Neville Goddard Audio Lecture: Is Causation Imaginal

About This Lecture

"Is Causation Imaginal" poses, as its title, the question that underlies all of Neville Goddard's teaching, namely what actually causes the events of our lives. His answer is unambiguous: causation is imaginal. Behind every visible occurrence stands an unseen imaginal act, a moment of inner seeing and feeling that precedes and produces the outer result. The world of effects that the senses report is, in his view, the delayed echo of imaginative activity, our own or another's, set in motion at some earlier point. What looks like chance, luck, or the impersonal grinding of circumstance is really the harvest of imagining that has since been forgotten.

Neville grounds this claim firmly in scripture, identifying the human imagination with the creative power the Bible calls Christ, the Word through whom "all things were made." If imagination is God in action within us, then nothing arises by accident or by the mechanical push of external forces; the real chain of cause runs through consciousness. He typically supports the argument with concrete illustrations, accounts of people who deliberately imagined a scene implying the fulfillment of a wish and then watched circumstances rearrange themselves to make that scene a fact. The point of such stories is not to amaze but to demonstrate, case by case, that the imaginal act was the genuine cause and the events merely its visible confirmation.

Much of the lecture is devoted to overturning the ordinary, common-sense picture of cause and effect. We are trained, Neville notes, to look for the cause of our condition in the outer world, in other people, in heredity, in the economy, in luck, and so we react endlessly to appearances and remain their prisoners. He reverses the order: the outer is effect, never cause. To search the world of effects for the source of one's life is to look in the wrong direction entirely, mistaking the shadow for the substance and the echo for the voice that produced it.

The practical thrust of the lecture is therefore responsibility and power in equal measure. If causation is imaginal, then to change one's life one must change the imaginal activity that is quietly generating it, refusing to react to appearances and instead persisting in the inner state that corresponds to the desired end. This places the lever of change inside the individual, where it can actually be moved, rather than out in conditions one cannot directly touch. It also asks for honesty, since the same law that fulfills a deliberate assumption will just as faithfully reproduce careless, fearful, or resentful imagining.

Neville urges the listener to watch their imagining as carefully as one would watch their conduct, treating inner conversations and mental images as the true causal acts they are. The discipline he recommends is to catch the imagination in the act, dismiss the scenes that imply what one does not want, and dwell instead in scenes that imply the wish fulfilled, felt as real and sustained over time. What is faithfully imagined in this way will, by the only law that finally matters in his system, externalize itself in due season, proving in experience that causation was imaginal all along.

Key Scripture

Neville grounds this lecture in Genesis 1:27, John 1:3.