Neville Goddard Audio Lecture: Gods Law And His Promise (1971)

About This Lecture

This lecture sets side by side the two great themes of Neville's later teaching: the Law and the Promise. The Law is the impersonal principle that imagining creates reality, that whatever state a person assumes and persists in will harden into fact in the outer world. Neville explains it through the seed image drawn from Genesis: all things bring forth after their kind, so the assumption you plant and dwell in inevitably bears its own fruit, neither more nor less than what was sown. The Law makes no moral judgment about the seed; it faithfully reproduces whatever inner state is held, which is why Neville stresses watching what one accepts as true of oneself.

Neville offers personal testimony to demonstrate the Law, recounting how he used disciplined imagining not only to change his own circumstances but on behalf of friends who brought him their needs. The emphasis throughout is practical: assume the feeling of the wish fulfilled, sustain that feeling against the contradiction of the senses, and let the assumption objectify itself in its own way and time. He is emphatic that the Law is given to everyone without favoritism and works for saint and sinner alike, like sun and rain falling on the just and the unjust. It is a principle, not a reward, and its impartiality is precisely what makes it dependable.

Yet the Law, he is careful to say, is not the goal. It serves the Promise, the assurance that God became man so that man might become God. The Promise is the foretold spiritual birth, the awakening of the Christ within, which unfolds in its own appointed time regardless of one's mastery of the Law. Neville reads scripture's covenant language, the promise made beforehand to Abraham, as a guarantee given to every person that the divine life buried in them will rise. No one earns the Promise by good behavior or skillful imagining; it is grace, fulfilled on God's schedule rather than man's.

Neville encourages his hearers to use the Law freely to ease and enrich the journey, to provide for themselves and others, to lift one another out of want, while keeping their eyes fixed on the Promise, the final unveiling of their own divine identity. He resists any temptation to treat the Law as the whole of his message or to dismiss it as mere wishing for things; rather he presents the two as a single coherent vision, the practical and the mystical fitting together like means and end. To apply the lecture is to live skillfully under the Law while trusting the Promise: shape your present world by conscious assumption, and let that mastery become the proving ground for the deeper awakening to come. Practically, this means choosing a definite end, assuming the feeling of its fulfillment, and persisting in that state as one would tend a planted seed, neither digging it up to inspect it nor abandoning it when the ground still looks bare. Mystically, it means holding that the spiritual birth promised in scripture is as certain as any harvest, guaranteed by the same God who gave the Law. The seed one plants and the awakening one awaits are governed by the same creative power. It remains one of his clearest statements of how the disciplined and the visionary sides of his teaching belong together.

Key Scripture

Neville grounds this lecture in Genesis 1:11, Galatians 3:8, John 1:1.