I recently read this book called Feeling Is the Secret by Neville Goddard. It's very short and easy-to-read book, but it was a profound one. I've been listening to Neville for a while now and I absolutely loved this book. In his book, Neville talks about how our thoughts and feelings affect who we become and what we achieve. He teaches how to make our future dreams a present fact by assuming the feeling of the wish fulfilled.
Everything starts in our minds. Here it's you. You have a mind and a body. Part of the mind is conscious and has the ability to choose thoughts and the other part is subconscious and has no ability to reject and will respond to any thought impressed by the conscious mind. It also cannot differentiate between what is real and what is imagined. And then we have the body, which is a mass of energy at a very high speed of vibration. The thoughts we have in the conscious mind, once impressed on the subconscious mind, alter the vibration of this instrument we call the body. We have invented a word to describe our conscious awareness of our vibration, and that word is feeling. If you ask a person, how are you feeling today? They'll say, I am feeling fine or I don't feel that good or I feel great. You never hear a person say, Oh, I am consciously aware of being emotionally involved with the negative ideas. Therefore I move to the negative vibrations. But that is exactly what happens. It's important that we grasp how the mind works and understand the relationship of the body to the mind. Now it's our results that we want to change. We said that the subconscious controls the vibrations of the body, which we call feelings. The vibrations control the action which produces the result. So the key to changing your results is to change the subconscious mind because it literally controls the behavior. With our conscious mind, we can choose our thoughts. Those thoughts are in the form of pictures, but in order to change the results, we need to impress those pictures on the subconscious mind. Now, the secret key lies here. The subconscious mind is our emotional mind, and it responds really well to our feelings. So when it comes to changing the subconscious mind, feeling is the secret. Thoughts without any feelings will not penetrate the subconscious mind and therefore cannot affect our behavior and will not produce any results. If you want to change your life, you must change your subconscious mind. The key to changing the subconscious is to use the feelings.
Let's suppose you desire to have more money. You have to change your subconscious mind about money. How do you do that? You start by visualizing, you build a picture of yourself as a rich person. Then as you are visualizing, you start to feel as if your desire state is already fulfilled. This is the whole idea behind prayer. As Jesus said, “Truly I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.” What you need for this type of belief is fate. Fate is the feeling that everything will fall into place while you are on your journey. It means trusting yourself.
Decide what is it that you want to attract to your life and begin to feel it. Create a vivid mental picture of what you desire in life and then feel as if you are already there. The key to making your subconscious mind accept your new picture is to feel your desire as already fulfilled. You have to be able to see the wish fulfilled already in advance and call those things that do not yet exist as though they do. You always go to the end and the end is where you begin.
This becomes even more important when you realize that you don't attract what you want, but what you are. Neville writes: “to seek on the outside that which you don't feel you are, is to seek in vain, for we never find that which we want, we find only that which we are.” To realize your desired state, you must feel as if you have already achieved it. Changing your feelings means changing your destiny. My mentor, Jim Ryan used to tell me “your life is not going to change until you change. And if you change, everything in your life will change.” So believe in yourself and start changing who you are and become the person that has the things that you want by feeling as if you've already achieved them. I’ll end the video with one of my most favorite quotes from Henry David Thoreau, “If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”