First published in 1948, Claude M. Bristol is considered a pioneer in the laws of attraction and assumption. While it isn’t too difficult of a read, it does get a bit tedious. Most of the book contains references and examples of known and unknown people who have exerted their use of imagination and trust in the subconscious to achieve feats and miracles. This book serves more as substantial proof rather than as an instructional how-to.

“Just as the conscious mind is the source of thought, so the subconscious is the source of power.”

Like Joseph Murphy, Claude Bristol puts the emphasis on the subconscious mind, or the “I AM” according to Neville Goddard. Bristol states that the subconscious mind has three main functions: 1) To take care of the body and do the things we don’t think about such as breathe or pump blood to our brains, 2) To take over during times of great duress or in emergencies, acting as an emergency relief pilot, and 3) To act on your behalf with the unseen world as the connecting force between you and another plane of existence. It is the last function that Bristol focuses on.

Bristol also believe that collective consciousness with regard to fears and worries bring about natural and economic disasters, such as what we read in The Isaiah Effect by Gregg Braden.

“There will never be another business depression if people generally realize that it is with their own fear thoughts that they literally create hard times. They think hard times, and hard times follow. So it is with wars. When peoples of the world stop thinking depressions and wars, they will become non-existent, for nothing comes into our economic scheme unless we first create it with our emotionalized thinking.”

Unlike Neville Goddard, Bristol does not claim that your subconscious has the power to make things happen without conscious effort. In fact, he claims the opposite. It is his believe that your subconscious mind simply delivers the answers, and then you must act on those answers.

“But daydreaming or mere undirected wishful thinking doesn’t have the power to release the latent forces within you that will bring you the one hundred thousand dollars or the mansion. When you employ your imagination properly, you see yourself doing a thing and you go ahead and do it. It’s the doing the thing you have pictured to yourself that brings it into actual existence.”

While he does emphasize the importance of focus and basically “living in the end” (though not said as such), it is his belief that you obtain your desires when you put in the effort that you subconscious will relay to you. While most who study the Law of Assumption believe in inspired action, we have come to understand that no action is necessary. Therefore, we can come to believe that Bristol is laying the groundwork here, and the understanding of our true nature and miraculous abilities isn’t fully revealed to him yet.

It is also worth mentioning that Bristol touches upon the need to remove negative thoughts.

“You know that two objects cannot fill the same space at the same time. Your mind can be compared to that space: you can’t keep your mind filled with negative thoughts or doubts if you have filled it with positive, powerful, and creative thoughts. Consider your mind a room with but a single door and you have the only key. It rests with you to decide who is to come through the door, that is, whether you are dominated by positive or negative thoughts, and which ones you are going to admit, for your subconscious mind will respond to the vibrations of the thoughts that are strongest in you.”

This is truly echoing two Neville sentiments for me: 1) You cannot serve two masters, and 2) Your dominant thoughts are your reality.

It is amazing to read something from this era that echoes so much of what Neville and our current teachers have spoken on the Law of Assumption. I find this book to be a valuable historical artifact in the field of the Law of Assumption.