Neville Goddard Audio Lecture: God Is Known By Experience (1972)

About This Lecture

Given in 1972, near the close of Neville Goddard's life, "God Is Known By Experience" (also circulated under the title "You Must Experience God") is among his most emphatic statements about the experiential, rather than intellectual, nature of true religion. His central claim is blunt and uncompromising: God is known by experience or not at all. Creeds, philosophies, and second-hand beliefs may point in a useful direction, may even quicken the longing, but they can never substitute for the actual unveiling of the divine within the individual. A description of fire is not the warmth of fire, and a doctrine about God is not the experience of God.

Neville grounds this in his lifelong reading of the Bible as a record of inner experiences rather than abstract theology. The figures and events of scripture, he teaches, dramatize awakenings that occur within consciousness, and when those same experiences begin to unfold in a person's own life they confirm, beyond argument, that God is the human imagination, one's own wonderful I AM. The name revealed to Moses, "I AM that I AM," is for Neville not the title of a far-off deity but the very awareness of being that each person carries; to know God is therefore to awaken to the creative power of one's own consciousness.

He speaks throughout with the authority of a witness rather than a theorist. Telling the audience that because he has experienced God he can no more deny it than deny the testimony of his own senses, he positions the lecture as testimony, not speculation. This is the spirit of Job's confession that Neville often invoked, "I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now mine eye seeth thee." The hearsay of religion gives way to first-hand sight, and only that sight, Neville insists, can finally satisfy. From this stance he feels qualified to describe in advance how his listeners too will come to know God for themselves.

The lecture is therefore both a defense of mystical experience and a kind of preview of the spiritual events Neville says await every person, the series of visions and inner transformations that culminate in the discovery of one's true identity. He does not ask the audience to take any of this on faith in the ordinary sense. Instead he points to a faith that is really a willingness to test, an experimental confidence that the law of imagination will prove itself the moment it is applied honestly and persistently.

The practical counsel that runs beneath the mysticism is characteristically grounded. Begin where you are, Neville suggests: take some specific desire, assume the feeling of its fulfillment, and let the results teach you who and what God is. As the law proves reliable in small things, the seeker is encouraged to wait expectantly for the deeper experiences that, in his teaching, eventually crown the practice. Application comes first and revelation follows; one does not believe one's way into God, but experiences one's way there, beginning with the imagination one uses every day.

Key Scripture

Neville grounds this lecture in Exodus 3:14, Job 42:5.