Neville Goddard — Imagination Creates Reality, The Law of Assumption | Self Growth Videos

Neville Lancelot Goddard was born February 19, 1905 in St. Michael, Barbados, one of ten children in a large white Barbadian merchant family. He moved to New York City alone at age seventeen to study the theater. He became a professional dancer — touring Europe in a two-man act, performing on Broadway and in ballet companies through his twenties. By his late twenties he had begun shifting his attention toward mysticism.

In 1933 Neville met Abdullah — an Ethiopian rabbi and teacher living in Harlem who became the single most important influence on his life. Neville studied under Abdullah for seven years. Abdullah drilled him in Hebrew, the Kabbalah, the esoteric interpretation of the Bible, and the specific psychological exercise Neville would spend the rest of his life teaching: imagining a scene that implies the fulfillment of your desire, feeling it as real, and sustaining that feeling long enough for the imagining to impress itself on what Neville called “the subconscious.”

Neville launched his public teaching career in the early 1940s with a series of small New York lectures and slim pamphlet-sized books — At Your Command (1939), Your Faith Is Your Fortune (1941), Feeling Is the Secret (1944), Out of This World (1949), The Power of Awareness (1952), Awakened Imagination (1954), The Law and the Promise (1961), and The Pruning Shears of Revision (1954). The books are short — most are under 100 pages — direct, and organized around the single claim that the stories you persistently imagine about your life are the stories that eventually materialize as your life.

He spent four decades on the American lecture circuit — San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Washington D.C., Chicago, across dozens of cities — delivering thousands of talks to small but devoted audiences. His lectures were almost always recorded or transcribed; thousands of transcripts survive. He never sought celebrity. He was a figure known inside the New Thought movement of the mid-20th century and nearly invisible outside it.

He died of an apparent stroke on October 1, 1972 in Los Angeles at age 67. His work passed into the small community of New Thought libraries, antiquarian booksellers, and a handful of devoted students who kept the transcripts alive by mimeographing and mailing them to one another through the 1980s and 1990s.

The rediscovery began around 2010. His books entered the public domain. YouTube creators started reading his lectures verbatim as audiobooks. By 2020 channels dedicated entirely to reading Neville’s transcripts had accumulated tens of millions of views. TikTok’s manifestation community — which peaked through 2020–2023 during the pandemic years — adopted Neville as a founding figure, frequently misquoting him but reliably pointing people back to his primary texts. The 2022 Mitch Horowitz biographical book At Your Command: Neville Goddard and the Modern Mystic brought him into serious contemporary publishing for the first time. His lecture archive is now more widely available than at any point during or since his lifetime.

His central teaching, compressed: the entire external world is a projection of consciousness. What you assume yourself to be and what you persistently imagine becomes, in time, your experienced reality. “Feeling is the secret” — the feeling of the wish fulfilled, sustained in a drowsy state akin to sleep, is the specific psychological act that brings imagined conditions into outer fact. There is only one power; you are it. God is your own wonderful human imagination. Do the imaginative work, and let the world catch up.