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

About This Lecture

Delivered in May 1971, "The Spirit of God" advances Neville's most fundamental conviction: the God of whom the Bible speaks is the human imagination, and the two are one. When scripture says the Spirit of God dwells within — "know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you?" — Neville takes it with complete literalness. That indwelling Spirit is your own wonderful imagination, the creative power by which your world is continually formed. To seek God, then, is not to look outward toward a distant deity enthroned in the sky, but to turn within to the imagining faculty that is forever shaping experience, and to recognize it as the very presence the scriptures call the Lord.

What distinguishes this lecture from a purely doctrinal statement is its strongly experiential, mystical character. Neville does not argue the identity of God and imagination only from texts; he testifies to it from his own life. He recounts paranormal episodes — including out-of-body experiences and visions associated with what he described as his own spiritual resurrection and awakening — offered as firsthand evidence that the Spirit of God is the living imagination at work in man. These accounts are not presented as curiosities but as confirmations: having been lifted out of the body and yet remained fully himself, Neville concludes that the self which imagines and perceives is independent of the flesh and is in fact the immortal creative power, the I AM, the Spirit of God.

These testimonies serve his larger argument that the great events of scripture are not distant history to be admired from afar but inner experiences awaiting their unfolding within every person. The birth, the crucifixion, the resurrection, and the ascension are, for Neville, mystical events that take place in the individual soul when the indwelling Spirit awakens. By sharing his own visions he means to assure the listener that what happened in him is the pattern of what will happen in all — that the Spirit of God hidden in human imagination is destined to wake and reveal itself as the true identity of the one who bears it.

From this identification flows the practical and devotional thrust of the talk. If the Spirit of God is your imagination, then every act of imagining is both sacred and causal, and the careless use of imagination is, in effect, the careless handling of God. Neville encourages the listener to honor imagination as the divine presence within — to use it reverently and deliberately, picturing only what they would lovingly call into being, since whatever is assumed in feeling tends to externalize. The awakening of God in man becomes the destiny the scriptures promise, and the disciplined, faithful exercise of imagination becomes both the means of bettering one's outer life and a rehearsal for that ultimate awakening. The same Spirit that, in the beginning, moved upon the face of the waters and called creation forth is, Neville insists, the very power stirring now in the listener's own awareness, leading them gently toward the day it remembers itself as God.

Key Scripture

Neville grounds this lecture in 1 Corinthians 3:16, Romans 8:9-11, Galatians 2:20.