Neville Goddard’s lecture “Freedom” articulates the principle that there is only one divine cause, known as I AM, which is universally diffused in every human consciousness. He uses biblical parables—such as Jesus calming the storm and the story of Noah’s ark—to illustrate that all external phenomena originate from our own imagination. Humanity itself is portrayed as the incarnation of the divine archetype, and each individual holds the creative power to shape their reality. By assuming full responsibility for both conflict and peace in one’s life, one gains freedom from all secondary causes. The lecture emphasizes awakening within the self—leaving the ‘‘ark’’ of illusion—and recognizing one’s true identity as God the Father. Ultimately, freedom is found in embracing the commandment “Hear O Israel, the Lord is one” and understanding that one’s life is entirely self-created.
When asked: “What is the greatest of all the commandments?” God answered: “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.” Accept this commandment! Live by it and you will be free from all secondary causes. There is only one God. He is the father of us all who is above all, through all, and in all. He is a universally diffused individuality whose name forever and ever is I AM. You may not be aware of who you are, what you are, or where you are; but by being aware, you are mentally saying I am. Every conscious being says I am; and if there is only one I am, then I am one individual – diffused! I am the sole cause of all that is. All things were made through imagining, and without awareness was not anything made that was made.
In the 8th chapter of Matthew, one of the miracles of scripture is recorded as an acted parable. It is said that when he entered the boat, he fell asleep and a great storm arose; so they woke him saying: “Lord we perish, save us.” And he said: “Why are you afraid, O men of little faith?” Then he rose and rebuked the wind and the sea, and there was a great calm. If there is only one cause, then he who quelled the wind and the sea is the one who caused the storm. There cannot be another. If there is confusion in your life, and you resolve it in your imagination, and the world bears witness to what you have done – you caused the change. And since there is no other cause, then did you not cause the confusion also? There is only one God and Father of us all who is above all, through all, and in all. If He is in every being who says I am, and there is only one God, no one can accuse another; for God’s name is not he is, but I am. No matter what appears on the outside, I am its cause. Assume full responsibility for the things you observe, and if you do not like what you see, know you have the power to change them. Then exercise that power and you will observe the change you caused. If you are truly willing to assume that responsibility, you are set free.
If this universal diffused individuality is in all, then the incarnation must be regarded in a different light. We were taught that the incarnation took place 2000 years ago by a unique individual, who was the incarnate God. But I tell you: humanity is the incarnation. The central figure – personified as Jesus Christ – is the perfect archetypal figure everyone must express. He is called the true witness, the first-born of the dead. Now incarnate in your body of flesh and blood, you are dead in the sense that you have forgotten that you are the creator of all things, and do not see yourself creating anything you observe. The morning paper tells of what she, he, and they, are doing, and you cannot relate their actions to anything you have done; yet there is only one cause, only one God, who is resident in you as your awareness, your own wonderful human imagination.
The parable tells us that God entered a boat and fell asleep. Humanity is that boat, the ark where God the Father creates as he slumbers. Even though you do not know the people you read about, if the reading disturbs you, you are the cause of that conflict. All imagination, I am dreaming, causing the misfortune and unhappiness of those whose lives I have touched with feeling. When you awaken and recall your dream, do you always know the people there? Do you know the children that were yours in the dream? The people who frightened you? You never saw them before, so how could they be other than that which you caused? You do not recognise them, yet you – the dreamer – caused them to do what they did. The same thing is true here. If the actions of a seeming other cause a motor response in you, even though you do not know him, your awareness is the cause of the storm. But when you awake, memory will return and there will be a wonderful calm.
God, the universally diffused individuality, is asleep in everyone. His transcendent revelation is personified as one called Jesus Christ. Thus personification awakens the memory in you as to who God the Father really is. God did not break up the I am and give each one of us a portion of himself. He gave each one, individually, his whole being. I am cannot be divided, and I am God the Father. If you haven’t yet discovered this, I am still asleep. In order to discover your fatherhood, you must find God’s son, foretold to be yours. While asleep in the state of Saul, you do not recognise him; and when you ask: “Whose son are you, young man?” he answers: “I am the son of Jesse, the I am.” When you awake and recognise God’s son, David, are you not Jesse? Are you not God, whose name forever and ever is I am?
It takes David to reveal you to yourself; yet you were his father before you fell asleep. Now dreaming your life into being, you fight against seeming others, calling them devils and Satan. You endow your shadow world with causation, thereby becoming a divided being, when God is not divided. There is no devil. There is no Satan. There is no being outside of your own wonderful human imagination.
” I, even I am he. I kill and I make alive. I wound and I heal and none can deliver out of my hand.” (Deut. 52) “I am the Lord and there is no other God. I form the light and I create darkness. I make the weal and I create woe. I am the Lord and there is no other; besides me there is no God.” (Isaiah 45) He who creates the evil, creates the good, the weal and the woe, the light and the darkness. He who kills is he who makes alive, and he who wounds is he who heals and there is no other God. If you really believe you are the one spoken of here – that it is you who create the evil, the good, the weal and the woe; that none can deliver out of your hand – then you are set free. You will never again believe in another, but know that your life is self-created. That you create the storms, as well as the peace and the calm. No longer will you believe he, she, or they, did it, for you will recognise them as reflections mirroring either the storm or the peace and calm within you.
Having entered the boat (called the ark) God fell asleep and there he remains until the dove brings him word that the flood of illusion is over. Dramatised as an acted parable, it is said that Noah put forth his hand and brought the dove into the ark with him. This is beautiful imagery and true. In my vision the dove descended through what appeared to be crystal clear water. He seemed to float, using his wings like a swan. Lighting upon my extended finger he smothered me with kisses as the vision came to its end.
Because everyone is the whole God, everyone will personify the perfect archetypal specimen called Jesus Christ. Lost in confusion, not knowing that humanity is the incarnation, men think of this archetypal specimen as the incarnate God. Yet the one grand commandment is: “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.” The word Israel means: the man who rules – not like a god, but as God, because he knows he is God. And the word translated “Lord” is I AM. Now let me translate it for you: Hear, O man who rules as God, the I AM, our I am is one I AM. We are not a bunch of little I am’s. Our I am is the one I AM who is God the Father. If this is true, then God cannot be divided; and the whole of him is wherever you are, wherever I am. There is no he, she, or they, in I am!
If you will completely accept this, you will set yourself free. You may not immediately see the effect of what you have done in your imagination; but it must come, because there is no other creator to stop it. All things are made through awareness, and without it is not anything made that is made. It is imagination who claims: “I kill and I make alive, I wound and I heal. I form the light and create darkness. I form the evil and I make the good, the weal and the woe, and there is no other.”
When the Jesuits speak of Satan, devils, and demons, it is because they do not know the greatest commandment. All of the Ten Commandments are based upon the negative thou shall not, except one, which is: “Love thy father and mother.” The commandment found in the 6th chapter of Deuteronomy, with ten words, contains all Ten Commandments in an entirely different presentation as: “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.”
Maybe you cannot accept my words now. Perhaps you feel the need to blame another – to have a scapegoat and believe the cause to be something you ate or drank – but why did you do it? What caused you to do exactly what you did? A disturbance in you! The storm in you caused the gland to be out of kilter. The gland cannot be the cause of your distress, but your dream can. The world, not knowing the single cause, will try to find something on the outside; but there is no secondary cause!
I received a letter this week from a lady who shared this self-revealing dream, saying: “I am in a place totally devoid of comfort. There are no curtains at the windows or rugs on the floor. My sons – in clean overalls – are sitting in straight back chairs against one wall, while my daughters – in starched, long cotton dresses – it opposite them. Looking much like the Quaker children here, my children appear to be without emotion, without feeling, or creative abilities. We are waiting for father! A young boy enters with a message stating that the work which had to be done in the children is finished, and therefore the father is not returning. “Then the scene changes and we are in a farm house. I look out the window to see fields of golden grain ripe for harvest. My eldest son, now radiantly happy, comes running into the house exclaiming that, for the first time, he has created for himself. His entrance was like magic, transforming the room, as all of my children began to use their talents – creating, laughing, animated, and alive. Before, like automatons, they had only obeyed the father by executing his will; but now that his work is finished, he has withdrawn himself, and they have become creators in themselves.
What a beautiful experience. She saw the world in miniature form. The father’s withdrawal is recorded as his death. He tells us: “Unless I die thou canst not live, but if I die I shall arise again and thou with me. A little while and you will see me no more; again a little while and you will see me as yourself.” Having withdrawn to dwell within, it is from there that you move, and not from without. All that I – the father – am, you will know yourself to be. If God is the father of all life, then you are the father. If he is a creator, you are a creator. Whatever God is, you will know yourself to be.
Now, God comes out of the desert with signs and wonders. The most outstanding sign is that of the fiery serpent, for everyone who sees it, lives. As your journey out of Egypt begins, the fiery serpent is released when the curtain is torn from top to bottom and all of the rocks are split. You are destined to fulfill scripture and, like me, know from personal experience that you are God the Father. I have shared my visions with you, telling you how true and wonderful the story of scripture really is and that there is only one way of salvation. Although unnumbered volumes have been written giving you many ways of redemption, there is only one. I am the way, and there is no other way.
Matthew tells the story of his awakening in dramatic form. Claiming “they” awoke, saying: “Lord, we perish, save us.” It is the unearthly wind which awakens you, and you are its cause. Awakening within your boat (your ark) you leave it behind as you enter an entirely different world as God the Father. Having purposely imposed the restriction of death upon yourself, knowing that you had the power and the wisdom to overcome it, you laid yourself down and fell asleep in the ark. And when the time is fulfilled, you awaken within that ark, come out, and witness the symbolism of your birth from above. A few months later you fulfill the 89th Psalm as you find David and your memory returns.
In the Book of Samuel, Saul (the demented king) made a promise to anyone who would bring down the giant opposition to Israel that he would set his father free. (This is done by discovering the father of the son.) So Saul asks David to identify his father, and David says: “I am the son of Jesse, the I AM.” So the father is set free when David brings down the giant, who – in your sleep of death – opposes you, and your memory returns as to who you really are.
Although I answer to an earthly name and sign my checks with it, I know who I am! I can tell you who I am in the hope that you will believe me; but in truth, I am only addressing myself, for I am in you and you are in me, and we are one. Everyone will have the same experience and in the end we will all return to the one body, one Spirit, one Lord, and one God and Father. We will all return from the victorious march through death as the same God, but expanded beyond our wildest dreams because of this excursion of the mind into a world of death which seemed so final. I cannot promise that, if you accept this one hundred per cent you will not have a headache tomorrow, or that the boss will not fire you. But if you accept this, you will know that your boss had no choice in the matter. You will know that you caused the firing. Maybe your dreams transcended your present limited position in that business, and only by being fired could they be realised.
One day I was fired from J. C. Penney Co. Working for a year and a half, running their elevator and being their errand boy, making $22. a week and paying $5. room rent, I could not understand it when they let me go. But my dreams, my desires, transcended my position there, so they had to do what they did in order for my desires to be realised. Believe me, you are the cause of the phenomena of your life – be it good, bad or indifferent. If, to you the news is distasteful, you are the dreamer of that distasteful storm. But the day will come when you will awake to discover that the storm is over. That there is only one cause, and that is awareness! I know it is easier to give advice and show the other person where he is wrong, than it is to acknowledge that he is only reflecting the wrong in you. It is difficult to accept the concept that the world is bearing witness to your thoughts, but it is true. If you do not like something or someone, do not look at it or them; look within to the one who is causing the image.
There is only one God, one cause of all life. He is not only above all and through all; he is in all. The universally diffused individuality is in each one of us in his fullness. Dwelling in each individual bodily, the father sleeps until the storm is over. Then he awakens and rebukes the storm that he created during his sleep, and there is a great calm. If you will accept this as your philosophy of life, and not turn to the left or the right, but claim you are solely responsible for the phenomena of your life, you will find it much easier to live. But if, at times, life seems too hard to bear, and you find a secondary cause, you have created a devil. Devils and Satans are formed from man’s unwillingness to assume the responsibility of his life. To see another other than self, is to build a golden image. Asking a priest for forgiveness. Calling him father in spite of being told to call no man on earth father. Seeing him as an authority, man goes whoring after a man-made false image.
So what is freedom worth to you? If you stop short of the ultimate, you do not really want freedom. If you were enslaved, what do you have that you would not willingly give – in its entirety – to be set free? Do you really believe there is only one God, who is in you in his entirety, and his name is I am? You do, although you have forgotten who you are, where you are, or that you have a son; one day the wind will awaken you during a storm, and as you come out of the ark the storm will abate. Then memory will return, as he who has always been your son stands before you and calls you father, as scripture unfolds within; and then you will know that the eternal story was always there. It was a sealed book until it unfolded from within.
Let the world remain in the storm if they want to, but if you accept my words you will be set free from any secondary cause, and you who have been causing your storm will find peace and be truly set free.
Now let us go into the silence.
In this lecture, Goddard redefines the traditional concept of God as a ‘‘universally diffused individuality’’ whose name is I AM. He argues that this awareness resides equally in every person, making each individual both the creator and experiencer of all events. By asserting that ‘‘all things were made through imagining,’’ he places imagination at the core of metaphysical practice and positions it as the sole active force in the universe.
Using the parable of Jesus calming the storm, Goddard demonstrates how the same divine power that causes disruption can also restore calm. This metaphor serves a dual purpose: it shows that apparent external crises are self-generated, and it highlights the necessity of resolving inner conflicts through directed imagination. The notion that ‘‘there is no secondary cause’’ invites listeners to relinquish blame and to accept complete responsibility for their experiences.
Goddard further unpacks the incarnation not as a one-time historical event but as an ongoing process in which ‘‘humanity is the incarnation.’’ Here, Jesus becomes an archetype representing our own dormant divine potential. The lecture encourages one to ‘‘wake up’’ from the dream of separation and to reclaim the ‘‘perfect archetypal specimen’’ embodied within each person.
The dream metaphor recurs throughout the lecture, comparing human life to a vessel in which the divine sleeps until ‘‘the flood of illusion is over.’’ The awakening occurs when ‘‘the dove’’—symbolizing inner revelation—returns, signifying that one’s creative imagination has been reoriented toward self-realization rather than projection. This process of inner awakening dissolves false dualities such as devils and Satan, which arise only from an unwillingness to accept personal responsibility.
Finally, Goddard addresses the practical implications of this philosophy: accepting one’s role as the sole cause brings genuine freedom but does not exempt one from everyday challenges such as illness or job loss. Instead, it reframes these events as necessary steps toward manifesting deeper desires. Freedom, in his system, emerges through consistent assumption of the ‘‘I AM’’ identity and the unwavering commitment to view all life events as reflections of one’s own creative consciousness.
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