Subconscious Mind

What Is the Subconscious Mind in Manifestation?

In Neville Goddard's teaching, the subconscious mind is the creative engine that transforms your inner assumptions into outer reality. It is the part of your mind that operates below conscious awareness, managing not only your bodily functions but also the circumstances, events, and encounters of your daily life. Neville often referred to it as the "deeper self" or used the Biblical metaphor of the "wife" in the marriage between conscious and subconscious mind.

The subconscious does not think, reason, or judge. It simply receives impressions and faithfully executes them. Whatever you feel to be true, whatever images you impress upon it with emotion, it accepts without question and begins to express in your physical world.

How the Subconscious Creates Reality

Neville described the relationship between the conscious and subconscious mind using the analogy of a gardener and the soil. Your conscious mind is the gardener: it selects the seeds (desires) and plants them. Your subconscious is the soil: it receives the seeds and grows them into physical form. The soil does not judge whether a seed is a flower or a weed. It grows whatever is planted.

This is why Neville placed such emphasis on what you feel and imagine, especially before sleep. Your feelings and images are the seeds. Every fearful thought, every assumption of lack, every feeling of unworthiness is planted just as surely as every assumption of abundance, love, and success. The subconscious grows them all indiscriminately.

The Subconscious Is Always Listening

Your subconscious does not turn off. It is recording and responding to your inner state every moment of every day. Your habitual thoughts, your inner conversations, your emotional responses to events: all of these impress the subconscious continuously. This is why mental diet is so important. Your subconscious is shaped not by occasional intense visualization sessions but by the cumulative weight of your daily inner life.

Impressing the Subconscious

Neville taught several methods for deliberately impressing the subconscious:

1. SATS (State Akin to Sleep)

The most direct method. In the hypnagogic state between waking and sleeping, your conscious mind's critical faculty relaxes, and your subconscious becomes highly receptive. Imaginal scenes accompanied by feeling sink deep into the subconscious during this window.

2. Repetition of Feeling

Returning to the feeling of the wish fulfilled throughout the day gradually impresses the subconscious through consistency. Even without the SATS state, persistent feeling creates a cumulative impression.

3. Revision

By revising past events in your imagination, you replace negative impressions with positive ones. The subconscious accepts the revised version and stops generating circumstances based on the original negative impression.

4. Mental Diet

By controlling your inner conversation and redirecting negative thought patterns, you prevent unwanted impressions from reaching the subconscious and replace them with desired ones.

The Subconscious vs. the Conscious Mind

Understanding the distinct roles of these two aspects of mind is essential:

The conscious mind is:

• Analytical and logical
• The selector and director
• Limited in its creative power
• Active during waking hours
• Capable of choosing and deciding

The subconscious mind is:

• Non-judgmental and literal
• The creator and executor
• Unlimited in its creative power
• Active 24 hours a day
• Incapable of rejecting what is impressed upon it with feeling

The key insight is that the conscious mind chooses, but the subconscious creates. Your conscious mind can decide what you want, but only the subconscious can bring it into physical reality. The bridge between them is feeling.

Why Feeling Impresses the Subconscious

The subconscious responds to feeling because feeling carries the signal of reality. Your subconscious cannot distinguish between an event you physically experienced and one you vividly imagined with genuine feeling. Both produce the same neurological and emotional patterns. When you "feel it real" in your imagination, your subconscious treats it as a real experience and begins to build your outer world accordingly.

This is also why fear is so creative. When you fear something, you are essentially doing a SATS session for your worst-case scenario: you vividly imagine it, feel the dread and anxiety, and impress that upon your subconscious. The subconscious, unable to judge the content, faithfully begins to create it.

Reprogramming the Subconscious

Years of negative conditioning, limiting beliefs, and habitual thought patterns have created deep impressions in your subconscious. These impressions are what generate your current reality. Changing your reality means creating new impressions that are stronger and more consistent than the old ones.

This is not an overnight process for deep-seated patterns, but it is absolutely achievable. Neville taught that persistent assumption, maintained with feeling, will eventually overwrite even the most entrenched subconscious programming. The old impression does not need to be removed. It simply needs to be replaced by a stronger, more consistent new impression.

Common Questions

Can I change deeply held subconscious beliefs?

Yes. No impression is permanent. Even beliefs formed in childhood can be overwritten through persistent assumption and feeling. The subconscious is infinitely malleable. What took years to build can be reshaped in weeks or months of dedicated practice.

How do I know what is in my subconscious?

Look at your life. Your outer circumstances are a faithful reflection of your subconscious content. If you consistently experience lack, your subconscious holds impressions of scarcity. If you consistently experience love, it holds impressions of worthiness. The 3D is your subconscious made visible.

Is the subconscious the same as the unconscious?

Neville used the terms somewhat interchangeably, but in his teaching, the subconscious is not merely a repository of repressed memories (as in Freudian psychology). It is the active creative power that shapes your reality. It is not something broken that needs healing but a faithful servant that needs conscious direction.