Neville Goddard Audio Lecture: A Mystical Experience (1960)

About This Lecture

Neville opens with the conviction that "all the world's a stage" and that God plays all the parts, undertaking the entire drama of human life in order to transform man the created into God the creator. The lecture frames existence as a single purposeful play: God becomes as we are so that we may become as He is, descending into human limitation and rising again as expanded awareness. This is not philosophy for its own sake; it is Neville's way of insisting that the divine is not a distant being but the very imagination at work in each of us, living out every role until the awakening comes.

From that foundation Neville turns to his central, practical claim — that life is an activity of imagining. Everything we behold, though it appears to be outside us, is first within, in the human imagination, of which the visible world is only a shadow. To change the outer fact, then, one does not wrestle with circumstance but revises the inner image until it feels natural and true. Imagining creates reality; this, he says, is the greatest of all problems, and supreme power, wisdom, and joy lie in its solution. The world is a mirror, faithfully reflecting back the assumptions a person persists in holding, whether chosen deliberately or accepted by default.

Neville illustrates the teaching with the imagery of his own mystical experiences — the rebirth of man "from above," symbolized as a birth out of the skull, and the awakening of the latent powers of the soul figured as the patriarchs of scripture rising in turn. Each is revealed as an aspect of the one self that is being resurrected, so that the Bible is read not as secular history but as a psychological drama unfolding within the individual. The story of salvation, in this reading, is the story of imagination discovering its own creative nature and identity with God.

The practical takeaway is unwavering: assume the feeling of the wish fulfilled, persist in that assumption, and the outer world must reshape itself to match the inner conviction. Neville counsels the listener to dwell in the end as though it were already accomplished — to feel the naturalness of the desired state rather than to beg for it from a distance. Because imagining is the creative power, the discipline is inward: catch the moods and inner conversations that contradict the wish, and gently revise them until the assumption of fulfillment becomes the dominant feeling. In this lecture the mystical and the practical meet, and the great mystery of God-becoming-man is offered as a working method for daily life. For Neville, the proof of the teaching is not argument but experience: when imagination is exercised with faith and sustained feeling, the assumed state hardens into fact, and the listener discovers firsthand that the creative power so often attributed to an outside God has been their own awareness all along.

Key Scripture

Neville grounds this lecture in Genesis 1:26, John 3:3, 1 Corinthians 15.