Neville Goddard Audio Lecture: Father Forgive Them (1971)

About This Lecture

Taking its title from Jesus' words 'Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,' this lecture reinterprets forgiveness as a creative, inward act rather than a moral concession. Neville begins from his foundational claim that everything in experience is the result of imaginal acts. People behave as they do, he teaches, because they are held in particular states of consciousness; their actions flow from the state they occupy, and they know not what they do precisely because they are unaware that imagination is the cause of their conduct. To forgive, then, is not to excuse an event after the fact but to change your inner picture of the other person, lifting them out of the state in which you had unwittingly imprisoned them.

Neville stresses that genuine forgiveness and forgetting are inseparable. So long as you continue to replay an injury inwardly, rehearsing the wrong and renewing the resentment, you keep both yourself and the other person bound to the offending state, and that state compels the very behavior you resent. A grievance held in memory is not a neutral record; it is an active imaginal act that perpetuates the offense. By revising your conception of another, by deliberately seeing and feeling them as the person you would wish them to be, you release them from the state, and in doing so you free yourself and reshape your own world. The lecture frames this as the practical secret hidden inside Christ's plea from the cross: the one who has been wronged holds the power to forgive, and that forgiveness is itself a creative act.

Throughout the talk Neville illustrates the principle with the kind of personal testimony that runs through all his lectures, showing how a deliberate inner change toward another person or situation produced corresponding outer results, the estranged reconciled, the hostile turned friendly, the stuck situation suddenly moving. The pattern is always the same: change the inner image and the outer relationship follows. He insists that this is not wishful thinking but the operation of a law, the law of assumption, applied to the way we hold one another in mind.

The recurring message is that man is forgiven everything because he is only ever in a state. No one is permanently identical with the deed; the deed belongs to a state through which the person is passing. Recognizing this dissolves the ground of condemnation and makes radical, total forgiveness possible toward anyone, regardless of what they have done. To withhold forgiveness is, in Neville's terms, to keep yourself chained to a low state, while to forgive is to step into liberty.

Forgiveness, in Neville's hands, becomes one of the most powerful instruments of the law of assumption, a practical tool for revising memory, healing relationships, and transforming the life that imagination has built. The cross, which the world reads as an emblem of suffering, he reads as the place where the highest creative act is performed: a complete change of consciousness toward those who seem most undeserving, undertaken with the full understanding that they truly know not what they do.

Key Scripture

Neville grounds this lecture in Luke 23:34.