Trust the Unseen Movement

A Lecture in the Voice and Spirit of Neville Goddard

You have assumed the state. You have felt the wish fulfilled. You have entered the new conception and accepted it as your own. Yet the outer world remains unchanged. The condition you desire to alter still stands before you. The evidence you long to see does not appear. And because it does not appear, the mind begins its quiet questioning. You wonder whether the assumption took. You wonder whether the feeling was deep enough. You wonder whether anything at all is moving. 

I tell you, something is moving. Something has moved. But the movement is unseen. It is not a movement of objects in space. It is a movement of consciousness itself. When you assume the feeling of the wish fulfilled, you have performed the only creative act there is. You have risen in awareness to a new level of being. That rising is the movement. It takes place in the invisible realm where all things have their origin. The senses cannot report it because the senses are tuned to the old state. They were fashioned to bear witness to what you were conscious of being before you assumed the new. They will report the new only when the new has become established enough to compel their testimony. To demand that they show you the change before you trust the change is to ask the servant to lead the master. It cannot be done.

The unseen movement is the true action. All outer action is but its shadow. When you trust this movement, you are trusting the only power that can rearrange your world. You are not trusting a future event. You are trusting an event that has already occurred in consciousness. The moment the feeling of the wish fulfilled became natural to you, the movement began. It does not require your supervision in the outer world. It does not require your calculation of time or method. It requires only your trust. Trust means you no longer look back to the old state for confirmation. Trust means you no longer search the darkness of the senses for signs that the movement is working. Trust means you rest in the conviction that what you have assumed in the invisible must clothe itself in the visible, because consciousness is the only reality.

This conviction is not a loud declaration. It is a quiet knowing. It is the feeling that the thing is already so. When you can think from the fulfilled desire without strain, when the new state feels as natural as breathing, the movement has done its deeper work in the unseen. The outer world, which is forever the slave of consciousness, must now conform. There is no other law. You are not asked to make it conform by force or by anxious watching. You are asked only to trust that the movement you initiated is even now bringing forth its own evidence in its own way. The how is not your concern. The movement knows its own way. Its ways are past finding out by the reasoning mind. Your part is to remain faithful to what you have assumed until the faithfulness becomes the very atmosphere in which you live.

Consider what this trust does to your sense of self. Before you assumed the new state, you were the man who wanted something, the man who lacked something, the man who waited for something to happen. The moment you assumed the feeling of the wish fulfilled and trusted the unseen movement, you ceased to be that man. You became the man in whom the thing is already done. This change of identity is the real transformation. It is not something you will see in the mirror at first. It is something you feel in the quiet of your own being. You no longer strive. You no longer plead. You no longer search the outer for what can only come from the inner. You are. And from this being, all things flow outward in perfect order.

The daily experience that follows this trust is quiet and majestic. You go about your affairs from the new level. You speak from it. You meet circumstances from it. Because you do, circumstances begin to arrange themselves differently. Not because you have forced them, but because you have withdrawn your faith from the old arrangement. The old arrangement was the out-picturing of your former state. When you trust the new state, you starve the old out-picturing of its life. It withers for lack of attention. The new out-picturing grows in its place. This is not a process you must manage. It is a process you must allow by your trust. Every time you return to the feeling of the wish fulfilled, you are feeding the new movement. Every time you turn from the unchanged conditions and dwell in the new state, you are strengthening the unseen action. The movement grows until it becomes irresistible. Then the outer world yields without your having to lift a hand against it.

Doubt will arise. It arises because the old state does not surrender its throne without a struggle. It will point to the unchanged conditions and say, “See, nothing has happened.” It will suggest that your assumption was in vain. When these suggestions come, do not fight them with argument. Argument only gives them life. Simply return to the feeling of the wish fulfilled. Feel its naturalness once more. Give thanks inwardly for having received what is not yet apparent to the senses. In this return you are trusting the unseen movement again. You are refusing to be moved by what is seen and are remaining loyal to what is unseen. Each time you do this, the old state loses a measure of its power over you. Each time you do this, the new state becomes more firmly established. Eventually the doubts grow faint. Eventually they cease to arise with the old force. You find yourself living from the new state without effort, and the outer world has no choice but to reflect the state from which you now live.

This trust is the very substance of faith. It is not the faith that hopes something will happen at some distant time. It is the faith that knows the thing is already accomplished in the only place where accomplishment can occur—in consciousness. Faith is the substance of the thing hoped for, the evidence of the thing not yet seen. Your trust is that substance. Your quiet conviction is that evidence. When you can rest in this, the absence of outer evidence ceases to trouble you. You know the movement is working. You know it cannot fail, because it is the movement of consciousness itself, and consciousness cannot deny what it has assumed. The signs will come. They always come. But they follow the movement; they never precede it. To demand the signs before you trust the movement is to reverse the order of creation. Creation moves from the invisible to the visible, from consciousness to form, from assumption to embodiment. Trust the order, and the order will reveal itself to you.

Think of the moment you first assumed the state. In that moment an unseen agreement was made. Your awareness agreed with the thing desired. The two became one in consciousness. This agreement is the movement. It is invisible to the outer eye, yet it is the most real event that can occur in a man’s life. From that agreement all future events in your world will flow. The old agreement, the agreement with lack or limitation or illness or whatever the former state was, begins to lose its binding power the moment the new agreement is trusted. The old out-picturing continues for a time because it was deeply established, but it continues only as long as you continue to feed it with your attention. When your attention is wholly given to the new state, when your trust is wholly placed in the unseen movement, the old out-picturing starves and the new out-picturing appears. This is the law. It is not a law of effort. It is a law of trust.

You are not asked to ignore the outer world. You are asked to see it truly. It is the mirror of consciousness. It has no power to create its own image. It can only reflect what is placed before it. When you place the new state before it by your assumption and your trust, it must reflect the new state. It may take time for the reflection to become clear, just as a mirror takes time to clear after it has been breathed upon. But the clearing is inevitable when you cease to breathe upon it with doubt. Trust the unseen movement, and you cease to breathe doubt upon the mirror. The reflection clears of itself.

This trust transforms your entire relationship to time. You no longer live in anxious anticipation of a future fulfillment. You live from the fulfillment as a present fact. The days are no longer empty spaces to be filled with waiting. They are the natural unfolding of what has already been established in consciousness. You move through them with a quiet certainty. You are not disturbed by delays because you know delays are not denials. They are the necessary interval in which the unseen movement completes its work. The interval is not empty. It is full of invisible activity. Every return to the feeling of the wish fulfilled adds to that activity. Every act of trust strengthens it. The interval ends when the movement has done all that is required of it in the unseen. Then the outer evidence appears, not as a surprise, but as the inevitable consequence of what you have trusted.

The peace that accompanies this trust is unlike any peace the outer world can give. It is not the peace of favorable circumstances. It is the peace of knowing that circumstances no longer have the power to determine your state. You determine your state by your assumption and your trust. Circumstances then conform to the state. This reversal of cause and effect is the great discovery. Most men live as though the outer is cause and their state is effect. They wait for the outer to change before they will change their state. But the outer cannot change until the state changes. When you trust the unseen movement, you have changed the state first. You have placed the cause where it belongs—in consciousness. The effect must follow. There is no other possibility.

As you persist in this trust, something subtle yet profound occurs. You begin to feel that you have always been the man in whom the wish is fulfilled. The memory of the old state grows dim. It becomes difficult to recall the feeling of lack or limitation because the new feeling has become so natural. This is the sign that the unseen movement has completed its work in you. The new man has been born. The old man has passed away. Not by effort, not by struggle, but by the quiet, persistent trust in the movement you set in motion when you assumed the feeling of the wish fulfilled.

Tonight, when you lie down to sleep, do not review the unchanged conditions. Do not search the darkness for proof that the movement is working. Assume the feeling of the wish fulfilled once more. Feel its naturalness. Give thanks for having received what is not yet apparent to the senses. Then sleep in the trust that the unseen movement is perfect in its operation. In the morning, rise in the same trust. Check only the feeling within you. If the feeling is natural, the movement continues. If doubt has entered, return to the feeling until it regains its naturalness. This is the simple, majestic way. There is no other way. Consciousness is the only reality. The movement of consciousness is the only creative power. Trust it, and you will find that all things are possible to you. You will have discovered that the unseen movement, once trusted, never fails to clothe itself in the seen. You are that movement. You are the power that moves. Trust yourself, and the world you desire is already yours.