Neville Goddard Audio Lecture: Who Is Jesus Christ

About This Lecture

This lecture poses its question directly and gives Neville's signature answer: Jesus Christ is your own wonderful human imagination. Rather than a single man who lived two thousand years ago in Palestine, Christ is the creative power and divine identity present in every person, the I AM through which the world is shaped. Neville treats the gospel accordingly, not as the biography of another but as a portrait of what is unfolding inside each of us, a story whose true setting is the human mind rather than ancient history.

He argues that we are all fragments of God who took on human life in order to awaken to our true identity as the sons of God. The story of Jesus is therefore not a finished event to be remembered but an ongoing spiritual reality enacted through individual consciousness and imagination. To illustrate the transforming nature of this awakening, Neville recounts the mystical experience of the Irish poet known as George Russell, who under deep meditation beheld a being of radiant light and overwhelming majesty, only to realize the figure was his own deeper self. Such visions, Neville suggests, are evidence that to awaken is to discover one's own divine glory rather than to meet a stranger.

The lecture's central teaching is that Scripture is autobiography. Everyone, he insists, is destined to find that the Bible was written about themselves and not about historical figures, and that the names and events are states and operations of their own consciousness. The creative imagination, identified as the Christ in you, comes into the world to fulfill the word of God, and everything written must finally be fulfilled by that inner Christ, in the only place it can be fulfilled, the experience of the individual. He invokes Paul's labor that Christ be formed in his hearers and the challenge to examine yourselves to see whether Christ is in you, reading both as pointers to this indwelling identity.

Practically, this answer to "who is Jesus Christ" carries an immediate instruction: trust and consciously use imagination as the divine power it actually is. If Christ is your imagination, then to imagine is to exercise the creative power of God, and to assume the states one desires while persisting in the feeling of their reality is to let the inner Christ do its work. Carelessness with imagination, by contrast, is a kind of crucifixion of the indwelling Christ on the cross of unwanted assumptions. Neville thereby fuses his answer to a theological question with the working method of his entire teaching.

He closes by encouraging the listener to recognize the Christ within as their own self, not as a borrowed belief but as a discovery to be made, and to expect the personal awakening that will one day confirm it beyond argument. The question "who is Jesus Christ" is finally answered, in Neville's view, not by study but by experience, when a person awakens to find that the power and identity they read about in Scripture has been their own imagination all along, wearing the only name that was ever truly theirs.

Key Scripture

Neville grounds this lecture in Galatians 4:19, Colossians 1:27, John 14:6, 2 Corinthians 13:5.