The Power of Awareness

Neville Goddard · Book · 1952

If Live In The End is the lecture I hand a stranger, this is the book I tell them to live with. Neville published it in 1952, and the first chapter, I AM, is the foundation everything else he ever taught stands on. Get this one chapter and you have the engine. The other twenty-six chapters are the working out.

The key passage

"When you know that consciousness is the one and only reality... 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." Chapter 1, I AM

What he is actually telling you

Second causes. That is his name for the excuses, and he means all of them. The economy did it. My boss did it. My childhood did it. As long as you believe the cause of your life is out there somewhere, you will keep trying to fix your life out there, and Neville says the out there is a mirror. His own summary sits at the front of the book: "Leave the mirror and change your face. Leave the world alone and change your conceptions of yourself."

And here is the part that stings a little. You are doing this all day already. Most of us walk around marinating in a low-grade feeling that things are not quite working out for us, and minor annoyances blow us around like a leaf in the wind, no anchor. That is an assumption too, just an unconscious one. Once you decide this book is telling the truth, the excuses run out. The state you live in is yours, and you take control of it.

What runs your life, he says, is your concept of yourself, the "I am" you are living from. And the way a concept becomes your world is assumption. Chapter 4, in one sentence: "an assumption, though false, if persisted in will harden into fact."

An assumption, run on purpose, is not a sentence you repeat at a mirror. It is a movie you move into, rich and visual, with the feeling turned all the way up. Dr. Joe Dispenza puts it this way: you fall so in love with the imagined self that when you open your eyes, it is almost a surprise you are not there yet. Neville would call that the state made natural. A picture without the feeling is a photograph. The movie plus the feeling is the assumption.

It is always at work

Understand this and the book changes temperature. The power of awareness does not clock in on the days you remember to use it. The I AM is at work all day, every day, in the states you accept without arguing. It was at work in the leaf-in-the-wind years too. It is always running. The only fork in the road is this: you direct it, or you let it direct you. You act, or you are acted upon. Those are the only two settings it has.

And here is the choice the whole book keeps handing you. The Bible says a house divided against itself cannot stand, and your inner life obeys it exactly. If your answer is yes in the morning and no by lunch, good luck, you will get the mixture. If your answer is no, then enjoy the no, because that is what a held no produces. If your answer is yes, and you hold it, the yes cannot help but harden. You can watch a small slice of people, call them the one percent, who move with so much direction and faith that their ideas cannot help but come to fruition. They do not have a different law. They just stopped splitting the house. Somebody's state is getting pressed into tomorrow every single night, like Neville's winepress. The only question this book leaves you is whether it is going to be yours.

How this works today

Run his diagnosis on an ordinary week. Listen to your own sentences. Every time you hear yourself say "I would, if it were not for..." you have just named a second cause and handed it the keys. I catch mine around work and money, the same places most people do. Neville is not asking you to deny that bosses and economies exist. He is asking who is in charge of the one thing that is actually yours: the state you meet them from.

Then test the other direction, small. My standing test is a phone call. Before I dial, I take thirty seconds and feel the call already done, the other person glad to hear from me, the thing handled. I am not scripting them. I am changing the face in the mirror, mine, and then I make the call and watch what walks in.

And when you open your eyes from a bigger movie and you are plainly not there yet, do not collapse into the old feeling. That gap is where the action comes from. Not forced action, not panic. Divinely inspired action: the natural next step of the person in the end, taken from the state instead of from the worry. The feeling puts you in the right place. Then you move from there.

Tonight's practice

1. Name one second cause you blamed today. Say it plainly.
2. Underneath it, name the "I am" you were actually living from.
3. Pick one small end for tonight, as small as a phone call going well, and run it like a movie, not a photograph. See it, hear it, and fall into the feeling of it until opening your eyes is the surprise.
4. Before sleep, feel it done for thirty seconds. Not hoped. Done.

Start with the whole practice

The full nightly version of tonight's practice is the SATS practice in the Playbook Starter, one of the seven practices I use every day. It is free.

Get the Playbook Starter