Awake, O Sleeper!
Neville Goddard
1/8/68
Now, tonight’s title is “Awake, O Sleeper!” You will find this in the 5th chapter of Ephesians: “Awake, O Sleeper, and arise from the dead” (verse 14). Now, what person rationally would grasp it? You see, the Bible is addressed to the Imagination which is spiritual sensation and only but immediately to the understanding or reason. If you try to grasp it through reason, well, it doesn’t make sense.
How could I speak to someone and tell him that he’s not only asleep but he’s dead? I equate sleep with death, and tell a man that I am addressing to awake, you sleeper, and arise from the dead. I am telling him he has entered a world of eternal death, but he doesn’t know it. I am telling him that he is dreaming his world into being, but he doesn’t know it…and maybe he doesn’t believe it, for he’s a rational being. In the Old Testament, in the 44th chapter of the Book of Psalms, we read, “Rouse thyself! Why sleepest thou, O Lord? Awake!”
So it’s addressed to the Lord. All the commands of scripture are addressed to the Lord and fulfilled by the Lord…there is nothing but the Lord. So we start on the greatest confession of faith that man has ever received through revelation. It’s called the Hebrews’ confession of faith, the Shema: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God the Lord is one.” It’s a compound unity, one made up of others; for the word is Elohim, the gods. Now I will tell you, I firmly believe in God.
I don’t have to believe in God, for I stood in the presence of the risen Lord who embraced me and incorporated me into his one body, and from that moment back in 1929 I am one with the body of the risen Lord. So here is the Lord. I don’t have to believe in it, but I will tell you, using the word “belief,” I believe in God.
I believe also that men are gods, and that collective man is God; that we are the gods spoken of in the 82nd Psalm—which we are told is the most difficult of all the psalms for the scholars to unravel. If it ever had any meaning, they said, the meaning has long been lost. This is what stumps them. It’s quoted in the 10th chapter of the Book of John; but we go back to the origin, the 82nd Psalm: “And God has taken his place in the divine assembly; in the midst of the gods he holds judgment” (verse 1). Now he speaks, “I say you are gods, sons of the Most High, all of you; nevertheless…”
Now here comes the future prophecy. All this is a present fact, you are gods now, sons of the Most High now. “Nevertheless, ye shall die as men and fall as one man, O ye princes” (verse 6). Here is a prophecy: you’ll fall as one man. Is the fall the result of disobedience as we are taught? Is the fall something that is a punishment? I tell you, it is not. The fall is a plan. It’s a pretext, an assumed appearance in order to conceal the real intention.
The real intention is an expansion, a further existence, an ultimate birth. That’s the real intention. And the gods fell as one man…one man. He chose us in himself before the foundation of the world. And as one man fell, it fragmented itself into the unnumbered men of the world. We are the gods in disguise, not recognizing our brotherhood, not recognizing ourselves.
I am telling you tonight you are the gods spoken of in scripture in that 82nd Psalm.
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