"Try it!": Neville Goddard on Successful Prayer

I want nothing more than your success. So I suggest prayer. Prayer is powerful beyond all your imagination. Try it. Give prayer a chance. DO it.

I previously read the Bible as a record of literal history. I was wrong. It is all psychological. It largely teaches one person, you, how to pray, and it forms your conscious to be able to pray successfully. For when prayer works, you have found God. Where? In your skull as your imagination. THAT is God. God is your awareness of being, your "I am" consciousness. It is your imagination which says, "I am that 'I am'" (Exodus 3:14). God is your imagination which becomes everything you want to be, your Jehovah Jireh ("In the mount YHWH provides" -- Genesis 22:14).

There is the solution for you: "become everything you want to be" in prayer. If in prayer you become what to want to be, your imagination - God - will become in life what you have become in mind. You want to be successful. Become successful in your mind: "I am that." Be successful first in mind. Do not imagine the feeling of wanting to be successful. Imagine instead the feeling of success of BEING successful. It is your imagined experience which becomes your manifest experience.

You have to imagine it, though. Mentally become what you want--assume that what you want is really received, with praise and thanksgiving to God for it. This can be done on the run while engaged in a task, but in any case, prayer is "the feeling of fulfilled desire."

I have read Neville Goddard for years (I am a slow reader and an even slower learner). All of Neville's books and most of his lectures are about prayer (and almost all are available free on the Internet in text, pdf, and audio forms). Please allow me to present a bit of his Prayer - The Art of Believing, from his Resurrection compilation of books:

"The first requirement (of prayer) is a controlled imagination." (Parentheses mine. Prayer is not your idle thoughts or wishful thinking. It is your imagination controlled by you.)

"Its exercise requires tranquility and peace of mind." Prayer is not forced with effort.

"The universal law of reversibility is the foundation on which its (this book's) claims are based." Here is the weirdness which throws everyone off: the universal law of reversibility. What the heck is the universal law of reversibility? It is one of the most important laws, an element of God's nature, you will ever learn:

". . . all transformations of force are reversible. If heat can produce mechanical motion, so mechanical motion can produce heat. If electricity produces magnetism, magnetism too can develop electric currents. If the voice can cause undulatory currents, so can such currents reproduce the voice, and so on. Cause and effect, energy and matter, action and reaction are the same and inter-convertible."

The law of reversibility is the law, or principle, if you would, which allows for inverse transformation: cause and effect THE OTHER WAY. Instead of a cause causing an effect, you have an effect causing a cause. Prayer rides this pony. Your mentally imagined prayer establishes an effect. THAT is “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1):

"If a physical fact can produce a psychological state, a psychological state can produce a physical fact. If the effect (a) can be produced by the cause (b), then inversely, the effect (b) can be produced by the cause (a). 'Therefore I say unto you, what things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye have received them, and ye shall have them' (Mark 11:24 E.R.V.).

"If your realized prayer produces in you a definite feeling or state of consciousness, then, inversely, that particular feeling or state of consciousness must produce your realized prayer. Because all transformations of force are reversible, you should always assume the feeling of your fulfilled wish. You should awaken within you the feeling that you are and have that which heretofore you desired to be and possess. This is easily done by contemplating the joy that would be yours were your objective an accomplished fact, so that you live and move and have your being in the feeling that your wish is realized."
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Chapter two of Prayer - The Art of Believing, deals with the dual nature of consciousness: awareness and the subconscious. "What we are conscious of is constructed out of what we are not conscious of. Not only do our subconscious assumptions influence our behavior but they also fashion the pattern of our objective existence." " Through prayer, the subconscious is suggested into acceptance of the wish fulfilled, and, reasoning deductively, logically unfolds it to its legitimate end."

"Man transmits ideas to the subconscious through his feelings. The subconscious transmits ideas from mind to mind through telepathy. Your unexpressed convictions of others are transmitted to them without their conscious knowledge or consent, and if subconsciously accepted by them will influence their behavior. The only ideas they subconsciously reject are your ideas of them which they could not wish to be true of anyone. Whatever they could wish for others can be believed of them, and by the law of belief which governs subjective reasoning, they are compelled to subjectively accept, and therefore objectively express, accordingly."
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"PRAYERS are not successfully made unless there is a rapport between the conscious and subconscious mind of the operator. This is done through imagination and faith. By the power of imagination all men, certainly imaginative men, are forever casting forth enchantments, and all men, especially unimaginative men, are continually passing under their power." You want to be the imaginative one: "the only restraint he can obey is the mysterious instinct that teaches him to eliminate all moods other than the mood of the fulfilled desire."

"Imagination and faith are the only faculties of the mind needed to create objective conditions. The faith required for the successful operation of the law of consciousness is a purely subjective faith and is attainable upon the cessation of active opposition on the part of the objective mind of the operator. It depends on your ability to feel and accept as true what your
objective senses deny.

"Neither the passivity of the subject nor his conscious agreement with your suggestion is necessary, for without his consent or knowledge he can be given a subjective order which he must objectively express. It is a fundamental law of consciousness that by telepathy we can have immediate communion with another.

"To establish rapport, you call the subject mentally. Focus your attention on him and mentally shout his name just as you would to attract the attention of anyone. Imagine that he answered, and mentally hear his voice. Represent him to yourself inwardly in the state you want him to obtain. Then imagine that he is telling you in the tones of ordinary conversation what you want to hear. Mentally answer him. Tell him of your joy in witnessing his good fortune. Having mentally heard with all the distinctness of reality that which you wanted to hear and having thrilled to the news heard, return to objective consciousness. Your subjective conversation must awaken what it affirmed."

". . . get into the spirit of these mental conversations and give them the same degree of reality that you would a telephone conversation. 'If thou canst believe, all things are possible to him that believeth' (Mark 9:23). 'Therefore, I say unto you, what things soever you desire, when you pray, believe that ye received them, and ye shall have them' (Mark 11:24). The acceptance of the end wills the means. And the wisest reflection could not devise more effective means than those which are willed by the acceptance of the end. Mentally talk to your friends as though your desires for them were already realized."
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Please see the rest of Prayer - The Art of Believing, and the other books in Resurrection.

See More Neville on Successful Prayer