y grandmother had a rosary she carried everywhere. Not in a dramatic way, not like a movie prop. It lived in her coat pocket, and she'd work the beads during Mass, during car rides, during any silence that felt too long to leave empty. She prayed for things she never asked for out loud. That was the deal, as far as I could understand it as a kid: you wanted something, you held it privately between yourself and God, and then you let go.
I have thought about that rosary a lot over the past four years.
The Question Nobody in My Family Would Have Framed This Way
Whatever you're going through, the store has a small curated catalog of products I'd point a friend toward.
I came to this practice the way most people do: sideways and desperate. March 2022, a Tuesday night around 11 p.m., kitchen floor of my Greenpoint apartment. Eight years of 70-hour weeks had collapsed into something that felt like a wall falling on me in slow motion. I wasn't functioning. I was barely sleeping. I had been on antidepressants for two years and still felt like I was watching my own life through frosted glass.
Three weeks later, Priya (my oldest friend, the most skeptical and careful reader I know, someone who argues about semicolons for sport) sent me an audiobook at 3 a.m. during a stretch of insomnia she was having herself. Neville Goddard's The Power of Awareness. She sent it without a preamble, just a link and a single sentence: "I don't know if this will mean anything to you but it meant something to me."
It meant something to me.
And then, within a few weeks, came the question that I wasn't expecting: what do I do with this if I was raised Catholic?
Because I was. Deeply, really Catholic. Not performatively. My grandmother's rosary was not decorative. My mom's faith was not a Sunday habit. I went to Mass, I went to CCD, I learned the prayers, I internalized the moral framework so thoroughly that it took years of adulthood to locate the parts of it that were mine versus the parts that were simply ambient, like the wallpaper of childhood I'd never thought to notice.
And here was this idea, Neville's idea, that your assumption is the fact you live from. That consciousness is the only reality. That what you imagine and feel as true will harden into experience. That you are, in some sense, the operant power in your own life.
My first reaction was not intellectual excitement. My first reaction was: is this witchcraft?
What "Witchcraft" Actually Means in the Tradition I Came From
Let me be specific about what I mean when I use that word, because I'm not being glib.
In the tradition I was raised in, witchcraft wasn't primarily about Halloween costumes or fairy-tale imagery. It was a theological category. It meant attempting to access spiritual power outside of and apart from God. It meant substituting human will and occult mechanism for divine will and grace. The concern was about the source of power: where is this coming from, and to whom does it belong?
That's a serious concern. And I think people who dismiss it without sitting with it for a moment are being intellectually lazy in a way that doesn't serve anyone.
The biblical prohibitions that critics of manifesting point to are real texts. Deuteronomy 18 prohibits divination, sorcery, casting spells, consulting the dead. Isaiah 8 warns against seeking guidance from mediums rather than from God. The consistent through-line in those passages is about who or what you are turning to as your source of power and knowledge. Are you turning toward God, or are you trying to access power that operates independently of God?
That is a coherent theological question. I held it seriously. I still do.
But when I actually sat with Neville's writing, when I read it carefully instead of reacting to the packaging, what I found was not an instruction manual for accessing occult power. What I found was a theology of consciousness that had significant overlap with things I had already been taught, in a different vocabulary, by the tradition I was raised in.
Mark 11:24 Is in the Bible
I want to say this plainly, because it gets glossed over in both directions.
Neville Goddard's entire framework is built substantially on scripture. Not occultly, not esoterically, not as decoration. When Neville says that your assumption becomes your reality, he anchors it in specific biblical texts. One of the most central is Mark 11:24, where Jesus says: "Whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours."
Believe that you have received it. Present tense. Before the physical evidence appears.
Neville read that as a technical instruction, not a metaphor. The "believing you have received" is the work. The felt sense of already having, of already being the version of you for whom this thing is a done deal, is the mechanism. And Neville, throughout his writing, traced that back to the nature of consciousness, to the idea that imagining creates reality because consciousness is what reality is made of.
You can disagree with his metaphysics. Many thoughtful Christians do. But what you cannot say, accurately, is that Neville was drawing on occult sources to construct an anti-Christian system. His sources were the Bible, William Blake, and his teacher Abdullah, who was himself a deeply scriptural thinker operating in a mystical tradition.
This matters for the witchcraft question. Because witchcraft, in the theological sense, means seeking power from a source that is not God. Neville's claim was precisely the opposite: that the power of consciousness, the power of imagining, is the divine power, the same creative force that the Genesis narrative describes God using in the act of creation. "And God said.. and it was so." The word spoken. The thing imagined into being.
Is that interpretation theologically orthodox? No. Neville was a mystic, and mystics, by definition, push against the institutional framework. But it is scripturally engaged, which is a meaningfully different thing from being anti-biblical.
What the Law of Attraction Actually Is, Versus What People Think It Is
Here is where I need to separate two things, because "the Law of Attraction" and "the Law of Assumption" are often used interchangeably in popular culture, and they are not the same thing, and the distinction matters for this conversation.
The Law of Attraction, as most people know it from The Secret (Rhonda Byrne, 2006), is a mechanism model: like attracts like, positive energy attracts positive outcomes, negative thinking brings negative events. It's framed as a cosmic law similar to gravity, operating neutrally and mechanically regardless of whether there is any relational or personal dimension to it. You are, in this model, basically tuning a radio frequency.
The Law of Assumption, as Neville taught it, is different in a way that matters. Neville's framework is not impersonal mechanism. It is really about the nature of consciousness and its creative power. And consciousness, for Neville, is not separate from the divine. It is the divine. "I AM" is both the name of God in Exodus and the name for the basic nature of human consciousness. The practice is not about attracting energy. It is about the state of being you are living from, the assumption that is functioning as your experienced reality.
That is closer to Christian mysticism than it is to The Secret. And Christian mysticism has a long, legitimate, richly documented history: Meister Eckhart, Thomas à Kempis, Hildegard of Bingen, John of the Cross. These were people who believed that the human consciousness, in its deepest nature, participates in the divine. They were not considered heretics (well, some of them had complicated institutional relationships, but that's a longer conversation). They were considered mystics, which is a different category.
When critics of manifesting point to the Law of Attraction and call it witchcraft, they are often pointing at the impersonal-mechanism version, the Secret-style frequency-tuning model. And I have some sympathy for that critique, because that model does treat divine or cosmic power as something that can be accessed and operated through technique alone, without any relational orientation toward God. That is closer to the witchcraft concern than Neville's framework is.
But the Law of Attraction and the Law of Assumption are not the same thing. And collapsing them, treating the critique of one as the definitive verdict on both, is sloppy thinking that doesn't serve people who are really trying to work this out.
The Harder Question: Is It About Who Gets Credit?
Here is the thing I've sat with for a long time, and I want to be honest about it rather than give you the tidy answer.
One of the theological concerns about manifesting, from a Christian perspective, is not just the source of power but the location of agency. If you are the operant power in your own life, if your consciousness is what creates your experience, then what is God? What is prayer? What is grace?
I don't have a perfectly clean answer to that. I want to be honest with you, friend, because I think the tidy answer would be a kind of condescension.
What I can tell you is what I actually experienced, and what I actually believe based on four years of this practice.
The night on the kitchen floor was not a night I felt powerful. It was a night I felt finished. And the thing that happened over the following weeks, the audiobook at 3 a.m., the layoff that felt like a door opening rather than a disaster, the $8,400 severance that appeared exactly when I needed it, the six-month freelance contract six days after the layoff, the $40,000 in debt I'd been carrying for years gone in 14 months, none of it felt like I had produced it through technique. It felt like it was given. It felt like something much larger than my own scheming had arranged it.
What the practice taught me was not that I was all-powerful. It taught me how to stop blocking what was already trying to reach me. It taught me that the version of my life I wanted was not something I had to manufacture by force. It was already there. And the work, the real work, was learning to get out of the way of my own fear and scarcity and self-concept long enough to receive it.
That is not a theology of human autonomy and divine irrelevance. That is very close to what my grandmother was doing with her rosary: holding something she wanted in the space between herself and God, and then letting go.
The vocabulary is different. The underlying orientation is not as far apart as the culture war framing suggests.
What Actually Makes Something Witchcraft, and What Doesn't
The store has products I'd point a friend toward. Honest reviews, no aggressive upsells.
I want to give you a more useful framework than "does this make me uncomfortable" or "does this use words my pastor didn't use."
From within the tradition I was raised in, the theological distinction is about orientation. Witchcraft is characterized by the attempt to use spiritual power for self-serving ends, outside of relationship with God, and in ways that treat divine power as something that can be commandeered through technique. The relational dimension is absent. There is no prayer, no surrender, no acknowledgment that you are not the source. You are simply operating a mechanism.
Manifesting, as I practice it, does not fit that description. My practice has always included what I can only call prayer, even though I don't always use that word. The SATS state (State Akin to Sleep, a Neville technique) that I use at night is not dissimilar from the contemplative prayer practices in the Catholic tradition I grew up in. You are quieting the external noise, entering a receptive state, and holding a desired experience as real. The posture is receptive, not commanding. You are not trying to coerce the universe. You are aligning yourself with what you believe is already possible.
And can you believe in God and do this? Yes. really yes. Many practitioners I know, including Beatriz, who has been doing somatic and manifestation work longer than I have and whose practice is among the most grounded I've encountered, hold a theistic framework alongside this work without cognitive dissonance. Because the theistic and the Nevillian are not necessarily in conflict. They are in conflict with certain institutional interpretations of theism. They are not in conflict with the mystical core of the tradition.
If you are working through this question for yourself, I'd also point you toward my piece on Is Manifesting a Sin? An Honest Christian Perspective, which goes deeper into the specific scriptural arguments. And if you want the full biblical case, Is Manifesting Against Christianity? What the Bible Actually Says is the companion piece I'd read alongside it.
The Parts of This I Still Hold Lightly
Four years in, and I'm not going to pretend I've resolved every thread.
There are specific aspects of some manifestation teaching, not Neville's specifically but in the broader space, that I remain cautious about. The idea that you are fully responsible for every circumstance in your life, including illness, including injustice, including things that happened to you before you had any capacity to assume anything at all. I think that teaching, in its extreme form, can become a theological horror. It is not what Neville actually taught, but it is what a lot of his derivative culture teaches, and I think that distinction matters.
And there is a version of this practice that does become a form of magical thinking disconnected from any relational dimension, any acknowledgment of grace, any humility about the limits of what we know. I'm not interested in that version. I never have been.
But the baby-and-bathwater problem is real. The fact that a practice can be taught badly, or used to construct a theology of pure human autonomy, does not mean the practice itself is witchcraft. Prayer can be taught badly. Fasting can be taught badly. Confession can be taught badly. The history of institutional Christianity is not a history of every teaching landing cleanly and without harm.
The question I ask myself is the same question I'd ask about any spiritual practice: does this orient me toward receiving, or does it orient me toward grasping? Does this make me more attuned to what is possible, or does it make me more rigid and demanding and transactional? Does this deepen something, or does it hollow something out?
In my experience, practiced carefully and with the kind of discernment I'm describing, this work deepens things. It has made me more present, not less. It has made me more aware of grace, not less. It has made me understand the rosary my grandmother carried differently, not as a primitive version of something I now do more sophisticatedly, but as the same necessary gesture. The same reaching. The same holding-something-as-true before the evidence arrives.
Mark 11:24. Believe that you have received it.
She believed. She held her beads. She let go.
I'm not convinced that was categorically different from what I do in the dark before I fall asleep.
If you're looking for structured support alongside this kind of practice, the store has a small catalog worth looking at.
A Note on the Word "Biblical"
The title of this article frames the choice as Biblical or witchcraft. I want to close by pushing back on that framing gently, because I think it sets up a false binary that I spent a long time trapped inside.
"Biblical" is not a simple category. The Bible contains multitudes. It contains mystical passages that read almost identically to Neville's most esoteric chapters. It contains Proverbs 23:7, "As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he." It contains Philippians 4:8, the instruction to dwell on "whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely." It contains the entire Gospel of John, which opens with one of the most radical claims about the creative power of the Word ever written.
It also contains the prohibitions I mentioned earlier. The texts are all there, and they are in genuine tension with each other in ways that serious biblical scholarship has been wrestling with for two thousand years. If you came here looking for a clean verdict, I understand that desire. I had it too.
But the clean verdict requires ignoring too much. It requires making the Bible simpler than it is, and making this practice more monolithic than it is, and refusing the discomfort of sitting in the actual tension.
My grandmother held her discomfort in her coat pocket along with her beads. She prayed for things she never fully understood and believed she had received them before they arrived. She died having received most of them.
I think that is the work. And I think it has always been the work, whatever we call it.
The store has a small curated catalog of products I'd point a friend toward if they're doing this work inside a Christian framework, honest reviews and no aggressive upsells.
