Neville Goddard Audio Lecture: The Secret Of God (1971)

About This Lecture

The premise of this lecture is captured in Neville's recurring formula that the secret of imagining is the secret of God. Far from being a faculty for idle daydreaming or escape, imagination is presented as the very creative power that scripture names God, the one reality out of which all experience is formed. To learn how imagination works, and to use it deliberately, is therefore to be initiated into the deepest secret of religion, a secret that, once seen, makes the whole of scripture legible as a single instruction in the art of conscious creation.

Neville unfolds this through his characteristic blend of mystical biblical interpretation and practical method. He argues that what people seek under the name of God is not a being external to themselves, enthroned somewhere beyond the sky, but their own wonderful human imagination, which projects and sustains the world they experience. The 'secret,' he says, has been hidden in plain sight throughout scripture, encoded in its symbols, names, and stories, waiting to be recognized by those who learn to read it as an account of inner, imaginal activity rather than of outer history. Leaning on Paul's phrase 'Christ in you, the hope of glory,' he locates the hidden God precisely where most people never think to look: in the imagining presence that is their own deepest self.

Why a secret at all? For Neville it is hidden not because God withholds it but because it is so intimate that it is overlooked, the way one overlooks the eye with which one sees. People search the heavens for a power that is operating as their own consciousness every waking and dreaming moment. The veil is not distance but familiarity; the moment imagination is recognized for what it is, the secret stands revealed, and the seeker discovers that the power he prayed to and the power he has been using are identical.

The lecture's practical thrust is that, once this identity of God and imagination is grasped, a person can consciously direct his creative power. By assuming the feeling of the wish fulfilled and persisting in it, he calls forth corresponding outer events, not by coaxing a distant deity to intervene but by exercising the creative faculty that is himself. Imagining, done deliberately and sustained until it feels natural and real, becomes prayer in its truest sense; the inner act, held faithfully, externalizes as outer fact.

Knowing the secret of God thus carries both privilege and responsibility, since whatever one imagines and accepts as true tends to come to pass, whether chosen or merely allowed. The careless imaginer creates as surely as the disciplined one, only blindly and often to his own harm. Neville's aim throughout is to move the listener from believing in a distant deity to recognizing and consciously exercising the divine imagination already operating as his own awareness, so that the secret of God becomes not a doctrine to admire but a power to live by.

Key Scripture

Neville grounds this lecture in Colossians 1:27, Genesis 1:1.