Neville Goddard: Imagination Plus Faith

Goddard’s talk on imagination and faith is truly inspiring and the fact that his message comes from the 1950s is amazing considering the time period he was in.  People reference “The Secret” and quantum physics when talking about creative visualization and making vision boards, but Neville Goddard was talking about this idea years before that.  Granted this concept is not new to many early cultures like the Aborigine and their songlines, but in our modern western culture this view is relatively new. 

Goddard interprets the Bible with a similar perspective of many of these early cultures. He stresses the importance of envisioning what you want to manifest and experiencing the “tomes” of the moment, meaning to engage your senses of what is around you.  Feel the items in front of you, smell the air, hear what is present.  Then believe it to be true and act as if it is a matter of fact.  Give it time to come into being and it will eventually happen. 

His example of envisioning an honorable discharge from the military when he was drafted back during WWII is a perfect example of this process.  He put is request in to his commanding officer to be discharged but it came back “disapproved.” After visualizing himself to be in his apartment in New York with his wife and daughter, touching the furniture, and seeing the views from various rooms, he let nine days pass and never once felt that it wasn’t going to happen.  On the ninth day the original letter denying his discharge came back and this time it said “approved.” His faith in his imagination is what made it happen and what was unseen was made seen.  As he puts it, “The vision had its own appointed hour it ripened for nine days then it flowered.”

He also uses a great analogy of a mental state being like a municipal state.  Just like our ability to move from Maryland to Delaware or New York to California, we can choose to move from one mental state to another.  The state doesn’t disappear when we leave it continues to exist and other people can visit it as well.  So we can choose to be in a “state” of poverty or a “state” of abundance.  It is the feeling that defines the state.  The physical reality is a reverberation (a verb implies action, to reverberate is to move again) of the mental and emotional state.  It is an echo of the vibrational frequency we are focused in.

Goddard stresses the use of visualization as the primary tool for manifestation and his life experience and analogies and truly inspiring.  Listen and enjoy the wisdom from one of the precursors to the current law of attraction movement.