#137: The Inner Witness

The Inner Witness

A Lecture in the Voice and Spirit of Neville Goddard

You have been waiting for the world to bear witness to your desire. You have said in your heart, “If only this would appear, or that would change, then I could believe.” And so you have remained in the outer court, looking to the evidence of your senses for permission to feel the reality of what you want. But the world has no power to grant you that permission. It cannot confirm what you have not yet accepted within yourself. The confirmation you seek must first arise as an inner witness, a quiet, unshakable conviction in the secret place of your own consciousness. Until that witness is born, the outer world remains silent, for it is not the cause but the obedient effect of the state you have assumed.

Consciousness is the only reality. All that you see round about you is but the out-picturing of what you are conscious of being. You are not at the mercy of circumstances; circumstances are at the mercy of your inner state. When you look to the world to prove to you that your desire is possible, you are reversing the order of creation. You are asking the shadow to validate the substance. The shadow has no life of its own. It can only reflect what is cast upon it. Therefore, the first and only necessary act is to become inwardly convinced. This inner conviction is the witness of which I speak. It is your own awareness of being when it has taken upon itself the nature of the fulfilled desire. It is not a hope. It is not a wish. It is a living, present conviction that the thing is so now, even while the senses deny it.

You cannot serve two masters. You cannot look to the outer evidence for your conviction and at the same time claim the inner witness. The moment you condition your feeling upon what the world shows you, you have shut the door to the very state you desire. The door is your own consciousness. To shut it is to remain in the old conception of yourself. To open it is to rise in consciousness to the naturalness of being the thing desired. This rising is not an effort of the will in the ordinary sense. It is a gentle, persistent turning of attention away from the appearance and a resting in the feeling that it is already so. In that resting the inner witness is born.

Consider what it means to be inwardly convinced. It means that you no longer argue with the evidence. You no longer plead with circumstances to change. You no longer postpone your joy until the outer world agrees with you. Instead, you carry within you a quiet knowing, a deep sense of rightness, as though the thing you desire has already taken place and you are now living in its fulfillment. This knowing does not shout. It does not strive. It simply is. And because it is, the world must in time rearrange itself to match it. Signs follow; they never precede. The inner witness comes first. The outer confirmation is the inevitable consequence.

Many of you have tried to feel the reality of your desire while still looking over your shoulder at the old conditions. You have said, “I will assume the feeling, but I must also keep watching to see if anything is happening.” In that watching you have betrayed the very assumption you attempted to make. The inner witness cannot be born in the presence of divided attention. You must be willing to let the old evidence die in your consciousness. You must be willing to become indifferent to what the senses report, not in a spirit of denial or struggle, but in the spirit of one who has found a greater reality within. When you do this, something profound happens. The old conditions lose their power to frighten or discourage you. They become like old garments that no longer fit the new man you have become in consciousness.

The inner witness is your awareness of being, now clothed in the garment of your desire. Before you were conscious of being poor, or sick, or unloved, or limited in any way, you were first conscious of being. That awareness of being is the I AM, the father, the conceiver. When you rise to the feeling of being the thing desired, you are causing this awareness to assume a new conception of itself. The conception is the son. The awareness is the father. And the two are one. This is the spiritual marriage spoken of in scripture, where two agree upon being one and their likeness is established on earth. The agreement is not made between two persons. It is made between your awareness and the state you have claimed as true. When that agreement is felt as natural, the inner witness stands.

You ask how long this must be maintained. There is no time in consciousness. The moment the conviction is established to the point where it feels natural, the work is done. The length of time it takes for the outer to conform is not your concern. Your only concern is to keep the inner witness alive. You do this not by constant repetition of words, but by quietly returning to the feeling whenever the old evidence tempts you to doubt. Each time you return, the conviction deepens. Each time you refuse to let the outer world be your witness, you strengthen the inner one. And one day you will discover that you no longer need to return, for the conviction has become your permanent state.

This is what it means to be born again. You die to the old conception of yourself—the one that waited upon the world for confirmation—and you rise in consciousness to a new conception in which the confirmation has already been given within. The old man is the one who says, “I will believe it when I see it.” The new man is the one who says, “I have seen it within, and therefore it must appear.” The world has no choice but to obey the new man, for the world is only the mirror of consciousness. Change the image in the mirror by changing the state of the one who stands before it, and the reflection must change.

There is a profound peace that accompanies the birth of the inner witness. It is the peace of one who no longer strives with the world. You still move among the same people, encounter the same circumstances, but you move among them from a different center. You are no longer reactive to what appears. You are established in what you have accepted as true. And because you are established, the appearances begin to lose their former power over you. What once seemed like an immovable mountain becomes a shadow that dissolves when you no longer feed it with your attention. Your attention is the sap that keeps alive the things of your world. When you withdraw it from the old and give it to the new inner conviction, the old withers and the new grows.

You may wonder what this inner witness feels like in the body. It is not a tense or excited feeling. It is a quiet, warm sense of rightness, as though something long desired has already been granted and you are now at rest in the possession of it. There may be moments when the outer conditions seem to contradict this feeling even more sharply than before. This is not a sign that the witness is failing. It is often the sign that the old state is resisting its own dissolution. Do not be disturbed. Simply return to the inner conviction. Do not argue with the appearance. Do not try to force it to change. The inner witness does not force. It simply knows. And what it knows, the world must in time acknowledge.

The scripture says that no man comes unto the son except the father draw him. The father is your awareness of being. The son is the state you have assumed. When your awareness draws the state into itself and becomes one with it, the son is born. This is the inner witness. It is the father and the son in agreement. And because they agree, the thing is established. You do not need the world to agree with you. You need only this inner agreement. When it is present, the world has no choice but to follow. It may take time for the full manifestation to appear, but the establishment has already taken place. The bridge of incidents is already being built, even though you do not yet see the completed structure.

Many have failed because they have reversed this order. They have tried to make the world their witness first. They have said, “Show me the money, show me the health, show me the love, and then I will believe.” But the world answers, “I cannot show you what you have not yet accepted as true within yourself.” The law is exact. It is not cruel. It is simply the way creation works. Consciousness must first assume the nature of the thing desired. Then, and only then, can the thing appear. This is why it is said that faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. The substance is the inner conviction. The evidence not seen is the inner witness. When these are present, the seen evidence must follow.

You are not asked to deny the outer world in some foolish or irresponsible way. You are asked to deny it the power to be your witness. You still see the old conditions. You still move through your daily affairs. But you no longer permit those conditions to tell you who you are or what is possible for you. You have found a deeper witness within. You have become convinced in secret. And the open confirmation will come in its own time and in its own way, for the law cannot fail.

There is a beautiful simplicity in this truth. You do not need to know how the thing will come. You do not need to plan the bridge of incidents. You need only to become inwardly convinced. The how is not your concern. The awareness that has assumed the state knows the way, and its ways are past finding out. Your part is to trust the inner witness more than you trust the outer evidence. When you do this consistently, you will discover that the outer evidence begins to change in ways you could not have predicted. Opportunities appear from unexpected quarters. People who seemed fixed in their attitudes toward you begin to change. Circumstances that seemed permanent begin to dissolve. All of this happens not because you manipulated the world, but because you changed the state from which you view the world.

The inner witness is the most practical thing in your life. It is not a mystical abstraction reserved for the few. It is the very power by which you create your world, whether you know it or not. You have always been using it. The question is whether you have been using it consciously and in harmony with your desire, or unconsciously in harmony with your fears. To become aware of this power and to direct it deliberately toward the fulfillment of your desire is to take your life into your own hands in the only way that matters. The world will then become your servant rather than your master.

As you persist in this inner conviction, you will find that you begin to think differently about yourself. You no longer see yourself as a victim of circumstances or as one who must wait upon the world for permission to live the life you desire. You see yourself as the operant power. You see yourself as the one in whom the creative action takes place. This change in self-conception is the real transformation. The outer changes are but the fruits of this inner change. When you know yourself to be the inner witness, you walk through the world with a quiet dignity. You are not anxious. You are not impatient. You are not resentful of delays, for you know that the thing is already done in the only place where creation is real—in consciousness.

The day will come when you will look back upon the time when you waited for the world to confirm you, and you will smile at the memory. You will see that the waiting was unnecessary. You will see that the confirmation was always within your power to give yourself. You will see that the world was never withholding anything from you; you were withholding the inner witness from yourself. And when you gave that witness permission to arise, everything else followed as naturally as day follows night.

So you see, the entire drama of your life is determined by this one simple fact: whether you become inwardly convinced before you ask the world to confirm you. This is the law that governs all manifestation. It is not a law that favors one person over another. It is a law that is the same for all. The difference between those who realize their desires and those who do not is simply the difference between those who have learned to trust the inner witness and those who have not. There is no other difference. All other distinctions—wealth, health, position, relationships—are but the outer expressions of this one inner fact.

You stand tonight at the threshold of this realization. You can continue to wait upon the world, or you can become the inner witness. You can continue to ask the outer to prove to you what is possible, or you can assume the reality of your desire in the secret place and let the outer become the proof. The choice is yours. But know this: the law is exact, and it is always operating. You are always assuming something. The question is whether you are assuming the fulfillment of your desire or the continuation of its absence. The inner witness is the assumption of fulfillment. When it is established, the absence must give way, for it has no foundation in the new state you have claimed as true.

Consciousness is the only reality. You are that consciousness. When you become convinced within, you have done all that is required of you. The rest is not your concern. The world will take care of the rest, for it must. It has no choice but to mirror the conviction you have accepted as your own. This is the great secret. This is the pearl of great price. This is the one thing needful. Become the inner witness, and all things shall be added unto you.

You are not asked to understand how this works. You are asked only to do it. You are not asked to explain it to others. You are asked only to live it in the secret of your own heart. The world does not need to know what you have assumed. It will know soon enough when the confirmation appears. Until then, guard the inner witness. Keep it alive by returning to it whenever the old evidence tempts you. And one day you will awaken to find that the thing you desired has become the thing you are living, and you will know that it was not the world that gave it to you. It was the inner witness, born in secret and made manifest in open. This is the way. There is no other.