The Power of Awareness

The Power of Awareness — Summary

A soldier set free in eight nights

In the spring of 1943, a freshly drafted American soldier lay on the hard bunk of a camp in Louisiana. He wanted only one thing in the world: to be discharged. Not to desert, not to go AWOL, but to go home honorably. So he filed his application for discharge, which could only go through if his commanding officer signed it. Within four hours the answer came back. It was a single word: disapproved. And the decision was final, with no appeal. No military or civilian authority could help him now.

Most people give up here. He did not. From that evening on, every night, right before falling asleep, he went home with his eyes closed. He did not recite facts in his head; he felt it. He was lying in his own New York apartment, in his own bed. He got up in imagination, 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, the red brick of the house across the way. It was all so real that when he fell asleep, his body already believed it was a civilian. For eight nights he repeated this scene, while every morning the same military reality greeted him. On the ninth day he was ordered to resubmit his application. He was called in to the commanding officer, who told him that he personally objected, that he had strong reservations, yet he had decided to overrule himself and sign. A few hours later the soldier was on a train heading home.

Neville Goddard's entire book is about that one idea: your circumstances do not create your life. The one you feel yourself to be does. "The Power of Awareness" came out in 1952, and to this day it makes one of the most radical claims a book has ever made. According to Goddard, your awareness does not reflect reality; it creates it. In this summary you will get 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 image you hold of yourself? And what is the concrete practice, the one you can do each night, that supposedly lets you rewrite even your destiny?