re: Neville's Most Perplexing Quote about Manifesting Marriage (How to Manifest Love & Marriage, etc.)

NEVILLE’S MOST PERPLEXING QUOTES ABOUT MANIFESTING MARRIAGE

 

This quote by Neville Goddard stumps a lot of people in the manifesting community:

"Do not confine the state of marriage to a certain man, but a full, rich and overflowing life..."

“What does this mean?” “Does that mean I can’t manifest a specific person?” “Why did he emphasize focusing on a state?” “What is a state?” "What is the state of marriage?"

I’ll answer that, but first … let me share a memory I have that goes back nearly twenty years ago today.

 

“August 6” memory.

Every summer, my Facebook feed gets plastered with anniversary posts by friends on social media. Most of those posts are photos from their weddings ten or twenty years ago. On rare occasions there will be a rogue poster who posts a celebratory divorce announcement, or sharing a funny a post about someone who demolished their wedding dress and did a photo shoot.

It would be socially unacceptable for a divorced person to share photos from their wedding day, especially if they were married more than once, but I’m doing it. Haha. Because I’m counter-cultural like that and love breaking social norms. But, I’m also doing it as it ties in with this blog’s message.

Years ago today—over the better half of two decades ago, back in 2004 or 2005, I got married (first marriage). This is me. 

This is a photo of a photo my mom had (and randomly dropped off without any context or reason, but I like it and I’m going to use it to tell this story); the photo truly doesn’t do justice to the beautiful stitching on the back of the dress. In fact, I may share photos of that too, haha, it was really beautiful. I like this photo because my grandmother was still alive, my brother and I were still close, and as the variety of photos included photos of just my family and me, I don’t have to worry about cropping the groom out.😉  

I was in a different state of consciousness back then.

I really don’t have any negative memories of the wedding or that season in my life. I borrowed a lot of my cousin’s used wedding decorations (I had my own theme, she had hydrangeas and I had sunflowers, it wasn’t like I duplicated her theme), and the way my aunts and (former) mother-in-law worked together hunting for all the best Dollar Tree buys on décor like fake sunflowers & centerpiece stuff was really fun.  I didn’t mind when my (former) mother-in-law wore a black dress (she didn’t have a lot of money, it was the most affordable for her budget, and it really did look nice on her).

Unlike other girls growing up, I didn’t really have a “dream” wedding beyond my inner-hippie wanting to be barefooted and have flowers in my hair. The wedding was part of an overall season that stemmed from my state of consciousness. I married a military man (Army Special Forces) so we’d already gotten legally married just in case he’d have to be deployed, we’d just bought a house that was getting built, we “did all the things” on the honeymoon (i.e., swam with dolphins in Mexico, went zip-lining way high up in the mountain area over a river, etc.) and my then-husband loved to show off photos of me in a string bikini on his social media (and I liked being shown off).

I would not marry that person again, but not for the reasons people might assume. He matched—or mirrored, rather—my own state of being. He reflected back to me my own state of consciousness, and that is a state I’ve already “passed through” as Neville Goddard would say, and not one I'm ever returning to.

A state is a mindset. An attitude. A mood. It’s how you think and feel about yourself and the world around you.

When I met him, we were both on the rebound and felt­ rejected by our exes. He’d received a “Dear John” letter while deployed overseas and we’d met on Match.com (when it first came out). We were both jaded by the online dating experience. We both took our careers seriously, both wanted to settle down, both cared way too much about other people’s opinions, both wanted to meet all the external benchmarks of success, both hyper-sensitive and self-critical under an outer “tough” exterior, both had prior struggles with weight issues (and even though I’d permanently lost the weight, he was the heaviest runner on his team just like I’d been the heaviest runner on my college cross-country team), both deeply insecure, both wanted to gain others’ approval (especially that of relatives), both had something to prove, both had covert narcissistic tendencies like thinking we were smarter and tougher than others (that’s why he was literally one of “America’s Best”), both thought the world was dangerous and unsafe, both thought of ourselves as ultimate bad-asses (I really wanted to be like Miss Congeniality and was really into kickboxing; he “knew“ I was “the one” when he tried to sneak up behind me in the shadows and I instinctively ducked and punched him hard), both desired to travel and enjoy a life of ease when he wasn’t in active combat (we even had a huge party-size hot tub with all the latest lights), and both just really cared too much about image.

I wouldn’t have admitted it back then because it takes a certain degree of self-awareness (and self-love!!!) for one to be able to see it, but everything centered on image (even the type of dog we had was the best of the best, and not just a German Shepherd, but a pure bred and trained by an AKC judge). I wasn’t just another guy’s wife on the team. I was the most educated, the most well-spoken, the most successful, had a good government job, and was even the Family Readiness Group (FRG) leader even though that job should have fallen on the Captain’s wife.  He had also been “the most popular” in high school (and would frequently remind me of that, as well as my having been a "band nerd").

He couldn’t just let me get a used car but had to make sure I had a new/like new car. We couldn’t just buy an old fix-er-upper house but had to have a new house built in a new housing area with all the upgrades. We were budget-minded but not tacky. We enjoyed nice things others around us couldn’t afford but acted modest.

I didn’t have my own sense of identity yet. About a year or so prior to meeting him, I’d walked away from my faith and a lot of what I’d known to be true. I’d suffered back-to-back heartbreaks and not just over “spiritual” guys but over discovering truths about the Bible, Christianity, etc., and nearly converted to Judaism, so it wasn’t just my beliefs about Self in terms of relationships with others, but much deeper than that. I had a very uncomfortable experience in church in which a man I deemed to be a false prophet/apostle was making everyone “fall in the spirit,” but when he came to me, I just didn’t feel it. It felt very wrong to me. I’d grown up in revival settings, the “Holy Spirit” was no stranger to me, but this guy physically pushing on me caused this great resistance with me, and I ended up being the only remaining standing while every one else was laying on the floor—including two people I was living with who were the parents of a guy I—and they too—thought I was going to marry. My Bible College professor said, "hallelujah, that's right, you will remain standing while others fall," but I was already in a state of disillusionment.

I’d also realized I wasn’t really called to be a missionary after all, I wasn’t even sure what I believed anymore because so much of Western Christianity is technically organized and systematic rebellion against God’s actual commands (if you read the Bible literally, which I don’t anymore, but at the time I did) and implementation of the exact pagan holy days that are spoken against in the Old Testament (and punishable by death), etc. Even the guy whose family I lived with was part of a need for acceptance and approval under the old identity (as my missionary friends I’d lived with for a month one summer told me if I married that guy, I’d truly be part of their “family” because their families were that close). That’s really what I wanted but didn’t realize it: a family. My grandfather (who was really the only dad I really had) had died, my grandmother (who was really more like my mom because my mom worked so much) had moved to Oregon while I was on a missions trip in Fiji leaving me feeling homeless, and I was really feeling all alone.  

Not being chosen by that guy meant not really being part of his family, and that was a more difficult part of an identity I’d started to build to then lose. I still remember his mother crying in the kitchen too. It was more difficult losing them—an idea of my future family—then it was losing the idea of that guy. That’s loss. That’s grief. That’s a state of being. “Not being chosen” is also a state of being. These are attitudes and moods. This is how we feel about ourselves, it’s a “state” and it manifests. 

For comparison, up until this mega loss of identity, as long as I was doing and being all of who I was raised to be in church and Bible college, then I also had a feeling of “being chosen” not by a guy but by God himself (an external God I don’t believe in anymore because God, Consciousness, Awareness, is in each of us and is us). Listen to just about any Christian worship song, and it won’t take you long to find songs that have lyrics about being “chosen for the kingdom.” When you sincerely believe you are chosen, that you have some type of divine calling on your life, etc., that is also a feeling state. It’s a state of consciousness and as long as you dwell in that state, you will always see proof of it in your 3D reality, people confirming it, etc. This is “chosen” versus “unchosen,” and the feeling state of “being chosen” is something so many people crave that they pay manifestation coaches thousands and thousands of dollars so that their Specific Person chooses them (and the way coaches help them do that is what I’m teaching you in this blog: by changing your state to that of feeling chosen).

Back to my story … Right before I met Hubby #1, I’d really experienced such a tremendous loss of identity, and had just started embracing things I genuinely desired that weren’t part of a trend or even what a “spiritually mature person” would be into (for example, after being rejected, I dated a skater who taught me how to ballroom dance, which had been a hidden desire I’d had for years), and I’d just started really getting into kickboxing. I’d also just gotten my own apartment to myself and decorated it like a little European bistro/café, because part of my identity that I wanted to keep was all my memories of when I’d been a barista and managed a bagel shop.

So, I’d just gone through all of that loss, back-to-back rejections, when Hubby #1 came along who had also experienced some rejection. He did all the things I wanted, pursued me, bought me flowers and jewelry, even learned ballroom dance for me so we could perform the nightclub two-step at our reception, but then didn’t dance with me after that because it was all part of both of us measuring up and getting that instant gratification of external validation. It was all for an invisible audience out there, somewhere, and—since I’d not yet built my own identity yet—my entire identity began revolving around him. I was in his show; it was his movie, and I was the supporting actress who would get punished if I outshined him (especially with my “book smarts”).

He didn’t know himself either though. He wanted to get married because all the guys on his team were getting married, and, later on, a few years later, he wanted to get divorced when all the guys on his team were getting divorced. He was whoever the Army told him he was, and I was whoever he wanted me to be, whoever his family wanted me to be, whoever my job wanted me to be, etc. I was Whoever with something to prove.

That is why I don’t desire to be with him or anyone like him, and why it wouldn’t even be possible, because I have an identity now. I know who I am and I recognize my own reflection. 

Note: a true narcissist is really someone who doesn’t know who they are (no really, I'm serious, I explain this further in an upcoming course using the myth of Echo and Narcissus; Narcissus was cursed to never know himself, that’s why he fell in love with his own reflection because he had never seen a reflection before and thought it was a real man in the water. He didn’t know he was looking at and falling in love with his own image). If you are afraid that you might be a narcissist or of becoming a narcissist, then know (and love) yourself better. If you want to repel a narcissist, know (and love) yourself better. Know Thyself!

Our “states” manifest, including our marriage partners.

Let’s revisit again the quote by Neville Goddard that stumps a lot of people:

“Wait! wait!” Some of you are interjecting. “Is Neville saying we can’t manifest a specific person?”

Let’s address this really quickly. No, he is not saying that you can’t manifest a specific person. He is specifically responding to someone who did not have someone specific in mind. You CAN manifest a specific person. I have yet to see anywhere where he actually said you could not. A lot of people have done it.

I did not consciously manifest my marriages, but I have personally, successfully consciously manifested multiple specific persons for different things (i.e., breaking no contact, completely changing how they—multiple guys—talked to me and treated me, getting out of the friend zone/not being FWBs, nice dates, having them say very specific things I scripted, receiving specific gifts, even manifested them drastically changing their political views because I stopped being into politics and wanted them less political too, just a long list of very crazy but cool things and I touched on some of that briefly in my books). I didn’t manifest changes in them by changing them, but rather I changed myself and how I saw them; by law they were forced to reflect that back to me and they did. Like clockwork. Some things “happened” in the 3D in "real time," most things happened in a few months, some things took a year, but still all really amazing and never gets old. And it’s not manipulation because again, they are not outside of you or separate from you. They are just your own reflection.

What Neville IS saying here is that YOUR STATE REFLECTS. I just did a free training video on this and there will be more (both courses & free training). 

We all are master manifestors and don’t realize it. We have all been unconsciously manifesting long before we came to the Law or to understanding what conscious manifesting is. I manifested that wedding and marriage. I didn’t do it consciously, but I still manifested it.

Let’s look at how I manifested it: by my state of being.

I didn’t fall to sleep imagining wearing a wedding band, but I’d been in a couple weddings and entertained ideas of my own wedding (especially when I was around certain bridezillas, I would imagine how differently I’d be and determine to “never” be like “that”). I think I had a longer mental list of things I did not want at my wedding (i.e., pettiness, being a bridezilla, being overly picky over superficial things, etc.) than what I did of things I wanted (because again, I had lost a sense of identity).

Everyone Is Yourself Pushed Out (EIYPO)

 If you are a visual learner and need visual graphics and video clips to better explain this, check out my courses and training videos. To explain what? Consciousness (also called “Awareness”) look as at all the contents of your mind and pushes it out onto the screen of space that you call “reality” (or that a lot of us call the “3D reality” or “3D mirror”). What are the contents of your mind? Your assumptions, beliefs, thoughts, “facts” or things you have accepted to be true, even your memories.

Everyone is forced by law to show up according to these. They could be completely different with other people and yet a certain way with you, because that is the story you have about them and what you expect on a subconscious level. Their criticisms of you only echo the criticisms in your mind. Their harsh words only echo your own negative self-talk and inner chatter. And vice-versa.

Abdullah looked at this in terms of one’s inner and outer kingdom, as this is how it’s described via allegory in the opera Parsifal (which was his favorite). The Fisher King’s physical kingdom was in great disarray because it was a reflection of his inner kingdom and his deep unhealed wound that only a fool—the young Parsifal, a child, an idea—could cure.

In order to manifest your heart’s desire—to physically have and hold in the 3D reality that which you deeply desire, you have to first have it in your inner reality. Abdullah taught to always start with self, to see oneself as the cause, because everything and everyone is really just a reflection of that inner truth.

“As above, so below.”

“As within, so without.”

“As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he…”

Everyone, including a specific person, is just your shadow, ever reflecting back to you how you think and feel—what you to know to be true—about yourself, how you think and feel—what you have accepted as fact—about them and how you think and feel—what you assume—about the world around you.

Bringing it altogether: how to manifest.

I didn’t dive into Marriage #2 in this blog, but if I were to, it would just be another illustration of how it was a manifestation—a reflection or expression, or echoing—of my state of consciousness I was in at the time. Other people call it “attracting,” but there’s nothing outside of you. The kingdom of heaven and the entire universe is within you. You are the universe. It is all from within.

“Though it appears as from without, it is from within.” This is a quote by William Blake that Neville often cited. It will seem as if someone is attracted to you, but it’s no different than when you imagine rain falling down and it finally rains; it seems like it is falling down on you and around you, but it is all from within you. God-in-You. I AM. 

So, those asking me about manifesting marriage to a Specific Person or even to someone you’ve not met yet, my advice is to focus on your state first and foremost. By doing this, if your "SP" has a lot of issues that need to change before you could be with them in a relationship, this will not only help you to re-write the story about them (to stop seeing them through your old state and stop trapping them in that old story), but it will also naturally reflect back to you more through them because of who you are.

When you “occupy” or “assume” a state, you don’t have to worry about finding the right “frequency” on the radio. You aren’t worried about “matching” their energy. You aren’t trying to conform to someone else’s ideal or gain their approval.

Your self-concept is not just the person who has your desire, but you KNOW YOURSELF, you know what you want, who you want to be, and you have realized you really are that person (in imagination). This REALIZATION process is also something I explain better with visuals in my courses and training videos. It’s not the same as what the world teaches as “self-acceptance.” You aren’t saying, “I’m just big boned, I’m just going to accept I’m fat and love myself as a fat person, and if people don’t like it, then they suck.” That’s not real self-acceptance if that is not who you really want to be. That would be like an acorn saying that it’s just a seed because that’s all anyone sees when they look at it.

You set your eyes on your deeper desires, and not just about a specific person but about YOU, your life, your beliefs, who you are even when that specific person is not in the room with you. Who are you? What do YOU like? What do YOU desire? What do YOU look like? What do YOU smell like? What do YOU sound like? How do YOU walk? How do YOU move through a room? What is YOUR energy like?

Newsflash: you don’t have to be high vibing all the time. Maybe you are like me and yeah that’s cool and all to be fun and happy, but bouncing off the walls gets dizzying and you like to just chill. Maybe you’re like me and you like to let yourself be lazy and just lay back, read a book, write, relax, enjoy the moment, especially with the sound of rain outside and something warm to drink. CALM 'n COZY, even meditative, reflective and melancholic, is my happy state because there were so many periods of my life in which I was a nervous wreck, couldn’t sit down, even ate standing up, and was just go-go-go-go! and saying things internally to myself like "Move it Private!" even years after the divorce. (Hubby #1 would say that jokingly but it wasn't really joking and just mirrored my fear that I was seen as lazy.) My dwelling state (the state I return to the most) is just very calm and laid back, and I have embraced it now. 

Let’s theorize. Maybe you’re like me, that’s your natural state, that’s who you enjoy being, but there’s a specific person who is the opposite and who maybe even has called you "lazy." I don’t know why you’d want to be with someone like that but if that’s your desire, I’m not judging you and ultimately they're just echoing your inner awareness. If something is your desire then it’s meant to be if you want it to be. A lot of people in this situation would try to change themselves to match that person. That’s because they have that person on a pedestal and don’t realize their own divinity.

You are the operant power. If you accept yourself fully, including your natural state, then they will too eventually. It may not happen overnight.

Or, say you used to be really political but now you’re not, and your Specific Person is still really political. Persist in your state, continue to ACCEPT and REALIZE this is who you are, and they will eventually conform to your state if that’s your desire.

It’s all about Cause & Effect.

To manifest anything, you understand the Law of Cause & Effect. Think in terms of the old cue cards that teach kids in “FIRST, THEN” steps. First, YOU know yourself, you know who you are, you know what you want, you know it’s yours, you know you already have it in imagination (the true reality). Then, it gets “expressed,” materializes, manifests or “reflected” back to you in the 3D reality.

If you do not change your dwelling state, if you do not change your mood about yourself, if you do not change your attitude about yourself such as “not feeling chosen” in general, then when you get in a relationship in the 3D, your partner will eventually mirror back to you those old beliefs. If you don’t change the story, then it doesn’t matter if you manifest your Specific Person, they will eventually conform to the state you are in. They will be forced by law to mirror you.

This is why Neville said to focus on states because Everyone Is Yourself Pushed Out. Should you still change the specific story about a Specific Person? Absolutely. I’m not saying to throw everything out that you’ve been told. I’m saying what Neville was saying: your state manifests and it will trump everything else.

So, know you are God of your reality, know who you are, know what you want, know your desires are meant to be, know you can have exactly what you want, know it’s already yours and keep your focus on your dwelling state. Want to be cherished? Then cherish yourself. FEEL cherished. Want to be adored? Then adore yourself and FEEL adored. Want to be a priority and shown up for? Then prioritize yourself and show up for yourself. FEEL what you would feel were you to be a priority. What would it be like to be shown up for? Want to be cared for? Then take care of yourself. Take care of your heart. Take care of yourself mentally too. Want to be appreciated more? Then appreciate yourself. FEEL appreciated.

The more you receive from yourself in imagination, the more you validate yourself, the less you need that from anything or anyone externally, and—ironically—the more people in the 3D mirror (including specific people) give that to you. Yes, you should imagine someone specifically saying or doing things if you want it specifically from them, but make sure you don’t NEED it. Make sure you are free from need because you’ve already given it to yourself. Otherwise, that “lack” or neediness will manifest too because it’s also a state.

To manifest a state of marriage then, make that "mood" your dwelling place that you keep returning back to. Determine for yourself what YOU desire not just your married life but your life & mood overall to be: "Do not modify your dream, but enhance it by making it lovelier..." He goes on to explain how to do a specific imaginal scene that implies its truth (such as imagining wearing a wedding ring as you fall asleep), but you need to do it in that state. Otherwise you are placing your trust in an outer act without inner change and will just keep manifesting the feeling of not having it. Dwell in the state of knowing your desire is yours. Any desire. 

Happy manifesting.

 Rebekah Jane Carter 🪄💫🌱

**Want to learn more?**

For instructional courses (that come with videos and course journals/workbooks), free training, community chat and 1:1 coaching sessions, visit my new iMagine app (available on GooglePlay by Tuesday, August 8, 2023 and on the Apple Store in a couple weeks) or go to the web version at https://rebekahjanecarter.trible.com