Neville Goddard Audio Lecture: I Am All Imagination (1971)

About This Lecture

Delivered in June 1971, this lecture takes its title from Neville's bold declaration that he is all imagination, and that imagination is God. He insists Christianity must continually be rescued from secular history, because Jesus Christ is not a figure entombed in the past but the human imagination itself, the creative power at work in every person here and now. To say "I am all imagination" is not arrogance but confession, the recognition of one's identity with the only God there is, the I AM that Moses heard at the bush and that scripture exalts under many names.

Neville grounds the claim in personal experience rather than abstract theory, which is what gives the lecture its force. He recalls his early instruction under Abdullah in New York, the teacher who drilled into him that the cause of his world was within and that he must dare to assume the wish fulfilled. He returns to his celebrated journey to Barbados, when, longing to be with his family and lacking the means, he was told to sleep as though he were already there. By persistently assuming he was in his homeland, imagination produced the unexpected and entirely natural means of travel. Such stories are offered as evidence, not decoration: the imaginal act, faithfully sustained, becomes fact.

The heart of the lecture is the practical and mystical fusion characteristic of Neville. Practically, because imagination is God, you create your world by what you imagine and accept as true; the outer is a faithful copy of the inner, so to change circumstance you change the inner activity and the world must follow. He warns that imagination works just as surely in idle fear and resentment as in deliberate construction, so the discipline lies in choosing what one persistently imagines. Mystically, recognizing imagination as God is itself the awakening to one's own divinity, the discovery that the creative power one has used unwittingly all along is the very Christ spoken of in scripture, Christ in you, the hope of glory.

Neville therefore invites the listener to stop seeking God outside, in temples or histories or the sky, and to honor, discipline, and trust the wonderful human imagination within. It is at once the source of all experience and the doorway to the Promise, the means by which one shapes daily life and the very being that will one day awaken as God. To apply the lecture is to take the identification seriously and personally: treat every imaginal act as a creative act of God, watch the inner conversations and moods you entertain, deliberately occupy the feeling of the wish fulfilled, and live from the conviction that the imagination you have always called your own is in truth the Lord and Christ of scripture, awaiting your full recognition. Begin with something definite: construct a brief scene that would only be real if your desire were already accomplished, enter that scene from within rather than viewing it as a spectator, and saturate it with the feeling of its being so. Return to it until it takes on the quality of an actual memory, and then release it, trusting the same imaginative power that conceived it to bring it to pass through natural events. In doing so you are not asking a distant deity for a favor; you are exercising the very creative activity that scripture calls God.

Key Scripture

Neville grounds this lecture in Genesis 1:27, Colossians 1:27, John 8:58.