Neville Goddard Audio Lecture: It Is Within (1965)

About This Lecture

Taking as his theme the saying that the kingdom of God is within you, Neville presses the words further than they are usually allowed to go. The inner kingdom, he argues, is not one realm among others, a private spiritual chamber set beside the larger public world. It contains everything, with nothing whatever lying outside it. The external world that seems so independent, so stubbornly solid, so plainly other than oneself, is in his view a projection of an inner state, an appearance thrown outward by consciousness and mistaken for an autonomous reality.

To articulate this he leans heavily on William Blake, whose insight he quotes with evident affection: all that you behold, though it appears without, is within, in your imagination, of which this mortal world is but a shadow. Neville treats the line not as poetic exaggeration but as exact metaphysics. The world is a shadow, and a shadow has no power to move itself; it can only follow the form that casts it. If the shadow is unwelcome, no amount of rearranging the shadow will help. One must turn to the form, the inner state, from which the shadow falls.

From this principle he draws his familiar practical conclusion. Because cause is internal and effect external, chasing circumstances directly is futile, an attempt to reshape the shadow with one's hands. The productive move is always inward: to locate the desired condition within, to enter imaginatively into the wished-for state, and to dwell there until it is real to oneself. When the inner substance is changed and accepted, the outer shadow has no choice but to rearrange itself to conform. The order is fixed; the inner comes first and the outer obediently follows.

Neville fills out the talk with personal anecdotes and reports of inner experience, the texture of his lectures in this period, illustrating how states assumed within consciousness later surfaced as facts in the shared world. These stories are not offered as boasts but as demonstrations of method, evidence that the law works as stated and is not merely a doctrine. The recurring note is radical inwardness paired with radical responsibility. If everything is within, then nothing arrives from a power outside the self, and there is no external author of one's fortune to petition or to blame.

This is both the comfort and the challenge of the lecture. It is comforting because whatever one desires is already present within, needing only to be claimed by a disciplined and faithful act of imagination rather than wrested from a reluctant world. It is challenging because it removes every excuse: the conditions one resents are shadows of inner states one has been holding, knowingly or not. Neville's counsel is to stop scanning the outer world for causes and to take the inner search seriously, examining what one has been assuming and feeling to be true.

To find God, he concludes, and to find the answer to any particular desire, one does not look outward to the heavens or to other people but inward to the creative consciousness that is the true location of the kingdom. The within is not a small place; it is the whole, and the man or woman who learns to govern it has learned to govern their world.

The Q&A: live in the end, then drop it

The closing question-and-answer period supplies an essential definition of Neville's method. He says he would not claim that anyone remains in one state throughout the day: attention moves through state after state. His observation that people commonly return to habitual states describes ordinary identity; it is not an instruction to keep one desired scene active all day.

Neville illustrates the point with money owed to him. At his wife's request, he imagined that the debtor had money, was willing to pay, and had paid. He performed the act on Wednesday, did not repeat it or think about it again, and received a check on Friday. In this context, living in the end means occupying the fulfilled standpoint during the imaginal act. Once the act was complete, Neville dropped the matter. The result did not depend on indefinite imagining or continuous emotional maintenance.

Key Scripture

Neville grounds this lecture in Luke 17:21.