Neville Goddard Lectures: “Rearrange the Mind”

08 Apr Neville Goddard Lectures: “Rearrange the Mind”

March 24, 1972

You should find tonight a very practical night, something that you an test—take it home tonight and prove it. You’ll take it from Scripture, but something first, I think with which you’re all familiar. If you took a piece of steel that’s magnetized, it does not differ in substance from the demagnetized piece of steel, only in the arrangement of its molecules. The rich man, the poor man, the beggar man, the thief are not different minds, but simply different arrangements of the same mind. There is only God in this world. So, when you say I am, and I say I am, it’s the same God, but we have arranged the structure of our minds differently. We have different concepts of self and that’s all. But not one is better because he is richer than the one who is poor. These are only different arrangements of the structure of the mind.

Now Scripture tells this and I’m quoting now, the book of James, the Epistle of James.

James is really a letter from Jacob. The word James and Jacob are identical. In Hebrew, Greek, and in the Arabic tongue, the same word. So, when they begin, James, a servant of God and the Lord Jesus Christ to the twelve tribes in the dispersion, you can see it once. It’s simply a Christian revision of this Jewish letter; it’s the letter of Jacob and if you read it carefully, only twice do they insert, say, Jesus Christ our Lord, all the others, there are eleven other times, it is simply God. The Lord is God, not Christ. So here it is really the servant of the Lord speaking. And he is giving us some fantastic instruction and very practical instruction. Now, listen to it carefully. I am now going to quote from the very first chapter of the book of James: “Be doers of the word and not hearers only, for he who is a hearer and not a doer is like a man who observes his natural face in the mirror then goes his way and at once forgets what he is like. But he who looks into the perfect law, the Law of Liberty, and perseveres, he will be blessed in his doing.”

Now, how do I look into the Law, the perfect Law, which sets me free, the Law of Liberty? I look into my mind. I’m now imprisoned. I’ve heard the sentence. I know exactly how long I’m supposed to serve. Now, I look into the Law of Liberty in my mind, and I assume that I am free. I’m set free. How? I am not concerned. Who brought it about? I am not concerned. I simply look into the perfect law, the Law of Liberty, and I dare to assume that I am free. If I dare to assume that I am free, I rearrange the structure of my mind, the same mind that heard the sentence that I accepted when I heard it. Now, I do not accept it. I look into the perfect law, the Law of Liberty. And if, as I’m told in Scripture, I persevere, then I will actually receive that which I am doing. I must not forget what I have done and sleep this night as though I am in prison; for if I am now set free, where would I sleep? Let me know exactly where would I sleep? Well, dare to assume that I am sleeping there now.

If I sleep in the assumption that I am free, I am not in jail. Even though the bars are there, I don’t see them, close my eyes against them. As Blake tells us, man’s perceptions are not bounded by organs of perception: he perceives more than sense, however acute, can discover. And so, reason or the ratio of all that we already know is not the same that it shall be when we know more. If I take this tonight and test it, and it proves itself in the testing until I have added to my knowledge. And so, I know more than before I tested it, and so when I find myself up against something that seems beyond solution, I have found something that can solve it. All I have to do is to rearrange the structure of my mind. So, I dare to assume that I am the man that I would be and sleep as though I am. That’s the rearrangement of that structure of the mind. I am the same being. I’m Neville. I know exactly those that I knew before, but now I know them differently. I know them now as a freed man, but I must not be a hearer of what I heard in Scripture. I must be a doer. I must do it.