Neville Goddard Audio Lecture: Who Is Jesus

About This Lecture

This lecture takes up the direct question, who is Jesus, and answers it in the most personal terms imaginable. The name Jesus, Neville notes, is the Anglicized form of the Hebrew Joshua, meaning Jehovah is salvation. Jesus is therefore not chiefly a man of the past but the saving power of God, the very salvation his name announces, which Neville identifies with the human imagination, the I AM, the Christ indwelling every person. To ask who Jesus is, on this reading, is ultimately to ask who you yourself most deeply are.

Neville insists that what is not written in scripture is, for his purposes, non-existent; he is interested in Jesus only as scripture presents him, and scripture presents one who came to fulfill the prophets. That fulfillment, he argues, must occur within each individual rather than once and for all in distant history. The gospel is not a biography to be admired from afar but a pattern of inner events that everyone is destined to undergo, a sequence of mystical experiences foretold in the writings. When a person passes through this series of experiences, the name and nature of Christ Jesus is conferred upon him, and he is one with the figure the scriptures describe.

The practical and mystical strands of Neville's teaching meet here as they do throughout his work. Because Jesus is the imagination, the creative power by which you assume states and shape your world is the very Christ scripture exalts; to use imagination wisely and lovingly is to work with the saving power named Jesus, and to misuse it in fear or resentment is to crucify that power afresh. The everyday act of imagining is thus never trivial, for it is the operation of the savior himself within you. Mystically, to know who Jesus is is to awaken to one's own divine identity, recognizing that life is a dream directed by imagination and that the dreamer is God.

Neville's answer dissolves the distance between worshipper and worshipped, which is the lecture's great aim. Jesus is not someone to be admired across the centuries, prayed to as another, or awaited in the clouds, but the deepest self of the listener, the imaginative I AM awaiting recognition. To apply the lecture is to take this identity seriously in practice: to honor the imagination as the saving presence of God, to use it deliberately and charitably in assuming the wish fulfilled, and to read the gospel as a description of experiences appointed to unfold in your own consciousness. This identification is meant to change how one lives, not merely how one believes. If Jesus is the imagination and the imagination is the saving power, then every assumption you make is a use of the savior's own creative activity, and the most ordinary inner act becomes charged with significance. One is therefore to imagine lovingly and deliberately, assuming on behalf of oneself and others the states one would wish to be true, knowing that this is precisely how the saving power named Jesus works in the world. Then the question that opened the talk turns back on the one who asked it, for to discover who Jesus is, Neville teaches, is finally to discover who you are.

Key Scripture

Neville grounds this lecture in John 8:58, Colossians 1:27, Matthew 1:21.