Neville Goddard Audio Lecture: Hear O Israel (1971)

About This Lecture

"Hear O Israel" takes its title from the Shema, the foundational commandment of scripture: "Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one." Neville Goddard treats this verse, which Jesus himself names the greatest of all commandments, as a coded statement about human identity rather than a doctrinal formula about a distant deity. Far from being a mere call to monotheism, the Shema is for him a revelation aimed directly at the listener, an announcement of who and what they really are.

The interpretive key is the meaning of the word Israel. Neville teaches that Israel does not name an ethnic people but "one who rules"—and not one who rules merely like a god, but as God, because he knows that he is God. Read this way, the commandment becomes an address to the awakened individual: hear, O man who rules as God, your I AM and the one I AM are a single I AM. The unity proclaimed in the Shema is therefore the unity of all consciousness in the one awareness of being, not the numerical solitude of a deity but the indivisibility of the one power expressing itself through countless faces.

From this foundation Neville develops his characteristic teaching that there is only one God and one power, expressed individually through each person's sense of "I am." To say "I am" is to speak the name of God revealed at the burning bush, and the seeming diversity of human beings is simply the variety of states through which that single I AM expresses itself. The apparent multiplicity of people and conditions does not contradict the oneness; it is that oneness in its endless self-expression. Hearing the commandment truly, then, means awakening to the fact that the power you have been seeking outside is your own innermost self, the awareness that has been with you all along.

The lecture carries practical force, for if your I AM is the one creative power, then the states you assume and inhabit shape your world. Ruling "as God" is not a metaphor for arrogance but a description of conscious responsibility: to choose deliberately the state from which you live, knowing that imagining creates reality. A person who has heard the Shema in Neville's sense no longer waits on circumstance or pleads with heaven; they take up the formative activity of assumption, occupying the feeling of the wish fulfilled as the natural exercise of a power that is theirs by identity.

Neville uses the Shema to collapse the gap between creature and Creator and to call the listener into the responsible exercise of imagination as the divine activity it truly is. To apply the lecture is to treat every "I am" you utter as sacred, refusing to follow it with descriptions of lack or limitation and instead aligning it with the self you wish to express. In doing so you obey the great commandment not as an external law but as the recognition of your own nature: hear, and know that the Lord your God, the one I AM, is the very awareness reading these words.

Key Scripture

Neville grounds this lecture in Deuteronomy 6:4, Mark 12:29, Exodus 3:14.