Neville Goddard Audio Lecture: Law of Assumption (1951)

About This Lecture

This brief recording, drawn from Neville's 1951 series of radio talks broadcast over Los Angeles station KECA, is a compact statement of the Law of Assumption — the principle at the center of everything he taught. The law is simple to state: whatever you assume to be true, and feel to be real, tends to become your experience. To assume is to take on the consciousness of already being or having what you desire, to wear the state inwardly as a settled fact before any outer evidence appears to justify it. Neville insists the law is impersonal and exact; it does not weigh whether the assumption is wise or foolish, only whether it is held, and so the discipline of choosing one's assumptions deliberately becomes the whole art of living.

Neville's emphasis falls on feeling and persistence. It is not enough to think about a wish or to affirm it as a formula; one must enter the feeling of its fulfillment — the inner sensation of already possessing it, the relief and naturalness of the accomplished desire — and then sustain that feeling. He draws the principle from Paul's God who "calls things that are not as though they were" and from the Gospel promise that whatever you ask in prayer, you should believe you have received it and you shall have it. The believing he means is present-tense possession, not future hope. An assumption, he teaches, though at first denied by the senses and flatly contradicted by present facts, will, if persisted in, eventually externalize and become objective reality. The senses report only what already is; the assumption quietly constructs what is to be.

Because the talk is short, it functions as a clear primer rather than an extended exploration, and its very brevity makes it a useful distillation of the method. The procedure Neville lays out is fourfold: define the state you wish to express; assume it now, as an accomplished fact, rather than as a thing still to be reached; dwell in the feeling of the wish fulfilled until it takes on the tone of reality; and remain faithful to that assumption despite every contrary appearance. The hardest of these, he suggests, is the last — for the senses will press their case, and the temptation is always to abandon the assumed state at the first sign that nothing has changed.

Neville is careful to frame this not as wishful thinking or self-deception but as a law as dependable as any in nature — a creative principle that operates impartially for anyone who learns to apply it with feeling and persistence. He invites the radio listener, who cannot see him and must take the teaching inward, to test the law personally rather than accept it on authority: to choose some modest, definite desire, assume its fulfillment in feeling, persist, and observe the result. The closing note is one of responsibility and quiet confidence — if assumptions harden into facts, then the listener is already, knowingly or not, the author of their circumstances, and the practical good news of the talk is that the authorship can be taken up consciously, beginning now, with the simple decision to assume the feeling of the wish fulfilled.

Key Scripture

Neville grounds this lecture in Mark 11:24, Romans 4:17, 2 Corinthians 13:5.