1949 · Neville Goddard

Out of this World

Thinking fourth-dimensionally: the clearest step-by-step statement of the SATS technique Neville ever put on paper.

📖 Read the full book — free in the vault

Subtitled "Thinking Fourth-Dimensionally", this short book is Neville's frame for how imagination can outrun the senses: the fourth-dimensional self can occupy the future now, and what it occupies, the three-dimensional world must eventually stage. Sci-fi flavored language, rigorously practical intent.

Its second chapter contains the most exact procedural description of the state akin to sleep in all of Neville's writing — immobilize the body, induce drowsiness, feel yourself right into the action of the fulfilled desire. If SATS is the flagship technique, this is its original manual.

Key ideas

The future can be occupied now

Man can observe events before they occur — and alter them. The fourth-dimensional focus (imagination) moves freely along the line the senses walk step by step.

The controlled waking dream

The working state is a moderate drowsiness: relaxed enough to loosen the senses' grip, awake enough to direct attention. Chapter 2 gives the full protocol.

First person, present tense

The scene must be experienced from within — performing the action here and now, not watching yourself perform it. This single correction rescues most failed practice.

Truth need not bow to facts

An imagined state contradicted by the senses is not thereby false; persisted in, it draws its own affinities and becomes fact. Reason describes what is; imagination decrees what shall be.

The ideal wells up from within

Your vision of perfection is not vanity but instruction: inner states mold outer worlds, and the ideal you can feel yourself into is the self you are being led to.

Chapter by chapter

Chapter 1Thinking fourth-dimensionally: observing and altering the future, and the two outlooks — natural and spiritual — on the same world.
Chapter 2The SATS manual: immobilize the body, induce the state akin to sleep, and feel yourself right into the proposed action.
Chapter 3Truth versus external reality: desire and imagination as the enchanter's wand, drawing their own affinities when the mind is akin to sleep.
Chapter 4The vision of perfection: the ideal comes from within, and inner states — not outer efforts — mold the worlds we walk through.

Essential quotes

“Immobilize the physical body and induce a state of consciousness akin to sleep; then, mentally feel yourself right into the proposed action – imagining all the while that you are actually performing the action here and now.”
— Out of this World — Chapter 2

“Drowsiness facilitates change because it favors attention without effort, but it must not be pushed to the stage of sleep.”
— Out of this World — Chapter 1

“Desire and imagination are the enchanter's wand of fable and they draw to themselves their own affinities.”
— Out of this World — Chapter 3

Practice what it teaches

Who this book is for: For the practitioner who wants the technique itself, exactly as its author prescribed it — the book to reread the night you recommit to nightly practice.