“Let Us Make Man”: Neville Goddard on Elohim and the Plurality of Creative Power

Genesis 1:26 reads: “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” While mainstream religion often struggles with the plural language — asking who the “us” and “our” refer to — the psychological symbolism makes the meaning immediately clear. Neville Goddard’s interpretation, derived from the revelation of the Bible's own symbolism cuts through the confusion.

The Hebrew word translated as “God” here is Elohim — a plural noun that curiously takes singular verbs. This is not a contradiction, but a symbolic clue. It suggests a plurality functioning as a unity. Neville identified this not as a council of heavenly beings, but as the diverse creative faculties within the human imagination — the one true creative power.

“Elohim is a compound unity, one made up of others. It is the human imagination, for man is all imagination, and God is man, and exists in us and we in Him.”
— Neville Goddard

The phrase “Let us make man” is not an external command from a distant deity, but a moment of inner construction. The “us” is the collection of your inner activities — thoughts, feelings, assumptions, inner conversations — which together form the state of being you inhabit. To “make man in our image” is to build self and shape experience according to the imaginal pattern held within.

The “image” is not a physical form, but an inner state — the structure of belief and feeling that you identify with and persist in. It is imagination that forms this image, and it is imagination that brings it into expression.

“The inner conversation is the ‘us’ in ‘Let us make man.’ Every time you imagine, you are reshaping yourself according to an inner pattern.”
— Neville Goddard (paraphrased)

Taken psychologically, this verse is not mysterious — it is exact. The plural of Elohim makes perfect sense when understood as the many aspects of consciousness working in unity. The confusion only arises when people try to make this about divine multiplicity rather than mental activity.

So, the power hinted at in Genesis is not distant or inaccessible. You are the Elohim — forming, naming, and giving shape to your world by what you accept in imagination. The Bible is not hiding secrets. It's simply written in the language of mind — and when read that way, its truth becomes obvious.