Neville recalls standing outside a small bookshop on 49th Street in New York City in 1939, where the two elderly women who ran it had put a large photograph of him in the window even though he had no books published at the time. Passing by, he overheard one woman ask another who he was, and heard himself described as "the mad mystic" who taught that a person's own consciousness is God and that imagining creates reality — a story he uses to illustrate that being called mad for this teaching was nothing new.