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Your Faith is Your Fortune (1941) by Neville Goddard

Channel: Master Key Society
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLRQtQvkM30

Neville Goddard's early statement of the law of assumption: your own awareness of being - "I AM" - is God, and you become whatever you assume and feel yourself to be. Read across 27 short chapters that reinterpret the Bible as a psychological drama about states of consciousness, not history.

Key points

The central claim: I AM is God

  • Your consciousness, your awareness of being, IS God - the only creator. There is no God apart from yourself. "Be still and know that I am God" means know that the very awareness that you exist is the creative power.
  • The unconditioned "I AM" is formless and faceless; it conditions itself by imagining itself to be something, and then becomes that. "First conceiving, then becoming that conceived" is how all things come out of nothing.
  • The conceiver is always greater than the conception. "I and my father are one, but my father is greater than I" = you and your self-image are one, but the awareness behind it precedes and outlasts every image.

The world is consciousness objectified

  • The outer world is a mirror; it reflects and magnifies whatever you are conscious of being. Do not try to change the world by force - "as fruitless as breaking a mirror to change your face." Change your conception of yourself and the reflection changes.
  • Expressions follow impressions; they never precede them. "Seeing is believing" must be reversed to "believing is seeing." Proof follows the claim, it does not come first.
  • You are not a victim of fate but of faith - your own. The faith that moves mountains is faith in yourself; no one has faith in God who lacks confidence in himself.

The technique: assume the wish fulfilled

  • Decide exactly what you want to be or have. Take attention entirely off the problem and place it on the desired end.
  • Enter the drowsy, receptive state: close your eyes, feel yourself faceless and formless, and repeat "I am, I am" until you lose all sense of the world and feel yourself floating/expanding. In this state impress the new conception by feeling "I am that" - the thing desired - until it thrills through you and a conviction is born.
  • Assume the consciousness of the wish already realized. Live in the feeling of the end as a present fact ("I am," never "I shall be" - the future tense is a confession of lack). "Let the weak say, I am strong."
  • Once the conviction is fixed, cry "It is finished," then rest. Walk unmoved through the interval, refusing to react to appearances or the evidence of the senses, confident it will embody itself in a way you need not plan ("my ways are past finding out").

Rebirth = changing states of consciousness

  • To "be born again" is simply to drop the state you are identified with and rise to the state you desire. You cannot serve two states at once; taking attention off one, you die to it and live in the other.
  • You cannot carry any part of the old consciousness into the new state ("new wine into old bottles"). Deny your present identity by taking your attention off it.
  • "To him that hath, shall be given" is a just, impersonal law, not a cruel one: you magnify whatever you are conscious of being, good or bad. The rich get richer because consciousness fills full the state it dwells in. Redistributed wealth returns to its former holders because consciousness is unchanged.

The Bible read psychologically

  • Every Bible character and story is a state of consciousness or a drama within man, not a historical person or event. The priesthoods erred by teaching people to worship the characters as real people.
  • Christmas is fixed (Dec 25) and Easter is movable because they are astronomical/agricultural markers (the sun's turn north; the first Sunday after the full moon in Aries) dramatizing an inner event - the birth and resurrection of a new state of consciousness in man - not the anniversaries of a man's life.
  • The virgin birth: your unconditioned consciousness (Mary) conceives a desire "without the aid of man" and, unaided, gives it birth. "Go and do likewise."
  • Crucifixion and resurrection: consciousness (I AM) is "crossed" or nailed by feeling itself to be the thing desired (the two - the desirer and the desire - fuse); the resurrection is that fixed state becoming visible. Good Friday is cause for rejoicing, not mourning.
  • Gethsemane means "to press out an oily substance" - the garden of creation, the joyful state in which you press out (generate) your defined desire by losing yourself in the feeling of already being it.
  • Joshua at Jericho is a "formula for victory": ignore the walls (obstacles), send in Rahab (your capacity to travel psychologically into any state), feel yourself already inside the city (the desired state) until you get the reaction of satisfaction, then rest (the seventh trumpet blast) and let it embody itself.
  • Other allegories read the same way: Daniel in the lions' den (turn your back on the problem, face the light that is God, feel the desired freedom); Elijah reviving the widow's child (consciousness breathes life into a dead desire); the disciples fishing on the right side (seek in consciousness, in the "deep waters," for the thing desired); the Count of Monte Cristo (man forgets he is God, is imprisoned, rediscovers the "ancient one" within, and rises reborn).

Prayer, the Trinity, and the twelve disciples

  • Prayer is not begging a God who does not exist; it is a "spiritual marriage" in which you relinquish your present nature and assume the nature of the thing prayed for. "When ye pray, believe that ye receive, and ye shall have."
  • The Trinity is three aspects of your own consciousness: the Father (the impressing/male aspect), the Mother (the receptive womb that receives impressions), and the Son (the visible expression that bears witness of the impression).
  • The twelve disciples are twelve faculties of mind to be disciplined: Simon Peter (disciplined hearing - admit only impressions you choose), Andrew (courage/faith in oneself), James (just judgment) and John (love), Philip (making the word flesh), Bartholomew (imagination - what most separates man from man), Thomas (disciplined denial/indifference to unwanted suggestion), Matthew (seeing desires as gifts of God), James son of Alphaeus (discernment/true clairvoyance), Thaddeus (praise and thanksgiving), Simon of Canaan (hearing only good news), and Judas (detachment - dying to what you are so as to become what you desire; his "suicide" is the disciplined letting-go, not betrayal).

Other threads

  • Stop looking for external masters, adepts, or ascended beings - "only slaves have masters." There is one master, the I AM within. Pseudo-teachers who sell initiation lead seekers to a mirage; the disillusionment is itself the first real initiation.
  • Throw the "money changers" out of the temple: your belief in the power of drugs, diets, money, or any external thing is a false god. It is your belief in the thing, not the thing itself, that acts.
  • Stop condemning yourself and others. "To the pure all things are pure"; the world condemns you only as long as you condemn yourself. Do not ask whether you are worthy to claim your desire - simply claim it.
  • Spiritual circumcision is stripping away the veils of race, nation, family, and finally the belief that you are "man" at all, to reveal the formless awareness beneath.
  • The "interval of time" technique: because people lose faith when a desire does not manifest at once, mentally travel to a natural future point (e.g. feel it is already Sunday when today is Wednesday), live in the joy of the fulfilled wish there, then return - creating a vacuum that nature rushes to fill.
  • Everything is "liquid light" (consciousness) crystallized at different velocities; your conception of yourself sets the velocity that expresses it.

Note: this is a New Thought / law-of-assumption text; its metaphysical claims (that consciousness is the sole cause of all events, that disease and circumstance yield to changed feeling) are presented by Neville as fact and are reported here as his teaching, not endorsed. The book cites cured incurables and cleared debts as anecdote, without evidence.