Neville Goddard Audio Lecture: Our Potter (1969)

About This Lecture

Built on the verse from Isaiah, 'O Lord, thou art our Father; we are the clay, and thou our potter; and we all are the work of thy hand,' this lecture interprets the figure of the potter as imagination itself. The Father, the Lord, and the potter are, for Neville, one and the same being: one awareness, one creative power, and that power is your own wonderful human imagination. Far from being a remote craftsman in the heavens, the potter is the inner activity at work within you at this very moment, constantly shaping the clay of circumstance into the present form of your life.

Neville's point is that the molding happens within before it appears without. Just as a potter forms the vessel in his hands while it is still soft and unfixed, the imaginer forms experience by the inner conceptions he holds and the feelings he dwells in. The clay is consciousness, pliable and responsive; the outer world is the finished vessel, the visible, hardened result of an inner shaping already accomplished. Nothing comes to a person except by way of this inner activity, whether he performs it knowingly or, as is far more common, unconsciously. The life one looks at, in all its detail, is the cast of imaginal acts long since pressed into form.

Neville often pairs the Isaiah image with the prophet's visit to the potter's house in Jeremiah, where the vessel marred in the potter's hand is made again into another vessel as it seemed good to the potter to make it. He hears in this not a lesson about submission to fate but a promise of remaking. The clay is never finally ruined; what has been badly formed can be gathered up and shaped anew. Applied to the inner life, this means no condition is sealed beyond revision, because the same imaginative power that produced it can reform it.

The lecture's practical thrust is therefore direct and demanding. If you want to change the shape of your life, you must produce the change first on the inside, in imagination. Wishing for a different vessel while leaving the inner clay untouched accomplishes nothing; you must actually assume the inner state that corresponds to the world you desire, occupying it in feeling until it takes on the solidity of the real. That inner penetration, held and sustained, compels the outer world to conform to it, just as the potter's pressure inevitably determines the vessel's final shape.

Neville thereby turns a passage commonly read as humble resignation to an external God into an empowering statement of creative responsibility. You are not inert clay in the hands of a distant deity who arbitrarily decides your fate; you are, in your own imaginal activity, the very potter shaping your own world, and the Lord addressed in the verse is the imaginative power within you. To know this is to accept both the dignity and the accountability of the role: every assumption you press into the clay of consciousness will, in time, stand before you as a finished and visible vessel.

Key Scripture

Neville grounds this lecture in Isaiah 64:8, Jeremiah 18:1-6.