Neville Goddard Audio Lecture: There Is No Evil (1970)

About This Lecture

In this lecture, with a version dated 1970, Neville makes the bold claim that there is no evil in the ultimate sense. What we label good and evil are not fixed external realities but states of consciousness through which the one creative power passes. Because everything springs from imagination and serves the larger purpose of awakening, even painful and seemingly wicked circumstances are woven into a design that finally works toward good. The claim is not that suffering is pleasant, but that nothing a person passes through is wasted or outside the redemptive pattern.

Neville grounds the teaching in two scriptural pillars. The first is Paul's assurance that all things work together for good to those who love God, which he reads not as wishful comfort but as a literal description of how experience is structured. The second is the startling word of Isaiah in which God declares that He forms the light and creates darkness, makes peace and creates calamity, doing all these things. If a single power forms both, Neville reasons, then darkness and calamity cannot be a rival evil; they are instruments within one purpose. To call something evil, he argues, is to fix it as a permanent and independent reality, whereas in truth it is only a state one happens to be occupying and can therefore leave.

The practical consequence is liberating. If nothing is irredeemably evil, then no situation is beyond transformation, and no person is beyond redemption. The one who grasps this stops condemning the world and others, recognizing instead that every condition is the outpicturing of an inner state, and that inner states can be changed by reimagining. Neville ties this directly to his discipline of revision: rather than resisting or denouncing an unwanted situation, one revises one's reaction and assumes a better state, and in doing so ceases to give reality to the evil once feared. Condemnation, by contrast, only fastens the unwanted state more firmly in place.

This reframes the whole moral life. The struggle is not a war waged against external wickedness, with enemies to defeat and villains to punish, but the quieter and more demanding discipline of choosing the states one dwells in. Judgment of others becomes not merely unkind but unwise, since the judging fixes a state and the one who judges shares the single consciousness being judged. Neville therefore urges the relinquishing of resentment and the practice of seeing difficulties as passing states rather than as enemies to be conquered, a stance that frees energy for creative imagining rather than spending it on blame.

He closes with reassurance. The creative power within is always tending toward fulfillment, and the whole of experience, including its darkest passages, is ultimately for our awakening. To trust this is not to grow passive or indifferent to suffering but to meet it with a steadier hand, confident that any state can be left for a better one and that the larger story bends toward good. The lecture thus dissolves the dread of evil into a workable discipline of states, leaving the listener with both philosophical relief and a concrete practice.

Key Scripture

Neville grounds this lecture in Romans 8:28, Isaiah 45:7, Matthew 7:1.