Neville Goddard Audio Lecture: The Duality Of Man (1972)

About This Lecture

Here Neville lays out his picture of human nature as fundamentally twofold, a duality housed within every single person. There is first the sense man, the outer, physical self, what he calls the man of dust. This is the self that reports the world through the bodily senses, that takes its cues from what can be seen, heard, and touched, and that accepts appearances as final and authoritative. Second there is the inner man, identified squarely with imagination, whom Neville calls the Lord from heaven and the immortal man. These two coexist in everyone, not as a higher and lower morality but as two distinct sources of authority, and the whole drama of spiritual growth is the question of which one is permitted to rule.

Neville roots the teaching in Genesis and the prophecy of the twins struggling in Rebekah's womb, where it is said that two nations are within her and that the elder shall serve the younger. He reads this not as ancient tribal history but as the inner constitution of every individual. The senses are the elder, dominant from the beginning, present and assertive long before a person becomes aware of any inner creative faculty. Imagination is the younger, awakening later into conscious awareness. The destiny encoded in the prophecy is therefore an inner reversal: the younger, imagination, is meant to come to reign over the elder, the senses, once it has been recognized and claimed. The natural order of dominance is to be overturned, with the latecomer set above the firstborn.

Neville reinforces this with Paul's contrast between the first man, who is of the earth and made of dust, and the second man, who is the Lord from heaven. The two figures are not two different people but two natures within one person, and Paul's sequence, the earthly first and the heavenly afterward, mirrors the Genesis prophecy of the elder serving the younger. The pattern, repeated across scripture, is for Neville a single revelation about the structure of the self.

The practical force of the lecture is an exhortation to stop letting the man of dust dictate reality. Most people live in unconscious obedience to the senses, believing a thing is so only after the senses confirm it, and shaping their inner lives to match outer evidence. Neville reverses the order. The imaginative man, the Lord from heaven, is to lead: one uses feeling and inner conviction to assume the desired state as already true, and then permits the outer evidence to catch up rather than waiting for it to grant permission. To live this way is to let the younger rule the elder, exactly as prophesied.

The lecture thus turns an obscure passage about quarreling twins into a charter for living from imagination. The conflict in the womb becomes the daily conflict in consciousness between what the senses insist upon and what imagination dares to assume. Neville's counsel is to take the side of the inner, heavenly man, deliberately and repeatedly, until imagination's rule becomes habitual. The creative, immortal man within is not meant to be the servant of appearances; he is meant to govern the entire experience of the man without, and the awakened person is the one who has let him take the throne.

Key Scripture

Neville grounds this lecture in Genesis 25:23, 1 Corinthians 15:47.