Neville Goddard Audio Lecture: The Spirit Gives Life

About This Lecture

This talk takes its title from Paul's words in 2 Corinthians 3:6, 'the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.' Neville uses the verse to draw the distinction that runs through the whole of his teaching: between the literal, historical reading of the Bible, which he calls the letter, and its inner, psychological meaning, which he calls the spirit. To cling to the letter, he argues, is to embalm the scriptures, to treat them as the dead record of events that happened to other people in another age, and so to miss entirely the life they were written to convey. Only when the same stories are understood as a drama unfolding within human consciousness do they release the creative power that is their true content.

Neville teaches that the Bible is addressed to the imagination and describes the inner experience of every individual rather than the secular past of a single ancient nation. Read spiritually, its persons and events become states of mind and successive stages of awakening: a journey out of bondage becomes the soul's deliverance from a limiting self-concept, a promised land becomes a desired state realized, a crucifixion and resurrection become the death of an old identity and the rising of a new one. The 'life' the Spirit gives, in this reading, is the realization that one's own wonderful human imagination is the creative reality the scriptures personify and name as God, and that assuming a desired state inwardly is what brings it to outward expression. He reinforces the point with John 6:63, where Jesus says, 'the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life,' as further warrant that scripture is meant to be heard with the inner ear.

Because the subjective or inner mind, as Neville often noted, is amenable to suggestion and tends to accept and embody whatever is impressed upon it as true, the manner in which one interprets and inwardly receives scripture matters enormously. A literal, fear-bound reading, full of external judges and arbitrary punishments, impresses bondage upon the inner mind and binds the very faculty that should set one free. A living, imaginative reading impresses freedom and possibility, and so liberates. The choice of interpretation is therefore not academic; it shapes the seed that is sown in consciousness and, by extension, the harvest that appears in life.

The lecture accordingly issues an invitation that is also a method. Let the letter die, Neville urges, so that the spirit may give life: take the Bible personally, read it as the autobiography of your own soul, and look in every story for the state of consciousness it is describing rather than the calendar date on which it supposedly occurred. Practically, this means using scripture as a guide to inner action, identifying the state implied by a promise and then assuming the feeling of that state until it becomes your own. Read this way, Neville promises, the Bible ceases to be a rulebook of commands to obey and becomes instead a manual for awakening and exercising the creative imagination within.

Key Scripture

Neville grounds this lecture in 2 Corinthians 3:6, John 6:63.