Neville Goddard Audio Lecture: Mind And Speech (1971)

About This Lecture

"Mind And Speech" (associated with his 1971 lecture also known as "Control Your Inner Conversations") develops one of Neville Goddard's most practical themes: the manifested world is the out-picturing of inner speech. He opens with the idea that mind and speech are two gifts given to man alone among living creatures, and that these gifts are bound up with immortality itself, for through them the imagination creates. Where the animal lives by instinct and reaction, man has been given the power to speak within himself and to think, and that power, rightly understood, is the very faculty by which worlds are made.

The heart of the lecture is the distinction between outer speech, which can be guarded, polished, and deliberately deceptive, and the ceaseless inner conversation that runs through a person morning, noon, and night. It is this hidden dialogue, Neville argues, that actually constructs experience. A person may speak graciously aloud while carrying on a very different conversation within, and it is the inner one that bears fruit. Whatever you silently and persistently say within yourself crystallizes into the events, circumstances, and relationships you later meet in the outer world, so that life becomes a faithful record of the talking no one else could hear.

Because of this, Neville urges the listener to monitor and deliberately revise their inner talking, a discipline he elsewhere calls watching one's mental diet. Rather than rehearsing complaint, fear, resentment, or the replaying of old grievances, one should carry on inner conversations from the premise of the wish already fulfilled, speaking inwardly as the person they desire to be and addressing others as though the desired relationship were already established. This disciplined practice of mental speech is, in his system, the very mechanism of conscious creation, more important than any outward affirmation because it reveals what a person truly assumes to be true.

He grounds the teaching in scripture, recalling that by your words you are justified and by your words you are condemned, and that in the beginning was the Word through which all things were made. The creative "word," for Neville, is precisely this inner speech, the formative activity of the imagination clothing itself in language. To master one's inner conversations is therefore to take command of the formative word that scripture personifies as creative, and to participate consciously in the same activity by which, in the Gospel of John, the world itself came to be.

The lecture is thus both a metaphysical statement, that mind and speech are the immortal, godlike faculties distinguishing man, and a concrete instruction in changing your life by changing the words you say to yourself unheard. To apply it is to develop the habit of listening to your own inner dialogue throughout the day, catching the conversations that affirm lack or hostility, and patiently replacing them with the imagined conversations of a fulfilled life. Done persistently, Neville promises, this revision of inner speech will reshape the outer world to match, for the world has never been anything other than the visible echo of the words within.

Key Scripture

Neville grounds this lecture in Matthew 12:37, John 1:1, Proverbs 23:7.