Neville Goddard Lecture, Esau and Jacob

Esau and Jacob

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ESAU AND JACOB

As I promised last Tuesday, I now want to give you my personal technique [I use] when I pray for myself or for others, but for the benefit of those who are here for the first time, I want to say that we believe here that Imagination creates Reality. And because only God creates Reality, your Imagining and my Imagining are one with the Supreme Power men call God. In order to tell you of my technique I must go back and give you the reasons. I will go back to my personal experiences and tie them together with the Bible. It speaks of the birth of a child in Genesis 25, the child of Isaac and Rebecca. Rebecca, desiring to conceive after twenty years of barrenness, prayed unto the Lord and the Lord responded to her prayer, and she felt this strange struggle going on within her and she wondered why, and the Lord said: ―Two nations are in your womb, and two peoples, born of you, shall be divided; the one shall be stronger than the other; the elder shall serve the younger.‖ And then at the moment of delivery out came first a red, hairy being, and then came another whose hand was holding the heel of the first and he was smooth-skinned and hairless.

The first was called Esau and the second was called Jacob. Now the story is, ―Bring me Jacob!‖ If you remember it, Jacob took Esau‘s birthright and then he took his blessing, and Esau said to his father, Isaac, ―Have you no blessing for me?‖ And Isaac his father said, ―You shall live by the sword; you shall serve your brother, but when you break loose, you shall break his yoke from your neck.‖ That was the only blessing he could give to his first-born son, for he had given it all to Jacob, which means ―the supplanter‖. It makes no sense if you take it literally. It has nothing to do with persons called Rebecca or Esau or Jacob. It is all within you that this drama is unfolding. I was seven years old when it happened to me, and I found myself an infinite stormy ocean. I was the ocean, and yet I was Neville. It seemed unconcerned as to what it did to Neville and it tossed Neville like a wave and Neville was scared almost to death. The ocean did not care, yet I, Neville, was also the ocean. This happened once a month from my seventh to twelfth year, and I could tell from the strange sense of expectancy I felt during the day when it was going to happen. I dreaded to go sleep for when I began to go to sleep then I became one with this immensity, and it was all this great ocean, and then a separation took place between the ocean and its wave, but I was still the ocean. Month after month this division took place until my twelfth year.

Then it vanished. When I was twenty-one, it returned on a different key. One night I was contemplating Samadhi and as I was reading this book on the life of Buddha (The Light of Asia). I fell into an involuntary trance. When I awoke the sun was up and I had not moved for ten hours, but during that interval I became infinite liquid light. I was not then divided; there was nothing but light. I was the One Reality and I was Infinite Light. That was the second experience.Then came others of a secondary state of this division. I was projected with a certain intensity out of my body. I became aware for the first time of this division and that I was more than just this being of flesh and blood. I was out, and this Reality was in the room looking at this body on the bed. Then I desired to get back into the body, integrating as a unit, and do it consciously. I did it, and then with a deliberate conscious intention I intensified this power and I felt myself moving out again. I desired to come down into the room, and I made a sort of loop. A cloud formation was over the head but everything was in detail. I could see through the breaks in the cloud the face that I see every day in the mirror – my face. I tried to go through the wall and I could not, and then I made a great leap at the wall and knocked myself back into the body again. Man thinks that when he looks into a mirror that that is all he is. Burn him up and he is gone! It is not so at all. Man that appears from the womb is this picture of the twin that comes into the world. Every child that comes from woman is Esau. You may be quite hairless by normal standards, but you are still Esau. He changes his name from Esau to Edom, which means ―redness‖ or ―red blood.‖ This being always comes first into the world, and after him comes one to supplant him and that is Jacob. You do not see Jacob. He is hidden. So it said that he had no hair. He lived in a tent.

That tent was Esau. Then comes the separation, for God and only God brings about that separation and God is that infinite ocean that will take this being and toss him over and over to bring about this separation. There is something in man that brings about this separation and separates Jacob from Esau. ―Have you no blessing for me, Father? You asked me to bring you venison and now I discover my brother has deceived you.‖ Surely he is well named ―the supplanter‖. ―He took my birthright and then my blessing, but surely, Father, you have a blessing left for me.‖ This is it: ―You shall live by the sword; you shall serve your brother, but when you break loose, you shall break his yoke from your neck.‖ There is something in this body that can break loose from this commanding power, and then it dies. That is all Esau can do. So this garment – the body – is under command to obey Jacob. Jacob is all Imagination. There is a being in man that divides this garment that moves by compulsion, and when he breaks loose, there is no Esau. Isaiah 49: ―He who forged me from the womb formed me to bring Jacob again unto him.‖ All He wants is Jacob. He wants to awaken in every being a Center of Imagining and that Center is called Jacob, the little one. ―How will he stand, for he is so little?‖ I scare him to death, but I do it to make him alive, and a Center that can create. In the later gospels it is called Jesus, the Supreme Being that rules the world. Now, from these experiences I saw the Bible differently. I would read the Book and see it differently. I have had only one real beating in my life and that was by a man who blew out his brains six months later. He asked me about a Bible passage. ―What does it say?‖ I said, ―Take up your bed and walk.‖ He said, ―Bring me the book! I said, ―My brother has it.‖ There were nine of us, and we did not have nine Bibles; my brother Cecil had it and I could not get it. This teacher brought out a cane, a long supple thing, and then I had to get over a bench and then he simply took out on my body what it took to explode a sexual expression in him. Then he stopped, and I was bleeding. Six months later he shot himself.

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