Sin: Neville Goddard’s Radical Reinterpretation

In today’s high-pressure world, words like sin often evoke guilt, fear, or rigid religious overtones. But Neville Goddard, the 20th-century mystic and teacher of spiritual law, offered a radically different understanding—one that shifts the conversation from shame to power.

To Neville, sin had nothing to do with moral failure. Instead, it referred to a misalignment with one's divine creative ability: to “sin” is to miss the mark of your fulfilled desire.

This interpretation doesn’t just offer spiritual relief—it opens the door to manifestation as a sacred practice: the art of hitting the mark.

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Sin as Missing the Mark

In the original Greek, the word for sin is hamartia, an archery term meaning “to miss the mark.” Neville took this literally and spiritually:

“Sin means to miss the mark. Not to attain your desire, not to be the person you want to be, is sinning.” — Neville Goddard

In this view, sin is not about wrong behaviour, but about failing to embody the state of the wish fulfilled. It’s the consequence of imagining from fear, doubt, or limitation, rather than from faith in your ideal.

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The Self-Inflicted Wound: Shooting Ourselves

Imagination, in Neville’s teachings, is not a passive faculty—it is the divine creative power. Every thought, assumption, and inner dialogue is an arrow released into the world.

But if the bow of your imagination is aimed unconsciously, the arrow will not strike your desire—it will turn inward.

To miss the mark is to shoot the arrow of belief into your own heart.
It is a psychic act of self-harm, performed daily by those who identify with lack, fear, or “reality” over possibility.

This symbolic wounding is what Neville would call sin: not a punishment, but a warning signal that imagination is being misused.

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The Mark of the Beast: A Scar of Misused Imagination

Revelation 13 speaks of the “mark of the beast”—a phrase often misunderstood as a future event or external branding. Neville-style interpretation invites us to see this not as a literal mark, but as the internalised scar of chronic misalignment.

The beast symbolises reactivity, ego, and belief in the power of the external world. To bear its mark is to live in repeated identification with fear, conformity, and limitation.

This “mark” is etched into consciousness when we imagine contrary to our divine nature.

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Manifestation: Hitting the Mark

If sin is missing the mark, then manifestation is hitting it.

Every time you dwell in the state of the wish fulfilled—feeling as though your desire is already real—you are aligning with the divine pattern. You become an archer who hits the target cleanly, effortlessly.

“Assume the feeling of the wish fulfilled.” — Neville Goddard

This is the core of Neville’s teaching. Manifestation is not about forcing the world to change. It is about changing your inner state until the outer reflects it. To hit the mark is to live from the end, to occupy the state of your ideal, and to believe it into being.

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Repentance and Revision: The Tools of Realignment

Neville offers us two tools to recover from sin:

• Repentance, not as sorrow, but as a shift in consciousness. To repent is to re-aim—to withdraw the arrow from your wound and aim once more at the fulfilled desire.

• Revision, which allows you to rewrite the past in imagination, healing inner wounds by changing how events are remembered and embodied.

Both tools reaffirm your creative authority.

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Conclusion: You Are the Archer

You are not here to live under the weight of guilt or helplessness. You are the archer, the arrow, and the target. Every moment offers you the choice to aim again.

To sin is to forget your power.
To manifest is to remember it.
The mark of the beast is the evidence of imagination misused.
The mark of God is the fulfilled life, born from conscious assumption.

Choose where to aim. Choose what you embody. The target is always within reach.