The Master Key System vs Feeling Is the Secret

The Master Key System and Feeling Is the Secret are two New Thought texts that describe the same two-part mind and then give opposite instructions for using it. Charles Haanel's course runs to 24 weekly parts and trains attention with a chair, a clock and a mental picture. The second book, published in 1944 by Neville Goddard, is four short chapters that tell the reader to stop trying and fall asleep in a chosen mood.

Readers who finish one often pick up the other, and the differences can be confusing. This page puts them next to each other, using the wording of each text. For the two authors themselves, see how the two teachers compare.

The two texts at a glance

• Date. Haanel's course dates from about 1912, with a book edition in 1916. Feeling Is the Secret came out in New York in 1944.
• Length. Haanel wrote 24 parts in numbered paragraphs. The 1944 booklet is four chapters and about 5,400 words, an hour's reading. Its author calls it "a small book but not slight."
• Chapters. The four are Law and Its Operation, Sleep, Prayer, and Spirit, Feeling.
• Homework. Every part of the course ends with an exercise and a set of questions. The booklet gives one instruction and no schedule.
• Proof offered. The course argues from the science of its day. The booklet refuses to argue at all. "I have purposely omitted all arguments and testimonials," he writes in the foreword, and asks the reader to test it.

The same map of the mind

Both books split the mind in two and give the deeper half the creative role. Haanel's Part Two says the conscious mind "has the faculty of discrimination, carrying with it the responsibility of choice," and stands as "the watchman at the gate" of a subconscious that "cannot argue controversially."

The later book's first chapter says the same thing in tighter phrases. "The conscious is personal and selective; the subconscious is impersonal and non-selective." It does not invent ideas of its own. It takes what it is handed and, in his words, "objectifies the accepted ideas." A reader could move from one book to the other and keep the same diagram.

Picture or feeling

The split comes with the question of how an idea gets from the upper mind to the lower one.

Haanel's answer is the image

Part Seven defines visualization as "the process of making mental images" and lays out three steps, idealization, visualization and materialization. The image has to be "clear and clean-cut" and it is built up by going back to it. His exercises start small. In Part Five the student pictures a familiar place and is told to "see the buildings, the grounds, the trees, friends, associations, everything complete."

Neville's answer is the feeling

The 1944 text never uses the word visualize. Its claim is one sentence long. "Ideas are impressed on the subconscious through the medium of feeling." A picture you look at coldly does nothing in his account, and a mood with no picture at all still registers. The whole method is to assume "the feeling of the wish fulfilled," the mood you would be in if the thing were already done.

The chair and the pillow

The two also work at different hours. The course student practices awake and upright. Part One asks for a room where you can be alone, sitting erect and perfectly still, "from fifteen minutes to half an hour daily." Stillness is the first skill and every later exercise begins from that seat.

The booklet moves the practice to bedtime. "Sleep, the life that occupies one-third of our stay on earth, is the natural door into the subconscious." Whatever mood you carry across that door is what gets impressed, so the rule is simple. "Never go to sleep feeling discouraged or dissatisfied." Prayer, in his third chapter, is treated as a second entrance of the same kind.

What the word counts show

We counted key words in Feeling Is the Secret, and then across a wider collection of Neville's ten books and 310 talk and lesson transcripts. The numbers make the gap plain.

Word family	In Feeling Is the Secret	In all 320 Neville texts
feeling	99	1,019
subconscious	77	125
sleep	53	1,255
imagine, imagination	11	5,688
visualize, visualization	0	33
concentrate, concentration	0	72

Two things stand out. Haanel's two working terms, visualization and concentration, are missing from the 1944 book and rare everywhere else in Neville. And the word subconscious, which carries the 1944 text, nearly vanishes afterward. Of its 125 uses in the whole collection, 115 fall in the 1944 book and the 1945 book on prayer. After that Neville talks about imagination instead. The book closest to Haanel in vocabulary is an early stage he moved on from.

How much work it takes

The course expects effort and says so. "Thought is a spiritual activity and is therefore creative, but make no mistake, thought will create nothing unless it is consciously, systematically and constructively directed." His course is graded so the student can hold attention a little longer each week.

Neville treats effort as a sign you have not yet accepted the wish as done. His last chapter says that when the feeling is caught "you are relieved of all effort to make it so, for it is already so."

Reading them together

The two fit better than their differences suggest. In a later book, The Power of Awareness, Neville gave the order himself. "First, visualize the picture in your consciousness. Then feel yourself to be in that state." The weeks of drill are a way to get good at the first sentence. The small book is about the second.

A practical order is the course by day and the booklet at night. Use the sitting and picture exercises to build attention that does not wander, then take one finished scene to bed and stay in its mood. Neither book offers evidence beyond the author's word, and this guide does not vouch for the results. It reports what each text asks the reader to do.

Questions readers ask

Which is shorter, Haanel's course or Feeling Is the Secret?

Feeling Is the Secret is far shorter. It has four chapters and about 5,400 words, roughly an hour of reading. Haanel's course has 24 parts and was written to be studied one part a week, with an exercise at the end of each.

Does Feeling Is the Secret teach visualization?

The 1944 book never uses the word visualize. Its instruction is to assume the feeling of the wish fulfilled, the mood you would have if the thing were done. Haanel's Part Seven teaches the opposite emphasis, a mental image built up in detail.

When does each book tell you to practice?

Haanel has the student practice awake, sitting upright and still for fifteen minutes to half an hour a day. Neville moves the practice to bedtime, because he calls sleep the natural door into the subconscious and wants the chosen mood carried into it.