Neville Goddard Audio Lecture: Justified States

About This Lecture

This lecture develops one of Neville's most liberating ideas: the doctrine of states. Drawing on William Blake's vision that neither the wicked nor the just are fixed identities but rather states a soul may fall into and rise out of, Neville argues that no person is permanently defined by what they have done. They are simply, for the moment, occupying a particular state of consciousness, much as a traveler occupies a town without becoming the town. The man is one thing; the state he is passing through is another. Because of this distinction, Neville teaches, God forgives and justifies everyone, knowing the individual is not the state but only a traveler within it.

The word 'justified' carries a precise weight here. To be justified is to be declared right, set in proper standing, and Neville borrows the language of Paul, 'whom he called, them he also justified,' to insist that the divine verdict on the individual is never the verdict on the state. A person caught in a state of cruelty or failure is not condemned in his identity; he is justified, because the eternal self that wears the state is innocent of it. The states themselves, high and low alike, exist as permanent possibilities through which all of us move, and in the end they are all justified as part of the journey by which awareness is enlarged.

From this follows Neville's radical teaching on forgiveness. If a person is only ever in a state, then you can forgive any human being whatsoever, no matter what they are, what they intend, or what they have done, because they are not the deed and will in time be lifted out of the state that produced it. True forgiveness, he is careful to say, is not a verbal pardon that leaves the memory of the offense intact and quietly nursed. To keep replaying an injury is to keep the offender pinned in the state that compelled the behavior, and to keep yourself bound there with him. Genuine forgiveness means a change of attitude so complete that the grievance is actually forgotten, the offender re-imagined in a nobler state.

Neville therefore frames the art of living as the practiced ability to forgive and forget by deliberately moving people, and ourselves, into higher states. Since identity is enduring but states are transient, condemnation makes no sense; the person you judge as fixed in a low state today may occupy a glorious one tomorrow, and your judgment, held firmly, helps keep him where he is. To condemn is to imprison; to forgive is to liberate, and the power to do either rests with the one who imagines.

The lecture thus dissolves judgment and resentment at the root. It replaces the instinct to label and condemn with the recognition that all states are ultimately justified, and it offers a concrete method for living by that recognition: revise how you hold others in mind, refuse to fasten anyone to their worst state, and practice seeing each person, and yourself, as the eternal identity passing through, never as the passing state itself.

Key Scripture

Neville grounds this lecture in Romans 8:30, John 8:11.