Neville Goddard Audio Lecture: God In Action (1970)

About This Lecture

This lecture states Neville's core identification as plainly as he ever puts it: your imagination is God, so when you imagine, God is acting. He invites the listener to survey the made world close at hand, the clothing they are wearing, the houses they live in, the automobiles in the street, every manufactured object within sight, and he points out that not one of these things came into being without first existing as an image in someone's mind. The chair was imagined before it was built; the building was imagined before it was raised. If imagination is the source of all these creations, and imagination is God, then it follows directly that every act of imagining is God in action.

From this premise Neville lays out a clear working method, one he returns to throughout his teaching. First, name precisely what you want, because vagueness produces vague results. Second, construct an inner scene that implies the fulfillment of that desire, a scene you could not be experiencing unless the wish were already yours. Third, enter that scene from within rather than watching it like a spectator, and feel it to be real, supplying it with the tones, sensations, and naturalness of an actual event. Fourth, and for Neville most decisively, persist in believing in the reality of the imaginal act. He stresses persistence above the other steps, suggesting that to abandon a clear imaginal act halfway is to misunderstand the very power one is wielding. The assumption, faithfully held, hardens into fact.

Neville grounds the teaching in scripture, drawing especially on the promise in Isaiah that the word going forth from the mouth of God shall not return empty but shall accomplish that which it was sent to do. He reads that 'word' as the imaginal act itself, a creative utterance spoken inwardly that, once released, must bear fruit. The same idea is echoed in the opening of John's gospel, where the Word is the agent of all that is made. For Neville these are not poetic flourishes but technical descriptions of how creation actually works: an inner word, vividly felt, becomes an outer condition.

The encouragement of the lecture is therefore both metaphysical and intensely practical. On the metaphysical side, Neville asks the listener to stop waiting on an external deity who may or may not answer, and to recognize that the creative power they have been praying to all their lives is their own wonderful human imagination. There is no second God somewhere beyond the sky; there is only this faculty, present and active in every person. On the practical side, he points out that imagination is never idle. It is working at every moment, building the future out of whatever images we feed it, whether we choose those images deliberately or let them run on fear and habit.

The difference between a life that drifts and a life that is consciously created, then, is simply whether a person takes hold of this power on purpose. Used deliberately and lovingly, occupied with scenes one would be glad to live, imagination becomes exactly what the title promises: God in action, working on the imaginer's behalf.

Key Scripture

Neville grounds this lecture in Isaiah 55:11, John 1:1.