1956 · Neville Goddard

Seedtime and Harvest

The mature Neville: life as a game with fixed rules, taught through the Bible's parables — as you sow in imagination, you reap in experience.

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Written at the height of his powers, Seedtime and Harvest is Neville's book of parables: Cain and Abel, Jacob's ladder, water into wine — each opened as a "mystical view" of how imagining sows the states that experience harvests. The golden string of Blake's couplet runs through every chapter.

Its center of gravity is Chapter 5's game of life: a game with aims and unbreakable rules, where thinking is sowing and circumstance is crop. The later chapters widen into imagining for others — the truth that an imaginal act on another's behalf is never lost.

Key ideas

Sowing and reaping are mental

The seed is the imaginal act; the harvest is experience. Nothing appears in the field that was not first planted in imagination — yours or accepted from another's.

The game has fixed rules

Unlike men's games, the rules of the game of life cannot be changed or broken — as one thinks, so one is. Mastery is not bending the rules but finally playing by them consciously.

The four mighty ones

Producer, author, director, actor — the faculties of imagination staging your life. The author writes the final scene: define it, and the rest of the play reorganizes.

Abel's offering

Cain offers the senses — facts as they are; Abel offers imagination — things as they ought to be. The favored offering has never changed.

Imagining for another

To imagine lovingly on another's behalf is to touch the one imagination in all. What you plant for them, you plant in the same field you harvest from.

Chapter by chapter

Chapter 1The golden string: the Bible's symbolic language, and the sleep of Adam from which imagination awakens as Christ.
Chapter 2The four mighty ones in every man — producer, author, director, actor — and how the author writes the final scene.
Chapters 3–4Abel's gift and Jacob's ladder: offering imagination over the senses, and the ladder of states with meaning standing above objects.
Chapters 5–6The game of life and its fixed rules — as one thinks, so one is — and practice: assume knowing, do it over and over.
Chapters 7–8Wise as serpents: preparing an inner place until a bridge of incidents manifests it, and the turning of water into wine.
Chapter 9Parables as laws of mind: no intermediary between you and the power, and imagining for another as the highest use of the law.

Essential quotes

“Life is a game and, like all games, it has its aims and its rules.”
— Seedtime and Harvest — Chapter 5

“In the game of life, the rules cannot be changed or broken. Only within the framework of its universal and everlastingly fixed rules can the game of life be played.”
— Seedtime and Harvest — Chapter 5

“I Give you the end of a golden string; Only wind it into a ball, It will lead you in at Heaven's gate…”
— Seedtime and Harvest — Chapter 1

Practice what it teaches

Who this book is for: For the practitioner past the basics — the reader who wants Neville's subtlest teaching on states, parables, and imagining on behalf of others.