Feeling is the Secret

The immediate catalyst for this book was Neville's own military conscription. On 12 November 1942, aged thirty-seven, he was drafted into the US Army and stationed at Camp Polk, Louisiana, assigned to the 11th Armored Division. He submitted a formal application for discharge to his Battalion Commanding Officer, Colonel Theodore Bilbough Jr. It was marked 'Disapproved.'

Every night in the barracks, Neville entered a self-induced hypnagogic state and assumed the precise sensory experience of sleeping in his own bed in his Greenwich Village apartment - the texture of his mattress, the familiar contours of his room, his wife beside him. He maintained this for eight consecutive nights. On the ninth day, Colonel Bilbough reversed his decision. Military records confirm that in March 1943, after just four months of service, Neville was honourably discharged. Feeling is the Secret is the manual he wrote immediately after. The technique it describes is the one he had just used.

The book was published in 1944 by G. & J. Publishing Company in Los Angeles. The initials stood for Grace and Jack - two devoted students of Neville's who ran a small metaphysical bookstore in Southern California and created the publishing imprint specifically to distribute his work. It was not a commercial venture; it was an act of belief.

DeVorss & Company, an established metaphysical publisher that had already published Neville's Your Faith Is Your Fortune in 1941, later assumed the primary distribution rights and kept the book continuously in print for over seventy years. In the 1990s, Neville's daughter Victoria authenticated his personal annotated copies for a revised edition, preserving the nuanced adjustments he had made to the text.

Published at the height of World War II, the book landed in a specific cultural moment: the individual had been reduced to a component of collective machinery, conscripted, rationed, and governed by forces entirely beyond personal control. Neville's counter-claim - that the physical world is 'man's conditioned consciousness objectified' and that external structures are secondary effects of internal assumptions - was not abstract philosophy in 1944.

It was a direct argument against the prevailing narrative of powerlessness. He was writing in the same circle as Joseph Murphy, who was also a student of Abdullah and would later publish The Power of Your Subconscious Mind using almost identical mechanics. Together they established the psychological framework that dominates New Thought practice to this day.

Neville's own background was the gap he never acknowledged. Israel Regardie - a prominent occultist and Neville's contemporary - observed that as a professional dancer and stage performer, Neville possessed a highly developed capacity for kinetic visualisation, somatic control, and emotional projection that most readers simply do not have. The ability to 'enter the feeling' of a scene on demand is a trained skill that takes years to develop in theatre. Neville taught it as though it were natural to everyone.

The book gives no pathway for someone who cannot readily access a vivid embodied imaginal state - which is most people, especially those under stress.

The 'feeling' definition created eighty years of mass confusion because the word feeling in English IS emotion. Neville's clarification - that the relevant state is acceptance and naturalness, not enthusiasm - appears in his lectures but is not stated clearly enough in the written text. The result is that the majority of practitioners attempting SATS are trying to generate performed joy about something they desperately want, which produces cognitive dissonance rather than conviction.

The book needed a chapter on what settled knowing actually feels like in the body - the quiet, neutral relief Neville described as 'the Sabbath' - and gave none.

There is no guidance for visualisation 'flatness' - the well-documented phenomenon where repeatedly imagining the same scene causes it to lose all emotional resonance and become a dull, uninspiring mental image. Rather than strengthening the impression, rigid repetition leads to boredom and disconnection.

Contemporary practitioners report this consistently, and the book offers no contingency - no instruction on when to vary the scene, how to restore felt-sense vividness, or what to do when the practice stops producing any inner response. Combined with no framework for nervous system dysregulation, this leaves practitioners with no recourse when the core method stops working.