Neville Goddard Audio Lecture: The I Of Man

About This Lecture

This lecture centers on the question of identity: what is the 'I' that each person calls himself? Neville's answer is that this 'I' is not the physical organism, the personal name, or the bundle of roles one plays, but the simple, underlying sense of awareness, the feeling of being, that precedes all of them. Strip away every label, every possession, every memory of what you have done, and something remains that cannot be stripped away: the bare fact that you are. Neville equates this 'I-am-ness' with the name of God revealed to Moses, 'I AM,' and with human imagination, declaring all three one and the same reality.

Neville develops the idea that the world a person experiences is a manifestation of his own consciousness, and that he sees only what the state of awareness he occupies allows him to see. A man does not perceive the world as it is, he teaches, but as he is; the outer scene is a faithful report of the inner state. From this comes one of the lecture's most pointed warnings: any effort to change outer conditions while leaving the inner structure of the mind untouched is, in his words, labor in vain. To rearrange circumstances without changing the 'I' that produces them is to keep harvesting the same crop while pulling at the leaves and ignoring the root. The 'I' is the true cause behind every appearance, and recognizing it as God, rather than as a small mortal self, is the heart of awakening.

The personal self, the 'Neville' or 'John' or 'Mary,' is described as a garment worn while walking the earth, while the wearer, the pure 'I AM,' is the divine and undying reality. The garment changes; it is born, ages, takes on roles, and is finally laid aside. The wearer does not change, for it is the eternal awareness in which all garments appear. To identify with the garment is to feel small, mortal, and at the mercy of events; to identify with the wearer is to know oneself as the imaginative power at the center of experience.

From this Neville draws his familiar and entirely practical conclusion. Because your awareness is the creative power, what you attach to 'I am' through feeling and assumption determines the shape of your life. 'I am' is never spoken into a void; it is the creative word, and whatever follows it, said with conviction and felt as real, tends to externalize. To say within yourself 'I am secure,' 'I am loved,' 'I am the man I wish to be,' and to persist in the feeling of it, is to set the creative 'I' to work on your behalf, just as carelessly entertained 'I am' statements of lack and fear set it to work against you.

To know the true 'I of man,' then, is to know yourself as the imaginative, creative God at the center of your own world, and to use that knowledge deliberately. The lecture is at once a contemplative invitation to discover who you really are beneath the personal mask and a practical instruction to wield the one name that creates, attaching it only to the states you would wish to see made visible.

Key Scripture

Neville grounds this lecture in Exodus 3:14, John 8:58.