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."
Neville went 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.
In 1931, Neville began to study the Kabbalah under a black-nationalist mystic named Arnold Josiah Ford, called Abdullah.
Like Neville, Ford was born in Barbados in 1877 and arrived in Harlem around 1910 and established himself as a leading voice in the Ethiopianism movement, a precursor to Jamaican Rastafarianism.
Neville was not naturalized until around the time of World War II, when he served in the United States Army.
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.
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.
The words of spiritual writer and ...
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