#134: The Secret Place Within

The Secret Place Within

A Lecture in the Voice and Spirit of Neville Goddard

You have looked to the outer world for the proof of your desire and, finding it not there, you have said within yourself that it is not yet so. But I tell you the proof you seek was never meant to be found in the outer world first. The evidence of your fulfilled desire lives only in one place, and that place is the secret chamber within you. There, and only there, your wish is already true. It does not become true when the senses confirm it. It is true now in that inner room, and when you enter and dwell in the feeling of its truth the outer world is compelled to reflect what you have accepted in secret.

The senses are faithful reporters of what has been. They have no knowledge of what is to be, for what is to be is first created in the invisible. When you give your attention to the testimony of the senses you remain in the world of effects and wonder why the cause does not appear. The cause is never in the outer. The cause is the inner act of assumption, and that act is performed in the secret place. Withdraw your attention from all that the senses report. Turn your back upon the evidence that denies your desire. Close the door of your mind to every argument that rises from the outer world and enter the chamber where your awareness is alone with itself.

In that secret place you do not plead for your desire. You do not hope that it may one day be. You accept it as already accomplished. You feel the joy of it. You feel the relief of it. You feel the naturalness of it as though it had already happened and you are simply remembering it. This feeling is the substance that clothes your desire and makes it visible. For feeling is the secret of creation, and the secret place is the only room in which that feeling can be fully and freely experienced without interference from the outer.

You are told to enter into your closet and shut the door. The closet is not a physical room with four walls. It is that state of consciousness in which you are conscious only of being and of the thing you desire to be. Shutting the door means refusing to let any thought, any memory, any present fact that contradicts your desire enter that state with you. You leave the entire outer world outside. You leave your name, your circumstances, your problems, and your fears at the threshold. And when the door is shut you are alone with your own wonderful awareness, and in that aloneness you assume the feeling that the desire is already fulfilled.

This assumption is not an act of will in the ordinary sense. It is an act of acceptance. You do not force yourself to believe something you doubt. You simply rise in consciousness to the level where the thing desired is natural to you. In the secret place it is natural. There is no strain there, no effort to make it so. It is already so. You have only to feel it as it is and remain in that feeling. The longer you can remain in the feeling of the wish fulfilled, the deeper the impression upon consciousness and the sooner the outer will conform.

Many turn away from this teaching because it seems too simple. They believe that something so profound must be complicated, must require long preparation or special conditions. But the secret place is always open. It requires no preparation other than the willingness to withdraw attention from the outer and give it to the inner. It requires no special time other than the moments you choose to enter. You may enter it in the midst of the busiest day by simply remembering that there is a place within you where the desire is already true, and by feeling, even for a few seconds, the reality of that truth.

When you emerge from the secret place the senses will still report the old condition. This is to be expected. The senses are reporting what is still visible, what has not yet been replaced. Do not argue with them. Do not try to force them to change. Return instead to the secret place and there renew the feeling of the fulfilled desire. Each time you enter and dwell in that feeling you are watering the seed you have planted in consciousness. The seed does not grow by your looking at the ground where it is buried. It grows by your continued assumption that it is already the plant you desire. So it is with your desire. You do not grow it by examining the outer evidence. You grow it by returning again and again to the secret place and there living in the end.

The father who sees in secret is your own awareness of being. He is not a being apart from you. He is the I AM that you are. And when he sees in secret that you have accepted the desire as true, he rewards you openly by objectifying that acceptance in your world. The open reward is not something he decides to give or withhold according to merit. It is the automatic consequence of your inner act. Consciousness is always objectifying its own content. When the content is the fulfilled desire, the world must reflect the fulfilled desire. There is no other way.

You may ask how long you must continue to enter the secret place before the outer changes. The answer is simple. You continue until the feeling of the fulfilled desire becomes the dominant feeling of your consciousness. When that feeling is natural to you, when you no longer have to enter the secret place to find it because it is with you wherever you go, then the outer will have no choice but to conform. For your world is always the out-picturing of your inner state, and when the inner state is fixed in the feeling of the wish fulfilled the world must mirror that state.

In the secret place there is no tomorrow. There is only now. The desire is not going to be fulfilled. It is fulfilled. Time, which seems so real in the outer world, has no power in the secret place. There the end is present. There the wish is already the fact. When you enter there you step out of the stream of time and stand in the eternal now where all things are possible because all things already are. This is why the feeling you experience there is so peaceful. There is nothing to wait for, nothing to work toward, nothing to earn. There is only the quiet joy of knowing that it is done.

The senses will tell you that this cannot be. They will point to the empty place where the desire should be and say it is not there. But you are not living from the report of the senses any longer. You are living from the conviction established in the secret place. And conviction is stronger than appearance. Appearance is the shadow. Conviction is the substance. When the substance is fixed the shadow must change. This is law, and it cannot be broken.

You may wonder whether you are worthy to enter this secret place and claim so great a gift. But worthiness is not a question that arises in the secret place. There you are not the man who doubts his worth. There you are simply awareness assuming a state. The state does not ask if you are worthy. It only asks if you will assume it. And when you assume it in the secret place, feeling it to be true, you have met the only requirement. For the secret place knows nothing of merit or demerit. It knows only the feeling that is impressed upon it.

As you practice this entering, you will discover that the secret place is not far away. It is not reached by long travel or difficult technique. It is reached by a simple turning of attention. One moment you are conscious of the outer world with all its problems. The next moment you have withdrawn attention from that world and are conscious only of the desire as fulfilled. That turning is the entering. That withdrawal is the shutting of the door. And in the moment the door is shut the inner chamber is occupied by you and your desire, and there the two become one.

The outer world may seem to grow more insistent as you begin this practice. Old problems may appear to intensify. This is not a sign that the practice is failing. It is a sign that the old state is being challenged by the new. The old state does not surrender easily. It has been fed by your attention for a long time. When you withdraw that attention and give it to the new state in the secret place, the old state makes a final effort to hold you. Do not be disturbed by this. It is the death rattle of the old. Continue to enter the secret place and dwell in the feeling of the new, and the old will fade as naturally as darkness fades when the light is turned on.

You are not asked to believe that the desire will be fulfilled someday. You are asked only to feel that it is fulfilled now in the secret place. Belief may waver. Feeling, when fully entered, does not waver. Feeling is the language of consciousness, and when you speak that language in the secret place consciousness hears and obeys. The outer world is the obedient servant of consciousness. It has no power to resist what consciousness has accepted as true.

In the secret place you discover who you really are. You discover that you are not the limited self the senses report. You are the awareness that can assume any state and make that state your reality. This discovery is the beginning of freedom. For when you know that you can enter the secret place and assume any state you desire, you are no longer at the mercy of outer conditions. You have found the place of creation, and from that place you can bring forth whatever you will.

The secret place is your true home. The outer world is the place of visitation. You go out into the world to experience what you have created in the secret place, but you return again and again to the secret place to create anew. When this rhythm is established you live no longer as a victim of circumstance but as a conscious creator. And the world, which once seemed so solid and unyielding, becomes as plastic as your feeling in the secret place.

Tonight, before you sleep, enter the secret place within you. Withdraw your attention from every problem, every fear, every evidence that denies your desire. Shut the door. Be alone with your awareness. And there, in the silence, feel your desire as already true. Feel it so completely that for a little while nothing else exists. Remain in that feeling as long as you can. And when you rise in the morning carry the memory of that feeling with you through the day. Return to it whenever the outer world calls you away. And you will find that the secret place is always open, always ready, and always true.

For in that place your wish is not a hope. It is not a possibility. It is a fact. And as you live in the feeling of that fact the world without must become the image of the world within. This is the law. This is the promise. And this is the way.

You are that one who enters the secret place. You are that one in whom the desire is already true. And as you dwell there, even now, the outer is already beginning to conform to the inner decree. There is no need to wait. There is no need to wonder. There is only the quiet certainty that what you have accepted in secret is already on its way to open manifestation. Dwell in that certainty. Live from that place. And the world will bear witness that you have found the secret place within.