Neville Goddard Lectures: “Your Mood Decides Your Future”

Let us take my friend’s revelation of this week plus scripture plus what we quoted earlier of A.E., the great Irish poet, and Sir Winston Churchill—how moods decide the fortunes and not fortunes decide the mood. You can conjure a mood at will. If you know a mood that would possess you were things as you desire them to be, you can conjure that mood and await results. We’re told in scripture—this goes back now to the Book of Genesis—here is a man who is blind, the symbol that you can’t see any effect in this world—his name is Isaac. He’s blind. He has two sons. And he’s asked one to go and bring him some venison; his name is Esau. A second son, whose name is Jacob, and Jacob, knowing his father’s request, disguises himself as Esau. He puts on hair, puts on leather, puts on everything to feel like Esau, because he knows his father can’t see and the father would have to depend upon feeling, not upon seeing.

So here is the story given to us that when Imagination is moved to the point of feeling the thing is done. Can’t see…that “I am blind, my son, come near that I may feel to see whether you are my son or not” (verse 21). A few verses on (this is the 27th chapter of the Book of Genesis) a few verses on he said, “Come near, my son, and kiss me” (verse 26). Is there anything closer, anything nearer that is more emotional than the kiss of one you love? And so, “Come close, come near, my son, and kiss me.” He wants to tell from the kiss if he can’t see the boy. So the first one comes and he feels him, and he said, ‘Your voice sounds like Jacob, but you feel and you smell like Esau.” Now the blessing was for Esau. Esau is the external world…this room is Esau. I want a world that is external, that is factual, that the world can see and enjoy it with me. That’s my Esau. I bring what I think is Esau—I’m blind, I can’t see it—and I create a mood, and bring the mood and make it so much a part of me that it seems to be real. It takes on the external state of Esau, it seems so factual, so external, so objective to me. Although I can’t see it, it seems real.

Do I believe, really, that the mood determines my fortune, or am I going to wait for the fortune to create in me the mood? Am I going to do what scripture teaches man to do— close his eyes to the obvious I am impoverished, I am unwanted, I am unknown? Well, I would like to reverse all of these states in my world, but my eye denies that they are reversed. I am still unknown, still impoverished, still unwanted, and everything in my world tells me that these facts are facts, but I don’t want them. So I close my eyes to the obvious. Then I bring my Jacob and I clothe Jacob in what is to me reality. I feel wanted. What is the mood that would possess me were I wanted? What is the mood that would possess me were I known? What is the mood that would possess me were I now affluent? What is the mood? And so, I bring it and clothe myself in the mood first, and then give it the tones of reality, all the sensory vividness that I can muster…and see if this really is true of scripture. For this is what scripture teaches.