Neville Goddard Power Of Awareness
Chapter Nineteen ESSENTIALS

The Essential points in the successful use of the law of assumption are these:
First, and above all, yearning; longing; intense, burning desire. With all your heart you must want to be different from what you are. Intense, burning desire [combined with intention to make good] is the mainspring of action, the beginning of all successful ventures. In every great passion [which achieves its objective], desire is concentrated [and intentioned. You must first desire and then intend to succeed].

As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after Thee, O God. -[Psalm 42:1]

Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness for they shall be filled. -[Matthew 5:6]

Here, the soul is interpreted as the sum total of all you believe, think, feel, and accept as true; in other words, your present level of awareness, God[,]5 I AM [the power of awareness], the source and fulfillment of all desires [understood psychologically, I am an infinite series of levels of awareness and I am what I am according to where I am in the series]. This quotation describes how your present level of awareness longs to transcend itself. Righteousness is the consciousness of already being what you want to be.

Second, cultivate physical immobility, a physical incapacity not unlike the state described by Keats in his “Ode to a Nightingale”:

A drowsy numbness pains my senses, as though of hemlock I had drunk.

It is a state akin to sleep, but once in which you are still in control of the direction of attention. You must learn to induce this state at will, but experience has taught that it is more easily induced after a substantial meal, or when you wake in the morning feeling very loath to arise. Then you are naturally disposed to enter this state. The value of physical immobility shows itself in the accumulation of mental force which absolute stillness brings with it. It increases your power of concentration.

Be still and know that I am God. -[Psalm 46:10]

In fact, the greater energies of the mind seldom break forth save when the body is stilled and the door of the senses closed to the objective world.

The third and last thing to do is to experience in your imagination what you would experience in reality had you achieved your goal. [You must gain it in imagination first, for imagination is the very door to the reality of that which you seek. But use imagination masterfully and not as an onlooker thinking of the end, but as a partaker thinking from the end.]

Imagine that you possess a quality or something you desire which hitherto has not been yours. Surrender yourself completely to this feeling until your whole being is possessed by it. This state differs from reverie in this respect: it is the result of a controlled imagination and a steadied, concentrated attention, whereas reverie is the result of an uncontrolled imagination – usually just a daydream.

In the controlled state, a minimum of effort suffices to keep your consciousness filled with the feeling of the wish fulfilled. The physical and mental immobility of this state is a powerful aid to voluntary attention and a major factor of minimum effort.

The application of these three points:

1. Desire
2. Physical immobility
3. The assumption of the wish already fulfilled is the way to at-one-ment or union with your objective. [The first point is thinking of the end, with intention to realize it. The third point is thinking from the end with the feeling of accomplishment. The secret of thinking from the end is to enjoy being it. The minute you make it pleasurable and imagine that you are it, you start thinking from the end.]

One of the most prevalent misunderstandings is that this law works only for those having a devout or a religious objective. This is a fallacy.

It works just as impersonally as the law of electricity works. It can be used for greedy, selfish purposes as well as noble ones. But it should always be borne in mind that ignoble thoughts and actions inevitably result in unhappy consequences.

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5 Neville deleted the word means after God and then added the matter in brackets. Ed.