Neville Goddard Quotes
101. See a situation as something on the outside, and you become entangled in its shadows . . for everyone who responds to your imaginal act is a shadow. How can a shadow be causative in your world? The moment you give another the power of causation, you have transferred to him the power that rightfully belongs to you. Others are only shadows, bearing witness to the activities taking place in you. The world is a mirror, forever reflecting what you are doing within yourself. If you know this, you are set free and a series of events will unfold within you to reveal the story of salvation.
102. Let us set ourselves, here and now, a daily exercise of controlling and disciplining our imagination. What finer beginning than to imagine better than the best we know for a friend. There is no coal of character so dead that it will not glow and flame if but slightly turned. Don’t blame; only resolve. Life, like music, can by a new setting turn all its discords into harmonies. Represent your friend to yourself as already expressing that which he desires to be. Let us know that with whatever attitude we approach another, a similar attitude approaches us. How can we do this? Do what my friend did. To establish rapport, call your friend mentally. Focus your attention on him and mentally call his name just as you would to attract his attention were you to see him on the street. Imagine that he has answered, mentally hear his voice . . imagine that he is telling you of the great good you have desired for him. You, in turn, tell him of your joy in witnessing his good fortune. Having mentally heard that which you wanted to hear, having thrilled to the news heard, go about your daily task.
Your imagined conversation must awaken what it affirmed; the acceptance of the end wills the means. And the wisest reflection could not devise more effective means than those which are willed by the acceptance of the end. However, your conversation with your friend must be in a manner which does not express the slightest doubt as to the truth of what you imagine that you hear and say. If you do not control your imagination, you will find that you are hearing and saying all that you formerly heard and said. We are creatures of habit; and habit, though not law, acts like the most compelling law in the world.
With this knowledge of the power of imagination, be as the disciplined man and transform your world by imagining and feeling only what is lovely and of good report. The beautiful idea you awaken in yourself shall not fail to arouse its affinity in others. Do not wait four months for the harvest. Today is the day to practice the control and discipline of your imagination. Man is only limited by weakness of attention and poverty of imagination. The great secret is a controlled imagination and a well sustained attention, firmly and repeatedly focused on the object to be accomplished.
103. Knowing that every desire is ripe grain to him who knows how to think from the end, he is indifferent to mere reasonable probability and confident that through continuous imagination his assumptions will harden into fact.
104. Men believe in the reality of the external world because they do not know how to focus and condense their powers to penetrate its thin crust. Strangely enough, it is not difficult to penetrate this view of the senses. To remove the veil of the senses, we do not employ great effort; the objective world vanishes as we turn our attention from it. We have only to concentrate on the state desired to mentally see it; but to give reality to it so that it will become an objective fact, we must focus our attention upon the desired state until it has all the sensory vividness and feeling of reality. When, through concentrated attention, our desire appears to possess the distinctness and feeling of reality; when the form of thought is as vivid as the form of nature, we have given it the right to become a visible fact in our lives. Each man must find the means best suited to his nature to control his attention and concentrate it on the desired state. I find for myself the best state to be one of meditation, a relaxed state akin to sleep, but a state in which I am still consciously in control of my imagination and capable of fixing my attention on a mental object.
105. The imaginative image is the only thing to seek.
106. Let nothing come between you and that foundation of which Paul speaks and defines as the creative power of God and the wisdom of God, no matter what it may appear to be. Allow no one to come between you and God, for God is your own wonderful human imagination, and who can lead you there? Every moment of the day you are thinking. Be careful what you think, for your thoughts will be tested by fire, and if they survive you will receive a reward. Your thought (your imagination) is fireproof. But if you believe fulfillment is conditioned on a chain letter, another person, or going to church and praying to an unknown God, then something has come between you and the one foundation. Nothing must come between you and your imagination (thought), who is the Lord Jesus Christ.
107. It may startle you to identify the central figure of the Gospels as human imagination, but I am quite sure you will be convinced that this what the ancients intended that we should know, but man has misread the Gospels as history and biography and cosmology, and so completely has gone asleep as to the power within himself.
108. Assume your wish through the sense of feeling. That assumption, subjectively appropriated and believed to be true, is faith. Can you believe in its reality? Knowing all things are possible to him who believes, can you persuade yourself that, although your reason and senses deny it, your assumption will make it so? Blake, in his wonderful “Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” said: “I dined with Isaiah and Ezekiel and asked: Does a strong persuasion that a thing is so, make it so? and Isaiah replied: All prophets believe it does, and in ages of imagination a firm persuasion moved mountains, but many today are not capable of a firm persuasion of anything.” Everything here was once only a desire, believed. This building, the clothes you wear or the car you drive were first a desire, then believed into being.
109. The man of imagination knows that the world is a manifestation of the mental activity which goes on within himself, so he strives to determine and control the ends from which he thinks.
110. Forgiveness is, in fact, experiencing in imagination the revised version of the day, experiencing in imagination what you wish you had experienced in the flesh.