Neville Goddard Audio Lecture: How to use the Imagination (Secret Of Imagining)

About This Lecture

This recording distills Neville's core method, what he often called the secret of imagining, into direct and unadorned instruction. The starting point is his foundational claim that imagination is the creative power and that everything now real was first only imagined. The chair, the building, the relationship, the career, all of it existed as an inner conception before it appeared as an outer fact. If that is true, then learning to use imagination is not a quaint self-help exercise but the most consequential skill a person can acquire. To use it correctly is not to daydream idly or to wish at the world from a distance, but to deliberately occupy the state one desires as though it were already so.

Neville's first instruction is a shift of attention. He asks the listener to withdraw from present surroundings and from the testimony of the senses, which can only report what already exists, and instead to construct an inner scene that implies the wish has been fulfilled. The emphasis falls on implication: rather than picturing the desire as a distant object to be pursued, one builds a small, natural scene that could only be true if the desire were already a fact, and then enters into it. A familiar form of the practice is to lie down where one is and, in imagination, to feel oneself fallen asleep in the home, situation, or condition longed for, sensing its solidity and atmosphere with the feeling of reality.

This is the move Neville sums up as making "there" become "here." The desired state is normally experienced as over there, in the future, belonging to someone else or to a luckier version of oneself. The technique collapses that distance by breathing reality into the imagined scene until the self is unmistakably within it rather than looking at it. One does not observe the wish fulfilled from outside; one occupies it from inside, where its details feel close and present. When the imagined state is sensed as natural and near, the inner work of the act is essentially done.

The decisive ingredient, as everywhere in Neville, is persistence in the assumption. A single vivid scene is not a transaction that obligates the world; it is the planting of a state that must then be lived in. He insists that if you continue to walk in the conviction of being the person you want to be, despite the contradiction of present facts, the assumption will harden into fact through the law of your own imagining. The senses will protest, circumstances may at first seem unchanged, and the temptation will be to abandon the assumption as unrealistic. Faithfulness through that interval is precisely what separates effective imagining from idle reverie.

Neville frames the whole practice as both a spiritual discipline and a dependable technique, refusing the usual divide between the two. Change what you are conscious of being, hold to it loyally, and the outer world will reshape itself to match the inner state you have assumed. The brevity of the lesson is deliberate: there is little to memorize and nothing exotic to acquire. The method is simple to state and demanding only in its requirement of attention and persistence, which is why Neville returns to it again and again as the heart of all his teaching.