Neville Goddard Audio Lecture: I Am Reality Called Imagination

About This Lecture

Regarded by many as one of Neville's strongest talks on imagination, this lecture equates the reality named God, the I AM, with the human imagination. For Neville there is no separation between the awareness by which you silently say "I am" and the divine creative power that Scripture personifies as God. Imagination, on this view, is not a faculty for idle daydreaming or escapist fantasy but the very substance and reality out of which the experienced world is continually shaped. To call it reality is to reverse the ordinary verdict that the outer world is solid and the inner world is vapor.

From this premise the lecture argues that everything in your life is rooted in an inner state. Because consciousness is the one reality, what you assume and persistently feel to be true tends to externalize itself in the world of fact. Neville therefore presses the listener to take responsibility for the assumptions they entertain about themselves, since each "I am" statement, whether of lack or of fulfillment, quietly defines the world they will go on to meet. He invokes the divine name given to Moses, "I AM THAT I AM," and the saying "before Abraham was, I am," to insist that this everyday awareness is the same eternal selfhood the Bible names as God.

To change circumstances, then, one does not first wrestle with the circumstances. One changes the inner conception and dwells in the feeling of the wish already realized. Neville offers the imaginative act, vividly experiencing in thought what one would experience in fact were the desire fulfilled, as the disciplined practice that proves the entire claim. He asks the listener to construct a short, sensory scene that implies the wish has come to pass, to enter it as a participant rather than observe it, and to repeat it until it acquires the tone of reality and is felt to be natural.

He ties this law of imagining to the deeper promise of his teaching. Recognizing imagination as God is at once the practical key to manifestation and the doorway to spiritual awakening, because the same power that answers a modest desire is the divine self that will one day be revealed within. By consciously occupying desirable states and refusing to let outer facts dictate the inner mood, the student gradually learns to live from imagination rather than from the senses, which is for Neville the whole art of life. The senses report what is; imagination determines what shall be.

The lecture closes by inviting the hearer to test imagination as reality in their own experience rather than to accept it as doctrine. Begin with something specific and believable, persist in the corresponding feeling, and observe how the world rearranges itself to match. As the student grows skilled at assuming and sustaining inner states, Neville promises, they discover not only that wishes are fulfilled but that the divinity they sought elsewhere has been at the center of their own being all along, wearing the familiar, unremarkable name of "I am."

Key Scripture

Neville grounds this lecture in John 8:58, Exodus 3:14, Genesis 1:27.