Foundations of the Law of Assumption | Lesson 2 of 9
Who Was Neville Goddard?
The life of the mystic whose teaching this platform honors and carries into the 21st century.
Neville Lancelot Goddard (1905 to 1972), known simply as Neville, was born in Barbados, the fourth of ten children in an English family. At seventeen he moved to New York City to study drama. He worked as a dancer and actor through the 1920s and early 1930s, touring with dance troupes and appearing on Broadway.
The turning point of his life came in 1931, when a friend brought him to hear an Ethiopian rabbi named Abdullah. Neville later said he had been told about this man for months and kept avoiding the meeting. When he finally walked in, Abdullah greeted him with the words "You are six months late," and told him that the brothers had announced his coming. Neville studied with Abdullah for five years, learning Hebrew, scripture, and the deeper meaning of the law. You can read more about this remarkable relationship in Neville’s own account of Abdullah and across his recorded lectures.
The Barbados story: the law in action
In late 1933, Neville wanted to spend Christmas with his family in Barbados but had no money for the trip.
Abdullah told him: "You are in Barbados." He instructed Neville to sleep each night as though he were already there, seeing New York from the perspective of the islands, smelling the tropical air, feeling his family around him.
For weeks, nothing happened. When Neville complained, Abdullah simply slammed the door on him and repeated: "You are in Barbados."
Before the last ship of the season sailed, a letter arrived from his brother with a ticket. Neville spent Christmas in Barbados, and sailed first class.
This story became one of his most retold demonstrations. The full account appears in his lectures and in the book The Law and the Promise, which you can read freely at the Internet Archive.
From 1938 until his passing in 1972, Neville lectured almost continuously across America, in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, often for free or a small hall fee. He never built an organization, never sold memberships, and never claimed any special power for himself. He wrote more than ten books, including The Power of Awareness, Feeling Is the Secret, and The Law and the Promise. Hundreds of his lecture transcripts are preserved and freely readable at sites like realneville.com, a long-standing archive maintained by students of his work.
"Change your conception of yourself and you will automatically change the world in which you live."
What this means: Your "conception of yourself" is the bundle of things you silently accept as true about you: I am shy, I am lucky, I am always broke, I am loved. Neville is saying that this self-image is the control panel of your world. You do not rearrange the world piece by piece. You change the one thing all of it reflects: who you assume yourself to be.
What made Neville different
Neville stripped away the heavy religious dogma of his era and offered people a clean, workable formula. He read scripture not as history but as psychology: every character a state of consciousness, every story a blueprint of the mind. He always searched for the most practical, direct way to explain how imagination works.
- He asked no one to believe him. He asked them to test it.
- He gave every technique away openly, in plain language.
- He backed every claim with case histories from his own students, many of which are collected in The Law and the Promise.
- He insisted the power was in you, never in him, a ritual, or an object.