The Frequency and Duration of Neville Goddard Imagining Exercises

10 seconds and out?
Sleep in it for a month?
Over and over until you are "there"?
Do nothing?

Two of the most puzzling aspects of trying to learn how to manifest from Neville Goddard's lectures are the duration and frequency of, well, doing it.

Neville learned the Law, as he called it, from Abdullah, an Ethiopian Jew who practiced and taught Kabbalah. Neville wanted to go to Barbados, and Abdullah told him, "You are IN Barbados." It took Neville a month to "get" it, a month of imagining that the wintry streets of New York were palm-lined dirt paths in balmy Barbados, and of imagining when he went to sleep at night that he was sleeping in his bed in his family home in Barbados. It took a month, but it manifested.

In Army boot camp, Neville wanted to be honorably discharged (per existing regulation) and back in New York with his wife and daughter. He imagined that he was in New York, and that he was NOT going back to the Army. The voice told him, "Do nothing," which he did, and nine days later he was on a train headed back to New York, honorably discharged.

Visiting Barbados again--this time with no way to leave the island--Neville imagined over and over and over in his room his boarding the ship as he would have to do in leaving, and the very next day the steamship company called to offer him passage.

Very often in his lectures Neville stressed to imagine exactly what you want "over and over and over, until it takes on all the tones of reality--until you are no longer thinking OF it, you are thinking FROM it."

Yet in "God's Law and His Promise," he says it shouldn't take anyone more than ten-seconds to bring what someone wants to your mind's eye and to hear them say that they have what they desired, to bring yourself to a state of vision that reaches a spiritual sense of climax that "it is done."

What is the catch? IT IS NOT HOW OFTEN NOR FOR HOW LONG ONE DOES IT, BUT HOW WELL.

From the month it took him to imagine being in Barbados at his beginning, to the 10 seconds he spent to hear a friend near his end, Neville through PRACTICE AND UNDERSTANDING grew in the ability to ACHIEVE QUALITY in his imagining. Eventually, "there" was a realm he could flit to in a heartbeat. What you wanted, he could almost instantly see AS DONE in the future, and being in the future in his mind, he could see and hear you there, too. How much time and effort we need to get there depends upon our skill in imagining well.

In the months before I was baptized in the Holy Spirit, I was learning how to meditate in an occult meditation workshop at the metaphysics bookstore in Honolulu. I didn't know at the time that I was being groomed for demon possession, but when the big moment came, I was shown what was going on and, leaving there, through events I was led to the House of Praise in Kaimuki where I accepted Jesus, and then to Grace Bible Church where, while praying for the gift of tongues I WAS ABLE TO USE THE SPIRITUAL TALENTS I HAD LEARNED IN THE MEDITATION CLASS TO CAST CONTROL OF SELF OUT OF MYSELF AND TO SURRENDER COMPLETELY TO THE SUPPORTING ARMS OF THE LORD. If he hadn't caught me, I would have fallen flat on my face.

My point is that I was not led by the deceiving spirit (which was but an illustration) but by the Lord Jesus Christ to learn spiritual skills--spiritual talents essential to my ability to release myself from my rebellion and to accept the Holy Spirit. I learned how to "un" myself well. I learned how to inwardly float with no effort to hold myself up and how to open up myself to another realm. Having completely surrendered my self-lordship to God's lordship, God welled up from deep within me in a display of his power and glory and I "received" that which had always been within me, that which I am, the consciousness of God, the Holy Spirit.

There are many, many people who have never heard of this stuff. And many of them suffer greatly. Yet this is scripture; it is the contents of the Bible which is published almost everywhere. It is the Gospel of Moses promulgated freely for the last three thousand years plus.. How to imagine well is what we all were supposed to learn from childhood, for it is our salvation. Salvation inside in the spirit, and salvation outside in the things that we need, are BIG things in our lives.

Frequency and duration, though . . . In Neville's book The Law and the Promise, page 19, a woman pained from a childhood accident, having heard of the Pruning Shears of Revision, sought to revise the accident that had caused her years of pain and suffering. It took her a considerable amount to time and effort to enter the reliving of the event, but at long last she was THERE: she could feel wind and the rush of the swing she had fallen from, the acceleration and the pause at its height. As a child she had jumped and landed wrong. But there again in her imagination, she jumped . . . and landed correctly. She ran to get her mother, to show her what she could do, and again and again she jumped for her imaginal mother. . . and landed correctly. Here is quality of imagining: she was healed of her back pains.

By the way, R. H. Jarrett in IT Works! (DeVorss, 1926) suggests writing down a list the things that you want and reading the list three times a day, and thinking of the things you want as often as possible. I am mindful that Neville kept a journal, and I keep half-sheets in my pockets at all times for writing down ideas that come to me (shower time is especially hard). I think it might be useful for you to write down what you want and, when you read the list, to go in imagination to the end you desire for each thing on the list. It goes without saying, of course, do not write down anything bad or anything you would not want anyone else to see, because then they almost certainly will.

And here is something you may not hear anywhere else: the manifestation of what you want, when it occurs, will be transitory. There is no permanent "end." We never reach "there" with nowhere else to go. But when what we do works, it is God right there in that working for that moment. If we could--gasp!--grab that moment ("Abel" in Genesis, and "Vanity" in Ecclesiastes), we would see God in the experience, and God would not be divided from us!
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Note Bueno added 11-28-2019:

Well, it is live and learn. Neville learned the causation by imagination process we call manifestation from Abdullah, a black Ethiopian Jew, in the 1930s. I do not think the terms beta, alpha, theta, and delta were bandied around much as states of consciousness back then. Neville learned to perform the process especially when falling asleep, and to work through the days events backwards as part of the process. It is my understanding that these exercises will lull a person into a theta state of consciousness, where imagination is the principle mode of thinking and communication with the subconscious and God, the Source of our thinking, is at its clearest.

The more practiced one is at getting into the theta state, I am informed, the easier it is to do. Mastering the process of theta-izing the mind would allow one to clearly "hear" the having of what was desired in the proverbial heartbeat, and not have to repeat it over and over and over to some level of reality it has already had.