Neville Goddard Audio Lecture: Law Your Choice And Risk (1968)

About This Lecture

Delivered in Los Angeles on June 20, 1968, this lecture concentrates on the practical wing of Neville's teaching, the 'Law,' as distinct from the 'Promise' of mystical awakening. The law of assumption, he explains, operates impartially and mechanically, the way a natural law operates: whatever state you genuinely occupy in imagination tends to objectify itself in your outer world, regardless of whether you intended it. Because the power is both real and morally neutral, it plays no favorites and renders no judgments. The responsibility for what gets created therefore rests squarely with you, and that responsibility is the 'risk' named in the title.

Neville's central insistence is that you are always choosing, whether you know it or not. Every assumption you dwell in, every inner conversation you carry on, every habitual mood is a choice that the law faithfully reflects back as circumstance. There is no neutral ground where one simply waits for life to happen; the imagination is ceaselessly busy, and it creates from whatever it is given. To use the law deliberately, then, is to take conscious command of this process: to select a definite end, to assume the feeling of its reality as though it were already so, and to persist in that assumption until it hardens into fact. This is the freedom the law offers.

But the same lecture that promises power issues a sober warning, for the freedom is total in both directions. The law that grants a chosen, desired state will just as obediently reproduce a careless, fearful, resentful, or self-pitying one. It does not edit your choices for your benefit or screen out the assumptions that will hurt you; it simply gives form to what you persist in feeling true. There is no external arbiter standing between your inner state and your results. Neville often anchors this moral mechanics in the principle that whatever a man sows, that shall he also reap, the seed being one's inner state and the harvest one's life.

Maturity in the teaching, as Neville frames it, is the willingness to accept this accounting honestly. It means refusing to lay one's circumstances at the feet of chance, fate, or the actions of other people, and instead tracing them back to prior assumptions one has entertained, often unconsciously. This can feel uncomfortable, even harsh, but Neville presents it as the price and the prize of real creative power: only by owning that you are the cause can you become the deliberate author of a different effect.

The practical instruction follows directly. Watch the assumptions you live in and the tone of your inner talk, since each is a seed already planted. Catch the careless or fearful imaginings and replace them with the feeling of the wish fulfilled. Choose your end with care, dwell in it until it feels natural, and persist past the appearance of contradiction. The choice is yours, Neville says, and so is the risk; but with that risk comes the genuine and exhilarating power to remake your life entirely from within.

Key Scripture

Neville grounds this lecture in Galatians 6:7, Mark 11:24.