Neville Goddard Audio Lecture: The Secret of The Sperm (1964)

About This Lecture

Delivered in December 1964, this lecture opens with a striking contemporary detail. Neville recounts how scientists meeting in Montreal had confessed that the sperm remains as much a mystery as ever, noting in particular its uncanny ability to pass through the surface of an egg that has no opening. He seizes on this admission with evident relish, because it hands him exactly what he wants: a point at which the most advanced natural knowledge of the day reaches a wall it cannot pass. The scientific puzzle becomes the doorway into a spiritual interpretation, and the sperm itself becomes a symbol of the creative power lying at the very heart of life, a power that produces the visible world while remaining, to outward investigation, invisible and inexplicable.

From the natural mystery Neville moves to the mystical claim that organizes everything else he says: this creative power is God, and God's creative power is one and the same as human imagination. The argument is not that imagination is like the creative force of life but that it is that force, operating in man. To make the point experiential rather than merely asserted, he relates a personal mystical episode. He describes how one morning, while lying in bed contemplating the sperm, he felt himself detached from his body, and he offers this experience as evidence of the inner reality standing behind the outer symbol. The seed that passes mysteriously into the egg becomes for him a figure of Christ, the seed of God's creative act planted in man, carrying the whole pattern of a new life within its hidden interior.

The interpretive move is characteristic of Neville's later lectures, in which scripture, a topical item from the news, and his own visionary experience are braided into a single argument. The sperm's penetration of a closed surface mirrors, for him, the way an inner conviction enters and impregnates consciousness without any visible point of entry, and the resulting new life mirrors the way an assumed state grows silently until it is born into outer fact. What science can describe but not explain, Neville claims to recognize from the inside, because the same power is at work in the imagining mind.

The practical and visionary point on which the talk rests is that this same supernatural power that the scientists could not account for is at work in every person as imagination. It is not reserved for the laboratory or the womb; it is the ordinary, ceaselessly active faculty by which one pictures, feels, and assumes. By recognizing imagination as this divine creative force and genuinely believing in it, Neville teaches, a person gains the means to transform their entire world, since the same seed-power that builds a body can be directed to build a life.

To apply the lecture, the listener is invited to treat each deliberate act of imagining as a creative seed: plant a single, clear assumption of the wish fulfilled, feel it as real, and then, like the hidden seed, leave it to do its work without anxious digging it up to inspect. The secret of the sperm, Neville concludes, is the secret of creation itself, and that secret turns out to be nothing exotic or distant but the God within, the human imagination one uses, knowingly or not, in every waking hour.

Key Scripture

Neville grounds this lecture in 1 Peter 1:23.