Neville Goddard Audio Lecture: The End Of The Play

About This Lecture

Here Neville treats human life as a play authored and acted by God, and asks the listener to consider what its ending is. The early Christian creeds, he suggests, are not dry doctrines to be recited but a dramatic account of God descending into a world of death and rising again into eternal life. The articles about being born, suffering, dying, being buried, and rising are, on his reading, the script of a single great drama, and the whole story of scripture is that descent and resurrection enacted within each individual person.

The lecture's key phrase is that the end of the play is "Self in Self and risen." God has so thoroughly entered humanity, Neville teaches, that he has become the very self of every person; the divine and the human are not neighbors but one buried identity. The climax of the drama, then, is the awakening of that buried self, its resurrection from the tomb of flesh into its original divine life. The last act, he says elsewhere, is what scripture calls Jesus Christ, the risen one who turns out to be the individual's own true identity rather than a separate savior watching from outside.

From this vision Neville draws his steady counsel not to judge the play before it is done. The hardships, defeats, humiliations, and apparent finality of death are scenes within a drama whose ending is already assured: resurrection and exaltation. Just as a wise theatergoer withholds judgment until the curtain falls, the soul is not to read present suffering as the verdict of its life, for the script guarantees a triumphant final act. This reframes pain not as meaningless or punitive but as a passage within a story moving inevitably toward glory.

Neville blends this mystical assurance with his practical teaching, refusing to leave the listener with consolation alone. The same God-self that will rise at the end is the creative imagination shaping experience now; the player who is destined to wake as God is already God in disguise, exercising divine power through every assumption he makes. So the lecture offers both comfort and instruction. Practically, one is to use imagination deliberately, assuming the states one desires, because the actor is divine and his imaginings are creative. Mystically, one is to await with confidence the foreordained ending, the moment the player discovers he was God all along, self rising in self into eternal life. The consolation and the instruction reinforce each other: knowing the ending is secure frees one from the paralysis of present circumstance, and using imagination well in the present is itself a rehearsal of the divine power that the final act unveils.

To apply the lecture is to hold both truths together at once. On the practical side, treat every imaginal act as the work of the God-self you already are, assuming the states you desire and persisting in them rather than reacting to the scene the senses report. On the contemplative side, refuse to judge any present act as the verdict of your life, reading hardship as a passing scene in a drama whose close is already written. Neville's counsel is finally one of trust: the player is divine, the script is merciful, and the end of the play is not death but resurrection, self rising in self into eternal life.

Key Scripture

Neville grounds this lecture in John 19:30, Galatians 2:20, John 11:25.