If Neville Goddards Birth From Your Own Skull Story Freaks You Out Youre Not Alone
26 Dec If Neville Goddard’s “Birth from Your Own Skull” Story Freaks You Out, You’re Not Alone
A lot of people who read Neville Goddard have a hard time when he discusses The Promise and especially the part where he starts talking about “the skull.”
The disturbing part is that he doesn’t mean it as a metaphor for your mind. He insists that Golgotha (the biblical place of the crucifixion) is your actual, physical skull right now. We’re going to explore this head-on (pun intended).
Freedom Barry his student, mentioned in “Transcript Of “Freedom On The Beach” Lecture Presented By Freedom Barry Held At Cambria, Ca On Sept. 14-15, 1996″
“Well, I continued going; this was then in June until he closed. I heard him five or six times before he closed and went for his two weeks in San Francisco. When he came back from San Francisco, I gave him two case histories of where I had put it to work, and he was delighted. So I never missed a single lecture from then until the calendar had come around another year and he went to San Francisco again. That was where he had this “Birth from Above,” which changed the entire direction of his teaching. And that hall was full when he opened. It held three hundred people in the Fine Arts Auditorium at the Wilshire in Los Angeles. The hall was full, and he told this shocking story in the most literal terms—of being born through the skull of his head as a womb opens. The next night, that was on Monday; by Thursday there were thirty people. The next Monday, there were twelve. He kept telling it, and after the third night, with the audience down to twelve, Freddy Messenger, who was his agent, said, “Neville, you’ve got to stop telling that story or you’ll have no audience at all.” Neville replied, “Then I’ll tell it to the bare walls.”
When I first started reading Neville’s lectures, mentions of the “skull” made me cringe. Was he talking about Kundalini or was he literally talking about our physical cranium? The answer is yes to both.
It’s a Physical Thing
In the lecture “The Crucifixion,” for example, he’s pounds the table on how it’s our bony “stone” cranium where the divine drama unfolds:
“So when you and I entered Golgotha, as we are told, “And when they came to the place which they called The Skull, there they crucified him.” Read it in the 23rd of Luke, “When they came to the place which they called The Skull, there they crucified him.” The word skull is translated as Golgotha; another definition is the Holy Sepulcher, so now we know what the Holy Sepulcher is: it is our own wonderful human skull. “
“One day, you awake in a tomb and the tomb is your own wonderful skull and that is the Holy Sepulcher. But this week, thousands of pilgrims will go to Jerusalem to the Holy Sepulcher, and some priests, quite innocently, will point out a place and say, “That’s it, that’s where he was buried.” He wasn’t buried there at all. There is no holy place in Jerusalem. The holy place is your own wonderful skull; that’s the Holy Sepulcher; that’s where he’s buried. That’s where he’s sound asleep, dreaming with you these visions of eternity until you awake.”
It’s Not Quite a Physical Thing
But here, in his lecture, “The Rock, the Water and the Wine,” he waves it off as not “quite” a physical thing that turns to ash in a crematorium. In a rare Q&A from 1966, Neville crystallizes the paradox in a way he doesn’t elsewhere…
“Q: Have you ever seen the energy in our mind…
A: Don’t try to locate it spatially. You actually feel the reality of what you are doing, but don’t say it must be here in your skull, for the skull of which I speak isn’t this one, and yet it is a skull. If you dropped dead this very moment and you requested cremation, that skull will turn to dust. But I tell you, you will still be in “the skull” and very much the being that you are.”
Map to Buried Treasure
Neville’s teachings tease you like a map to buried treasure, but the “X marks a spot” is both in your physical head and in some ethereal space or state.