Neville Goddard Audio Lecture: Ends Ultimate And Temporary

About This Lecture

Neville builds this lecture around a single, almost mathematical principle: meaning flows backward from the end. Quoting the psalmist's plea, 'Lord, let me know my end and the number of my days,' he argues that we cannot truly understand a life, a relationship, or any pursuit until we know what it is moving toward. The end is not an afterthought tacked onto a sequence of events; it is the interpreter of the whole. Just as the last act of a play reveals what every earlier scene was really about, the destination of a journey gives weight and direction to each step that led there.

From this premise he draws his central distinction. Temporary ends are the countless aims of daily life: the jobs, relationships, possessions, and circumstances we set our hearts on and reach for through the disciplined use of imagination. Neville is emphatic that these are real and entirely worth pursuing. He never disparages the desire for a better situation, and he reaffirms that any specific wish can be realized by assuming the feeling of its fulfillment and persisting in that assumption. Yet every temporary end shares the same fate. Once attained, it gives way to another. The satisfaction of arrival is brief, and a new desire rises to take its place, so that no single accomplishment ever proves to be the destination of the journey.

The ultimate end, by contrast, is fixed and shared by all. It is the awakening of the individual as God, the unfolding of what Neville calls the divine plan written into every person. He reads the entire scriptural drama as pointing toward this one conclusion, treating the prophets and the gospel narratives as a single story whose climax is the birth of God within the human soul. Seen this way, the many temporary ends of a lifetime are not distractions from the real goal but steps and rehearsals within one great purpose. Each desire fulfilled is a small demonstration of the creative power that, fully awakened, is the ultimate end itself.

The practical encouragement that follows is twofold and carefully balanced. On one hand, Neville urges listeners to keep using imagination boldly for their present desires. There is no virtue, in his teaching, in pretending we have outgrown ordinary wants; the law of assumption is meant to be exercised, not renounced. On the other hand, he warns against the quiet error of mistaking any passing satisfaction for the final aim. The person who treats a promotion, a marriage, or a fortune as the meaning of existence will find the meaning evaporating the moment it is grasped.

By keeping the ultimate end steadily in view, Neville suggests, the seeker gains the proper perspective on every smaller success and disappointment. A failure stops looking like the collapse of everything, and a triumph stops looking like the summit, because both are understood as moments within a story whose conclusion is already secured. This long view does not deaden desire; it steadies it. One pursues each temporary end with full energy while resting in the certainty that the ultimate end, the awakening, will arrive regardless of how the smaller scenes play out.

Key Scripture

Neville grounds this lecture in Psalm 39:4.