Neville Goddard’s method

The teaching

As Neville Goddard teaches it.

Consciousness, the one reality

Neville begins where Feeling Is the Secret begins: the world, and all within it, is a person's conditioned consciousness made visible. Consciousness is both the cause and the substance of everything that appears, the one reality, not as a figure of speech but in fact. Its name, in his reading of scripture, is I AM, the name God gives Moses at the burning bush, and its power is the imagination. God, for Neville, is not a being elsewhere but the human imagination itself, and every story in the Bible is a drama played out inside the one who reads it.

From this follows what his students call the law of assumption. A person's assumptions about themselves and their world, persisted in, harden into fact. The outer world is a mirror and cannot change until the face before it does. In his phrase, a person never attracts what they want, but always what they are. To change one's world, one changes one's concept of oneself.

The conscious and the subconscious

Consciousness, he teaches, runs in two streams. The conscious is personal and selective: it chooses, judges and conceives ideas. The subconscious is impersonal and does not select: it accepts as true whatever the conscious feels to be true, and gives it form in the world in ways known only to itself. The conscious is the realm of effect and the subconscious the realm of cause; he calls them the male and the female of the mind, the one that conceives and the one that bears.

Feeling is the only medium between them. No idea is impressed on the subconscious until it is felt, and once it is felt, whether it is good, bad or indifferent, it must be expressed. This is why his whole method is a training of feeling. On one point the house holds otherwise: no one brings illness or misfortune on themselves by what they have felt.

Sleep, the natural door

Sleep, which fills a third of life, is in Neville's teaching the natural door into the subconscious. What a person feels as they fall asleep is carried down and acted out in the days that follow, so the mood in which one drops off matters more than any other. His rule is never to go to sleep discouraged or dissatisfied, nor in the consciousness of failure. Before sleep the student is to feel satisfied, to assume the feeling of being and having what is sought, and to drift off in it.

Prayer, the art of assuming

Prayer for Neville is not asking. It is the art of assuming the feeling of being and having that which one wants, and of yielding to the wish rather than forcing it. It is done in a passive state close to sleep. Lie flat on the back or sit relaxed in a chair, close the eyes, and feel sleepy, until a faraway feeling comes and there is no wish to move, though one could.

In that state imagine, not how the wish came true, but simply that it has. Effort is fatal to it. The student rests in the end as already accomplished and is indifferent to the means, because in his teaching the acceptance of the end wills the means. The drowsy state needs nothing but rest; it is never sought by going without sleep.

The scene that implies fulfilment

To make the wish concrete, Neville teaches the building of a single short scene, one that could only happen after the wish is realised. It should be an event in which the student acts, not one they watch. The best known of his examples is a friend's handshake of congratulation: the student imagines the hand in theirs, the pressure of the grip and the friend's voice saying how glad they are, as if it were happening now.

The scene is entered from the inside. The student does not see themselves in it as a spectator would, but sees it through their own eyes from where they would stand. It is kept to a single small act, so that it can be run again and again in the drowsy state until it takes on the tones of reality, and the student falls asleep in it.

Living in the end

Between sessions the student lives in the end, as Neville calls it: going through the day as the person who already has what was imagined, thinking from the wish fulfilled rather than of it. They are not to watch anxiously for signs, nor to plan the route by which it must come. An assumption, he teaches, builds a bridge of incidents, a chain of ordinary events that leads to its own fulfilment, and the student need only cross it when it appears.

Revision

In his later books Neville added a nightly practice he called revision. Before sleep the student goes back over the day and finds the scenes that went badly: the argument, the refusal, the unwelcome news. They replay each in imagination as it should have gone, hearing the words they wished to hear, until the revised version feels real. Revision works, he taught, by the same law as the rest of his method: what is felt as real is what the subconscious takes in, so the revised scene, once felt, takes the place of the one remembered.

Imagining for others

Because the law, as he teaches it, works on whatever is felt, Neville asks that it be used for another only in love: to imagine a friend well, or happy, or hearing good news, as a gift the friend need never know of. The house adds the limit his method needs. A reader may picture good for someone else, but never another person choosing what they have not chosen, returning, loving or obeying; another person's will is their own.

The Law and the Promise

Neville divided his teaching in two. The Law is everything above: the use of imagination to shape the world one lives in. The Promise is what he held the Bible to be truly about: that the imagination, which is God in us, will one day awaken in each person to its own nature.

He described four experiences in which, he said, this happened to him. The first was a birth from within his own skull, with the sign of an infant wrapped in swaddling clothes. The second was the discovery of David as his son, which showed him God as father. The third was the splitting of his body from top to bottom, like the curtain of the temple, and his rising up through it as a serpent of golden light. The fourth was the descent upon him of the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove. He taught the Promise as a gift that comes in its own time, and never as a technique.