Neville Goddard Audio Lecture: The Apple Of His Eye (1965)

About This Lecture

"The Apple of His Eye," given in 1965, takes its title from a phrase that appears only a handful of times in scripture, beginning in the thirty-second chapter of Deuteronomy. Neville Goddard points out that in Hebrew the expression literally means "the little man of the eye"—the tiny reflected figure you see when you look closely into another person's pupil. From this small and intimate image he builds an entire teaching about how God regards humanity and what the destiny of man actually is.

When God beholds man, Neville says, he sees only himself reflected in miniature, the little man within his own eye. The divine project, then, is to expand that miniature into fullness, until the small reflection grows into the complete stature of God. Human life is a process of progressive unfoldment in which the individual matures into the divine identity that was always being reflected back. The smallness is not a permanent verdict but a starting point; what looks like an insignificant figure in the pupil is destined to grow until it fills the whole field of vision and is recognized as one with the beholder.

Neville connects this to the succession of names by which God is progressively revealed in scripture. He traces the movement from El Shaddai, God Almighty, the God of power who appears to the patriarchs; through the revelation of I AM, pure being, disclosed to Moses at the bush; and on to the final name of Father, infinite love, made known in the Gospel. Each name marks a stage in the spiritual maturation of the one being beheld, culminating in the recognition of oneself as God's own son. The reflection grows up, as it were, learning first power, then being, and at last the love that is the fullness of the divine nature.

The protective tenderness of the phrase underscores how cherished and central each person is in this unfolding. To touch God's people, the prophet says, is to touch the apple of his eye, the most sensitive and guarded part of the body, the thing instinctively shielded above all else. Neville hears in this an assurance of God's intimate care: you are not peripheral to the divine attention but at its very center, the reflection God watches over as he watches over his own sight. The image of the eye, the most delicate of organs, conveys both the closeness and the fierce protectiveness of the relationship.

The practical thrust of the lecture unites reassurance and responsibility. You are not a stranger to the creative power of the universe but its very reflection, destined to grow into its fullness, and that destiny is not passive. By assuming and living from your divine identity rather than from a sense of smallness and exile, you cooperate consciously with the expansion Neville describes, hastening the maturing of the little man into the whole. To apply the teaching is to refuse the self-image of insignificance and instead to occupy the dignity of one whom God beholds as himself. The lecture is finally a meditation on intimacy with God, framed as the slow, certain enlargement of the little man in the eye into the complete stature of the divine.

Key Scripture

Neville grounds this lecture in Deuteronomy 32:10, Psalm 17:8, Zechariah 2:8.