966, just six years before his death. It is in Resurrection that Neville presents his ideas in their full bloom of maturity.

It is important to understand that Neville’s thought significantly broadened after 1959, a year that opened him to a series of mystical awakenings. This cycle of revelation had actually begun years earlier when he reported being “taken in spirit into a Divine Society,” and then returned to earth “tormented by my limitations of understanding.” These limitations began to lift in July 1959 when the teacher underwent a mystical rebirth, or resurrection, from within the womb of his own skull.

Following that experience by five months, in December 1959, Neville encountered the biblical figure of David who addressed him lovingly as “Father,” confirming his Oneness with God. Four months thereafter, in April 1960, Neville experienced the opening of his body by a bolt of lightning to reveal a Divine luminous fluid within, representing the living water of God.

Neville called this cycle of rebirth “the Promise” – a process of self-realization that awaits all men and women as they come to understand, fully and experientially, that they are Christ clothed in the flesh.

In the essay Resurrection, Neville adds one further stage to his realization. He describes the fulfillment of Christ’s three-and-a-half year ministry on earth with the Holy Spirit descending upon man in the form of a dove, bringing complete and final union with God. According to my calculations, Neville may have experienced this fourth stage in January 1963, but his telling leaves it unclear.

None of these experiences, of course, can be fully understood using our ordinary points of reference: They are neither strictly physical nor strictly belonging to some ethereal or spirit realm; they are, in Neville’s teaching, revelations of a Higher Reality, which comes into focus with the unfolding of our Divine nature.

Neville first wrote about his mystical rebirth in his 1961 book, The Law and the Promise. But the details in Resurrection help us better understand the phenomena involved. In Resurrection, Neville provides a series of Biblical citations, which sync his experiences to Scripture while illuminating and giving further meaning to the events themselves. In a sense, The Law and Promise tells us what occurred; in Resurrection we learn why it occurred.

Anyone who approaches Resurrection for practical ideas, and finds all of this mysticism a bit heady, need not worry. Neville’s culminating essay is preceded by four exquisitely practical, useful lessons in deploying the power of your imagination. As an anthology, Resurrection provides the full arc of Neville’s teaching. This is why is often considered his crowning work.

The audio edition of Resurrection also gives you Neville’s original words as he set them down. Over the years, publishers, perhaps seeking to bring colloquial familiarity to the text, have made small and, in my view, unnecessary alterations to Neville’s work, sometimes omitting or changing a word or reference that was presumably considered opaque. I believe in preserving Neville’s original style. Everything in audio volume is exactly as Neville wrote it when he took inspiration from Isaiah 30:8: “And now go write it before them on a tablet, and inscribe it in a book, that it may be for the time to come as a witness forever.”

Resurrection is a work to experience again and again. It presents Neville’s teaching not only as a practical way of life but, ultimately, as a complete vision of life. It delivers what he called a “framework of faith, a faith leading to the fulfillment of God’s promise.” May it open you to your highest possibilities.

Mitch Horowitz is a PEN Award-winning historian, author, speaker, and narrator. His books include the contemporary classic The Miracle Club.

Resurrection can be found in audio and print.

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