Neville Goddard Your Faith Is Your Fortune Chapter 15
INTERVAL OF TIME
Let not your heart be troubled;
ye believe in God,
believe also in Me. In My Father’s house are many mansions;
if it were not so, I would have told you.
I go to prepare a place for you.
And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto Myself;
that where I am, there ye may be also. – John 14:1-3
„Let not your heart be troubled; ye believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also”.
The ME in whom you must believe is your consciousness, the I AM; it is God. It is also the Father’s house containing within itself all conceivable states of consciousness. Every conditioned state of consciousness is called a mansion.
This conversation takes place within yourself. Your I AM, the unconditioned consciousness, is the Christ Jesus speaking to the conditioned self or the John Smith consciousness. „I AM John”, from a mystical point of view, is two beings, namely, Christ and John. So I go to prepare a place for you, moving from your present state of consciousness into that state desired. It is a promise by your Christ or awareness of being to your present conception of yourself that you will leave your present consciousness and appropriate another.
Man is such a slave to time that, if after he has appropriated a state of consciousness which is not now seen by the world and it, the appropriated state, does not immediately embody itself, he loses faith in his unseen claim; forthwith he drops it and returns to his former static state of being. Because of this limitation of man, I have found it very helpful to employ a specified interval of time in making this journey into a prepared mansion.
„Wait but a little while” [Job 36:2].
We have all catalogued the different days of the week, months of the year and seasons. By this, I mean you and I have said time and again, „Why, today feels just like Sunday” or „-Monday” or „-Saturday”. We have also said in the middle of Summer, „Why, this feels and looks like the Fall of the year”. This is positive proof that you and I have definite feelings associated with these different days, months and seasons of the year. Because of this association, we can at any time consciously dwell in that day or season which we have selected.
Do not selfishly define this interval in days and hours because you are anxious to receive it, but simply remain in the conviction that it is done – time, being purely relative, should be eliminated entirely – and your desire will be fulfilled.
This ability to dwell at any point in time permits us to employ time in our travel into the desired mansion. Now I (consciousness) go to a point in time and there prepare a place. If I go to such a point in time and prepare a place, I shall return to this point in time where I have left; and I shall pick up and take you with me into that place which I have prepared, that where I AM, there ye may also be.
Let me give you an example of this travel. Suppose you had an intense desire. Like most men who are enslaved by time, you might feel that you could not possibly realize so large a desire in a limited interval. But admitting that all things are possible to God, believing God to be the ME within you or your consciousness of being, you can say, „As John, I can do nothing; but since all things are possible to God and God I know to be my consciousness of being, I can realize my desire in a little while. How my desire will be realized I do not (as John) know, but by the very law of my being I do know that it shall be”.
With this belief firmly established, decide what would be a relative, rational interval of time in which such a desire could be realized. Again, let me remind you not to shorten the interval of time because you are anxious to receive your desire; make it a natural interval. No one can give you the time interval. Only you can say what the natural interval would be to you. The interval of time is relative, that is, no two individuals would give the same measurement of time for the realization of their desire.
Time is ever conditioned by man’s conception of himself. Confidence in yourself as determined by conditioned consciousness always shortens the interval of time. If you were accustomed to great accomplishments, you would give yourself a much shorter interval in which to accomplish your desire than the man schooled in defeat.
If today were Wednesday and you decided that it would be quite possible for your desire to embody a new realization of yourself by Sunday, then Sunday becomes the point in time that you would visit. To make this visit, you shut out Wednesday and let in Sunday. This is accomplished by simply feeling that it is Sunday. Begin to hear the church bells; begin to feel the quietness of the day and all that Sunday means to you; actually feel that it is Sunday.
When this is accomplished, feel the joy of having received that which on Wednesday was but a desire. Feel the complete thrill of having received it, and then return to Wednesday, the point in time you left behind you. In doing this, you created a vacuum in consciousness by moving from Wednesday to Sunday. Nature, abhorring vacuums, rushes in to fill it, thereby fashioning a mould in the likeness of that which you potentially create, namely, the joy of having realized your defined desire.
As you return to Wednesday, you will be filled with a joyful expectancy, because you have established the consciousness of that which must take place the following Sunday. As you walk through the interval of Thursday, Friday and Saturday, nothing disturbs you regardless of conditions, because you predetermined that which you would be on the Sabbath and that remains an unalterable conviction.
Having gone before and prepared the place, you have returned to John and are now taking him with you through the interval of three days into the prepared place that he might share your joy with you, for where I AM, there ye may also be.