Neville Goddard Audio Lecture: Call Upon Self

About This Lecture

In this lecture Neville takes the scriptural promise that "whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved" and turns it inward. The name to be called upon, he argues, is not an external deity standing apart from you but the I AM that you are, your own consciousness and imagination, which scripture treats as the very name of God. When Moses asks for that name at the burning bush, the answer is simply I AM, and Neville reads this as the discovery that awareness itself, the bare sense of being, is the only God anyone has ever addressed. To call upon self, then, is to claim a desired state as already true within you rather than to petition a power located somewhere outside yourself.

The practical teaching follows directly from this identification. To call upon the Lord is to assume the feeling of the wish fulfilled, to occupy in imagination the state of the person you wish to be and to persist in it until it hardens into fact. Neville is precise about the mechanics: you do not beg, bargain, or wait; you appropriate. The mood of fulfillment is the calling, and the steadiness with which you hold it is the answer already on its way. He frames salvation not as rescue from sin in the conventional moral sense but as deliverance from an unwanted state of consciousness into a desired one, accomplished entirely by a deliberate shift in self-conception.

Neville draws his usual sharp line between God's Law and God's Promise, and this lecture sits squarely on the side of the Law. The Law is the disciplined, repeatable use of imagination to reshape circumstance, available to everyone without favoritism; calling upon self is that Law in action. Yet behind the Law stands the Promise, the eventual awakening of the dreamer to discover that the creative I AM addressed all along is one's own deeper identity, the Christ buried within. The two are not in tension. Mastering the Law eases the journey and proves the principle, while the Promise unfolds in its own appointed time as the final unveiling of who the caller really is.

Neville typically illustrates the principle with personal testimony and stories of ordinary people who reshaped their lives by quietly assuming and dwelling in a new inner state rather than chasing it in the outer world. The lecture's lasting work is to close the gap between prayer and assumption. Prayer, rightly understood, is not addressed upward to a distant heaven; it is a turning within to the only power that has ever answered, the self you are. To apply it, choose the wish you most want fulfilled, construct a short imaginal scene that implies it is already accomplished, enter the feeling of that scene as though it were now your own, and return to it faithfully until the senses confirm what imagination has assumed. That, Neville says, is what it means to call upon the name of the Lord and be saved.

Key Scripture

Neville grounds this lecture in Romans 10:13, Joel 2:32, Exodus 3:14.