Neville Goddard Audio Lecture: Foundation Stone (1959)

About This Lecture

Given in December 1959, "The Foundation Stone" makes a single bold equation: there is only one stone worth building on, and it is your own wonderful imagination. What scripture calls Christ, the Lord, or God, Neville says, is this imaginative power in man, one with the Divine Imagination that creates, sustains, alters, and dissolves the whole of creation. He reaches for the masonry language of the Gospels — the stone the builders rejected becoming the head of the corner, the wise man who builds his house upon rock — and turns it inward. Build your life on anything else — circumstance, opinion, the testimony of the senses, the goodwill of others — and you build on sand that the first contrary appearance will wash away.

From this premise Neville develops his radical idea of a responsive universe. The world is not indifferent matter standing apart from you; it is infinite response, and the individual perceiver is its cause. Nothing you experience is independent of your own perceiving — the conditions you meet are the faithful echo of states you have occupied, knowingly or not. To know that imagining creates reality is therefore to hold the cornerstone of all power. Neville says that once a person truly grasps this they will not lead a superficial or impatient life, because they understand what every inner act is doing: each mood, each silent assumption, each rehearsed conversation is laying another course of stone in the structure of their future.

The practical teaching follows directly from the metaphysics. Whatever you faithfully place upon the stone as an imaginal activity — a scene that implies the wish already fulfilled, entered with sensory vividness and felt as real — must come into your world. Neville urges deliberate, disciplined use of imagination rather than idle daydreaming. The technique is to construct a short, natural scene that would only be true if the desire were already accomplished, to enter it as if from within rather than watch it as a spectator, and to give it the tone of reality by feeling it. This is the act of building: not pleading toward a distant God, but assuming, here and now, the consciousness of the answered prayer.

The lecture's final emphasis is fidelity. Having laid an imaginal act upon the foundation, the builder must not abandon it the moment the senses report no change. Neville warns that most failures are not failures of imagination but failures of persistence — the premature return to building on sand because the rock seemed slow. Remain faithful to the stone, he counsels, refuse to let appearances renegotiate the assumption, and creation will rearrange itself to confirm what you have assumed. To found one's life on imagination is thus both the highest mysticism and the most practical of disciplines: the discovery that the Christ scripture proclaims is the very power of perception within you, and that to use it knowingly is to build a house that the floods cannot move.

Key Scripture

Neville grounds this lecture in Ephesians 2:20, 1 Corinthians 3:11, Matthew 7:24-25.