Neville Goddard Audio Lecture: Heirs To The Universe (1971)

About This Lecture

Neville frames human beings not as struggling outsiders in a hostile world but as rightful heirs to the entire universe. The inheritance, he explains, is not claimed by force, luck, or favor but through imagination, which he flatly identifies with the person: 'man's imagination is the man himself.' This is no figure of speech for Neville. What we imagine and assume is what we ultimately receive, because the imagining self is the active creative principle standing behind every experience we ever have. To change what one imagines is therefore to change who one is, and to change who one is, is to change the world one inherits.

He leans on the parable of the Prodigal Son to illustrate the point with feeling. The younger son who demands his portion, squanders it in a far country, and finally returns in rags is, for Neville, everyone who has wandered into the distant land of sense and limitation. We forget our origin, spend our creative substance on passing appetites, and reduce ourselves to beggars amid the very abundance that is ours. Yet the story does not end in disgrace. The father runs to meet the returning son, restores the robe and the ring, and welcomes him to a birthright that was never actually forfeited. Neville reads this homecoming as the soul's recovery of its creative authority, the dawning realization that the riches were always available to be claimed, awaiting only our return to right awareness.

A recurring and notably democratic note in the talk is that no one has been shortchanged on imaginative capacity. As Neville puts it, no man has too little imagination; the difference between people is not the size of the gift but the discipline applied to it. Most leave the faculty entirely undisciplined, allowing it to drift through idle, anxious, and often fearful imaginings, and so they inherit circumstances that faithfully match those moods. The beggar and the heir, in this teaching, possess the identical power; they differ only in how consciously they govern it.

The practical charge that follows is direct. Neville urges the listener to take command of imagination rather than be carried along by it. This means deliberately choosing and then occupying states of fulfillment, entering the feeling of the wish already realized, and dwelling there with conviction and persistence until the assumed state begins to externalize. He treats this as an act of disciplined attention, not wishful daydreaming. One selects the inner state one would be glad to live in, refuses the contradicting evidence of the senses, and remains loyal to the chosen assumption through repetition.

Used this way, imagination accomplishes the very transformation the parable dramatizes. It carries a person from the far country back to the father's house, from the posture of a beggar at the edge of life to that of a confident heir laying claim to the universe. The inheritance, Neville insists, is not a distant reward to be granted after death or after sufficient suffering. It is a present possession that disciplined imagining unlocks now, in the only place creation actually occurs, which is the activity of the imagining self that each of us already is.

Key Scripture

Neville grounds this lecture in Luke 15:11-32, Romans 8:17.