Neville Goddard Audio Lecture: Who Is Paul

About This Lecture

Neville interprets the apostle Paul as a parabolic figure standing for every individual on the path of awakening. His starting point is the name change from Saul to Paul. 'Saul,' he notes, carries the meaning of 'to ask' or 'one who asks,' representing the seeker who looks upon the divine yet does not recognize it. While still 'Saul,' the man gazes into the face of the Only Begotten Son but fails to know his own son, because he has not yet remembered who he truly is. He asks, he seeks, he even persecutes in his blindness, precisely because he is unaware of the identity hidden within him.

The transformation comes when memory returns. As the inner vision is restored, the seeker passes from Saul to Paul, and now Paul knows the Son, recognizing the relationship between himself as the Father and the Son who calls him 'Father.' For Neville this dramatizes the central mystery of his teaching: the awakening of the indwelling God, the moment a person remembers that he is the Father, that his imagination is God, and that the Son, whom he had looked upon without recognition, is the very revelation confirming his divinity. The change of name marks a change of state, from the one who asks in darkness to the one who knows in light.

Neville draws on Paul's own account of his calling to make the point. Paul writes that it pleased God to reveal his Son 'in me,' not merely to him, and that he was set apart from his mother's womb for this revelation. Neville reads that little preposition as decisive: the revelation is inward, an event in consciousness, and the 'mother's womb' from which Paul was set apart is the long gestation of mortal experience that precedes the inner birth. The road to Damascus, with its blinding light and the voice from heaven, becomes for Neville a symbol of the sudden inner illumination in which the persecuting, asking self is struck down and the knowing self rises.

The lecture thus answers its own question, 'Who is Paul?,' with Neville's characteristic reply: he is you. Paul's conversion is read not as a one-time historical episode to be admired from a distance but as the inner experience of spiritual awakening destined to occur within each individual when the long amnesia of mortal life lifts. The whole story is autobiography in advance, a picture of what every seeker will undergo when divine memory returns and the scales fall from the eyes.

Understood this way, the figure of Paul becomes a promise rather than a biography. The seeker who now asks in apparent blindness, who looks upon the divine without recognizing himself in it, will in due time have memory and vision restored. He will pass from Saul to Paul, from asking to knowing, and will recognize with certainty his own identity as God the Father, with the Son as the eternal confirmation of who he has always been. The lecture's reassurance is that this is not reserved for one extraordinary man in the first century; it is the appointed end of everyone who, for now, still walks the Damascus road as Saul.

Key Scripture

Neville grounds this lecture in Acts 9:1-9, Acts 13:9, Galatians 1:15-16.