The Bible, when read rightly, was meant to be the greatest love story ever told—about the reader—and to show man how to attain his deepest desires.
Neville Goddard taught that the Bible is not a historical account, but a psychological drama — a symbolic unfolding of the inner world and its divine imagination. Its verses speak in symbols, tracing the movement of consciousness through longing, identity, union, and transformation.
One of the most quietly pivotal verses on love in the narrative is Genesis 2:24:
“Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.”
This is not a description of physical marriage. It is the psychological-emotional structure behind every transformation in the Bible. It is a symbolic instruction: To “leave father and mother” means to break from inherited thought patterns and subconscious conditioning — the familiar framework of belief represented in stories like Laban. The “wife” is the state one longs to embody, the assumption of the wish fulfilled. To “be joined” to her is to cleave or "crucified" to that desired state in imagination — and to remain faithful to it, no matter what the senses say. And when the two become “one flesh,” it means the imagined state has been fully accepted and impressed upon the subconscious — it is now expressed outwardly as physical fact. In Neville Goddard’s terminology, the state has moved from assumption to embodiment.
To “cleave” in this way is an act of love in its deepest biblical sense. In Neville’s framework, love is not mere affection — it is the union of the self with the desired state. Love, here, is not passive; it is the cleaving force of assumption. You do not simply think about your desire — you become inwardly married to it.
But this cleaving does not come easily. In a world trained to value struggle over surrender, criticism over creativity, and survival over joy, it can feel unnatural — even foolish — to break from inherited stress patterns and step into what we love. We are conditioned by habit minds, reinforced by cultural noise, taught to distrust ease and defer desire. The world says be realistic; the soul says be faithful. And so, the inner work of leaving father and mother — that is, shedding the familiar identity formed by society, trauma, and tradition — becomes one of the greatest spiritual challenges. To cleave to a new state requires not just vision, but courage — to love what is possible more than we fear what is familiar. This is why love, in the biblical sense, is an act of faith: a bold refusal to keep living by the old name.
This is the same inner marriage explored in the mystery of ask, believe, receive — where asking is desire, believing is cleaving, and receiving is the becoming of one flesh. It is love that makes manifestation inevitable, for love is the fusion of imagination and feeling.
This pattern — from leaving, to cleaving, to becoming — pulses through the entire biblical narrative. And most powerfully, it is saturated with love and desire — not as sin, but as divine longing.
Paul's Mysteries
Paul repeats the mystery again in another manner while echoing the 'seed in itself' (Genesis 1:11), and 'man in His Image' (Genesis 1:26):
"That you are to put away, in relation to your earlier way of life, the old man, which is completely turned to evil desires; And be made new in the spirit of your mind, And put on the new man, to which God has given life, in righteousness and a true and holy way of living."— Ephesians 4:22–24
The Garden, the Bride, and the Song of Desire
In the Song of Solomon, this same pattern is no longer hidden — it becomes luminous.
The bride is both a woman and a garden. Her presence evokes Eden, not as a memory but as a living desire:
“A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed.”
(Song of Solomon 4:12)