The Search by Neville Goddard

What this book is about

The Search is a short essay, dedicated to Victoria, in which Neville recounts a series of visions and draws a teaching from them. It opens at sea, where a meditation on “the perfect state” carries him into a scene like the Pool of Bethesda, where a waiting multitude is molded into perfection around him. He then describes nights from about the age of seven when he felt united with a greater self that seemed a stormy ocean, and says he later came to know it as love, a mirror to whatever it is conceived to be. Further visions follow: dissolving into a shoreless sea of light while asking “Who Am I?”, watching a quartz crystal take the form of the living Buddha, who was himself, and a garment of light joined by a silvery cord to his sleeping body. From these Neville argues that intense meditation unites us with the state contemplated, that love and hate both make us into what we dwell on, and that outer change follows a change in one’s concept of self. He closes by calling the universe a dream and us its eternal dreamers.