Neville Goddard Books

This book contains the very essence of the Principle of Expression. Had I cared to, I could have expanded it into a book of several hundred pages but such expansion would have defeated the purpose of this book.

Commands to be effective – must be short and to the point: the greatest command ever recorded is found in the few simple words, “And God said, ‘Let there be light.’”

In keeping with this principle I now give to you, the reader, in these few pages, the truth as it was revealed to me.

Don’t be anxious or concerned as to results. Results will follow just as surely as day follows night. Have faith in this planting until the evidence is manifest to you that it is so. Your confidence in this procedure will pay great rewards. You wait but a little while in the consciousness of the thing desired; then suddenly, and when you least expect it, the thing felt becomes your expression. Life is no respecter of persons and destroys nothing; it continues to keep alive that which man is conscious of being. Things will disappear only as man changes his consciousness. Deny it if you will, it still remains a fact that consciousness is the only reality and things but mirror that which you are conscious of being. The heavenly state you seek will be found only in consciousness for the Kingdom of Heaven is within you.

The secret of feeling or the calling of the invisible into visible states is beautifully told in the story of Isaac blessing his second son Jacob by the belief, based solely upon feeling, that he was blessing his first son Esau. It is recorded that Isaac, who was old and blind, felt that he was about to leave this world and wishing to bless his first son Esau before he died, sent Esau hunting for savory venison with the promise that upon his return from the hunt he would receive his father’s blessing.

THIS book is concerned with the art of realizing your desire. It gives you an account of the mechanism used in the production of the visible world. It is a small book but not slight. There is a treasure in it, a clearly defined road to the realization of your dreams.

Were it possible to carry conviction to another by means of reasoned arguments and detailed instances, this book would be many times its size. It is seldom possible, however, to do so by means of written statements or arguments since to the suspended judgment it always seems plausible to say that the author was dishonest or deluded, and, therefore, his evidence was tainted.

Consequently, I have purposely omitted all arguments and testimonials, and simply challenge the open-minded reader to practice the law of consciousness as revealed in this book. Personal success will prove far more convincing than all the books that could be written on the subject. – NEVILLE

Creation is finished. You call your creation into being by feeling the reality of the state you would call. A mood attracts its affinities but it does not create what it attracts. As sleep is called by feeling “I am sleepy,” so, too, is Jesus Christ called by the feeling, “I am Jesus Christ.” Man sees only himself. Nothing befalls man that is not the nature of himself. People emerge out of the mass betraying their close affinity to your moods as they are engendered. You meet them seemingly by accident but find they are intimates of your moods. Because your moods continually externalize themselves you could prophesy from your moods, that you, without search, would soon meet certain characters and encounter certain conditions. Therefore call the perfect one into being by living in the feeling, “I am Christ,” for Christ is the one concept of self through which can be seen the unveiled realities of eternity.

Sympathy for living things—agreement with human limitations—is not in the consciousness of the king because he has learned to separate their false concepts from their true being. To him poverty is but the sleep of wealth. He does not see caterpillars, but painted butterflies to be; not winter, but summer sleeping; not man in want, but Jesus sleeping. Jesus of Nazareth, who scattered the evil with his eye, is asleep in the imagination of every man, and out of his own imagination must man awaken him by subjectively affirming “I AM Jesus” Then and only then will he see Jesus, for man can only see what is awake in himself. The holy womb is man's imagination. The holy child is that conception of himself which fits Isaiah’s definition of perfection. Heed the words of St. Augustine, “Too late have I loved thee, for behold thou were within and it was without that I did seek thee.” It is your own consciousness that you must turn as to the only reality. There, and there alone, you awaken that which is asleep. “Though Christ a thousand times in Bethlehem be born, if He is not born of in thee thy soul is still forlorn.”

Neville dedicated this book to his daughter Victoria

"I discovered that my expectant mood worked as a magnet to unite me with this Greater Me, while my fears made It appear as a stormy sea. As a boy, I conceived of this mysterious self as might, and in my union with It I felt its majesty as a stormy sea which drenched me, then rolled and tossed me as a helpless wave.

As a man I conceived of It as love and myself the son of It, and in my union with It, now, what a love enfolds me! It is a mirror to all. Whatever we conceive It as being, that It is to us.

I believe It to be the center through which all the threads of the universe are drawn; therefore I have altered my values and changed my ideas so that they now depend upon and are in harmony with this sole cause of all that is. It is to me that changeless reality which fashions circumstances in harmony with our concepts of ourselves.

My mystical experiences have convinced me that there is no way to bring about the outer perfection we seek other than by the transformation of ourselves.

As soon as we succeed in transforming ourselves, the world will melt magically before our eyes and reshape itself in harmony with that which our transformation affirms."

The undisciplined mind finds it difficult to assume a state which is denied by the senses. But the ancient teachers discovered that sleep, or a state akin to sleep, aided man in making his assumption. Therefore, they dramatized the first creative act of man as one in which man was in a profound sleep. This not only sets the pattern for all future creative acts, but shows us that man has but one substance that is truly his to use in creating his world and that is himself. "

The habit of seeing only that which our senses permit, renders us totally blind to what we otherwise could see. To cultivate the faculty of seeing the invisible, we should often deliberately disentangle our minds from the evidence of the senses and focus our attention on an invisible state, mentally feeling it and sensing it until it has all the distinctness of reality.

I AM is that which, amid unnumbered forms is ever the same. This great discovery of cause reveals that, good or bad, man is actually the arbiter of his own fate, and that it is his concept of himself that determines the world in which he lives [and his concept of himself is his reactions to life]* In other words. If you are experiencing ill health, knowing the truth about cause, you cannot attribute the illness to anything other than to the particular arrangement of the basic cause-substance, an arrangement which [was produced by your reactions to life, and] is defined by your concept “I am unwell.” This is why you are told “Let the weak man say, ‘I am strong’ ” (Joel 3:10), for by his assumption, the cause-substance — I AM — is rearranged and must, therefore, manifest that which its rearrangement affirms. This principle governs every aspect of your life, be it social, financial, intellectual, or spiritual.

"CERTAIN WORDS in the course of long use gather so many strange connotations that they almost cease to mean anything at all. Such a word is imagination. This word is made to serve all manner of ideas, some of them directly opposed to one another. Fancy, thought, hallucination, suspicion: indeed, so wide is its use and so varied its meanings, the word imagination has no status nor fixed significance.

I know of no greater and truer definition of the Imagination than that of Blake. By imagination we have the power to be anything we desire to be.

If the story of the immaculate conception and birth of Christ appears irrational to man, it is only because it is misread as biography, history, and cosmology, and the modern explorers of the imagination do not help by calling It the unconscious or subconscious mind.

All things are judged in relationship to your present conception of yourself. Every man’s conception of himself is a vibrant note in the Cosmic Symphony, which note automatically determines the value of all notes in relationship to itself.

Change your conception of yourself. Revalue yourself and you will automatically change your world. Man has always played the losing game by attempting to change his world, while he himself remained with his present values or conceptions of himself.

Jesus discovered this law. So instead of changing men he changed himself. He said, “And now I sanctify myself, that they also might be sanctified through the truth. “He found himself to be the truth of all that he saw his world to be.

These mystical experiences will help to rescue the Bible from the externals of history, persons and events, and to restore it to its real significance in the life of man.

Everything written in the Scriptures about Jesus Christ is written about Man. “And when they came to the place which is called The Skull, there they crucified him” (Luke 23:33). The “rock-hewn tomb, where no one had ever been laid.” (Luke 23:53) is the skull of man. And “if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his” (Rom. 6:5).

The man who has experienced Scripture cannot escape the responsibility of telling its meaning to his fellow men. The unknown writers of the gospel of God were not describing situations and events of the past as historians. Their story of Jesus Christ is their own experience of God’s plan of redemption as men who themselves had experienced redemption.