Neville Goddard Power Of Awareness
Chapter Five THE TRUTH THAT SETS YOU FREE

The Drama of life is a psychological one, in which all the conditions, circumstances and events of your life are brought to pass by your assumptions.

Since your life is determined by your assumptions, you are forced to recognize the fact that you are either a slave to your assumptions or their master. To become the master of your assumptions is the key to undreamed-of freedom and happiness. You can attain this mastery by deliberate conscious control of your imagination. You determine your assumptions in this way:

Form a mental image, a picture of the state desired, of the person you want to be. Concentrate your attention upon the feeling that you are already that person. First, visualize the picture in your consciousness. Then feel yourself to be in that state as though it actually formed your surrounding world. By your imagination that which was a mere mental image is changed into a seemingly solid reality.

The great secret is a controlled imagination and a well-sustained attention firmly and repeatedly focused on the object to be accomplished. It cannot be emphasized too much that, by creating an ideal within your mental sphere, by assuming that you are already that ideal, you identify yourself with it and thereby transform yourself into its image [thinking from the ideal instead of thinking of the ideal. Every state is already there as “mere possibilities” as long as we think of them, but as overpoweringly real when we think from them].

This was called by the ancient teachers “Subjection to the will of God” or “Resting in the Lord”, and the only true test of “Resting in the Lord” is that all who do rest are inevitably transformed into the image of that in which they rest [thinking from the wish fulfilled]. You become according to your resigned will, and your resigned will is your concept of yourself and all that you consent to and accept as true. You, assuming the feeling of your wish fulfilled and continuing therein, take upon yourself the results of that state; not assuming the feeling of your wish fulfilled, you are ever free of the results.

When you understand the redemptive function of imagination, you hold in your hands the key to the solution of all your problems.

Every phase of your life is made by the exercise of your imagination. Determined imagination alone is the means of your progress, of the fulfilling of your dreams. It is the beginning and end of all creating.

The great secret is a controlled imagination and a well-sustained attention firmly and repeatedly focused on the feeling of the wish fulfilled until it fills the mind and crowds all other ideas out of consciousness.

What greater gifts could be given you than to be told the Truth that will set you free?

The Truth that sets you free is that you can experience in imagination what you desire to experience in reality, and by maintaining this experience in imagination, your desire will become an actuality.

You are limited only by your uncontrolled imagination and lack of attention to the feeling of your wish fulfilled. When the imagination is not controlled and the attention not steadied on the feeling of the wish fulfilled, then no amount of prayer or piety or invocation will produce the desired effect.

When you can call up at will whatsoever image you please, when the forms of your imagination are as vivid to you as the forms of nature, you are master of your fate. [You must stop spending your thoughts, your time and your money. Everything in life must be an investment.*]

Visions of beauty and splendor, Forms of a long-lost race, Sounds and faces and voices, From the fourth dimension of space – And on through the universe boundless, Our thoughts go lightning shod – Some call it imagination, And others call it God. [Dr. George W. Carey, “The New Name”]

*Neville follows this with the date April 12, [19]53. In Awakened Imagination (1954), he would write, “On the morning of April 12, 1953, my wife was awakened by the sound of a great voice of authority speaking within her and saying,

‘You must stop spending your thoughts, time, and money. Everything in life must be an investment’. To spend is to waste, to squander, to layout without return. To invest is to lay out for a purpose from which a profit is expected. This revelation of my wife is about the importance of the moment. It is about the transformation of the moment… It is only what is done now that counts… Whenever we assume the feeling of being what we want to be, we are investing”. (Ch. 5) – Ed.