#146: The Power of Inner Agreement

The Power of Inner Agreement

A Lecture in the Voice and Spirit of Neville Goddard

Nothing appears in your world until your consciousness has agreed to it. This is the changeless law, and it operates whether you know it or not. You may desire with all the intensity of your heart. You may picture, affirm, or long for the change. Yet until the moment your awareness of being consents, until it feels itself to be one with the desired state, the thing remains suspended, a word without flesh, a promise without fulfillment. The outer cannot precede the inner. Signs follow; they never lead. The evidence you seek must first be agreed upon in the secret place of your own consciousness before it can clothe itself in form and stand before you as fact.

You have wondered why certain desires linger year after year while others, sometimes smaller, appear almost at once. The difference lies not in the desire itself, nor in the favor of circumstances, nor in the merit of the one who desires. It lies solely in whether the agreement has been made. The desire is the word that stirs within you. It comes as an urge, a vision, a quiet insistence that life could be fuller, freer, richer than it now appears. But the word alone has no power to embody itself. It must be received into consciousness. It must be felt as true. It must be agreed with. Only then does it become reality. Only then does it resurrect from the realm of mere possibility into the realm of living fact.

Consider the present state of your world. Every condition that now surrounds you, every relationship, every limitation or freedom, every experience of lack or abundance, has appeared because at some level your consciousness agreed with it. You may not have agreed deliberately or with full understanding. You may have agreed by default, by feeling the condition to be real and therefore inevitable. Yet agree you did. The sick man who continues to feel himself limited by his body has agreed with illness, and so it persists. The man who feels himself bound by financial lack has agreed with poverty, and the world continues to reflect that agreement. You are at this very moment living in the out-picturing of agreements you have already made, some of them so old and so habitual that you no longer notice the consent you are giving them.

The good news is that the same power that sustained the old can withdraw its consent and give it to the new. Nothing in your world has any life except the life your consciousness lends it by agreement. When you withdraw that agreement, the condition begins to fade, for it has lost the consent that gave it form. When you give your agreement to a new state by feeling yourself to be it, that new state begins to take on substance, for consciousness has no choice but to out-picture what it has consented to be. This is why the transformation of your world does not require you to battle conditions or to wrestle with appearances. It requires only that you change the agreement within.

The Scriptures speak of this mystery in the opening words of the Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.” The word is your desire, the living urge toward a greater expression of life. God, in this context, is your own awareness of being, the I AM that you are. When the word is with God—when the desire is accepted into your awareness and felt as your very own being—then the word becomes God. It becomes reality. It must then appear, for there is no other creator in the universe but consciousness agreeing with its own conceptions. The desire that once floated as a wish has now been nailed to the cross of agreement. It has been given life. It has been resurrected as fact.

“Two shall agree as touching anything and it shall be established on earth.” These words have been repeated for centuries, yet their meaning has remained hidden from most who heard them. The two who must agree are not two separate persons. They are your awareness of being and the thing you desire to embody. When these two touch in living feeling, when you become conscious of being the healthy one, the abundant one, the loved one, the free one, the agreement is sealed. What has been agreed upon in the inner world must then be established in the outer, for the law is absolute and knows no exception. There is no power in heaven or on earth that can prevent the outer from conforming to the inner consent.

This agreement is not an intellectual assent. It is not a matter of saying the words or even of believing them in the ordinary sense. It is a living sensation, a feeling of naturalness that fills the consciousness so completely that for a little while you are lost in it. The old doubts and fears have no room in that feeling. The question of how the thing will come does not arise, for you are no longer looking for the thing. You are being the thing in consciousness. In that moment the two have agreed, and the establishment on earth is assured, though the visible proof may not yet have appeared.

You have perhaps tried to bring about the desired change by working upon the outer scene. You have reasoned with conditions, pleaded with people, manipulated events, or waited for the right opportunity. All such efforts are in vain until the inner agreement is reached. The outer is forever the shadow of the inner. It possesses no independent life. It can only reflect what your consciousness has consented to. So long as you continue to feel yourself bound by the old state, you are agreeing with it, and it will continue to appear with perfect fidelity. The moment you withdraw your consent, the moment you feel yourself to be free of it, that state begins to lose its substance. It fades because it has lost the agreement that sustained it.

This is why you have so often felt stuck, as though no amount of effort could move the condition. You were looking for the change to appear first so that you might then feel it to be real. But the order is forever the reverse. The feeling must come first. The agreement must be made within before the evidence can appear without. You cannot wait for the world to convince you of the new state. You must convince yourself in consciousness, and then the world will follow as surely as night follows day. The world has no power to resist an inner agreement. It has no choice but to bear witness to what consciousness has consented to be.

Feel, for a moment, the freedom this understanding brings. Your desire is not something distant, dependent upon the right circumstances or the right people or the right amount of time. It is already alive within you as a living urge. It asks only to be received, to be felt as true, to be agreed with. When you do this, you are not forcing anything into being. You are simply allowing the law to operate without interference. You are letting the word be with God. You are letting the two agree. And in that simple letting, the power that created the universe goes to work to clothe your desire in form.

The agreement is always felt as naturalness. It is never a strained effort or a desperate affirmation. It is the quiet realization that you are now that which you formerly desired to be. The man who agrees with health does not argue with his body. He feels himself to be whole, strong, vital. He lives in the sensation of well-being even while the senses may still report limitation. In that feeling the agreement is made, and the old state loses its hold. So it is with every desire. Whether for abundance or for love or for creative fulfillment or for peace, the way is the same. You do not look to the world for permission. You do not wait for evidence before you will consent. You turn within and agree with the possibility by feeling it as your present reality. This is the act that moves mountains, for it is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not yet seen by the outer eye.

You may wonder how long the agreement must be held. There is no measure of time in consciousness. The moment the feeling of being is attained, the moment the naturalness is experienced, the thing is done. It may appear tomorrow or next month or in ways you cannot now foresee, but its appearance is inevitable. The means will unfold, the incidents will arrange themselves, but these are not your concern. Your only concern is the inner agreement. Keep that, and all else takes care of itself. The father within, which is your own awareness, does the work once the consent has been given.

Many have found themselves repeating affirmations or visualizing scenes without result and have wondered why the law seemed to fail them. The reason is always the same. They have not yet agreed. The words or the pictures remained in the outer mind, but the consciousness did not consent. The feeling of naturalness was never entered into. Only when the desire is felt as true, only when the awareness says yes in its depths, does the power go forth to embody it. This is why the simplest feeling, held in secret and consented to, accomplishes what the most elaborate techniques cannot. The technique is useless without the agreement. The agreement needs no technique. It is itself the power.

The world you now see is the perfect and faithful record of your past agreements. Change the agreements, and you change the record. There is no other way. You cannot change the reflection without changing that which casts the reflection. Your consciousness is the light, and your agreements are the images it projects upon the screen of space. Agree with limitation, and limitation appears with perfect accuracy. Agree with freedom, and freedom must appear. The law is no respecter of persons. It respects only consent. It knows nothing of your past failures or your present doubts. It knows only what you are agreeing with in this moment.

Tonight, as you withdraw from the outer world and rest in the silence of your own being, take the desire that has lived with you, the one you have longed to see made real. Do not argue with it. Do not question its possibility. Do not wonder how it will come. Simply feel yourself to be it. Feel the naturalness of it. Let your awareness and your desire touch and become one. In that touch the agreement is made. In that agreement the power that is God goes forth. And in that power your world begins to conform to what you have consented to be.

You are not at the mercy of conditions. Conditions are at the mercy of your inner agreement. You are not waiting upon the world. The world is waiting upon you. It waits to reflect what you have agreed to in the secret place of consciousness. Agree with the good, the beautiful, the abundant, the healthy, the loving, and these must appear, for consciousness has no choice but to out-picture what it has consented to be. This is the power of inner agreement. It is the key that unlocks every prison, the light that dispels every darkness, the creative act that transforms the desert of the present into the promised land of fulfilled desire.

Dwell upon this truth until it becomes your living conviction. The old agreements will rise and tempt you to return to them, for they have been long established and feel familiar. But you need not fight them. You need only persist in the new agreement. Every time the old feeling returns, gently withdraw your consent from it and give your consent again to the new. In this persistence the old loses its power, and the new gains substance. The agreement once made and kept becomes the fixed state of consciousness, and the world has no choice but to bear witness to it.

This is the freedom the truth brings. You no longer need to wait for the world to change before you can be at peace. You can be at peace now by agreeing with peace. You can be abundant now by agreeing with abundance. You can be loved now by agreeing with love. The agreement is the act of the creator within you. It is the I AM declaring itself to be. And what the I AM declares in feeling must be established on earth, for there is no other law, no other power, no other reality.

Go your way in the quiet certainty that the power is within you. Take your desires, whatever they may be, and agree with them in consciousness. Feel them real. Feel them natural. Feel them now. And in that feeling know that the thing is done. For the agreement has been made, and the establishment on earth is assured. Nothing can prevent it. Nothing can delay it beyond the time required for the outer to conform to the inner consent. You have heard the truth. Now the power is in your hands. Use it, and your world will bear witness to the majesty of inner agreement. For where two have agreed, it is established, and the word has become flesh.