Chapter 2 of Your Faith Is Your Fortune – Neville Goddard
“So shall My word be that goeth forth out of My mouth; it shall not return unto Me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it.”
Man can decree a thing and it will come to pass.
Man has always decreed that which has appeared in his world. He is today decreeing that which is appearing in his world and he shall continue to do so as long as man is conscious of being man.
Nothing has ever appeared in man’s world, but what man decreed that it should. This you may deny; but try as you will, you cannot disprove it for this decreeing is based upon a changeless principle.
Man does not command things to appear by his words, which are, more often than not, a confession of his doubts and fears.
Decreeing is ever done in consciousness.
Every man automatically expresses that which he is conscious of being. Without effort or the use of words, at every moment of time, man is commanding himself to be and to possess that which he is conscious of being and possessing.
This changeless principle of expression is dramatized in all the Bibles of the world.
The writers of our sacred books were illumined mystics, past masters in the art of psychology. In telling the story of the soul, they personified this impersonal principle in the form of a historical document both to preserve it and to hide it from the eyes of the uninitiated. Today, those to whom this great treasure has been entrusted, namely, the priesthoods of the world, have forgotten that the Bibles are psychological dramas representing the consciousness of man; in their blind forgetfulness, they now teach their followers to worship its characters as men and women who actually lived in time and space.
When man sees the Bible as a great psychological drama, with all of its characters and actors as the personified qualities and attributes of his own consciousness, then and then only will the Bible reveal to him the light of its symbology.
This Impersonal principle of life which made all things is personified as God. This Lord God, creator of heaven and earth, is discovered to be man’s awareness of being.
If man were less bound by orthodoxy and more intuitively observant, he could not fail to notice in the reading of the Bibles that the awareness of being is revealed hundreds of times throughout this literature.
To name a few:
“I AM hath sent me unto you.”
“Be still and know that I AM God.”
“I AM the Lord and there is no God.”
“I AM the shepherd.”
“I AM the door.”
“I AM the resurrection and the life.”
“I AM the way.”
“I AM the beginning and the end.” I AM; man’s unconditioned awareness of being is revealed as Lord and Creator of every conditioned state of being.
If man would give up his belief in a God apart from himself, recognize his awareness of being to be God (this awareness fashions itself in the likeness and image of its conception of itself), he would transform his world from a barren waste to a fertile field of his own liking.
The day man does this he will know that he and his Father are one, but his Father is greater than he.
He will know that his consciousness of being is one with that which he is conscious of being, but that his unconditioned consciousness of being is greater than his conditioned state or his conception of himself.
When man discovers his consciousness to be the impersonal power of expression, which power eternally personifies itself in his conceptions of himself, he will assume and appropriate that state of consciousness which he desires to express; in so doing he will become that state in expression.
“Ye shall decree a thing and it shall come to pass”
can now be told in this manner:
You shall become conscious of being or possessing a thing and you shall express or possess that which you are conscious of being.
The law of consciousness is the only law of expression.
“I AM the way”.
“I AM the resurrection”.
Consciousness is the way as well as the power which resurrects and expresses all that man will ever be conscious of being. Turn from the blindness of the uninitiated man who attempts to express and possess those qualities and things which he is not conscious of being and possessing; and be as the illumined mystic who decrees, on the basis of this changeless law.
Consciously claim yourself to be that which you seek; appropriate the consciousness of that which you see; and you too will know the status of the true mystic, as follows:
I became conscious of being it. I am still conscious of being it. And I shall continue to be conscious of being it until that which I am conscious of being is perfectly expressed.
“Yes, I shall decree a thing and it shall come to pass.”