How social-media manifesting gutted a mystic’s gospel of creative communion.
The Age of Algorithmic Faith
Open any social platform and you’ll find a liturgy of abundance. Glittering affirmations promise five-figure miracles in ten days; influencers speak in the soft tones of preachers, their sermons delivered to ring-light congregations. The algorithm rewards devotion. Every scroll is an act of faith that the next post will finally contain the secret we’ve been missing. But the doctrine never changes: want more, buy more, become more.
What began as a mystic’s teaching on divine imagination has been subsumed by a capitalist machine that confuses creation with consumption. The man who once taught that imagination was the mind of God now trends beside brand partnerships and manifestation courses. Neville Goddard’s vision of creative communion has been stripped for parts and repackaged as lifestyle content. The algorithm has learned to speak in tongues—and every syllable sells.
Who Goddard Actually Was
Before he was a meme, he was a mystic. Neville Goddard, born in Barbados in 1905, began his career as a dancer before devoting himself to metaphysical study and the interpretation of Scripture as inner drama rather than historical record. For him, Adam, Eve, and Christ were not figures of antiquity but states of consciousness within the human self.
In Goddard’s teaching, imagination was not daydream or delusion; it was the creative act of God expressed through human mind. “I AM,” he wrote, was not egoic self-assertion but an invocation of divine participation—a conscious alignment with Being itself. In The Power of Awareness, he declared:
“Be still and know that you are God. Your imagination is Christ, the creative power through which all things are made.”
There was nothing of hustle culture in this theology—no pressure to optimize, no scarcity disguised as empowerment. Goddard’s message was contemplative and incarnational. He lectured in velvet tones to crowded halls, not selling a product but offering initiation into a vision of imagination as prayer: to imagine rightly was to commune with the divine, to become co-creator rather than consumer.
The Theft
Every sacred thing attracts thieves. The lineage of distortion is easy to trace once you start looking: New Thought → Prosperity Gospel → Manifestation Culture. A three-act tragedy of metaphysical colonization.
The early New Thought writers—Mary Baker Eddy, Emma Curtis Hopkins, and others—sought to articulate consciousness as causation, a language for how thought and divinity intertwine. By mid-century, those ideas had been repackaged for the postwar boom as the Prosperity Gospel: faith as investment strategy, prayer as return on investment. Now, in the era of the influencer, theology has completed its final conversion into content—visualization as performance, spirituality as side hustle, salvation as passive income.
Even the language has been looted. “Manifestation” once meant revelation—the moment when the unseen makes itself known. Now it is a verb for acquisition, a way to summon wealth like a courier service. The tone has shifted from awe to entitlement, from thy will be done to the universe owes me rent.
Scroll through any “manifestation” hashtag and the flattening is obvious: Pretend you already have it. The universe will deliver. Compare that to Goddard’s cadence: Assume the feeling of the wish fulfilled. One is about pretending; the other is about becoming. Pretending requires performance. Becoming requires faith.
What we are witnessing is the colonization of imagination itself—the last interior frontier transformed into real estate for brand expansion. Every sacred word is repurposed for affiliate links. Every mystery reduced to a marketing funnel. They have taken the temple of imagination and built a mall in its place.
What Was Lost
The tragedy isn’t merely semantic; it’s spiritual. Goddard’s practice was slow, contemplative, and intimate. He taught his students to enter silence, to feel a state until it became real within them. Imagination, for him, was the womb of creation—dark, hidden, gestational. Today that silence has been replaced by the dopamine economy, where revelation must prove itself in thirty-second metrics.
The contemplative act has become performative; the sacred interior has been converted into spectacle. Assume the feeling of the wish fulfilled has mutated into Fake it till you make it. In Goddard’s world, the seed was left buried until harvest. In ours, we dig it up hourly to check its engagement.
When imagination becomes a product, the soul becomes its raw material. We have lost the being behind the owning, the stillness behind the scroll, the reverence behind the branding. When everything is framed as potential profit, even revelation begins to sound like hustle advice.
Imagination as Prayer
But imagination was never meant to be a vending machine. It was meant to be a meeting place. To imagine is not to demand—it is to reply. It is the human soul echoing the creative pulse of the universe.
Here lies the meeting point of the mystic and the maker. When we create—through word, craft, ritual, or story—we are not leveraging reality; we are participating in it. The old mystics called this prayer. The mn’tu’k call it correspondence: a dialogue between worlds. The artist knows it as flow, the craftsperson as devotion, the mystic as incarnation.
Creation is not leverage. It is liturgy.
When Goddard spoke of “feeling the wish fulfilled,” he was not describing performance psychology but spiritual alignment—entering the mood of answered prayer not to manipulate reality but to mirror its generosity. To imagine well is to praise existence by imitating it.
In Spirit’s terms, the act of making is a conversation with the living world—the way a carver listens to the grain of wood or a weaver to the breath of wind. Imagination is correspondence, not conquest. It is the soul’s way of saying, “I see what you’re doing, Creation, and I will help.” That is the gospel worth reclaiming.
How to Read Him Now
What, then, do we do with a prophet turned Pinterest board? We read him like scripture, not strategy.
Read him aloud. Goddard’s lectures were written to resonate in air, not to be skimmed between notifications. His sentences unfold at the speed of breath, not bandwidth. Let the rhythm reveal its own understanding.
Journal imaginatively. Don’t write to track outcomes; write to trace revelation. Let feelings arrive, let images shimmer at the edges of your attention. Treat the act as conversation, not documentation.
Approach his words as communion rather than commodity. You are not here to extract tips from a mystic—you are here to encounter consciousness meeting itself. Practice gratitude, not leverage. Every thank-you is an act of participation; every moment of wonder is rebellion against market logic.
To read Goddard rightly is to sit again at the feet of mystery, not in the checkout line of self-optimization. He belongs not to the entrepreneurs of eternity, but to the contemplatives of creation.
Closing Benediction
We began with the feed; let’s end there.
The scroll still hums—endless, glittering, hungry. It promises transformation at the pace of refresh. But revelation does not live in pixels; it waits in the pause between them.
You can scroll forever and never touch God—or close the screen and remember you already were the Word made flesh.
Close.
Breathe.
Remember.