Book Review: The Power of Awareness by Neville Goddard

I will open with a video discussing the book followed by remarks based on reading the book.

Introductory Video

The following video by Daniel Moreno about the book The Power of Awareness by Neville Goddard, summarizes a number of points (14:43 minutes).

Moreno begins by observing the two layers of the mind, the conscious and the much larger and more powerful subconscious (SC). Up to 95% of your mental activity is below your awareness. The SC does not reason or think, it responds to repetition and emotion.

Your inner life is the blueprint of your world and not the product of it.

The SC is in its most permeable state in that period just before and after sleep called the hypnagogic state. The SC is programmable. Feeling, imagery and repetition are what program the SC through the RAS. Techniques to reprogram the SC include:

1. Autosuggestion. A phrase repeated in the hypnagogic state. Imagination engaged with emotion (feeling) and repetition (IER) wins over will power.
2. Sensory saturation. Involve as many sensory channels as possible when imagining what you want.
3. The revision technique. The emotional charge of past events (memories) can be changed by imagining the event with a positive outcome.
4. Repeat every day without change. Consistency is important so as not to confuse the SC.

Understanding this does nothing in itself. Actual application of the following principles is necessary:do

1. Identify the emotional state that you want to inhabit. This is how you will feel when your goal is met.
2. Find your hypnagogic window before and after sleep.
3. Imagine with as much sensory detail as possible, being in the desired state.

Extracting from the Book¹

1. I AM

This is the fundamental basis from which you generate a concept of your unique self. I AM is the awareness of being. It is the manifestation of consciousness in innumerable forms while being constant. Different concepts of oneself define different arrangements of the underlying substance

One’s concept of oneself determines one’s life. Consciousness is the one and only reality.

2. Consciousness

Consciousness is the first cause substance from which all is made and must in turn remain consciousness. Consciousness is the one and only reality and therefore the only substance. All of what we consider to be reality must be from it. Since our reality emerges from our consciousness, that is where we must turn to change it.

The concepts that we hold in our mind are what create the world that we know. The concept that we hold of our selves is what determines our nature. The ultimate substance of all things is consciousness.

3. Power Of Assumption

You have to change your consciousness before you change your outer world. To change your thoughts you need new ideas. Change begins with desire to change. This comes from your imagination. Imagination is the only redemptive power in the universe.

The next step is identify the feeling and state of the new state and dwell on this feeling until it becomes real. To become the new state you must be fully conscious of it by living it. Assume you have or are what you want already and live accordingly. Reality will catch up. This is faith.

4. Desire

To attain an ideal you must imagine that you are already that ideal. You must assume the feeling of the wish fulfilled until your assumption has all the sensory vividness of reality.

The assumption of the feeling of the wish fulfilled makes the future dream a present fact. This begins with desire and ends in the faith of fulfillment which becomes manifest.

5. The Truth That Sets You Free

Your life is determined by your assumptions. You must attain conscious control of your imagination. 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 be fulfilled.

6. Attention

The power of desire is proportional to the degree of attention focused on it. The power of attention is a measure of your inner force. Focus attention on the feeling of the wish fulfilled excluding distractions.

As an exercise to develop your attention, in the hypnagogic state at bedtime, review the days activities backward from climbing into bed to arising in the morning. It is necessary to strengthen your attention to control the focus of your imagination.

7. Attitude

Assumptions and expectations govern what we see and do. They affect or create attitudes that subtly manifest in our behaviour and thereby create a reactive behaviour in others. By controlling our imagination and feelings to other we can ameliorate relationship.

8. Renunciation

Attempting to resist something keeps it present and strengthens it. Renouncing by turning away defeats it. Control your imagination by turning away from undesirable thoughts to ones that are positive and uplifting. By pruning undesirable and wasteful thoughts and cultivating a positive imagination your life will be transformed.

9. Preparing Your Place

In your concept of self claim that which is good and true. Your experiences in life are the result of your assumptions and not directly your will. You go and prepare a place for yourself by imagining yourself into the feeling of your wish
fulfilled.

10. Creation

Creativeness is only becoming aware of what already is. Creation is finished. We experience what already is. Our concept of self is what determines the self that we experience. Concepts determine the route that attention follows.

11. Interference

You can change the concept of yourself raising your vibration and causing change in your reality. Imagination forms consciousness into concepts which manifest the physical world. Your imagination is the only redemptive power.

12. Subjective Control

Your imagination is able to do all that you ask in proportion to the degree of your attention. This requires control and concentration. You must be able to achieve control of your imagination by shutting out attractions of the objective world and using the mind to focus attention under your control.

13. Acceptance

The world that we harvest is that which is the focus of our attention. Desire, attention and focus on the feeling of the desired state. When absorption reaches the state of complete acceptance the state can manifest in reality.

14. The Effortless Way

The path of least energy is the path of least action times the least time. Assumption works like this as attention minus effort. All aspects of the visible world are the result of assumptions. Assumptions can be controlled only in the present moment. Movement between states is done through fulfilled assumption.

15. The Crown Of The Mysteries

Assumption is the key to fulfillment, it is equivalent to belief. Assumption is the highest use of consciousness. The assumption guides all your subconscious activities towards an objective manifestation.

16. Personal Impotence

Self surrender is necessary. You can only yield or conform to your assumptions. You can in no way effect change otherwise.

17. All Things Are Possible

Rest in the assumption that you are already what you want to be, for, in that determined assumption,
you and your Infinite Being are merged in creative unity. He says that whatever you would imagine and assume to be true will come to pass.

As an aside, if there are an infinite number of possible realities as some maintain, then this may be the means of moving your consciousness to ther reality that you desire.

18. Be Ye Doers

Knowing the possibilities that you can achieve, you must do to put them into effect. The dynamic prevails over the passive.

19. Essentials

There are three points:

1. Desire
2. Physical immobility leading to increased mental energy.
3. The assumption of the wish already fulfilled

20. Righteousness

Righteousness is the consciousness of already being conscious of what you want to be. All else follows from this.

21. Free Will

Your assumptions, conscious or unconscious, direct all thought and action to their fulfillment. Free will can only operate in making your assumptions. Further than that is illusion. You have complete free will in choosing your assumptions but none over how they are implemented.

22. Persistence

You must persist in the consciousness of what you desire.

23. Case Histories

Eight examples of people using the Law of Assumption to attain what they wanted. The intensity and completeness of the imagined state plus persistence which in one case went for two years stand out.

24. Failure

Success of an outcome is proportional to how seriously you feel natural about its outcome. It comes down to the imagination and filling ones consciousness with it. Errors or weaknesses in your consciousness which lead to failure can be overcome when identified and corrected with discipline.

25. Faith

Faith is the confidence in and the experience of that which you desire. Faith is an activity of your own consciousness. Faith is the belief in the reality of what your consciousness assumes. You are consciousness and as such are a god, a creator( and co-creator).

26. Destiny

Every moment you create your own destiny. All the good and bad you create. Through your desire you create your destiny.

27. Reverence

The knowledge that your creator is the very self of yourself and never would have made you had he not loved you must fill your heart with reverence.

Key Points

1. I AM is the fundamental awareness of self.
2. Consciousness is the basis for all that is and from which all is constructed as part of itself.
3. Imagination is the basis from which we star with desire to change. We build concepts of our selves and the world. These form the basis of our reality.
4. One must fully live the experience of the new state for it to manifest.
5. The degree of attention to the new state determines the effectiveness of fulfillment.
6. Control of ones imagination is key.

Resources

1. The Power of Awareness. Global Bookshelf (PDF).
2. The Power of Awareness. Internet Archive (PDF).
3. Spiritual Quest – Neville Goddard – Collection. (PDF)

Articles in This Series

Refer to the series index in Gnostic Wisdom.

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