Neville Goddard Audio Lecture: Feel Chosen (1972)

About This Lecture

Delivered in 1972, this lecture asks the listener to do something deceptively simple: feel chosen. Neville insists that the sense of being wanted, accepted, and elect is not a status conferred by other people or handed down by an external God, but an inner state one assumes and then lives from. He observes that many lives repeat the same patterns of rejection, exclusion, and lack precisely because the person secretly carries the self-image of one who is overlooked. That hidden conviction, faithfully reflected by a neutral creative power, keeps reproducing itself in the outer world, so that circumstance merely confirms what the person already believes about their own worth.

Neville roots the teaching in scripture, leaning especially on Ephesians 1:4-5, which says we were chosen 'before the foundation of the world' and predestined to adoption as sons. He reads this not as comfort reserved for a favored few but as the very structure of every consciousness: God, the eternal 'I AM,' has already chosen and embedded himself within each person. He pairs this with Ecclesiastes 3:11, that eternity has been set within the human heart. To feel chosen, then, is not to earn an honor but to claim what is already true, to stop arguing with a gift that was given before time began.

Much of the lecture's force comes from Neville's contrast between living assumption and mere intellectual effort. Consciousness, he maintains, responds to identity rather than to striving; you do not reason your way into a new world but become someone for whom that world is natural. To dramatize that the change is the work of imagination and faith rather than human cleverness, he turns to the story of Gideon, whose army is deliberately whittled down from thousands to a mere three hundred so that the victory can never be credited to numbers or strength. The reduction is the point: when every visible support is removed, the triumph must belong to faith alone. So it is, Neville says, with the inner life. You do not seize your good by force of personality; you assume the feeling of being chosen and let that feeling do the work.

The self-image, in his account, is the hinge on which everything turns. A person who feels unwanted will, almost without noticing, behave and interpret events in ways that invite further rejection, while a person who feels genuinely chosen meets the same world and finds it generous. Because the law is impartial, it will faithfully outpicture either mood; the only question is which one you occupy.

The practical instruction is characteristically concrete and tied to the threshold of sleep. As you drift off, deliberately dwell in the feeling of being so wanted, so accepted, so chosen that the mood saturates you and carries over into the coming day. Construct, if it helps, a simple imaginal scene in which someone you respect treats you as the elect and beloved one, and feel the reality of it until it is yours. You cannot, Neville warns, rise each morning feeling shunted aside and unwanted and then expect a generous, welcoming world to meet you. Feel chosen first, and the world will arrange itself to agree.

Key Scripture

Neville grounds this lecture in Ephesians 1:4-5, Ecclesiastes 3:11, John 17:20-23.