Feeling Is The Secret
In brief
Feeling Is The Secret, published in 1944 by Neville Goddard, is a concise practical manual of New Thought instruction on the disciplined use of imagination and feeling. Its central claim is that consciousness is the sole cause and substance of experience, and that a settled inner feeling impressed upon the subconscious determines the outer conditions of life.
Key ideas
- The visible world is consciousness objectified rather than an independent reality
- Consciousness alone is the cause and substance of all experience
- Sleep is the natural threshold at which the waking mind impresses the subconscious
- Prayer is a controlled entrance into the subconscious rather than petition to an external power
- Assumed feeling, not effort or struggle, is the operative force that shapes outer conditions
You already know what you want. What you have not been told is the single feeling that hands it to you. Inside is the mechanism behind the visible world, and the one door you pass through nightly without noticing you hold the key.
This Book Is: Manifestation · Consciousness · Spirituality
Chapters
Feeling is the secret to manifesting your desires.
About This Book
There is a law older than any scripture, quieter than any doctrine, and more immediate than any ritual: the law that the inner state of the one who seeks determines what the outer world must become. "Feeling Is the Secret" is Neville Goddard's most precise formulation of this law. It is not a book about positive thinking, nor a manual of affirmations. It is a map of the relationship between consciousness and creation, written for the student who has grown weary of techniques that work upon the surface of the mind while leaving its depths undisturbed.
Neville draws the student's attention to a threshold that every human being crosses each night without ceremony and almost without notice: the boundary between waking and sleep. It is at this hypnagogic frontier, he teaches, that the subconscious mind becomes fully receptive, not to words alone, but to the saturated inner knowing he calls feeling. Feeling, in Neville's precise usage, is not emotion in the common sense. It is the assuming of a state, the quiet, convincing sense of a wish already fulfilled. The subconscious, which knows no future and no past, receives this impressed feeling as present fact, and then labors, by ways invisible to the reasoning mind, to extrude that fact into the waking world.
The territory this book opens is fundamentally spiritual, not merely practical. Neville is writing within a current that flows from Hermeticism through William Blake and into the New Thought tradition, but his voice is his own. Where others counsel effort, he counsels stillness. Where others teach the student to pursue desire, he teaches the student to inhabit its fulfillment. The shift he calls for is a shift in identity, not in activity, a realization that consciousness itself is the only causative agent, and that what one truly is in feeling, one will inevitably become in experience.
To enter this text as an initiate rather than a casual reader is to accept a discipline: the discipline of monitoring the inner life with the same care one might bring to any sacred practice. Neville asks nothing of the student that cannot be done in the silence between sleeping and waking. Yet what he asks in that silence is everything, for it is there that the boundary between the self who wishes and the self who knows dissolves, and the secret Neville speaks of is at last no longer a secret at all.
More like this
As a Man Thinketh
1903 · 38 min read
You blame the circumstance. Allen turns you toward the seed that grew it. Every condition you call fate began as a thought you never questioned, and he will show you the garden before he hands you the tools to tend it.
How To Manifest Your Desires
· 95 min read
You already possess the one faculty capable of reshaping every circumstance of your life, yet most people direct it by accident rather than by will. Neville Goddard restores imagination to its rightful throne, not as a pleasant diversion but as the very mechanism by which the universe organises itself around the inner life of a person. The question this work leaves open is the one you will carry long after the final page: what are you, even now, silently assuming to be true?
In Tune with the Infinite
1897 · 4h read
You have looked outward for the cause of your troubles and the source of your strength. Trine holds that both were always within, and that one realization, lived rather than merely believed, reorders health, peace, power, and plenty. What that realization is, and how it is kept, he makes plain.
About this edition
First published 1944.
The Catalog of Copyright Entries lists this book with a copyright date of 15 December 1944 and the number A185912. A search of the copyright renewal registers for 1950 to 1977 found no renewal for it, and those same registers do carry renewals of other works first copyrighted in December 1944, so the relevant pages are covered. Finding no renewal is evidence rather than proof, and no search report has been obtained from the Copyright Office.
Presented as a reading edition by Better Thought. Typography, chapter titles and glossary links are ours. The words are the author's.
The Master Key Experience
The books teach the law.
The Experience trains it.
A 24-week guided journey through the laws of mind: weekly gates, lessons drawn from the texts in this library, and a living companion that remembers you.
Begin the ExperienceFree · Begin without an account