Neville Goddard Audio Lecture: Feel After Him

About This Lecture

In this lecture Neville takes as his text the words attributed to Paul that men should seek God and 'feel after Him and find Him,' though He is not far from any one of us. The unusual verb is the hinge of the whole talk. We are not told to reason toward God or to assemble proofs of His existence; we are told to feel our way to Him, as one gropes in the dark for something near at hand. For Neville this is not a quaint figure of speech but a precise description of method. God is not reached by argument or external evidence but is touched through inner feeling and imaginative sensing, and the phrase becomes the organizing image around which the lecture turns.

He pairs Paul's counsel with William Blake's saying that imagination is spiritual sensation, drawing the two threads into a single claim that sits at the center of the talk: the creative power people call God is identical with human imagination. Man, Neville argues, is all imagination, and God dwells in us as our own imagining while we dwell in Him. To 'feel after' God, then, is simply to turn attention inward to the very faculty by which we assume states and experience them as real. The search ends where it began, in the seeker's own awareness, because the awareness doing the seeking is itself the divine activity being sought.

This identification carries a consequence that Neville never lets the listener avoid. If imagination is God, then the quality of one's imagining is never a private or harmless matter; it is creative. The inner conversations we carry on, the scenes we replay, the moods we indulge are not commentary on our lives but the productive cause of them. To find the God within is therefore also to discover where one's creative power has been spent carelessly, and to begin to direct it on purpose.

From this follows the practical discipline that runs through all of Neville's work. Because imagining creates reality, the way to lay hold of a desired end is not to petition a distant deity but to feel the end as real now, occupying the state in imaginative sensation until it acquires the conviction of accomplished fact. The instruction to 'feel after' the wish is meant literally: you reach into the imagined situation with your senses, hearing the voices, registering the touch and the atmosphere, until the feeling of fulfillment is unmistakably present. Neville teaches that the persuasiveness of the inner experience, not its visual sharpness, is what externalizes it.

The lecture thus unites a mystical reading of scripture with a usable practice. To apply it, take a single desire and translate it into a felt scene that implies its fulfillment, then enter that scene in a relaxed, near-sleep state and sustain the feeling until it becomes natural. In doing so the listener accomplishes both ends of the talk at once: by feeling after the wish fulfilled and persisting in that inner sensation, one simultaneously touches the God within and draws the assumed state into outer expression.

Key Scripture

Neville grounds this lecture in Acts 17:27.