Neville Goddard

The teaching

Taught from his books and lectures, above all At Your Command (1939), Your Faith Is Your Fortune (1941) and Awakened Imagination.

The law, in brief

Neville Goddard teaches one law: imagination is God in man, and an assumption, felt as real and persisted in, hardens into fact. The student assumes the feeling of the wish already fulfilled, above all in the drowsy state before sleep, by dwelling in a short scene that implies it, and then lives in the end, as one who has it. That method, with revision and his account of the Promise, is taught in full in the branch called Neville Goddard's method. What follows is the ground he built it on: his reading of the name of God, of the Bible and of the states a person passes through.

I AM

When Moses asks God's name at the burning bush, the answer is “I AM THAT I AM.” Neville reads the whole of his teaching in it. I AM is the awareness of being in each person, before anything is added to it, and it is God. Every sentence a person says of themselves that begins with I am is therefore a decree: to say I am poor, I am ill, I am unlucky is to name oneself, and the world obeys the name. So the student watches what follows I am, and claims the state they wish to embody, not as a hope for later but as a present fact of consciousness.

He reads the psalm in the same way: “Be still, and know that I am God.” Stillness is the drawing of attention away from the senses, and the I AM known in that stillness is God, and is the student's own.

Shut the door

The Gospel tells the one who prays to enter into the closet and shut the door. The closet, in his reading, is the mind, and the door is the senses: to pray is to shut out the evidence of the world as it now is, and in that inner room to assume the state desired. Nothing outside has to agree. What is assumed in secret, he holds, is rewarded openly.

The Bible as a drama of the mind

Neville reads scripture as psychology, not history. Its persons are states of consciousness, its places are states, and its stories show the law at work in the reader. The best known example is the blessing of Jacob. The old father Isaac is blind; his elder son Esau is hairy and real to the touch, the world as the senses report it; his younger son Jacob, smooth-skinned, comes disguised to take the blessing. The student is Isaac. Blind to the senses for the moment, they give the blessing, the full feeling of reality, to Jacob, the imagined state; and once it is given it cannot be taken back, though Esau, the present fact, comes in afterwards to claim it.

In the same way Daniel in the den turns his back on the lions, the problem, and faces the light, and they cannot touch him; and the twelve disciples are the faculties of the mind, which must be called and disciplined one by one.

States, not persons

From William Blake he took the rule to distinguish states from the individuals who are in them. A person is not their poverty, illness, anger or failure: these are states, like rooms, which a person enters and can leave, and every possible state already exists, waiting to be occupied. Creation is finished, he says; what feels like creating is choosing which state to occupy, and dwelling there until it becomes natural.

From this follows his teaching of forgiveness. To forgive is not to excuse a wrong but to stop seeing the person fixed in it: to imagine them in the state they would wish to be in, and to stop occupying, oneself, the state of the one who was wronged.

Imagination is God

Blake gave him his other foundation, the conviction that the eternal body of man is the imagination, which is God himself. Neville makes it literal. Jesus, in his reading, is the human imagination; the crucifixion is the imagination fixed on the cross of the body and its senses; the resurrection is its awakening to what it is. Every act of imagining is therefore an act of God done in the one who imagines, and faith is loyalty to a reality not yet seen.

The interval and persistence

Between the assumption and its fulfilment there is an interval of time, and in it the senses go on reporting the old state. The student neither argues with them nor goes looking for signs, but persists, returning again and again to the feeling of the wish fulfilled, until it is as natural as the old feeling was. He reads the parable of the friend who knocks at midnight, and is answered because he will not stop knocking, as a lesson in that persistence.

What the house adds

The results Neville reported are his own accounts, and nothing shows that imagining alone brings events about. His teaching can be kept as a discipline of attention and of hope, with the rule the branch keeps for it above all: a person may imagine good for another, but never another person's will bent to their own.