A rare snapshot of a glowing Neville in 1972.

Into the Silence

The final year of mystic Neville Goddard

Mitch Horowitz
16 min readDec 22, 2022

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“To outgrow is to die. You die to one state and you move into another state.” — Neville Goddard, May 5, 1972

It is difficult to speak of Neville Goddard’s final lectures since we possess a valuable but incomplete record of the teacher’s public talks from the last year of his life, 1972.

The speaking catalogue that survives is thanks to Neville’s fateful decision to grant listeners blanket permission to record his lectures, which brought dramatic new exposure and listenership to his work in the digital age. Neville’s career as a public speaker began on February 2, 1938, in New York City, and he was soon delivering talks at metaphysical churches and in auditoriums on both coasts and throughout the nation. The advent of portable consumer audio technology made possible the recording of his presentations mostly from the mid-1950s through the final two years of his life, with the plurality in the late sixties.

Today, the lecturer’s words — resounding in his clipped, mellifluous speaking style — are a source of fascination and study for seekers worldwide. His message, always consistent yet fresh in delivery, was that your imagination is the creative force symbolically called God in the Bible — a book not of historical events and tensions between man and divinity but rather a…

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Mitch Horowitz

"Treats esoteric ideas & movements with an even-handed intellectual studiousness"-Washington Post | PEN Award-winning historian | Censored in China