San Francisco, 1959
Neville Goddard used the word Promise for what he said God does in every person at the end of their journey, whether or not they ever try anything. He reported it happening to him in four visions between July 1959 and January 1963, and he wrote each date in his Bible beside the verse he matched it to. In his language the Law is imagination put to work on your own circumstances, and the Promise is the part nobody can work for. We present his experiences as his report, in his words. He counted 1,260 days from first to last, the number in Daniel and Revelation. The calendar gives 1,261, and you can run the count yourself below.
The instrument
“Now, go home and compute it,” he told a San Francisco audience in 1968. Each cell below is one day, each row one month. Drag the slider, or press count, and the running total follows the calendar. Then switch the start date and see what changes.
Day
0
Monday, July 20, 1959
| Gap | He said | Calendar |
|---|
The extra day
July 20, 1959 to January 1, 1963 is 1,261 days. Neville says 1,260, and he says it flatly: “No matter how you try it, you cannot bring it out to one thousand two hundred and sixty-one or one thousand two hundred and fifty-nine.” That line is from The Signs of the End, 1968, and in the same talk he walks through the months and mentions leap year by name.
He gives the three gaps in several talks as 139, 123 and 998, and they do add to 1,260. The first and third match the calendar. The second, December 6, 1959 to April 8, 1960, is 124 days, because it crosses February 29, 1960. Without the leap day it would be 123, and that is the likeliest source of the difference.
There is a second way to arrive at the same number. Two of the three talks we hold from 1959 date the first night July 21. In his 1968 talk on the 1,260 days he also says July 20 was an ordinary day, that he went to bed around eleven, and that it began at four in the morning, which on a clock is the 21st. From July 21 the calendar gives exactly 1,260, though the first gap then becomes 138 and no longer matches what he said. The dates he reported are set out below.
| Where | What he says | Date |
|---|---|---|
| The Birth of the Babe, Sept 8, 1959 | “On the morning of July 20, I was in San Francisco” | July 20 |
| The Second Vision, Sept 11, 1959 | “the experience that took place on July 21st” | July 21 |
| Esau and Jacob, Nov 13, 1959 | “this fulfillment of July 21st of this year” | July 21 |
| The Law and the Promise, 1961 | “In the early hours of the morning on July 20, 1959” | July 20 |
| One Thousand Two Hundred Sixty Days, Sept 13, 1968 | “On July 20 of the year 1959, my day was normal.” He also says he wrote that date in his Bible. | Both |
| The Most Precious Gift, undated | “on the night of the 19th day of July” | July 20 |
The biblical figure comes from a different calendar altogether. Daniel’s “a time, two times, and half a time” is three and a half years of 360 days each, and Neville knew that. “I did not use the ancient calendar, but our modern one,” he said. That is why the single day shows.
The four events
“I have recorded the date of every great mystical event I have experienced, next to the passage of scripture which parallels it.” He said he had no idea any of it was coming, and that he recognized the verses afterward.
A dream of a city where the arts flourished was “suddenly interrupted by the most intense vibration centered at the base of my skull.” He found himself sealed inside his own head, pushed at the base and worked his way out “inch by inch.” His body lay on the bed. Three of his brothers appeared, an infant lay wrapped on the floor, and he lifted it and asked, “How is my sweetheart?”
He matched it to“You must be born from above.”John 3:7, with the sign of the child in Luke 2
“A vibration similar to the one which preceded his birth started in my head,” this time at the top. It exploded, and he was in a modestly furnished room with a boy in his early teens leaning in an open doorway, whom he knew as David of the Bible and as his own son. In later talks the boy addresses him as Father.
He matched it to“I have found David. He has cried unto me, ‘Thou art my Father, my God and the Rock of my salvation.’”Psalm 89
“A bolt of lightning out of my skull split me in two from the top of my skull to the base of my spine.” At the base he saw golden liquid light, knew it as himself, and rose up the spine into his head, which “vibrated like an earthquake.” In a 1971 talk he likens it to a hot rivet going into steel.
He matched it to“The curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom,” and “as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of man be lifted up.”Matthew 27:51, John 3:14
His head became luminous with no edge to it. About twenty feet above him a beige dove floated without moving its wings. He raised a finger, it came down, and “it smothered me with kisses.” A woman beside him said the bird had broken through “the ring of offense” to show its love. He told an audience seven days later: “It happened on the 1st of January of this year.”
He matched it to“The spirit of the Lord God is upon me because he has anointed me”Isaiah 61, and in Resurrection, Luke 3:22
These four are his own later selection. Three days after The Birth of the Babe, in a talk titled The Second Vision, he says “twenty-four days later came the second vision,” a scene of his own body dropping dead at a table, which he read as the death of Herod. By the 1960s that one has left the sequence, and of the years before the dove he says only “a few, but not the important ones.”
The Law and the Promise
“Prior to that I spoke only of the law,” he said of the years before 1959. Afterward the Law stayed in his talks, in second place. He never told anyone to stop using it, and his favorite phrase for what it does is that it cushions the blows.
| The Law | The Promise | |
|---|---|---|
| Terms | “God’s law is conditional.” | “God’s promise is unconditional” |
| Who works it | “Man is the operant power.” | “It came like a shot out of the nowhere.” |
| Can you speed it up | Yes, by assuming the end and persisting | “all the meditation in the world isn’t going to produce it.” |
| What it does | “Use the law to cushion the blows while God keeps his promise” | “God became you that you may become God.” |
| Can you change it | “As you imagine, so shall your life become.” | “But I cannot change the Promise.” |
| When he learned it | From Abdullah in New York, by his account in the 1930s | “I knew nothing of the promise until 1959” |
That last row is why his late talks can sound harsh about his own teacher. In June 1971 he says of Abdullah, “He understood the Law, not the Promise.” Neville had not been able to say otherwise of himself until he was 54. In two undated San Francisco talks he goes back to the night of July 19, 1959. He says he “only knew the Law,” and that not even “the greatest authority in the world” could have told him different.
The change shows in his vocabulary, which we track word by word on the hub.
Two books
Most of the book is letters from people who used the Law. The last chapter turns to the Promise in the first person, with dates, and it stops at the third event. There is no dove in it, because that had not happened yet.
A short confession of faith at the end of a collection of his earlier books. All four events appear here as acts in a drama, about “the resurrected one,” with no calendar dates and with the gaps given in rough months. He said why: “I told it in the third person most of the time because I thought that people would accept it more readily.”
The vibration
The Barbados story drifts across the years, and the opening of this one barely moves. Every full telling we read starts with a physical vibration in the head. He treated it as a plain fact and offered no theory of what it was in the body, and we offer none either.
“the most terrific vibration within my skull”
The Birth of the Babe“the most intense vibration centered at the base of my skull”
The Law and the Promise“an intense vibration centered at the base of his skull”
Resurrection“a vibration centered at the base of my skull began to increase in intensity until I thought I would explode from the force of it.”
One Thousand Two Hundred Sixty Days“felt within my head the most intense vibration, and I thought, this is a brain hemorrhage”
The Secret of ImaginingHe also reports that it moved. In the 1961 book the sound seems to come from the corner of the room, and he wonders whether it “could be caused by a very high wind.” He then reads that against John 3, where the wind “blows where it wills” and it is the same word as spirit. He was a man who had spent decades teaching that thought works by feeling, and his account of the biggest event of his life starts with a sensation he had not chosen.
Questions
Neville reported a birth from his own skull on July 20, 1959, his son David calling him Father on December 6, 1959, his body split with golden light rising up the spine on April 8, 1960, and a dove descending on January 1, 1963.
Neville said 1,260, the figure in Daniel and Revelation. The first night to January 1, 1963 is 1,261 by the calendar. He gave one gap as 123 days where the calendar gives 124, because of February 29, 1960.
He said no. The Law responds to what you do, and the Promise comes in its own time as a gift. He said he was not seeking it when it happened and that no diet or meditation produces it.
Yes. He called himself the pattern, said each person will experience the same events in the first person, and told audiences that nobody is left out. That is his teaching, and it cannot be checked from outside.
The Law and the Promise, 1961, tells three of the events in the first person with dates. Resurrection, 1966, tells all four in the third person without dates. His talks from 1959 to 1972 retell them often.
He read Revelation 12 as giving the clue: a woman brings forth a child and is then fed for 1,260 days. So he began counting at the child, and he told listeners to begin there too.
Sources
This is his account. We have no way of testing an inner experience, so we neither vouch for it nor mock it. The day counts are plain arithmetic, and you can check them above.