Neville Goddard Audio Lecture: I Say You Are Gods

About This Lecture

Neville builds this lecture around what he calls one of the most difficult of all the Psalms, Psalm 82, in which God stands in the divine assembly and says, 'I say, you are gods, sons of the Most High, all of you; nevertheless you shall die like men, and fall like any prince.' He refuses to soften the line into poetry or pious hyperbole. If those addressed are called gods, he reasons, then they are not merely men, and the closing warning that they will 'die like men' cannot be a denial of their divinity. Instead he hears in it the descent of the divine into mortal experience, God consenting to forget himself and to fall into the limitation of human life so that he may, in the end, rise again as himself.

He reinforces the reading with John 10:34, where Jesus, accused of blasphemy for making himself equal with God, defends himself by quoting the very Psalm: 'Is it not written in your law, I said, you are gods?' Neville draws attention to the way Jesus cites it, not as an old saying about long-dead figures but as a present and binding truth, as though the declaration were happening now and applying to those standing before him. From this he derives his recurring conviction that scripture is addressed to the imagination and describes a process every person actually undergoes: God becoming man so that man may become God. The whole movement of incarnation and awakening is contained, for Neville, in that one audacious sentence.

The difficulty of the Psalm, in his treatment, is also its glory. To the natural mind the words seem either incomprehensible or arrogant, but read as autobiography of the soul they become the key to the entire Bible. The 'gods' are not a separate class of beings; they are humanity in its true identity, presently veiled by the experience of mortality. The 'death like men' is the self-forgetting that accompanies entry into the world of the senses, the amnesia of the divine who has clothed himself in flesh. The awakening, correspondingly, is the recovery of one's original identity as the 'I AM,' the creative consciousness that the scriptures personify as God.

Neville's mystical thrust is matched by a practical refusal of false humility. Where conventional piety deflects the claim and protests its own smallness, Neville insists that the listener take the declaration personally and literally. To say 'I could never be God' is, in his view, to reject the express word of scripture and to remain asleep. The honest response is not pride but acceptance: to begin living from the assumption that the promise is true, to claim the dignity of the 'I AM,' and to expect the inner unfolding that confirms it.

The practical orientation, then, is to read the promise as one's own future and to let it reshape one's sense of identity in the present. Rather than straining to prove the claim, the listener is encouraged to assume it quietly, to honor the creative power of their own imagination, and to trust the whole arc of scripture, which exists, Neville says, precisely to lead each individual into the realization that they are the very God the text addresses.

Key Scripture

Neville grounds this lecture in Psalm 82:6, John 10:34, Psalm 82:1.