Resistance – What Is It and Did Neville Goddard Teach It?

When a manifestation seems to have failed or to be delayed, “resistance” is an explanation commonly given by teachers of the Law. Although I personally have not found an instance of Neville using that exact word, I believe that he expresses the same idea.

Neville does speak of “conditioning desires,” and he instructs people to avoid doing it. In my opinion, these conditions are resistance. These are also “limiting beliefs.” These terms all express the same essential idea, and they boil down to fear.

What Are “Conditions?”

The words of prophecy spoken of in the book of Revelation are your basic desires which must not be further conditioned. Man is constantly adding to and taking from these words. Not knowing that the basic desire contains the plan and power of expression, man is always compromising and complicating his desire. Here is an illustration of what man does to the word of prophecy — his desires.

Man desires freedom from his limitation or problem. The first thing he does after he defines his objective is to condition it upon something else. He begins to speculate on the manner of acquiring it. Not knowing that the thing desired has a way of expression all of its own, he starts planning how he is going to get it, thereby adding to the word of God.

If, on the other hand, he has no plan or conception as to the fulfillment of his desire, then he compromises his desire by modifying it. He feels that if he will be satisfied with less than his basic desire, then he might have a better chance of realizing it. In doing so, he takes from the word of God.

Freedom For All, Neville Goddard

Conditioning your desire means that you don’t immediately claim it because you believe you need certain conditions first, and/or you believe current, external conditions are blocks. Conditions include believing something must come a particular way or cannot come a particular way. It includes thinking two desirable things are at odds and one must be sacrificed, and similar false dichotomies. The biggest condition is the identity you cling to, otherwise known as your “concept of self.”

Going to the “end” in an imaginal act, you remove conditions, which produces a state of faith. It creates the feeling that no matter what happens between now and the desire manifesting, the outcome is assured.

Fighting Fears and Doubts Creates Resistance 

Of course, this is just a complicated way to talk about “fears” and “doubts” which hide under a veneer of being realistic, reasonable, even righteous. The conditions often relate to your current state of consciousness; they seem emotionally real to you and may even seem to flatter you. They often make you feel “right” or “superior.”

Fears and doubts are represented in the Bible by “Satan the Devil,” which means opposer or resistor. Satan is said to disguise himself as an angel of light. 

For such are false apostles, deceitful workers, transforming themselves into apostles of Christ. And no wonder! For Satan himself transforms himself into an angel of light. Therefore it is no great thing if his ministers also transform themselves into ministers of righteousness, whose end will be according to their works.

2 Cor 11:13-15

These fears and doubts can feel like they guide you from harm. But these beliefs are misleading you and they’ve tried to usurp the place of God — your higher consciousness. This is important to understand because you likely have attachments to these fears and doubts. You may do mental gymnastics to justify them. On the surface, they may even seem reasonable, protective, good, moral, or like insurmountable “reality.”

People often notice that where they have resistance, affirmations may cause the opposite of what they want to happen. This is because the emotional experience of what is unwanted is still more real. You still have conditions. It feels so real that, out of fear, you affirm against these conditions, which inadvertently confirms them as real. But you wouldn’t be scared of a thought if it didn’t feel real. You’d have nothing to resist. So when you resist, it persists.

You cease resisting when you accept the state of the wish fulfilled without conditions. You accept it as real inside of you regardless of what currently looks real outside. Nothing needs to be fought or changed — there are no conditions which present a problem.

You do not fight against your problem; your problem will only live as long as you are conscious of it. Take your attention away from your problem and the multitude of reasons why you cannot achieve your ideal. Concentrate your attention entirely upon the thing desired.

Feeling Is the Secret, Chapter 6, Neville Goddard

Neville advises keeping a good “mental diet” to avoid undoing imaginal acts with negative speech. A mental diet is more than positive affirmations — it is ignoring the old ideas and not giving them life. You must starve them of the emotions which confirm they are real. 

And if perchance you catch yourself imagining what you do not wish to experience, stop it, stop it right there and then, and don’t give it an extra second. It may be you are in the midst of an emotion and you’d like to complete the emotion and tell [someone] off completely. Don’t. Stop it. Break it. And that causes a sort of a mental, well, a mental abortion, a mental miscarriage. If you break it without exploding the emotion.

Feel After Him, Neville Goddard

Detaching from Fears and Unwanted Situations 

In the story of the Jewish prophet Daniel, he learns that he could be thrown into the lion’s den if he continued to pray to his god (Daniel, Chapter 6). Your doubts and fears similarly threaten you from entering the state of the wish fulfilled. But Daniel persisted in praying as he always did. He ignored this decree from the King and focused on his prayer to God; this symbolizes faith in the desired outcome, a higher state of consciousness.

Now when Daniel learned that the decree had been published, he went home to his upstairs room where the windows opened toward Jerusalem. Three times a day he got down on his knees and prayed, giving thanks to his God, just as he had done before. Then these men went as a group and found Daniel praying and asking God for help. So they went to the king and spoke to him about his royal decree: “Did you not publish a decree that during the next thirty days anyone who prays to any god or human being except to you, Your Majesty, would be thrown into the lions’ den?”

Daniel, Chapter 6 (Bible)

Daniel still got thrown into the lion’s den, but nothing happened! His persistent faith saved him. And he is not described as freaking out in the lion’s den; there is only implication he calmly maintained trust in God, the assurance he would be saved. So even when it looks like everything is going wrong, if we persist in our positive assumptions, our deepest fears may not manifest at all. What appeared as a sure disaster may wind up being nothing at all, or sometimes even part of the “bridge of incidents” that leads to your manifestation.

So the king gave the order, and they brought Daniel and threw him into the lions’ den. The king said to Daniel, “May your God, whom you serve continually, rescue you!”

And when Daniel was lifted from the den, no wound was found on him, because he had trusted in his God.

Biblical scriptures also instruct us to “resist the devil, and he will flee from you” — this sounds like a contradiction. But it talks about submitting to God first 

Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.

James 4:7

You “resist” by ignoring the feared thing and yielding to the desired state instead. You resist being affected by fear. That is not the resistance which confirms a fear is real because you aren’t fighting it with emotional energy. This is also what is meant by “detachment.” The detachment is from the fears and doubts and any external situation or occurrence which stirs them up or appears contrary to the desire. The less emotional reaction to them, the better. 

Uprooting Old Fears

You don’t have to go on a witch hunt to uproot old fears. You don’t need to do endless therapy analyzing your childhood. Inner work isn’t healing but assuming the state of being healed. Your work is to plant the positive “seeds”  (beliefs) about your desires so there is no room for anything else. In the scriptures, when you planted the seeds of wheat (your desires), the “enemy” (your fears) also sowed weeds (unwanted stuff) in your field (your subconscious). See Matthew 13:24-30;36-43. 

Until the seeds sprout and grow, you can’t always know which is which. The weeds may look like wheat, meaning your fears may actually seem to be “good” or to “make sense,” hence your inability to identify them as holding you back. They are not hiding deep in your subconscious. They are growing in front of your eyes. You just can’t see them as fears because of your current state. But when the harvest arrives, the workers reap the fields and pick out the weeds, tossing them into the fire. The workers are said to be angels, which simply represent your guiding insights. This means you will have realizations come to you that create clarity. This is often in an instant and is part of the bridge of incidents — the events which lead to the manifestation. Then you will simply discard the unwanted ideas and the old fears. It will be fast and simple and doesn’t require intense therapy or work. 

Negative Emotions Alert You 

Negative emotions are actually wonderful signals that tell you that you’ve been mentally dwelling on stuff you don’t want. These emotions are an alarm from your subconscious. They are blaring to tell you the “enemy” has been planting “weeds.” Thank the emotions, release them, and then shift to the new ideas which should create the desired emotions. In this way, you’re planting more seeds of what you want in a good soil, not where “weeds” will choke it out. Too many weeds choke out the wheat. Joseph Murphy, another teacher of the Law, also acknowledges that people fail when the old idea is still stronger than the new idea, and intense denial of the old idea can actually strengthen it. This is why he often suggests installing a belief of continual improvement, which gradually weakens the old state. Again, you weaken the old ideas by turning away from them, and plant the new beliefs until they increasingly dominate.

If you meditate regularly, then you will notice thoughts veering into unwanted places more quickly, and you will learn to simply redirect your mind. Before the emotional alarm even sounds, you will notice the negative thoughts emerging. At first you will still fear them, and sometimes it will be a struggle. People often feel exhausted in these times. But as you cultivate your desired state with imaginal acts, your soil ceases to be hospitable to fearful thoughts. These thoughts just blow away, unable to take root. You don’t attach to them or respond to them and will automatically default back to the new state of mind. There is nothing to resist because it no longer feels real, much as your desires once felt like a far off fantasy. The less real the opposing “condition” is, the more easily the desire is accepted as a natural reality and the faster it manifests. Your soil is good for planting what you want, meaning your mind easily accepts it as there is no opposition to it. 

Using Imaginal Acts in a State Akin to Sleep

If you experience an imaginal act very strongly, meaning it felt very real, this experience will  wipe out the many previous experiences which had created a cycle (because you kept reconfirming it emotionally). This to me is like your soil becoming hostile to weeds but not to the wheat plant. The weeds just don’t have what they need to grow anymore. Your new emotional experience has created a stronger belief and the old belief will now feel weak at best. 

This is why Neville emphasizes imagining scenes in a drowsy, relaxed state, otherwise known as a “state akin to sleep.” In this sleepy, hypnotic state, you are able to experience imagination in a way that feels real. This state also quiets the logical mind from stirring opposition. Doing imaginal acts in a state akin to sleep is like spraying weed killer on old thoughts and adding in fertilizer to grow what you want. During the day, the old thoughts just don’t seem to pop up anymore, or they do less and less, and as they do, you just easily pluck them out or let them shrivel up.

No, an imaginal act doesn’t have to be a scene or visual at all, but multi-sensory experiences created in your mind often feel more real to people. You certainly can just do affirmations, which is an imaginal act of hearing and speaking. Individuals may find different senses more impactful than others.

Naturalize Your Desires to Remove Conditions and Resistance 

The point of imaginal acts is to normalize the new emotional experience so it becomes natural to assume the desire is a reality. The desire is now as “normal” for you to experience as anything else that is currently normal for you. Another way to normalize a desire is to create a past which makes it logically expected. This is what revision is for, and forgiveness is also revision (wiping the slate clean). The past can be something two seconds ago that you didn’t like or an old story from your childhood.

When something feels natural, we accept it as done without being concerned with conditions. You don’t “try” to manifest mundane stuff because it’s so natural for you that you just take it for granted, and you assume any effort you make will easily get it for you. Most of us would say we can have a banana whenever we want. We don’t deliberately manifest bananas because… why would we? Our current state of being makes it so we easily assume we can have a banana whenever we want and that any action to get one will not be blocked. This is what it means for something to be natural to your current state. The desire comes upon you and you accept it as not only possible, but probable, and you assume any outer action taken towards it will work. 

No you can’t fake it until you make it outwardly — that’s called lying to yourself, being delusional, and trying to force stuff because you’re actually scared it won’t happen. You must practice being in a new state inwardly until it becomes comfortable, like breaking in a new pair of shoes. It’s so comfortable and worn in that it’s now your default, like the pair of shoes you go for most often. Then you will be compelled to walk across that bridge of incidents to your manifestation.

Often when people get to this point, they will preach about not needing techniques. They will say “You just have to believe!” But how does one just believe? By starving opposing beliefs so they die off and making the new belief feel more real. You make it feel natural for someone like you to experience such a thing. This is a removal of conditions, mainly ones about yourself, who you are, and what kinds of experiences you have. Your concept of self changes when you cultivate the end state which assumes there is no trauma, there was no poverty, there was no fight, etc. The bridge of incidents frequently includes the transformation into the person you need to be to experience what you want, including shedding various fears that contradict it. When these old fears bubble up in your awareness, then your conscious mind responds to it as silly, because they no longer make sense based on your new normal.

Your present feelings about a matter reveal what is more real and natural to you: the fears or the desire. If opposing conditions and old fears feel real, then you will react to them like they are real, and that is resistance. But as you cultivate the desired state so that it becomes your default, you react less to current conditions and fears as they arise, and they will arise less and less. Once your faith becomes stronger than your resistance, the desire inevitably manifests.

The Antidote for Resistance

A breakdown of the above article into a practical guide of applicable steps: