1905–1972
Neville Goddard
A Barbados-born dancer who became one of the century's most singular teachers — reading the Bible as psychology and insisting, for four decades of nightly lectures, that imagination creates reality.
Barbados to New York
Neville Lancelot Goddard was born on February 19, 1905 in St. Michael, Barbados, one of ten children in a merchant family. At seventeen he sailed to New York City to study drama, and through the 1920s he worked as a dancer and actor on stage and in touring companies. He would later open lectures with stories from those years — the 1933 trip home to Barbados, imagined first and then lived, is the one he retold most.
Abdullah and the turn
By his own account, in the early 1930s a fellow performer led him to Abdullah, an Ethiopian-born teacher of Hebrew and scripture in New York. Neville described studying with him for years — Hebrew, Kabbalah, and a way of reading the Bible in which every character is a state of consciousness rather than a person in history. Dancing fell away; the teaching remained.
The lectures
From 1938 until his death he taught continuously — first in New York, then for most of his life from Los Angeles, with long seasons in San Francisco and New York. He spoke without notes, took questions, and let attendees record him; those tapes circulated hand to hand for decades and are the recordings this library restores. In 1951 he read nine short talks over station KECA in Los Angeles, and for a time he had a weekly television program there.
The Law and the Promise
His teaching has two movements. The first he called the Law: an assumption, felt as present fact and persisted in, tends to externalize — tested deliberately, in imagination, most effectively in the drowsy state he called “a state akin to sleep.” The second, after a series of mystical experiences beginning in 1959, he called the Promise: his account of scripture's story unfolding in the individual. The late books and lectures center on it.
In his own words
He published seventeen works between 1939 and 1966, all now in the public domain and complete in this library — from At Your Command (1939) through the 1948 class and The Power of Awareness (1952) to Resurrection (1966). He died in Los Angeles on October 1, 1972.
We owe the practice to Neville Goddard (1905–1972). Feelingfield is independent and is not affiliated with or endorsed by his estate.