Neville Goddard Audio Lecture: Christ The Reality Of Man

About This Lecture

In this lecture Neville turns the conventional picture of Christianity inside out, insisting that the Christ proclaimed in Scripture is the very substance of every human being rather than a man who lived once in the distant past. For Neville, the word "Christ" does not point backward to a biography but inward to the creative power, the I AM awareness, that constitutes our deepest identity. To say Christ is the reality of man is to say that the living God dwells within us as our own wonderful human imagination, so that the search for a savior outside the self is, in his view, a search in the wrong direction.

He develops the idea that the entire biblical drama is a portrait of the unfolding of God within the individual. The promises of a coming redeemer are fulfilled not in another person but in the listener, when consciousness awakens to its own divinity. Neville treats the figures and events of Scripture as states and stages of this inner unfolding rather than as secular chronicle, leaning on Paul's confession that it is no longer he who lives but Christ who lives in him, and on the mystery named in Colossians as "Christ in you, the hope of glory." Read this way, the Bible becomes a personal blueprint, and every reader is invited to find their own name written between its lines.

The practical thrust is characteristic of Neville. Because Christ is the reality of man, the imaginative act is itself a divine act. What you assume yourself to be, while inwardly occupying the feeling of the wish already fulfilled, you give reality to, because the same creative power that Scripture calls Christ operates through your awareness. There is, on this teaching, no second cause: circumstances, other people, and chance do not author your world; the assuming imagination does. To shift an experience, then, you do not first rearrange the outer facts but inwardly become the person whose desire is realized, and persist in that conviction until the outer world conforms.

The lecture moves continually between two registers that Neville never finally separates. One is mystical revelation, the assurance that each of us will personally experience the awakening of Christ within as an unmistakable inner event, not as a belief adopted but as something undergone. The other is the daily law of assumption, the disciplined habit of imagining from the end and refusing to let the senses dictate the inner mood. He presents these as two faces of a single truth: the power that one day wakes as the Christ in you is the very power you are using, often carelessly, in every act of imagining today.

Neville closes by urging the listener to test the claim experimentally rather than accept it on authority. Dwell in the assumption you desire, treat your own imagination as sacred, and watch how faithfully life answers. Trust the inner Christ as the only true cause of the world you experience, and the conventional, external God recedes as the indwelling reality is recognized as your own self.

Key Scripture

Neville grounds this lecture in Galatians 2:20, Colossians 1:27, John 14.