Skip to content

Out of this World (1949) by Neville Goddard

Channel: Master Key Society
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aO_XltYHGWc

Neville Goddard's short book arguing that the future is not fixed but chosen: by "thinking fourth-dimensionally" - assuming in a drowsy, relaxed state the feeling of the wish already fulfilled - a man alters his future to match his own concept of himself.

Key points

The future is flexible and set by attitude, not act

  • Neville opens from his own claimed experience of observing events before they happened in the three-dimensional world; if an event can be seen before it occurs, life proceeds "according to plan" and that plan exists in another dimension slowly moving through our space.
  • Man can alter his future. Once altered, it forms a new deterministic sequence from the point of interference. The future is determined by attitudes, not acts.
  • The cornerstone of all things is "man's concept of himself." He acts and experiences as he does only because his self-concept is what it is; change the concept and the future changes automatically. All changes take place in consciousness.

Two ways of seeing: the natural and the spiritual focus

  • Everyone has a natural focus (ordinary waking consciousness governed by the senses, called "the carnal mind") and a spiritual focus (controlled imagination governed by desire, "the mind of Christ").
  • The natural view confines reality to the present moment; the spiritual view sees past and future as a present whole, events as concrete and objective. To cultivate it, deliberately disentangle the mind from the senses and focus attention on an invisible state, feeling it until it has the distinctness of reality.

Desire is the engine

  • Desire is the mainspring of action; nothing is done without a desire dominating the mind. A desire is an awareness of something lacked; there is "no absolutely unselfish desire."
  • The spiritual man speaks to the natural man through desire, and obedience to its voice is "an immediate assumption of the wish fulfilled." To desire a state rightly is to have it: by assuming the feeling of the wish fulfilled and living from that conviction, man alters the future in harmony with the assumption. "Assumptions awaken what they affirm."

The technique for changing the future

  • Three steps, restated twice in the book: (1) Define your objective - know definitely what you want. (2) Construct a single event you would encounter after the desire is fulfilled - one with "the action of self predominant" (e.g. being congratulated on a promotion). (3) Immobilize the body and induce a drowsy state akin to sleep, then mentally feel yourself INTO the action, performing it here and now.
  • Crucial distinction: you must participate in the imagined action (feel the friend's solid hand, carry on the conversation), not watch yourself at a distance as if on a movie screen. "Make elsewhere here, and the future now." Feeling yourself in action versus visualizing yourself in action is "the difference between success and failure."
  • Restrict the imagined act to a single condensed action and re-enact it over and over until it feels real, or the mind wanders off along associational tracks. Maintain it with the minimum of effort - "attention without effort" is why the drowsy state works, but do not push through into actual sleep (unless the aim is a conscious projection out of the body).
  • A "lullaby" variant: in the sleepy state repeat a short phrase implying fulfillment, such as "Thank you," as though addressing a higher power that has already done it.
  • Assumptions "though unreal to the senses, if persisted in, until they have the feeling of reality, will harden into facts." An assumption enlists all means toward its own realization; "how the waking dream becomes physical fact is not our concern."

The fourth dimension and the Serial Universe

  • A dimension is any way of measuring a thing entirely different from the others. Time is a fourth way to measure an object (its lifespan), independent of length, width, height. The more dimensions, the more real and substantial a thing is; time's new quality is "changeability."
  • A point is a cross-section of a line, a line of a surface, a surface of a solid, and a solid a cross-section of a four-dimensional body. So the person you meet is a cross-section of a four-dimensional self spanning every moment from birth to death, all coexisting.
  • Because the four-dimensional world is "slowly passing through" our three-dimensional one, and the future already exists there, moving along time's length lets us see and rearrange it. Neville uses the analogy of the printed page: we read words singly and successively, but all the words are equally present and could be rearranged to tell a different story. A dream is "uncontrolled four-dimensional thinking" - the rearrangement of past and future sensory impressions (he recounts a dream whose fused fragments he then met, rearranged, the next day).
  • Retreating further into the inner mind externalizes time again and enlarges space, implying an infinite series of dimensionally larger worlds - the "Serial Universe." In practice we need only two: the world known through the bodily organs and the world perceived independently of them.

Imagination is the man; there is no one to change but self

  • "Man's imagination is the man himself, and the world as imagination sees it is the real world." Neville says he schooled himself not in courses but in sitting for hours imagining himself other than his senses dictated, until passersby became part of his fantasy and behaved as he imagined them.
  • To "know the truth" of a neighbor is to assume he is already what he desires to be; any concept short of his fulfilled desire is a false judgment. We must deny the evidence of the senses and imagine only "the lovely and of good report," because imagination serves evil as swiftly as good.
  • "I AM" is the self-definition of the absolute, the root from which everything grows. Your answer to "Who am I?" - your concept of self - need not conform to external reality ("Let the weak say, I am strong"). New Year's resolutions die because they are "severed from their root," the sense of I-am-ness.
  • All outer change requires prior inner change: "As within, so without." No help comes from without; we can receive no more than our assumptions affirm, and to protest what happens to us is to protest "the law of our being." Neville closes with his mystical vision at sea of healing a multitude at the Pool of Bethesda after meditating on "the perfect state," offered as proof that transforming self reshapes the world.

The book is dense with scriptural quotation (John, Romans, Job, Joel), which Neville reads not as history but as psychological law - all that was said of God is said of "man's consciousness." These are New Thought / law-of-assumption metaphysical claims presented as fact; Neville offers his own experiences as the only evidence and concedes his "own many failures" at mastering attention.

Reception

  • Overwhelmingly devotional. Commenters treat Neville as a near-prophet and this as one of his essential texts; the top-liked notes are blessings, affirmations, and "I am" declarations rather than discussion.
  • Many share personal manifestation testimonies as proof it works: a woman who moved from NYC to New Orleans and rebuilt her life, a "food witch" who visualized meals and had people feed her for a year, someone who pictured a repaired car bumper and then had it fixed via another's insurance after a crash. Several say they were doing this instinctively long before they knew Neville's name.
  • The narration draws repeated, specific praise ("the audio narrator is exceptional," "he made the book even better"), and one recurring in-joke is love for the cabinet-opening sound effect that signals "new knowledge is about to be unlocked."
  • A strong thread reads Neville through scripture - that the Bible is misunderstood, that "I AM" means God is within and needs no church or intermediary. Commenters cross-recommend the wider New Thought canon: Florence Scovel Shinn, Joseph Murphy, Bob Proctor, Abraham Hicks, Abdullah (named as Neville's teacher).
  • The main pushback is Christian: at least one commenter argues that removing God's will and the Holy Spirit turns the method into "magic," and that a Christian reader would need to fold prayer and submission to God into each step.
  • The common refrain is that these readings are meant to be heard many times - "PLEASE listen more than once, to each word" - with listeners reporting they return to the book repeatedly and always find something new.