Neville Goddard Audio Lecture: Signs And Wonders (1964)

About This Lecture

Given in May 1964, this lecture takes its text from the Book of Deuteronomy, where God is said to have brought His people out of Egypt 'with signs and wonders, with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm.' Neville reads the passage not as a record of distant history alone but as a description of how the creative power within each person operates. In his interpretive habit, the geography of scripture becomes a map of inner states. Egypt is not merely a nation on the Nile but a condition of bondage, a state of consciousness in which one feels confined, limited, or enslaved by circumstance, and the deliverance from it is accomplished not by armies or escape but by a shift in the state from which a person is living.

The central idea of the talk is that signs and wonders are the outer confirmations that follow inner acts of imagining. When a person assumes a new state and persists in it, events begin, sometimes gradually and sometimes with surprising swiftness, to arrange themselves so as to support that assumption. A chance meeting, an unexpected offer, a change of heart in someone who had been opposed: these Neville reads as the signs that the inner work has taken root and is bearing fruit. They are wonders precisely because they cannot be traced to any obvious effort on the part of the one who imagined; they appear to come from outside, when in truth they are the lawful echo of a state assumed within.

In keeping with his customary manner, Neville does not leave the principle abstract. He characteristically illustrates such teaching with concrete instances of imagining acted upon and then objectified, showing the listener what it actually looks like when an assumed end hardens into fact and how the supporting circumstances tend to arrive by paths no one could have planned. The 'mighty hand and outstretched arm' of the text he reads as figures for the power of disciplined imagination, the strong and deliberate reaching of awareness toward a chosen end, while the exodus itself becomes the movement out of an unwanted state into a freely chosen one.

The most practical and reassuring note in the lecture concerns what the listener is not required to do. Because the signs follow the inner assumption rather than the other way around, one need not strain outwardly to manufacture proof or to force results into being. The work is to occupy the wish fulfilled faithfully and to remain in it; the confirmations are not the cause of the change but its evidence, and they will appear of themselves as the outer world conforms to the inner conviction. Anxious striving for tokens of progress, Neville implies, is itself a symptom of unbelief, a quiet return to Egypt.

To apply the teaching, identify the state of bondage you wish to leave, define the freed state you would occupy in its place, and then assume that freed state as your present reality, feeling it as natural and finished. Hold to it through the interval in which nothing visible has yet changed, and read the signs that follow not as luck but as the lawful unfolding of the assumption. The lecture thus transforms an ancient story of rescue into a present-tense instruction for the deliberate use of imagination.

Key Scripture

Neville grounds this lecture in Deuteronomy 6:22, Deuteronomy 26:8.