Who was Neville Goddard?

Neville Lancelot Goddard was born in Barbados on 19 February 1905 and moved to the United States as a young man. He worked for a time as a dancer in New York before turning to teaching. Between 1929 and 1936 he studied with a teacher he called Abdullah. He went on to write fourteen books and give more than three hundred lectures, and in the mid-1950s he hosted a television series in Los Angeles, where he lived for about twenty years. He died on 1 October 1972 (biography).

He usually published and spoke simply as "Neville".

A few of the titles readers most often start with, with their publication years.

• Imagination as the creative power. He identified human imagination with the divine and taught that the outer world reflects a person's inner state.
• Assume the feeling of the wish fulfilled. Change the assumption you live from, and circumstances are said to follow. "An assumption, though false, if persisted in, will harden into fact."
• The state akin to sleep. Unlike teachers who stressed willpower, he recommended impressing a single sensory scene on the mind in the drowsy state before sleep.
• The Bible as psychology. He read scripture as a drama of states of mind rather than as history.
• "The Promise". Late in his career he taught a mystical account of spiritual awakening, distinct from using imagination for worldly aims.

All of this is summarised from the same encyclopedia entry; his own books are the primary source.

Goddard was a religious teacher, not a researcher, and his evidence is testimony: letters and stories from his audiences. That is worth knowing before treating his claims as proven.

• No controlled evidence supports the claim that imagination alone changes external events.
• His method overlaps with real psychology at the point where belief changes behaviour: expectations that become self-fulfilling (Merton, 1948) and confidence that sustains effort (Bandura, 1977).
• It also carries a known risk: enjoying an imagined ending can reduce the effort that would get you there (Oettingen & Mayer, 2002).
• Modern summaries often go further than he did, promising specific people, sums of money or dates. Be especially careful with paid courses that do.

You can take his central exercise, imagining vividly who you want to be, as a useful rehearsal, and still make your decisions about money, health and relationships on ordinary evidence.