Imagination · “Feel It Real”
Test Yourself
Adopt an experimental stance: deliberately test the law of assumption on small, checkable cases so that belief becomes earned experience rather than borrowed faith.
Put the law on trial — don’t take it on authority.
- Pick a small, checkable target.
- Run it; observe honestly, hits and misses.
- Keep what works for you; discard what doesn’t.
- Faith becomes real only when it becomes experience.
What it is
Less a single procedure than a stance: Neville’s challenge to put the entire philosophy on trial. Rather than believing on his authority, you run your own small, checkable experiments — the ladder, the telephone, a congratulation scene — observe the results, and let outcome (not faith) decide whether you keep or discard the method. It is the empirical discipline that frames every other technique in the Atlas.
The Method
- Take the challenge. “Take my challenge and put this philosophy to the test” (Thinking Fourth-Dimensionally).
- Commit to a real verdict. “If it does not work you should not use it as a comforter. If it is not true, you must completely discard it.” Neville stakes a falsifiable claim, not a feel-good belief.
- Know that experience, not assent, is the test. Faith “is not complete until through experiment it becomes experience” (Test Yourselves). You won’t know “until you try either to prove or disprove it.”
- Run small, checkable cases. Use a low-stakes, verifiable target (Neville’s examples in Test Yourselves include the telephone and revising the mail) so you can clearly see whether it worked.
- Guard the input. Part of the test is refusing to passively assume the bad news that arrives by phone, mail, or TV — “like a computer, choose what you are going to allow to enter.”
- Keep what proves out; discard what doesn’t. Treat each technique as a hypothesis. Adopt the ones that produce results for you; drop the rest. (The compilation’s own advice: “Find the one (or ones) that work best for you… and use them.”)
Source & Lineage
The core challenge — “put this philosophy to the test… if it is not true, you must completely discard it” — is from Neville Goddard’s “Thinking Fourth-Dimensionally.” The experimental framing (“faith… is not complete until through experiment it becomes experience”) and the practical telephone/mail tests are from “Test Yourselves” (25 September 1967).
In Crosson’s compilation this is presented as a bonus “challenge” rather than a discrete technique. Genuine Neville material.
Common refinements
Only counting the hits. Honest testing logs failures too; otherwise it’s not a test.
- Choosing un-checkable targets. Pick something you can clearly confirm or disconfirm.
- Using it “as a comforter” — Neville explicitly rejects keeping the philosophy if it doesn’t work for you.
- Over-stakes first experiments. Start small and low-risk to keep the test clean.