Consciousness Neville Goddard Quotes

Man moves in a world that is nothing more or less than his consciousness objectified.–Neville Goddard

I AM wealthy, poor, healthy, sick, free, confined were first of all impressions or conditions felt before they became visible expressions. Your world is your consciousness objectified. Waste no time trying to change the outside; change the within or the impression; and the without or expression will take care of itself. When the truth of this statement dawns upon you, you will know that you have found the lost word or the key to every door. I AM (your consciousness) is the magical lost word which was made flesh in the likeness of that which you are conscious of being.

To be conscious of being poor while praying for riches is to be rewarded with that which you are conscious of being, namely, poverty. Prayers to be successful must be claimed and appropriated. Assume the positive consciousness of the thing desired.

With your desire defined, quietly go within and shut the door behind you. Lose yourself in your desire; feel yourself to be one with it; remain in this fixation until you have absorbed the life and name by claiming and feeling yourself to be and to have that which you desired. When you emerge from the hour of prayer you must do so conscious of being and possessing that which you heretofore desired.

You must be in the consciousness of being or having that which you want to be or to have before you drop off to sleep. Once asleep, man has no freedom of choice. His entire slumber is dominated by his last waking concept of self.

When you drop your desire in consciousness as a seed, confident that it shall appear in its full-blown potential, you have done all that is expected of you. To be worried or concerned about the manner of their unfoldment is to hold these fertile seeds in a mental grasp and, therefore, to prevent them from really maturing to full harvest.

Man fails to do the works of Jesus Christ because he attempts to accomplish them from his present level of consciousness. You will never transcend your present accomplishments through sacrifice and struggle. Your present level of consciousness will only be transcended as you drop the present state and rise to a higher level. You rise to a higher level of consciousness by taking your attention away from your present limitations and placing it upon that which you desire to be. Do not attempt this in day-dreaming or wishful thinking but in a positive manner. Claim yourself to be the thing desired. I AM that; no sacrifice, no diet, no human tricks. All that is asked of you is to accept your desire. If you dare claim it, you will express it.

Be not afraid nor dismayed by reason of this great multitude; for the battle is not yours, but God’s.” You do not fight against your problem; your problem will only live as long as you are conscious of it. Take your attention away from your problem and the multitude of reasons why you cannot achieve your ideal. Concentrate your attention entirely upon the thing desired.

Never go to sleep feeling discouraged or dissatisfied. Never sleep in the consciousness of failure.

Consciousness is the one and only reality, not figuratively but actually. This reality may for the sake of clarity be likened unto a stream which is divided into two parts, the conscious and the subconscious. In order to intelligently operate the law of consciousness it is necessary to understand the relationship between the conscious and the subconscious. The conscious is personal and selective; the subconscious is impersonal and non-selective. The conscious is the realm of effect; the subconscious is the realm of cause. These two aspects are the male and female divisions of consciousness. The conscious is male; the subconscious is female. The conscious generates ideas and impresses these ideas on the subconscious; the subconscious receives ideas and gives form and expression to them. By this law-first conceiving an idea and then impressing the idea conceived on the subconscious-all things evolve out of consciousness;

Instead of fighting against the evidence of the senses you claim yourself to be that which you desire to be. As your attention is placed on this claim, the doors of the senses automatically close against your former master (that which you were conscious of being).

All that meditation amounts to is a controlled imagination and a well sustained attention. Simply hold the attention on a certain idea until it fills the mind and crowds all other ideas out of consciousness. The power of attention shows itself the sure guarantee of an inner force.

Man’s chief delusion is his conviction that there are causes other than his own state of consciousness.

Without the aid of any man, he will define himself as that which he desires to express. He will discover that his I AM is the virgin conceiving without the aid of man, that all conceptions of himself, when felt, and fixed in consciousness, will be embodied easily as living realities in his world.

To rise in consciousness to the level of the thing desired and to remain there until such level becomes your nature is the way of all seeming miracles.

Actually, you are destined to reach the point where you realise that through your own desire you can consciously create your successive destinies

Sleep is the time when the male or conscious mind turns from the world of sense to seek its lover or subconscious self.

The conscious generates ideas and impresses these ideas on the subconscious; the subconscious receives ideas and gives form and expression to them.

Thomas, the doubter — when disciplined — would deny that sickness or anything else which was not in sympathy with the consciousness to which he belonged had any power to affect him.

Your consciousness is the only living reality, the eternal head of creation. That which you are conscious of being is the temporal body that you wear. To turn your attention from that which you are aware of being is to decapitate that body; but, just as a chicken or snake continues to jump and throb for a while after its head has been removed, likewise qualities and conditions appear to live for a while after your attention has been taken from them.

If ye believe not that I AM He, ye shall die in your sins.” Unless man discovers that his consciousness is the cause of every expression of his life, he will continue seeking the cause of his confusion in the world of effects, and so shall die in his fruitless search.

The numberless unrealized hopes and ambitions of man are the seeds which are buried within the consciousness or virgin womb of man.

Consciousness follows vision, and I step into the vision and explore a world just as real as this.

Man’s chief delusion is his conviction that there are causes other than his own state of consciousness.” —NEVILLE GODDARD, BARBADIAN AUTHOR AND MYSTIC

John I can do nothing; but since all things are possible to God and God I know to be my consciousness of being, I can realize my desire in a little while. How my desire will be realized I do not (as John) know, but by the very law of my being I do know that it shall be.

Leave all and follow me.” In the face of seemingly mountainous obstacles claim your freedom. The consciousness of freedom is the Father of freedom. It has a way of expressing itself which no man knows. “Ye shall not need to fight in this battle. Set yourself, stand still, and see the salvation of the Lord with you.

You rise to a higher level of consciousness by taking your attention away from your present limitations and placing it upon that which you desire to be. Do not attempt this in day-dreaming or wishful thinking but in a positive manner. Claim yourself to be the thing desired. I AM that; no sacrifice, no diet, no human tricks. All that is asked of you is to accept your desire. If you dare claim it, you will express it.

Proof that you are will follow the consciousness that you are; it will not precede it.

Desire is the mainspring of the mental machinery. It is a blessed thing. It is a right and natural craving which has a state of consciousness as its right and natural satisfaction.

As we lift up our consciousness, our world reshapes itself in harmony with the level to which we have risen.

Now let this saying sink deep in your ear: BE CONSCIOUS OF BEING THAT WHICH YOU WANT TO APPEAR.

Your world in its every detail is your consciousness objectified.

There is a story told of a little blind girl who had five brothers. The brothers, trusting their senses, went out into the world and lost their way, while the little girl, unable to trust her senses, wove a thread of gold. Attaching one end to her finger, she tied the other to the sun and never lost her way. You, too, can learn to trust the light of consciousness by holding onto the thread that is your aim and not allowing yourself to become enmeshed in the evidence of your senses.

Did the Prophet Elijah really restore to life the dead child of the Widow? This story, along with all the other stories of the Bible, is a psychological drama which takes place in the consciousness of man. The Widow symbolizes every man and woman in the world; the dead child represents the frustrated desires and ambitions of man; while the prophet, Elijah, symbolizes the God power within man, or man’s awareness of being. The story tells us that the prophet took the dead child from the Widow’s bosom and carried him into an upper room. As he entered this upper room he closed the door behind them; placing the child upon a bed, he breathed life into him; returning to the mother, he gave her the child and said, “Woman, thy son liveth.

The subconscious is what a man is. The conscious is what a man knows. "I and my Father are one but my Father is greater than I." The conscious and subconscious are one, but the subconscious is greater than the conscious.

Far greater is he that is in you than he that is in the world." This is the cry of everyone who finds his awareness of being to be God. Your recognition of this fact will automatically cleanse the temple, your consciousness, of the thieves and robbers, restoring to you that dominion over things which you lost the moment you forgot the command, "Thou shalt have no other God beside ME.

The twelfth and last of the disciplined qualities of the mind is called Judas. When this quality is awake man knows that he must die to that which he is before he can become that which he desires to be. So it is said of this disciple that he committed suicide, which is the mystic’s way of telling the initiated that Judas is the disciplined aspect of detachment. This one knows that his I AM or consciousness is his savior, so he lets all other saviors go. This quality — when disciplined — gives one the strength to let go.

The future must become the present in the imagination of the one who would wisely and consciously create circumstances. We must translate vision into Being, thinking of into thinking from. Imagination must center itself in some state and view the world from that state.

Judas, the one whom the world in its ignorance has blackened, will when man awakes from his undisciplined state, be placed on high for God is love and no greater love has a man than tins — that he lay down his life for a friend. Until man lets go of that which he is now conscious of being, he will not become that which he desires to be; and Judas is the one who accomplishes this through suicide or detachment.

Since life is infinite, the concept of an ultimate destiny is inconceivable. When we understand that consciousness is the only reality, we know that it is the only creator. This means that your consciousness is the creator of your destiny. The fact is, you are creating your destiny every moment, whether you know it or not. Much that is good and even wonderful has come into your life without your having any inkling that you were the creator of it.

The eleventh quality called is Simon of Canaan. A good key phrase for this disciple is “Hearing good news.” Simon of Canaan, or Simon from the land of milk and honey, when called to discipleship, is proof that the one who calls this faculty into being has become conscious of the abundant life. He can say with the Psalmist David, “Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies; thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.

The consciousness of being is not dependent upon being anything. It preceded all conceptions of itself and shall be when all conceptions of itself shall cease to be. "I AM the beginning and the end." That is, all things or conceptions of myself begin and end in me, but I, the formless awareness, remains forever.

Man, not knowing this law of consciousness, constantly gives thought to this previous habitual conditions and, through being attentive to them, places upon these dead bodies the eternal head of creation; thereby he reanimates and re-resurrects them. You must leave these dead bodies alone and let the dead bury the dead.

You can be anything in this world but you cannot know it or expect it to come unless you Act. If you react based on the past, you continue in the same pattern. To be the man you desire to be you must create the scene, as this lady did, and the whole world will be convulsed if that is necessary to bring it to pass. There is no other power but God, but God had to ‘forget’ he was God in this state of sleep, and then He awakens and consciously determines the conditions he wants in the world.

Once defined, your conscious claim established, continue in this confidence until the reward is received. As surely as the day follows the night any attribute, consciously claimed, will manifest itself. Thus, that which to the sleeping orthodox world is a cruel and unjust law becomes to the enlightened one of the most merciful and just statements of truth.

You shall become conscious of being or possessing a thing and you shall express or possess that which you are conscious of being.

No man can lift you to the level you desire. The power to ascend is within yourself; it is your consciousness.

A complete transformation of consciousness rubs out all evidence that anything other than this ever existed in the world.

These seeds are pressed out and planted when man loses himself in a wild, mad state of joy, consciously feeling and claiming himself to be that which he formerly desired to be.

A garden is a cultivated piece of ground, a specially prepared field, where seeds of the gardener's own choice are planted and cultivated. Gethsemane is such a garden, the place in consciousness where the mystic goes with his properly defined objectives. This garden is entered when man takes his attention from the world round about him and places it on his objectives.

The essential feeling of naturalness can be achieved by persistently filling your consciousness with imagination — imagining yourself being what you want to be or having what you desire.

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.

This very day start your new life. Approach every experience in a new frame of mind — with a new state of consciousness. Assume the noblest and the best for yourself in every respect and continue therein.

Within that blankness we call sleep there is a consciousness in unsleeping vigilance, and while the body sleeps this unsleeping being releases from the treasure house of eternity the subconscious assumptions of man.

Such simple acceptance of your desires is like the dropping of fertile seed into an ever-prepared soil. When you drop your desire in consciousness as a seed, confident that it shall appear in its full-blown potential, you have done all that is expected of you. To be worried or concerned about the manner of their unfoldment is to hold these fertile seeds in a mental grasp and, therefore, to prevent them from really maturing to full harvest.

Man, not knowing that his world is his individual consciousness outpictured, vainly strives to conform to the opinion of others rather than to conform to the one and only opinion existent, namely, his own judgment of himself.

quietly where you are and assume the mental attitude of listening; recall your friend's voice; with this familiar voice established in your consciousness, imagine that you are actually hearing his voice and that he is telling you that he is or has that which you wanted him to be or to have. Impress upon your consciousness the fact that you actually heard him and that he told you what you wanted to hear; feel the thrill of having heard. Then drop it completely. This

The law is always in operation, always absolute. Your consciousness is the rock upon which all structures rest. Watch what you are aware of. You need not concern yourself with others because you are sustained by the absoluteness of this law.

If you are dissatisfied with your present expression of life, then you must be born again. Rebirth is the dropping of that level with which you are dissatisfied and rising to that level of consciousness which you desire to express and possess.

So, all the little icons in the world that people worship – these are the little things called “error”; and one day you will discover the true God. And when you discover the true God, you will find that He is all within your own wonderful being as your own wonderful human imagination. You’ll walk in the consciousness of being God. You don’t brag about it. As Blake answered when they asked him “What do you think of Jesus Christ?” Blake answered, “Jesus Christ is the only God”; but he hastened to add to it, “But so am I, and so are you.” So, you don’t tell any one. You simply know that you are the Being spoken of in Scripture as “God the Father.” For all that is said of Him, you are going to experience; and you are going to experience it in the first-person, singular, and a present-tense experience. And then you will know.

Man, who is free in his choice, acts from conceptions which he freely, though not always wisely, chooses. All conceivable states are awaiting our choice and occupancy, but no amount of rationalising will itself yield us the state of consciousness which is the only thing worth seeking.

Desires expressed, or pressed out, result in the passing of that particular desire. Man cannot possess a thing and still desire to possess it at one and the same time. So, as one consciously appropriates the feeling of being the thing desired, this desire to be the thing passes—is realised.

The fifth quality called to discipleship is Philip. This one asked to be shown the Father. The awakened man knows that the Father is the state of consciousness in which man dwells, and that this state or Father can be seen only as it is expressed. He knows himself to be the perfect likeness or image of that consciousness with which he is identified. So he declares, “No man has at any time seen my Father, but I, the son, who dwelleth in his bosom have revealed him; therefore, when you see me, the son, you see my Father, for I come to bear witness of my Father.” I and my Father, consciousness

Man transmits ideas to the subconscious through his feelings. The subconscious transmits ideas from mind to mind through telepathy. Your unexpressed convictions are transmitted to them without their conscious knowledge or consent, and if subsconsciously accepted by them will influence their behaviour.

when a man prays successfully he believes that he is already that which he desired to be, therefore he cannot continue desiring to be that which he is already conscious of being. At the moment of satisfaction, physical and psychological, something goes out which in time bears witness to man’s creative power.

When you know that consciousness is the one and only reality—conceiving itself to be something good, bad or indifferent, and becoming that which it conceived itself to be—you are free from the tyranny of second causes, free from the belief that there are causes outside of your own mind that can affect your life.

Time is ever conditioned by man's conception of himself. Confidence in yourself as determined by conditioned consciousness always shortens the interval of time. If you were accustomed to great accomplishments, you would give yourself a much shorter interval in which to accomplish your desire than the man schooled in defeat.

As the will of heaven is ever done on earth, you are today in the heaven that you have established within yourself, for here on this very earth your heaven reveals itself. The Kingdom of Heaven really is at hand. Now is the accepted time. So create a new heaven, enter into a new state of consciousness and a new earth will appear.

These inner movements not only produce corresponding outer movements: this is the law which operates beneath all physical appearances. He who practices these exercises of bilocation will develop unusual powers of concentration and quiescence and will inevitably achieve waking consciousness on the inner and dimensionally larger world.

However, the understanding of the causes of your experience, and the knowledge that you are the sole creator of the contents of your life, both good and bad, not only make you a much keener observer of all phenomena, but through the awareness of the power of your consciousness, intensify your appreciation of the richness and grandeur of life.

The reason lies in the fact that consciousness is the one and only reality, it is the first and only cause-substance of the phenomena of life. Nothing has existence for man save through the consciousness he has of it. Therefore, it is to consciousness you must turn, for it is the only foundation on which the phenomena of life can be explained.

Your reactions reveal where you live psy- chologically; and where you live psychologically, determines how you live here in the outer visible world]. The importance of this in your daily life should be immediately apparent. The basic nature of the primal cause is consciousness. Therefore, the ulti- mate substance of all things is consciousness.

Remember the reward is to the one who endures. Stand still. Standing still is the deep conviction that all is well; it is done. No matter what is heard or seen, you remain unmoved, conscious of being victorious in the end. All things are made by such agreements, and without such an agreement there is not anything made that is made. "I AM that I AM.

Regardless of occasional experiences to the contrary, it is your destiny to rise to higher and higher states of consciousness, and to bring into manifestation more and more of creation's infinite wonders. Actually, you are destined to reach the point where you realise that, through your own desire, you can consciously create your successive destinies.

To rise to the level of any state is to automatically become that state in expression. But, in order to rise to the level that you are not now expressing, you must completely drop the consciousness with which you are now identified. Until your present consciousness is dropped you will not be able to rise to another level. Do not be dismayed. This letting go of your present identity is not as difficult as it might appear to be. The invitation of the scriptures, "To be absent from the body and be present with the Lord," is not given to a select few; it is a sweeping call to all mankind. The body from which you are invited to escape is your present conception of yourself with all of its limitations, while the Lord with whom you are to be present is your awareness of being.

Fishermen know that if they wish to catch big fish, they must fish in deep waters; if you would catch a large measure of life, you must leave behind you the shallow waters with its many reefs and barriers and launch out into the deep blue waters where the big ones play. To catch the large manifestations of life you must enter into deeper and freer states of consciousness; only in these depths do the big expressions of life live.

Man, fishing all through the night of human ignorance, attempts to realise his desires through effort and struggle only to find in the end that his search is fruitless. When man discovers his awareness of being to be Christ Jesus, he will obey its voice and let it direct his fishing. He will cast his hook on the right side; he will apply the law in the right manner and will seek in consciousness for the thing desired. Finding it there, he will know that it will be multiplied in the world of form.

Consciousness is the one and only reality. All phenomena are formed of the same substance vibrating at different rates. All is consciousness modified by belief. Out of consciousness I as man came, and to consciousness I as man return. In consciousness all states exist subjectively, and are awakened to their objective existence by belief. The only thing that prevents us from making a successful subjective impression on one at a great distance, or transforming there into here, is our habit of regarding space as an obstacle.

When this belief is so firmly established that you feel confident of results, your desire will embody itself. How it will be done, no man knows. I, your desire, have ways ye know not of; my ways are past finding out. Your desire can be likened to a seed, and seeds contain within themselves both the power and the plan of self-expression. Your consciousness is the soil. These seeds are successfully planted only if, after you have claimed yourself to be and to have that which you desire, you confidently await results without an anxious thought.

When man realises that the conscious state in which he lives is the choice that he has made of a mate, he will be more careful of his moods and feelings. He will not permit himself to react to suggestions of fear, lack or any undesirable impression. Such suggestions of lack could never pass the watch of the disciplined mind of the mystic, for he knows that every conscious claim must in time be expressed as a condition of his world—of his environment. So he remains faithful to his beloved, his defined objective, by defining and claiming and feeling himself to be that which he desires to express.

But, once you know that consciousness is the only reality and is the sole creator of your particular world and have burnt this truth into your whole being, then you know that success or failure is entirely in your own hands. Whether or not you are disciplined enough to sustain the required state of consciousness in specific instances has no bearing on the truth of the law itself — that an assumption, if persisted in, will harden into truth. The certainty of the truth of this law must remain despite great disappointment and tragedy — even when you 'see the light of life go out and all the world go on as though it were still okay'.

As your attention is removed from the world round about you and placed upon the I AM so that you are lost in the feeling of simply being, you will find yourself slipping the anchor that tied you to the shallows of your problem; and effortlessly you will find yourself moving out into the deep. The sensation which accompanies this act is one of expansion. You will feel yourself rise and expand as though you were actually growing. Do not be afraid of this floating, growing experience for you are not going to die to anything but your limitations. However, your limitations are going to die as you move away from them for they live only in your consciousness.

You cannot force anything outwardly by the mightiest effort of the will. There is only one way you can command the things you want and that is by assuming the consciousness of the things desired. There is a vast difference between feeling a thing and merely knowing it intellectually. You must accept without reservation the fact that by possessing (feeling) a thing in consciousness you have commanded the reality that causes it to come into existence in concrete form. You must be absolutely convinced of an unbroken connection between the invisible reality and its visible manifestation. Your inner acceptance must become an intense, unalterable conviction which transcends both reason and intellect, renouncing entirely any belief in the reality of the externalisation except as a reflection of an inner state of consciousness. When you really understand and believe these things you will have built up so profound a certainty that nothing can shake you.

word on its way, to speak this word into being, you simply do this: Sit quietly where you are and assume the mental attitude of listening; recall your friend's voice; with this familiar voice established in your consciousness, imagine that you are actually hearing his voice and that he is telling you that he is or has that which you wanted him to be or to have. Impress upon your consciousness the fact that you actually heard him and that he told you what you wanted to hear; feel the thrill of having heard. Then drop it completely. This is the mystic's secret of' sending words into expression-of making the word flesh. You form within yourself the word, the thing you want to hear; then you listen, and tell it to yourself. "Speak, Lord, for thy' servant heareth."Your consciousness is the Lord speaking through the familiar voice of a friend and impressing on yourself that which you desire to hear. This self-impregnation, the state impressed upon yourself, the word, has ways and means of'expressing itself of' which no man knows. As you succeed in making the impression you will be unmoved by appearances.

Everyone is free to create his world as he wants it if he knows that the whole thing is responding to him. In Luke 13 we are told the story of five Galileans who have been murdered by Pilate. ‘And he mixed their blood with their offering, etc.’And the central figure of the gospels which is your awakened Imagination says to his followers; ‘Do you think these five were worse sinners than the others? I tell you ‘No.’ But unless you repent you will all likewise perish in the same manner.’Here on one level we think it served them right, just as those who saw the scene on the Sunset Blvd. would say ‘It served her right cutting across the street like that!’ In this story in Luke we are told that a man sinned in the past and was murdered by Pilate. It has nothing to do with it. Then Jesus asked them, ‘Do you think that the eighteen upon whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them were worse offenders than the others who dwell in Jerusalem? I tell you, No; but unless you repent you will all likewise perish. On this level of the dream people think of getting even. It is a dream of confusion and people are reactivating, but man has to awaken and become an actor. On this present level man is always reflecting life, not knowing he is the cause of all he observes. But when he awakens from the dream and then becomes an actor. What percentage would have done what this lady in the car did? They would have reacted, or feasted on the fruit of the tree of good and evil. They would have had a violent reaction, and then they would have had a violent resistance from this dead universe. But this lady makes her dream and the whole thing comes to pass exactly as she pictured it, even to the number of blocks. You might almost think she had manufactured that little old lady in gray, but I tell you everything comes in response to our own wonderful imaginal activity. You can be anything in this world but you cannot know it or expect it to come unless you Act. If you react based on the past, you continue in the same pattern. To be the man you desire to be you must create the scene, as this lady did, and the whole world will be convulsed if that is necessary to bring it to pass. There is no other power but God, but God had to ‘forget’ he was God in this state of sleep, and then He awakens and consciously determines the conditions he wants in the world.

Well, everyone is going to confront that gorilla on the threshold. Every one has him, unseen by mortal eye, and he whispers into your ear to entertain the unlovely thoughts of the world. And your every reaction that is unlovely, it feeds upon it; and your every thought that is kind and wonderful and loving, she feeds upon it. And the day will come, you will be strong enough to confront this. And may I tell you? it will take you the twinkling of a second to dissolve it. You don’t labor upon it. All it needs is the core of integrity within you. When you pledge yourself, and no one else, – you don’t swear upon your mother, you don’t swear upon a friend, you don’t swear upon the Bible; you pledge yourself to redeem it. At the moment you pledge yourself, – and within you, you know you mean it, – the whole thing dissolves. It’s no time at all in dissolving. And then all the energy returns to you, and you are stronger than ever before to go forward now and eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. And if you go forward and misuse it again, you start another form building; and one day you will dissolve it again. Eventually you will become completely awakened, and you will use your wonderful power only – not for the good, – that tree will come to an end, – for Life itself. For, eating of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is this world. The day will come that you will eat of the Tree of Life that bears the fruit of truth and error. Error will embody itself here, and one day you will confront error, and the error will dissolve before your mind’s eye as truth begins to glow before you, because you are eating, then, of the Tree of Life as you formerly ate of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. And the combat of good and evil produces this monster, and the combat of truth and error produces an entirely different form of being, more glorious than that one of good and more horrible than this. The error will dissolve just as quickly when you confront error. So, if today your teaching is not true and you live by it, you are building something just as monstrous; but one day you will confront error, and you will discover that you lived by a false concept of God – something on the outside of Self; that you formerly worshipped, a little golden figure, made of gold and silver. It had eyes, but could not see. It had ears, but could not hear. It had a mouth, but could not speak. It had feet, and it could not walk. It made no sound within its throat. And those who made it are just like it. And those who trusted it are just like it, too. So, all the little icons in the world that people worship – these are the little things called “error”; and one day you will discover the true God. And when you discover the true God, you will find that He is all within your own wonderful being as your own wonderful human imagination. You’ll walk in the consciousness of being God. You don’t brag about it.

The man who is not prepared for the conscious plunge into the assumption of the wish fulfilled in the faith that it is the only way to the realization of his dream is not yet ready to live consciously by the law of assumption, although there is no doubt that he does live by the law of assumption unconsciously.

Before we can undergo a psychological change, we must become aware of the one to be changed, and we do this by keenly and uncritically observing our reactions to life. Many people are as yet unaware that there exists an inextricable link between our reactions and the conditions of our lives. This is because our reactions form the body of one’s true self, which is our state of consciousness.

In spite of your appearance of freedom of action, you obey as everything else does, the law of assumption. Whatever you may think of the question of free will, the truth is your experiences throughout your life are determined by your assumptions — whether conscious or unconscious. An assumption builds a bridge of incidents that lead inevitably to the fulfillment of itself.

Because creation is finished, what you desire already exists. It is excluded from view because you can see only the contents of your own consciousness. It is the function of an assumption to call back the excluded view and restore full vision. It is not the world, but your assumptions that change. An assumption brings the invisible into sight. It is nothing more nor less than seeing with the eye of God, i.e. imagination.

Man's chief delusion is his own conviction that there are causes other than his own state of consciousness. All that befalls a man — all that is done by him, all that comes from him — happens as a result of his state of consciousness. A man's consciousness is all that he thinks and desires and loves, all that he believes is true and consents to. That is why a change of consciousness is necessary before you can change your outer world. Rain falls as a result of a change in the temperature in the higher regions of the atmosphere, so in like manner, a change of circumstance happens as a result of a change in your state of consciousness.

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, visualise 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 mental image is changed into a seemingly solid reality.

Your imagination is able to do all that you ask in proportion to the degree of your attention. All progress, all fulfillment of desire depend upon the control and concentration of your attention. Attention is attracted from without when you are consciously with the external impressions of the immediate present... Your attention is directed from within when you deliberately choose what you will be preoccupied with mentally.

Therefore, you must turn from the objective appearance of things to the subjective centre of things, your consciousness, if you truly desire to know the cause of the phenomena of life, and how to use this knowledge to realise your fondest dreams. In the midst of the apparent contradictions, antagonisms and contrasts of your life, there is only one principle at work, only your consciousness operating. Difference does not consist in variety of substance, but in variety of arrangement of the same cause-substance, your consciousness.

What you must strive after is being. In order to do, it is necessary to be. The end of yearning is to be. Your concept of yourself can only be driven out of consciousness by another concept of yourself. By creating an ideal in your mind, you can identify yourself with it until you become one and the same with the ideal, thereby transforming yourself with it.

One of the greatest pitfalls in attempting to use the law of assumption is focusing your attention on things, on a new home, a better job, a bigger bank balance. This is not the righteousness without which you "die in your sins" [John 8:24]. Righteousness is not the thing itself; it is the consciousness, the feeling of already being the person you want to be, of already having the thing you desire.

If you had a different concept of yourself, everything would be different. You are what you are, so everything is as it is. The events which you observe are determined by the concept you have of yourself, the events ahead of you in time are altered, but thus altered, they form again a deterministic sequence starting from the moment of this changed concept. You are a being with powers of intervention, which enable you, by a change of consciousness, to alter the course of observed events — in fact, to change your future.

Thus the scriptures tell you that you must persist in rising to (assuming) the consciousness of your wish already being fulfilled. The promise is definite that if you are shameless in your impudence in assuming that you already have that which your senses deny, it shall be given unto you — your desire shall be attained.

To attempt to change the world before we change our concept of ourselves is to struggle against the nature of things. There can be no outer change until there is first an inner change. As within, so without. I am not advocating philosophical indifference when I suggest that we should imagine ourselves as already that which we want to be, living in a mental atmosphere of greatness, rather than using physical means and arguments to bring about the desired change. Everything we do, unaccompanied by a change of consciousness, is but futile readjustment of surfaces. However we toil or struggle, we can receive no more than our subconscious assumptions affirm.

If I be lifted up in consciousness to the naturalness of my desire, I shall automatically draw the manifestation unto me. Consciousness is the door through which life reveals itself. Consciousness is always objectifying itself.