The Law and the Promise by Neville Goddard

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A book in 15 chapters. About 2.5 hours to read.

The 1961 book that sets the two halves of the teaching side by side. The law, that imagining creates reality, is told through dozens of first-hand accounts from his students; the promise is what the whole story points to. The fullest book of worked examples on this shelf.

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What this book is about

The Law and the Promise is written in two parts. In the first, which he calls the Law, Neville argues that imagining creates reality, and he illustrates the claim with what he presents as true stories, many of them accounts from people who heard him teach. Each chapter opens with an epigraph, often from Blake, and turns the idea a little. “Dwell Therein” asks the reader to live in the dream, thinking from it rather than of it. “Turn The Wheel Backward” describes revising the day as one wished it had gone. “There Is No Fiction” and “Subtle Threads” hold that imaginal acts are causes. “Moods” treats feeling as a cause of circumstance rather than only its result, and “Attitudes” looks at how our memory of another person shapes him. “The Creative Moment” closes the first part with Blake’s moment that Satan cannot find. The last chapter, the Promise, recounts four mystical experiences, among them what Neville describes as a birth from above in San Francisco in July 1959 and the finding of David as his son, which he reads as scripture fulfilled in the individual.

1 The Law: Imagining Creates Reality 9 min
“The purpose of the first portion of this book is to show, through actual true stories, how imagining creates reality.”
2 Dwell Therein 14 min
“I wish it were true of man’s noble dreams, but unfortunately - perpetual construction, deferred occupancy - is the common fault of man.”
3 Turn The Wheel Backward 13 min
“The perfectly stable or static state is always unattainable.”
4 There Is No Fiction 13 min
“If we had this wider view of causation - that causation is mental, not physical -that our mental states are causative of physical effects…”
5 Subtle Threads 6 min
“Nothing appears or continues in being by a power of its own.”
6 Visionary Fancy 10 min
“The images of our imagination are the realities of which any physical manifestation is only the shadow.”
7 Moods 10 min
“Men regard their moods far too much as effects and not sufficiently as causes.”
8 Through The Looking Glass 13 min
““A man that looks on glass, On it may stay his eye; Or if he pleaseth, through it pass, And then the heav’n espy.””
9 Enter Into 7 min
“Imagination it seems will do nothing that we wish until we enter into the image of the wish fulfilled.”
10 Things Which Do Not Appear 4 min
“To refuse to recognize the creative power of man’s invisible, imaginal activity, is too great to be argued with.”
11 The Potter 11 min
“The word translated ‘Potter’ means imagination.”
12 Attitudes 8 min
“Memory, though faulty, is adequate to the call for sameness.”
13 All Trivia 9 min
“We must use our imagination to achieve particular ends, even if the ends are all trivia.”
14 The Creative Moment 7 min
“Whenever we imagine things as they ought to be, rather than as they seem to be, is “The Moment”.”
15 The Promise: Four Mystical Experiences 19 min
“In all I have related thus far - with the exception of G.B.’s Vision of the Child -imagination was consciously exercised.”

Three passages

“To revise the past is to re-construct it with new content. Man should daily relive the day as he wished he had lived it, revising the scenes to make them conform to his ideals.”

Chapter 3, Turn The Wheel Backward

“Moods are not only the result of the conditions of our life; they are also the causes of those conditions.”

Chapter 7, Moods

“The Bible is a vision of God’s Law and His Promise. It was never intended to teach history but rather to lead man in faith through the furnaces of affliction to the fulfillment of God’s promise, to rouse man from this profound sleep and awaken him as God.”

Chapter 15, The Promise: Four Mystical Experiences