Prayer: The Art of Believing by Neville Goddard

What this book is about

Prayer: The Art of Believing presents prayer as an art that asks for practice and a controlled imagination, not ceremony or vain repetition. Neville builds the book on what he calls the law of reversibility: if a physical fact can produce a psychological state, then a psychological state can produce a physical fact. From this he reads the instruction in Mark 11:24 to believe that one has already received what one prays for. “Dual Nature of Consciousness” sets out the conscious and the subconscious, the subconscious being what a man is and the conscious what he knows. “Imagination and Faith” and “Controlled Reverie” describe a partly subjective state, which he compares with hypnosis, in which suggestion takes hold. The longest chapter, “Law of Thought Transmission”, turns to prayer for others: Neville holds that to change another person one must change one’s conception of him, and he separates visual images, mental sounds and mental actions. “Good Tidings” treats happy inner conversations as a form of prayer, and “The Greatest Prayer” ends with the assumption of the feeling “I AM Christ”.