Neville Goddard Audio Lecture: The Mystery Of Jesus Christ (1971)

About This Lecture

In this lecture Neville treats Jesus Christ not as a separate historical savior to be admired and petitioned from a distance, but as the awakened state latent within every person. The mystery, as he frames it, is not a doctrine to be believed about someone else; it is the unveiling of one's own identity as God the Father. To experience this mystery is to recognize that the creative power scripture names God is one's own wonderful human imagination, and that one has simply forgotten this divine nature while absorbed in the world of the senses. The gospel, on this reading, is the record of an awakening that each person is meant to undergo, not the biography of a man uniquely set apart.

A central image is the relationship between father and son, which Neville uses to locate the mystery within the individual. He leans on Revelation 22:16, where the speaker declares, "I am the root and the offspring of David." Ordinarily root and offspring would be two different things, an ancestor and a descendant separated by generations, yet here they are spoken as one identical being. Neville seizes on this paradox: the root and the offspring are one, which means the father and the son are revealed as a single identity discovering itself from two directions.

David, in his mystical reading, is not merely a king of ancient Israel but the personification of all humanity gathered into one figure, the sum of every life a person has lived and every experience the race has gathered. When the mystery unfolds, this composite son comes and calls you Father, and in that address your own fatherhood and divinity are disclosed to you. You learn who you are by being claimed as God by the very humanity you imagined into being. As Neville puts it, there never was and never will be another, for the pattern is not a one-time event in the past but an eternal form that fulfills itself within each individual in turn.

The lecture insists, with characteristic firmness, that this knowledge cannot be reached by intellectual assent alone. One may accept every proposition and still not know the mystery, because it is not finally a matter of belief but of experience. You will know who you truly are only to the degree that the mystery of Jesus Christ actually unfolds within you, as inner event rather than as agreed-upon teaching. Neville's own descriptions of such experiences function as testimony that the awakening is real and concrete, not a figure of speech.

In moving the entire drama of the gospel inward, Neville does not diminish it but intensifies it. Christ becomes the eternal pattern of awakening that each person is destined to live through, the moment in which God, who long ago became man and descended into the world of the senses, is at last revealed as the very self one has always been. The crucifixion, the resurrection, the fatherhood disclosed by the son, all of it is happening, or waiting to happen, within. The mystery of Jesus Christ, for Neville, is therefore the mystery of one's own buried and recoverable divinity, and the lecture is an invitation to expect its unveiling as a personal certainty.

Key Scripture

Neville grounds this lecture in Revelation 22:16, Galatians 4:19.