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The man who said you are already there

Who was Neville Goddard?

  • 1905 to 1972
  • 10 books
  • 310 transcripts searched

Neville Goddard (1905 to 1972) was a dancer from Barbados who became a New York and Los Angeles teacher, publishing under the single name Neville. He taught that human imagination is God, and that when you assume the feeling of the wish fulfilled, your world moves to match it. People now call this the law of assumption. He said he learned it from a turbaned Black teacher named Abdullah, who told him in 1933, with no money and no ticket, that he was already in Barbados.

Search his words Find your exercise

Every quote here was checked against his own text. All 1.57 million words of it.

Neville Goddard about 1939, aged 34, from the back cover of At Your Command
Neville about 1939, aged 34 · back cover of At Your Command

Contents

Every page in this section

How he said it works

  1. 01What is the law of assumption?Where the phrase comes from and how it differs from the law of attraction.
  2. 02The state akin to sleepThe drowsy state fans call SATS, in the words he used.
  3. 03RevisionRelive the day as you wish it had gone.
  4. 04Living in the endThink from the wish, never of it.
  5. 05What science says about the drowsy stateHypnagogia, theta waves and what the sleep labs have measured.

His story

  1. 06Who was Abdullah?Every word Neville left about his teacher, sorted, and every theory checked.
  2. 07The Barbados storyAll his tellings side by side, and the ship he sailed on.
  3. 08The PromiseThe visions from 1959 to 1963 that changed what he taught.

Tools

  1. 09Drowsy Scene SessionA dark, timed session built on his three steps.
  2. 10Nightly Revision LogRewrite the day. It stays on your device.
  3. 11Neville Goddard quotes108 quotes by topic, each one traced to its source.
  4. 12Sympathetic ResonanceWhy like attracts like, as physics you can play with.

Keep going

  1. 13Is the law of attraction real?The older idea and what the studies say.
  2. 14William Walker AtkinsonThought as vibration, thirty years before Neville.
  3. 15Edgar CayceThe sleeping prophet of Virginia Beach, his readings counted year by year.

The Neville Index

Search everything he said

We pulled 310 transcripts of his talks and lessons and all 10 of his main books into one index, 1.57 million words from 1939 to 1972. Type a word and the bars show how often he used it each year, so you can watch an idea arrive, peak and fade.

Word by wordReady

Talk transcripts come from realneville.com and the scans at archive.org. Some are machine-read, so a count can run slightly off, and a few talks carry only a year or no date at all.

What the index shows

His vocabulary changed after July 20, 1959

At about four that morning in San Francisco, he wrote, “the most intense vibration” started at the base of his skull. He felt himself born from his own head, and he wrote the date beside the matching passage of scripture. Count his words before and after that night and you can see the change. Consciousness fell from 70 uses per 10,000 words in his early books to under 2, and it never came back. David, who was barely in his vocabulary before, became a constant. He kept teaching the law of assumption, though it stopped being the point of his talks. What took over is the Promise.

The numbers as a table

The exercises

Seven things he told people to do

Most lists of Neville techniques are other people’s summaries. These are his instructions, with the book or talk each one comes from. The last two came straight from Abdullah, and almost nobody teaches them.

01 · The scene1949
  1. Know definitely what you want.
  2. Build one small event that could only happen after you got it. A handshake, a phone call, someone saying congratulations. You have to be doing something in it.
  3. Lie down or sit still, close your eyes and imagine you are sleepy. Then feel yourself into the action, here and now, until it feels real.
“You must always participate in the imaginary action, not merely stand back and look on.”

Out of This World, 1949. He calls this a “simple formula for changing the future.” Run it in the session tool.

New York, 1933

“You are in Barbados”

This is the story his whole teaching rests on. He was still telling it in 1971, and Barbados comes up in 81 of the 320 texts. He was 28, out of work and living in a small room on 75th Street. Step through the six weeks below, using his 1948 telling.

November 1933, 72nd Street

“As you walk through this door now you are not walking on 72nd Street, you are walking on palm lined streets.”

He has just waved his parents off on their ship home. Out of nowhere he wants to go too, for the first time in 12 years, so he walks to Abdullah’s place on 72nd Street and says so.

Passage
None
Money
$0
Class
Abdullah says first
Ship
SS Nerissa

He came home in February 1934 and started eating meat and drinking again, the way Abdullah had said he would. Abdullah’s lesson stuck with him for life: stay faithful to the idea and don’t compromise on the third-class cabin. Every version of the story differs a little, and we lined them up.

The teacher

Neville never told the Abdullah story the same way twice

Everything most people know about Abdullah comes from Neville, and his own details don’t line up. He gave at least two different years for their first meeting and told it as a mystical scene: Neville, you are six months late. The teacher told him they had known each other in China thousands of years ago.

He holds steady on the outline: an old Black teacher on 72nd Street who taught him Hebrew and Kabbalah. The vivid details come from single talks, the turban from 1948 and the rye, ice cream and center orchestra seats from a 1964 question and answer. In 1971 he added something his fans rarely repeat: He understood the Law, not the Promise.

Open the Abdullah file

Timeline

His life in twelve dates

  1. 1905

    Born in Barbados

    February 19, the fourth of ten children of Joseph Goddard, a merchant, and Wilhelmina Hinkson.

  2. 1922

    Sails to New York at 17

    He goes to study theater and doesn’t see Barbados again for almost 12 years.

  3. 1926

    A dancer who looked like Valentino

    He tours vaudeville in the act “Amerique and Neville.” Newspapers of the time remark on how much he resembles Rudolph Valentino.

  4. 1929

    Abdullah, maybe

    In a 1964 talk he says he met Abdullah in ’29. In 1967 he says 1931. No document puts the two men in one room, and the Abdullah file lays out what we could and could not trace.

  5. 1933

    Barbados

    By his account he sails on the Nerissa on December 6, moved up to first class at the dock, and comes back in February a different man.

  6. 1939

    At Your Command

    His first book. He had started lecturing in New York the year before.

  7. 1943

    A New Yorker profile

    After nine months in the Army at Camp Polk, Louisiana, he gets a profile in The New Yorker called “A Blue Flame on the Forehead.”

  8. 1944

    Feeling Is the Secret

    Just over 5,000 words, and still the book most people start with.

  9. 1951

    “The Law of Assumption” goes on the radio

    He gives a talk under that title on station KECA in Los Angeles in July. The Power of Awareness follows in 1952.

  10. 1959

    The vision

    July 20, San Francisco. It starts the run of experiences he later called the Promise, ending on January 1, 1963.

  11. 1965

    Late-night television

    He appears often on The Joe Pyne Show through 1967, after hosting his own series on KTTV in the 1950s.

  12. 1972

    Dies in West Hollywood

    October 1, aged 67. Mitch Horowitz, working from the death record, corrected the old heart attack story: it was a hemorrhage from ruptured veins in the esophagus.

The shelf

Ten books, and where to start

The spines run left to right by year, and a wider spine means a longer book. Pick one to see what’s in it and when to read it, or go to his books in order for reading routes, and to the Lecture Finder for the talks.

The free editions

Read him free, set to be read

  1. Feeling Is the Secret, the 369 Rabbit Hole edition

    1944 · Neville · 26 pages

    Feeling Is the Secret

    The complete short book on sleep, prayer and feeling, with a short introduction on how to read it.

    Open the PDF
  2. The Power of Awareness, the 369 Rabbit Hole edition

    1952 · Neville · 99 pages

    The Power of Awareness

    The law of assumption at full length, all 27 chapters and his case histories, including the soldier in Louisiana.

    Open the PDF
  3. The Neville Field Manual

    Ours · 23 pages

    The Neville Field Manual

    All seven exercises with his words, the steps, the usual mistake and the source, plus a first week.

    Open the PDF
  4. The Abdullah File

    Ours · 36 pages

    The Abdullah File

    All 67 passages where Neville speaks about his teacher, the contradictions, three theories tested and the 1928 notice from The New York Times.

    Open the PDF
  5. At Your Command, the 369 Rabbit Hole edition

    1939 · Neville · 28 pages

    At Your Command

    The sermon that started it all, on decree and awareness, with no chapter breaks and no mention of imagination.

    Open the PDF
  6. Your Faith Is Your Fortune, the 369 Rabbit Hole edition

    1941 · Neville · 126 pages

    Your Faith Is Your Fortune

    All 27 short chapters on the Bible read as psychology, from Before Abraham Was to A Formula for Victory.

    Open the PDF
  7. Out of This World, the 369 Rabbit Hole edition

    1949 · Neville · 30 pages

    Out of This World

    Four chapters on thinking fourth-dimensionally and his three-step formula for changing the future.

    Open the PDF
  8. Awakened Imagination, the 369 Rabbit Hole edition

    1954 · Neville · 60 pages

    Awakened Imagination

    The eight original chapters, including The Pruning Shears of Revision, in the 1954 wording.

    Open the PDF
  9. The Law and the Promise, the 369 Rabbit Hole edition

    1961 · Neville · 113 pages

    The Law and the Promise

    Thirty-five signed accounts of the Law, then his own first account of the Promise.

    Open the PDF

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Checked against his text

Real, reworded or not found

What people sayWhat we foundVerdict
Neville taught the law of attractionThe phrase appears zero times in all 1.57 million words, though he kept the verb. In Feeling Is the Secret he turned it around: “You never attract that which you want, but always attract that which you are conscious of being.”Never his phrase
“Law of assumption” is his own termYes, though it’s rarer than you’d think. It titles a 1951 radio talk and runs through The Power of Awareness, which holds 44 of the 48 uses.His words
He taught “SATS”He taught the state, 26 uses of “akin to sleep” across 9 texts. The acronym isn’t in any book or talk. Fans made it later.Idea yes, name no
The “lullaby method” is a modern inventionThe name is modern, the method is his. He says “like a lullaby” in the 1948 lessons and in Out of This World.His method
“Everyone is you pushed out”That exact line isn’t in our index. His wording is “the world is yourself pushed out,” or in two talks “Everyone is yourself pushed out.” The phrase “yourself pushed out” turns up 36 times in 29 texts.Reworded
“An assumption, though false, if persisted in will harden into fact”Genuine and repeated often. It appears in the 1948 lessons and The Power of Awareness.His words
Students who imagined climbing a ladder started meeting laddersOut of This World uses a ladder to show the difference between watching yourself and feeling yourself climb. We found no students and no ladders turning up in any text.Not found
Abdullah was Arnold Josiah FordAn unproven theory. Ford was 52 in 1929, left for Ethiopia around 1930 and died in 1935, and Neville described seeing Abdullah in New York decades later.Doesn’t fit
Abdullah was G. M. Ahmad AbdoullahThe strongest lead. The New York Times of November 3, 1928 lists a man of that name at 30 West 72nd Street, the street and house Neville described. No document yet names the two men together.Strong lead
He died of a heart attackThe record says otherwise, according to Horowitz: a hemorrhage after a rupture of the esophageal veins.Corrected

Questions

Common questions

Who was Neville Goddard?

A Barbados-born dancer turned teacher (1905 to 1972) who wrote and lectured as Neville in New York and Los Angeles. He taught that human imagination is God and that assuming the feeling of the wish fulfilled changes what you experience. He published ten main books and gave hundreds of talks, and our index holds 310 transcripts of them.

What is the law of assumption?

Neville's teaching that an assumption, held and felt as true, hardens into fact. He used the phrase in a 1951 radio talk on KECA in Los Angeles and throughout The Power of Awareness in 1952, which holds 44 of the 48 uses in his surviving text.

Is the law of assumption the same as the law of attraction?

They overlap, but Neville never used the words law of attraction. The older phrase describes like drawing like. Neville said you become what you assume, and he wrote in 1944 that you never attract what you want, only what you are conscious of being.

Who was Abdullah?

The teacher Neville named as his own, a Black man in a turban who taught him Hebrew and Kabbalah on 72nd Street in New York. Neville said he was born in Ethiopia in one talk and North Africa in another, and raised in the Jewish faith. The strongest lead is G. M. Ahmad Abdoullah, listed at 30 West 72nd Street in 1928, though no document names the two men together, and Neville gave different dates for when they met.

Which Neville Goddard book should I read first?

Feeling Is the Secret from 1944. It runs about 5,400 words, so it takes under half an hour, and it covers sleep, feeling and prayer. Follow it with Out of This World, which has his three-step formula.

What does SATS mean in Neville Goddard?

SATS stands for state akin to sleep, a fan shorthand. Neville used the words state akin to sleep and described the drowsy state often, but the acronym does not appear in any of his books or talks in our index.

What is revision in Neville Goddard's teaching?

Reliving the day in imagination the way you wish it had gone. He set it out in chapter 4 of Awakened Imagination in 1954, The Pruning Shears of Revision, and tied it directly to forgiveness.

What is the difference between the Law and the Promise?

The Law is using imagination to change your life here. The Promise is what Neville said happened to him between 1959 and 1963, a series of visions he matched to the Gospel story and said everyone will one day experience. He said even Abdullah understood the Law and not the Promise.

Are Neville Goddard's books in the public domain?

In the United States it looks that way for the books from 1939 to 1961. Books of that era had to be renewed, and we found no renewal for any of these titles in the New York Public Library renewal data. Newer editions can add their own copyrighted material, other countries run on different terms, and this is not legal advice.

Sources

Where this comes from

No part of his text is ours. Quotes are short and carry their source. If you find a mistake, tell us and we’ll fix it.

  1. Neville, talks and lessons: realneville.com text archive.
  2. Neville, scanned talks: archive.org part 1, part 2, part 3, and the merged archive, which holds the 1964 question and answer on Abdullah.
  3. Neville, books by year: archive.org and archive.org.
  4. Biography, dates and news citations: Wikipedia, Neville Goddard, used for the Mackenberg clipping, the Valentino reviews, the Army record and the KTTV series.
  5. Mitch Horowitz, “Neville Goddard: A Timeline,” 2025, for the cause of death.
  6. Robert M. Coates, “A Blue Flame on the Forehead,” The New Yorker, September 11, 1943. Cited from the magazine’s listing; we have not read the full text.
  7. Portrait: Wikimedia Commons, listed as public domain, from the back cover of At Your Command.
  8. Copyright renewals: New York Public Library renewal data, searched for every title.