Introduction
You often struggle to change your life because you rely on willpower, physical action, and logical reasoning alone. You work hard to alter your external circumstances, yet the same unwanted patterns return because you try to force change on the surface level. You wonder why your best intentions fail and why your desires remain out of reach despite your conscious efforts. Neville Goddard argues in Feeling Is the Secret that your failure stems from misunderstanding the division within your own mind.
Your conscious mind generates ideas and makes choices, but it lacks the power to create physical reality by itself. Your subconscious mind holds the actual creative power, yet it accepts impressions blindly without reasoning or evaluating truth. You fail to manifest your desires because your conscious thoughts contradict your deeper emotional state. The subconscious accepts only what you truly feel to be real.
The book explains the exact mechanics of how consciousness operates and how you can harness your feelings to shape your destiny. You will learn how to bypass the critical conscious mind and plant seeds of desire directly into the subconscious realm.
- How do your conscious and subconscious minds interact during daily life?
- What role does sleep play in planting new impressions in the depths of your mind?
- How can you use prayer and passive feeling instead of force to attain your goals?
- Why do your external actions always mirror your inner emotional beliefs?
1. Law and Its Operation
Your mind operates through two distinct divisions. The conscious mind acts as the personal and selective generator of ideas. The subconscious mind serves as the impersonal and non-selective receiver that produces physical reality.
Consciousness is divided into conscious and subconscious realms, where feeling serves as the only medium to impress ideas.
The conscious mind functions as the realm of effect. The subconscious mind serves as the realm of cause. It accepts and objectifies whatever you feel to be true without arguing or reasoning about its validity.
Conscious and Subconscious Roles
You initiate every experience through the male and female divisions of consciousness. Your conscious thoughts generate initial concepts and desires. Your subconscious mind acts as the female recipient that accepts these mental impressions and brings them into physical form.
The Power of Feeling
Feeling is the one and only medium through which ideas are conveyed to the subconscious mind. You can think about a goal constantly, but nothing manifests until you feel the reality of that idea.
- No idea can be impressed on the subconscious until it is felt.
- The subconscious does not argue or reason about the truth of an idea.
- It simply accepts what is felt as true and out-pictures it to the last detail.
Dominant Feelings Prevail
When multiple feelings conflict within you, the dominant feeling always expresses itself in the physical world. What you feel you are always dominates what you wish to be.
A feeling such as that you are healthy is stronger and more effective than wishing to be healthy. The latter statement implies a current lack that your subconscious will continue to reflect. You must therefore claim the state of your desire as an existing fact through your emotions.
2. Sleep
Sleep serves as the natural door and vital gateway into the subconscious mind where creative impressions are made. You spend about one-third of your stay on earth in this state. It provides the essential bridge between the conscious mind and the subconscious depths.
Sleep is the natural gateway and vital bridge into the subconscious mind for creative impressions.
The Gateway to the Subconscious
The conscious waking life interacts with the objective world through the senses. During sleep, the conscious mind turns away from the world of sense to unite with the subconscious. You enter a state of dream-like receptivity where impressions sink deep without interference.
Entering the Night
Whatever mental state or mood a person carries into sleep dictates their waking experiences and actions the following day. You must never go to sleep feeling defeated or distressed. Your subconscious accepts the emotional tone you hold as you drift off and reproduces it.
Guard your thoughts carefully before you close your eyes at night. Select feelings that match your desired reality.
- Bring a calm sense of fulfillment to bed;
- Drop all worries and arguments before resting;
- Assume the feeling of the wish fulfilled as you drift away.
Waking Realities
The impressions left upon the subconscious during slumber determine your subsequent days. You wake up carrying the invisible momentum of whatever mood you cultivated before sleep. Your subconscious works silently through the night to build the physical equivalent of your final resting thoughts.
Manage your nights to control your mornings. The thoughts you embrace in the darkness become the circumstances you meet in the light.
3. Prayer
Prayer is the art of yielding to a desired state through a relaxed, passive frame of mind rather than through forced effort.
Attempting to force an outcome that your senses deny causes conflict and failure. Instead, prayer requires entering a passive reverie similar to the state right before sleep, where your mind easily senses the reality of a subjective state.
The Art of Yielding
You must abandon all mental struggle when you want to change your circumstances. Force creates resistance because your conscious mind fights against the physical evidence of the senses. Prayer asks you to surrender this useless battle.
To manifest a desire, you must assume the exact feeling that would be theirs if the wish were already a reality.
Passive Reverie
The subconscious responds to persuasion rather than compulsion, making it akin to a beloved partner. You cannot bully your subconscious into accepting a new truth through sheer willpower.
- Relax your body into a calm posture;
- Let go of all urgent demands and immediate tensions;
- Drift into a passive reverie where the outer world fades away.
By mentally assuming the end result and relaxing into it, the subconscious is moved to build the exact likeness of that assumption.
Avoiding Mental Conflict
Any effort to compel results through mental strain acknowledges that you lack the desired state. You defeat your own purpose whenever you pray from a sense of want or scarcity.
Shift your attention away from what your eyes currently see. Accept the subjective state as an accomplished fact while your mind remains quiet and receptive.
4. Spirit and Feeling
Your external actions and capabilities are directly determined by what you believe and feel yourself to be.
Neville Goddard calls this domain spirit and feeling. You cannot act differently than your current self-concept dictates. When you alter your inner identity, outer changes follow automatically.
Internal Identity
By internalizing the feeling and belief of being the person you wish to be, your daily actions shift. You embody higher states of consciousness without forcing external behavior.
- Internalize the feeling of the desired state.
- Believe yourself to be the person you wish to become.
- Produce corresponding works and results naturally.
As Within So Without
The outer visible world is merely a mirror reflecting the internal contents of your consciousness. Nothing comes from the outside environment. All conditions, actions, and objects are simply objective states bearing witness to subconscious impressions.
A change in inner impression inevitably causes a change in outer expression. You do not need to fight circumstances. You only need to change what you accept as true inside yourself.
Embodying Higher States
You can rise above current limitations by claiming a higher state in imagination. Feel the reality of the new condition before your physical eyes can see it.
The subjective assumption hardens into objective fact because the subconscious must externalize whatever you impress upon it with feeling. Maintain this inner conviction until the outer world catches up.
Conclusion
Consciousness, sleep, prayer, and feeling integrate into a unified system that governs your entire physical reality. Your conscious mind acts as the generator of ideas while your subconscious mind operates as the creative builder of conditions. Because the subconscious mind does not reason deductively, it accepts whatever you feel to be true as an objective fact and proceeds to externalize it. You must therefore stop relying on outer sensory evidence and instead direct your inner emotional life with absolute intention.
You apply this philosophy in daily life by following a specific sequence of mental acts.
- Define your objective clearly and decide precisely what state or condition you wish to experience in your waking life.
- Construct an action or mental scene that implies the fulfillment of your desire, ensuring the scenario heavily involves the senses of movement or touch.
- Relax your physical body completely by entering a drowsy, sleepy state just before ordinary slumber takes over.
- Assume the feeling of your wish fulfilled by actively experiencing the imagined scene until it feels natural and real.
- Drop the desire into the subconscious mind with absolute confidence, letting go of all mental strain regarding how the result will manifest.
- Maintain the newly assumed identity throughout your waking hours by refusing to let contrary sensory evidence shake your inner conviction.
You hold complete dominion over your destiny through the disciplined management of your moods and assumptions. When you consistently align your dominant feelings with the ideal you wish to express, the outer world rearranges itself to match your inner certainty.
10 Key Ideas
- Your conscious mind generates ideas while your subconscious mind holds the actual creative power to shape physical reality.
- Feeling serves as the one and only medium through which ideas are conveyed to the subconscious mind.
- When multiple feelings conflict within you, the dominant feeling always expresses itself in the physical world.
- Sleep serves as the natural door and vital gateway into the subconscious mind where creative impressions are made.
- Whatever mental state or mood a person carries into sleep dictates their waking experiences and actions the following day.
- Prayer is the art of yielding to a desired state through a relaxed, passive frame of mind rather than through forced effort.
- Any effort to compel results through mental strain acknowledges that you lack the desired state and defeats your purpose.
- Your external actions and capabilities are directly determined by what you believe and feel yourself to be.
- The outer visible world is merely a mirror reflecting the internal contents of your consciousness without influence from the outside environment.
- You hold complete dominion over your destiny through the disciplined management of your moods and assumptions.