1954 · Neville Goddard

Awakened Imagination

The identity of Christ and human imagination — and the practical arts of revision, inner speech, and thinking from the end.

This is Neville's deepest book, and his own favorite ground: the claim that the Christ of scripture is not a man in history but the human imagination itself — "the power that worketh in us". What religion calls salvation, Neville presents as the awakening of that power from passive dreaming to deliberate use.

For a mystical book it is remarkably practical. Two of the most usable chapters Neville ever wrote are here: the distinction between thinking *of* the end and thinking *from* it (Chapter 2), and the disciplines of revision and inner speech (Chapters 4–6) that turn the metaphysics into a daily craft.

Key ideas

Chapter by chapter

• Chapter 1The awakening claim: continuous imagination is sufficient for all things, and an assumption persisted in hardens into fact.
• Chapter 2The pivot of the whole teaching: from thinking of the end to thinking from the end — "determined imagination is the beginning of all miracles".
• Chapter 3The two outlooks — natural and spiritual — and the inner body through which the second sees.
• Chapter 4Revision as the first act of cure: the daily exercise of rewriting the day, and why it heals the reviser first.
• Chapter 5Inner speech revealed as the engine of states: what you say inwardly is what you are sowing.
• Chapter 6The method of matching: make inner speech and action agree with the fulfilled desire, and the outer world reshapes itself.
• Chapter 7States already exist and the mental diet that keeps you in the chosen one — infidelity to the diet is why the world stays unchanged.
• Chapter 8Advent: the awakening of Christ in you — imagination rising from dream to deliberate creation.

Essential quotes

“Determined imagination, thinking from the end, is the beginning of all miracles.”

— Awakened Imagination — Chapter 2

“Experience has convinced me that an Assumption, though false, if persisted in, will harden into fact, that continuous imagination is sufficient for all things.”

— Awakened Imagination — Chapter 1

“The way to change the outer world is to make the inner speech and action match the outer speech and action of fulfilled desire.”

— Awakened Imagination — Chapter 6

“Nothing is more important to you than the ideas on which you feed. And you feed on the ideas from which you think.”

— Awakened Imagination — Chapter 7

Practice what it teaches

• Living in the End
• Revision
• The Mental Diet