Ch. 1free to read
The Power of Awareness
What It’s About
Your consciousness doesn't reflect your life—it creates it. Goddard pushes the law of assumption so far that he claims only one thing matters: who you believe yourself to be internally. Your circumstances follow later. Learn to settle the feeling of already having what you want in those moments before sleep, and make a new self-image so natural that the outer world has no choice but to follow.
Three Key Ideas
Consciousness Creates Reality
Your outer circumstances follow from the inner self-image you hold, not the other way around.
Assumption as a Practical Law
Persisting in the feeling of a desired state as already true will, over time, cause that state to become fact.
Thinking From the End
Lasting change comes from inhabiting the desired state inwardly, not from observing it as a distant goal.
Read a Sample
The Power of Awareness: Summary
A soldier set free in eight nights
In the spring of 1943, a newly drafted American soldier lay on a hard bunk at a camp in Louisiana. He wanted only one thing in the world: to be discharged. He didn't want to desert or go AWOL. He wanted to go home honorably. So he filed an application for discharge, which could only go through if his commanding officer signed it. The answer came back within four hours, and it was a single word: disapproved. The decision was final, with no appeal. No military or civilian authority could help him now.
Most people give up here. He didn't. From that evening on, every night right before he fell asleep, he went home with his eyes closed. He didn't recite facts in his head. He felt it. He was lying in his own bed, in his own New York apartment. In his imagination he got up, walked through the rooms, touched the furniture, stepped to the window, put his hand on the sill and looked out at the street. He saw the sidewalk, the leaves on the trees and the red brick of the house across the street. It was all so real that by the time he fell asleep, his body already believed it was a civilian. He repeated this scene for eight nights, and every morning the same military reality was waiting for him. On the ninth day he was ordered to resubmit his application. He was called in to see the commanding officer, who told him he personally objected and had strong reservations, but had decided to overrule himself and sign. A few hours later the soldier was on a train headed home.
Neville Goddard's entire book is about that one idea: your circumstances don't create your life. The person you feel yourself to be does. "The Power of Awareness" came out in 1952, and it still makes one of the most radical claims any book has ever made. According to Goddard, your awareness doesn't reflect reality. It creates it. In this summary you'll find answers to three big questions. Why should you stop looking for the cause of your problems in the outside world? How can you change the way you see yourself? And what's the concrete practice, the one you can do every night, that supposedly lets you rewrite even your destiny?
Who It’s For
- Anyone who feels stuck because outer circumstances seem to block every path forward.
- Anyone who wants to understand how self-image and inner dialogue shape daily outcomes.
- Anyone curious about the psychology of desire, attention, and deliberate mental habit.
- Anyone drawn to classic mind-power writing and wants a clear, close reading of Goddard's core ideas.
About the Author: Neville Goddard
Neville Goddard (1905-1972) was a Barbadian-American author and lecturer who spent decades teaching what he called the law of assumption. He delivered lectures across the United States and wrote a series of short, densely argued books in the 1940s and 1950s, of which The Power of Awareness is widely considered the clearest statement of his thought.
Goddard drew on the Bible as his primary source text, reading it as a psychological manual rather than a historical record. His influence on the modern law-of-attraction movement is substantial, and his books have found new audiences well beyond his own lifetime.
