Neville Goddard Audio Lecture: The Pearl Of Great Price

About This Lecture

Built on the parable in the thirteenth chapter of Matthew, where a merchant in search of fine pearls finds one of great price and sells everything he has to buy it, this lecture reveals the pearl as the human imagination itself. The kingdom of heaven, Neville teaches, is not a place one enters after death but the state of consciousness in which everything is subject to one's imaginative power, and entering it costs nothing less than the surrender of every belief in outer causation. The merchant's transaction is therefore a parable of conversion, the moment a person trades one whole way of seeing the world for another.

To buy the pearl, Neville explains, you must be willing to give up the conviction that anything external controls you. He lists the usual claimants to that authority, politics, the economy, other people, astrology, accident, and chance, and insists that each must be relinquished. The full price is the wholehearted acceptance of imagination as the sole creative power operating in your life. This is a steep cost precisely because most people cling to these second causes; they would rather keep a familiar world of many powers than own a single pearl. Yet Neville maintains that whoever pays the full price is set free forever, gaining a power that, once truly possessed, can never be lost or stolen.

The lecture knits together Neville's two great themes, the Law and the Promise, and shows them meeting in this one image. As the Law, accepting imagination as the only cause is the practical key to manifesting the conditions you desire, achieved through the disciplined, repeated feeling of the wish fulfilled until the assumed state becomes fact. The pearl is a working power, not an ornament; owning it means actually living from the end and watching the outer world conform. As the Promise, the same pearl opens onto the realization of one's identity with God, the awakening in which the imaginer discovers that the creative power was their own deeper self all along.

Neville frames the merchant's costly purchase as the wisest exchange a person can ever make. To trade dependence on the outer world for mastery through the inner is to give up only an illusion of security and to gain the one thing of unconditional value. He gently confronts the listener's reluctance, acknowledging how strange and even reckless it can feel to withdraw all faith from circumstances and invest it entirely in imagination, yet pressing the point that half measures will not do. The merchant did not buy the pearl on credit or keep a few lesser pearls in reserve; he sold all.

He closes by urging listeners to value their imagination as the treasure of treasures and to make the purchase in earnest, entering by persistent inner assumption the kingdom where their own creative awareness reigns. The practical instruction is unchanged from the rest of his teaching, to assume the feeling of the wish fulfilled and persist, but here it is given the weight of an all-or-nothing decision, the single transaction on which a free and creative life depends.

Key Scripture

Neville grounds this lecture in Matthew 13:45-46.