Neville Goddard Audio Lecture: Spiritually Known

About This Lecture

This lecture turns on Paul's statement in 1 Corinthians 2:14, that 'the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness unto him; neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.' Neville uses the verse to draw the line that runs through all his teaching, the line between two fundamentally different ways of seeing. The natural man, in his account, confines reality to the evidence of the five senses and the testimony of the present moment, treating whatever cannot be touched or measured as mere fancy. The spiritual man, by contrast, learns to perceive invisible states as concrete and real, and, more than that, learns to dwell within them deliberately as the true causes of the visible world.

Neville's point is that the truths he teaches, the creative power of imagination, the reality and substance of inner states, the mystical meaning hidden in scripture, simply cannot be reached by intellect or won by argument. They are 'spiritually known,' apprehended through an inner faculty that has to be cultivated, much as a sense must be exercised before it grows acute. The cultivation, in his description, consists in disengaging attention from the clamor of the senses and fixing it instead on the invisible, until the inner state becomes more vivid and more authoritative than the outer scene. To one still locked entirely in the natural view, such teaching sounds like foolishness, even self-deception; to one who has begun to see spiritually, the same teaching becomes self-evident, almost obvious.

He presses the contrast further by reminding listeners, with Paul in 2 Corinthians 4:18, that the things which are seen are temporal while the things which are not seen are eternal. The visible is the effect, already passing; the invisible is the cause, enduring and creative. To live by sight alone is therefore to live among shadows and to mistake them for substance. The natural man's error is not that he sees the visible but that he stops there, granting finality to what is only a reflection.

From this Neville develops the practical discipline of seeing the invisible. It means deliberately occupying the feeling of the wish fulfilled and treating that inner state as more real than any contrary appearance, refusing to let the senses revise it downward. The whole Bible, in his reading, is addressed to this spiritual faculty rather than to secular history, which is precisely why it stays opaque to the literal, fact-hunting mind; one must read it from the inside, as a description of states of consciousness, before it yields its life.

The invitation of the lecture, then, is to make the deliberate shift from the natural to the spiritual mode of perception. Practically, that means giving less and less authority to the report of the senses and more and more to the inner act of assumption, persisting in the unseen state until it discloses itself outwardly. As the faculty strengthens, Neville promises, what once seemed foolishness will be recognized as the very substance of reality, and the spiritual sense, like any trained sense, will see clearly where it once saw nothing at all.

Key Scripture

Neville grounds this lecture in 1 Corinthians 2:14, 2 Corinthians 4:18.