Feeling Is the Secret by Neville Goddard

What this book is about

Feeling Is the Secret is a short book in which Neville sets out what he calls the law of consciousness, leaving out arguments and testimonials by design. In “Law and Its Operation” he divides consciousness into a conscious part, personal and selective, and a subconscious part that is impersonal and accepts as true whatever is felt to be true; feeling, in his telling, is the only medium by which an idea reaches the subconscious. He reads Paul’s language of husband and wife as a figure for this relation, a leadership of the lover rather than the tyrant. “Sleep” treats the moments before sleep as the natural door into the subconscious: Neville argues that the mood in which one falls asleep sets the pattern of the waking day, and asks the reader to drift off in the feeling of the wish fulfilled. “Prayer” describes a passive, drowsy state akin to sleep and insists that prayer is a yielding without effort, never a forcing. The last chapter, on spirit and feeling, reads faith as feeling and closes on the idea that one is what one believes oneself to be.