Neville Goddard Audio Lecture: What Is Man (1972)

About This Lecture

Delivered on January 31, 1972, "What Is Man?" takes up one of scripture's oldest questions, the psalmist's wondering cry, "What is man, that thou art mindful of him?" and answers it with the full force of Neville Goddard's mystical vision. Far from being a small creature lost in a vast and indifferent universe, man, he insists, is the very container of the divine. The great things do not happen somewhere far off, in heaven or in history; they happen in the individual, for the kingdom of God comes to you in you. The whole, the entirety of the creative power, is actually held within each person, however ordinary and limited that person may appear.

Neville opens the lecture by recalling a line from a poem by Robert Penn Warren in which the Lord stares into the dark pit of self from which all has sprung. He uses this image to dramatize his teaching that the source of all things is found within one's own deep self, in an inner darkness that is not emptiness but pregnant ground, the womb from which every experience issues. From there he develops the central claim that the visible world, for all its apparent solidity and permanence, is the unreal, and the invisible inner kingdom is the real. The senses report a world that seems primary; Neville reverses the verdict and calls that world secondary, derivative, a shadow cast by the unseen.

To actually believe this, he says, is the supreme act of faith, a deliberate reversal of ordinary assumptions that places ultimate reality in consciousness rather than in outer appearance. It is easy to give the idea intellectual assent and quite another thing to live as though the invisible were more substantial than the visible. Yet that is precisely the conviction Neville asks for, because it is the hinge on which his whole law turns. If the inner is cause and the outer is effect, then to trust the reality of an imagined, felt state above the contrary evidence of the senses is the very faith that calls things that are not as though they were.

Underlying all of this is Neville's identification of God with the human imagination. If man contains the whole and the kingdom is within, then the imagination is divine, and one's inner states are the true creative ground of experience rather than passive reactions to an outer world. The dignity this confers on the individual is enormous: the same power that fashioned creation is seated within, awaiting recognition and use. The question "What is man?" is thus answered not by measuring him against the cosmos but by uncovering the cosmos, and its maker, within him.

The practical and devotional upshot is an exalted view of human identity and responsibility. Neville urges the listener to honor this inner reality, to live from the conviction that the invisible is more real than the visible, and to treat their imaginal acts as the genuine causes they are. Rather than begging an external deity for favors, one is to recognize and exercise the divine power already within. The answer to "What is man?" is finally the discovery that man, awakened, is one with God.

Key Scripture

Neville grounds this lecture in Psalm 8:4, Luke 17:21.