Neville Goddard Audio Lecture: Law Of Assumption

About This Lecture

This lecture presents the law that gives Neville's whole teaching its name. An assumption, he explains, is the act of accepting something as true before any physical evidence supports it, an inner posture taken up in advance of the facts. Where ordinary thinking waits for proof and then believes, the law of assumption reverses the order: one believes first, occupies the state of the answered desire, and lets the proof follow. Citing Blake's observation that 'what seems to be, is, to those to whom it seems to be,' Neville argues that perception is irreducibly subjective and that the state of consciousness a person occupies determines the world they actually experience. The conclusion is uncompromising. To change one's circumstances, one must change the inner assumption, not struggle against the outer conditions, which are only the shadow cast by a prior state of mind.

The practical method he gives is precise rather than vague. Neville instructs the listener to enter a relaxed, drowsy condition bordering on sleep while keeping attention under deliberate control, a state in which the analytical mind is quieted but awareness has not been surrendered. In that condition one imagines vividly a scene that would necessarily be true if the desire were already fulfilled. He recommends mentally conversing with friends and relatives as they would speak to you once your aim has been realized, hearing their congratulations or their changed tone, and he counsels a definite emotional shift: away from the ache of wanting and into the quiet gratitude of already possessing. The imagined state is to be held with full sensory richness, with sound and touch and atmosphere, until it loses all strain and feels entirely natural. At that point, Neville teaches, the subconscious has accepted the assumption, and what the subconscious accepts it proceeds to express.

Neville is careful to root this method in scripture rather than presenting it as a private invention. He invokes Paul's teaching in Romans that conviction shapes individual reality, so that nothing is unclean of itself but only to the one who esteems it so; Jesus' promise that all things are possible to one who believes; and the definition of faith in Hebrews as the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. In his reading these are not pious sentiments but exact statements of the operative law. Faith is given a concrete meaning: it is the assumed feeling held steadily enough to become substantial.

If there is a single emphasis that the lecture returns to, it is persistence. An assumption made once and abandoned at the first contrary evidence accomplishes nothing; the law rewards loyalty to the unseen. The listener is urged to remain faithful to the assumption of the wish fulfilled even while present facts argue against it, treating the inner conviction as more real than the outer report. To apply the teaching, choose one clear and believable end, distill it into a brief scene implying its fulfillment, enter that scene nightly in the drowsy state, and refuse to let daytime appearances talk you out of it. The message is finally simple and demanding at once: assumption, sustained with feeling and faith, is the mechanism of personal transformation, and what you persist in assuming hardens, in time, into fact.

Key Scripture

Neville grounds this lecture in Romans 14, Matthew 21:22, Hebrews 11:1.