SATS is an acronym for ‘State A Kin To Sleep’.
This phrase was popularized by the new thought Christian mystic Neville Goddard.
The SATS state is also referred to as the hypnagogic state (the drowsy state before sleep).
SATS can also be the Hypnopompic state (the drowsy state upon waking up).
Neville Goddard and many other students of mental science believe SATS allow one to get in contact with the deeper subconscious mind.
This deeper connection helps facilitate more rapid manifestations of things desired.
“It is in sleep and in prayer, a state akin to sleep, that man enters the subconscious to make his impressions and receive his instructions. In these states the conscious and subconscious are creatively joined. The male and female become one flesh.” – Neville
How To Get Into SATS – Neville Goddards Method
Neville Goddard in various writings outlines a simple process for achieving SATS.
Step One: Know what you want
“The first step in changing the future is Desire, that is, define your objective
— know definitely what you want.” – Neville
This step is important because if you don’t know what you want, you won’t be able to maintain your attention for long enough to see anything happen in the outside world.
Focus on one goal at a time.
Trying to do several things leads to confusion and wasted energy.
Step Two: Construct An Event
Before entering into a state akin to sleep it’s important to think about an event that symbolizes the attainment of your desire. The event must be something you would experience AFTER you have achieved the goal.
In his writings, Neville gives an example of what women wanting to get married might envision,
“Then assume the feeling of being married. Imagine a wedding band on your finger. Touch it. Turn it around the finger. Pull it off over the knuckle. Keep the action going until the ring has the distinctness and feeling of reality. Become so lost in feeling the ring on your finger that when you open your eyes, you will be surprised that it is not there.” – Neville
If you are looking to sell your business you might construct an event in which you are opening your bank account and seeing the wire transfer.
The key is to make the scene something short and believable for your subconscious mind.
This scene is what you will be using in the next step during SATS
Step Three: Immobilize Your Physical Body
“The third step Is to immobilize the physical body and induce a state akin to sleep. Then mentally feel yourself right into the proposed action, imagine all the while that you are actually performing the action HERE AND NOW. You must participate in the Imaginary action, not merely stand back and look on, but FEEL that you are actually performing the action, so that the imaginary sensation is real to you.” – Neville
In this third step, you enter SATS.
This is done naturally before you drift off to sleep.
In the work of Carlos Castaneda, this when you enter the ‘crack between worlds’ or the second attention,
“The twilight is the crack between the worlds. It is the door to the unknown.”
– Carlos Castaneda
This state can also be achieved through meditation or even breathwork.
This state is often accompanied by weird bodily sensations, vibrations and sometimes noises.
In this state, you should find it very easy to have vivid visualizations.
Start feeling yourself into the scene you constructed before the exercise.
Then repeat it over and over again until you fall asleep.
SATS Neville Goddard Guided Meditation
Any meditation which allows you to get into a drowsy state can be used for SATS.
Ideally, you want to learn to get into this state without the aid of outside meditations.
This will allow you to achieve the state more consistently and practice feeling yourself into your desire.
As mentioned before, breathwork is a great way to achieve the relaxed state needed for SATS.
A great breathwork mediation is the WIM HOF method.
Experiment with using it before you begin your visualizations.
Other ways of entering SATS
Despite being a simple process, entering into SATS is not always easy.
“Very few people can sit quietly and not enter a reverie or a state of
uncontrolled thinking.” – Neville
This is because most people are not well-versed in meditation.
Through the technology of modern society, we are bombarded with endless streams of dopamine.
So the prospect of sitting still and repeating the same mental scene can quickly become tiresome.
The key is consistency.
With practice, you will sharpen your ability to focus on the task in front of you.
Just like physical exercise, mental work needs to be done with small progressions.
If you can only concentrate for 1 minute, that’s fine.
Just ensure you make the progression and development of your mental skills a priority.
Doing SATS for 20 minutes a day is more than enough to achieve satisfactory results.
If all this is still difficult for you, Neville does share some other methods of entering SATS.
SATS Neville Goddard method 2: Gazing
“If it is difficult to control the direction of your attention while in a state akin to sleep, you may find gazing fixedly into an object very helpful. Do not look at its surface but into and beyond any plain object such as a wall, a carpet, or any other object which possesses depth. Arrange it to return as little reflection as possible. Imagine then that in this depth you are seeing and hearing what you want to see and hear until your attention is exclusively occupied by the imagined state.” – Neville
This second method is very similar to the occult practice of scrying.
Having something to stare at might work better for you if your mind tends to go crazy when you close your eyes.
Simply see the event you constructed, see if through the medium and eventually, you will be engulfed by it.
Neville Goddard SATS Success Stories
There are many success stories about Neville Goddard’s SATS method.
For modern stories you can check out YouTube or the Neville Goddard subreddit.
Neville also shared a range of stories from his students in his book ‘The Law and The Promise’.
Perhaps the most famous story is Neville’s own story about Barbados.
The story is about how Neville wanted to return to his family home in Barbados but couldn’t go due to financial struggles.
His mentor and friend the mystic Kabbalist Abdulla taught Neville about the Law of Assumption.
When Neille complained about wanting to go to Barbados,
Abdulla corrected him by saying,
“You are in Barbados.”
When Neville finally started accepting this reality through the SATS exercise, tickets to go to Barbados arrived to him through serendipitous means.
This whole SATS thing might seem odd.
Perhaps even crazy.
But as Neville advised his students,
Put it to the test.
Do this and you will be one step closer to mastering your mind and shifting your reality.