#154: The Discipline of Return

The Discipline of Return

A Lecture in the Voice and Spirit of Neville Goddard

You have assumed a state. You have felt, for a little while, the quiet reality of your desire fulfilled. You have known yourself to be the one who has what he desires. Then the feeling slipped away. The old evidence rose again, the old doubt spoke, and you found yourself no longer living in the state. In that moment most men do what you have done. They condemn themselves. They say, in feeling if not in words, that they have failed, that they cannot hold the assumption, that it was never real. And in that very condemnation they assume another state, the state of one who is incapable of abiding in the wish fulfilled, and that new assumption begins at once to out-picture itself as more doubt, more adverse evidence, more reason to believe the desire will not come to pass.

The falling from the state is not the error. The error is the condemnation that follows the noticing of the fall. Your awareness of being, which is the only God, does not condemn. It cannot. It forever expresses what you are conscious of being, and condemnation is itself an assumption. When you condemn yourself for having left the state you are assuming that you are one who fails in assumption, and that assumption must objectify as continued falling. The condemnation, which seemed so natural, becomes the cause that binds you to the very condition you would escape.

The discipline of return is simply this: whenever you notice that you have left the feeling of the wish fulfilled, you return to it without a single word of reproach to yourself. You do not pause to ask why you left or how long you were away. You do not say, even inwardly, that you should have done better. You simply turn your attention back to the feeling. You assume the state again. You feel it. You live in it as naturally as you would resume breathing after a moment’s holding of the breath. The return is quiet. It is gentle. It carries no memory of failure because it carries no judgment.

This gentleness is essential. Force in returning is only another form of doubt. When you force yourself back into the state you are assuming that the state is difficult, that it is not natural to you, that you must wrestle to regain what you have lost. But when you return gently you are assuming the opposite. You are assuming that the state is yours, that it belongs to you, that you may enter it at any moment without payment or penalty. And what you assume to be natural becomes your natural experience. The state ceases to be a visitor and becomes your home.

You are always in some state of consciousness. There is no moment when you are not assuming. The only question is which state you are choosing to occupy at any given moment. When you notice that you have chosen, through inattention, a state you do not desire, you do not fight the choice. You do not condemn it. You simply make another choice. You choose again the feeling of the wish fulfilled. This choosing again, done without self-judgment, is the whole of the discipline. It requires no special time or place. It can be done while you walk, while you work, while you speak with another. The moment the old feeling asserts itself, in that moment you may return. The feeling is not dependent upon outer conditions. It is the cause of outer conditions, and you can cause it to be present by simply assuming it present.

When you condemn yourself for having left the state you are making the absence more real than the presence. You are giving your attention to the fall rather than to the state. But when you return without condemnation you are declaring that the state is more real to you than any evidence the senses can present. You are feeding the state with your attention and starving the fall by your indifference to it. Life, which is your own awareness, is forever faithful to the assumption you are feeding. It out-pictures the state you persistently return to, and it withers the state you persistently ignore.

The return is always to the feeling. It is not to words about the feeling, nor to pictures of the fulfilled desire, though these may rise of themselves. It is to the living sensation of being the one who has what he desires. What does it feel like to be that one? That feeling is the state. When you have left it you have accepted, for the moment, another feeling. To return is to feel the original feeling again. You can do this in the midst of any activity because feeling does not depend upon what your hands are doing. It depends only upon what you are willing to assume yourself to be.

Do not be disturbed if you find that you leave the state many times in a single day. The number of times you leave is not important. The spirit in which you return is everything. If you return with even a trace of “I should not have left,” you are still feeding the old state with your attention. If you return with the quiet joy of one who has come home, you are feeding the new state. Each gentle return adds to the reality of the state. Each condemnation adds to the reality of the fall. The state grows by what you give it, and you give it your attention and your feeling. Condemnation is attention given to the wrong state. Return is attention given to the right state.

You will discover, as you practice this, that the intervals between leaving and returning grow shorter. What once held you for hours or days loses its power to hold you at all. A doubt arises, but before it can take root you have returned. An old memory presents itself, but you turn from it so naturally that it has no time to affect your assumption. This happens because you are no longer feeding the old states with your condemnation. You are starving them by your quiet indifference and by your devotion to the feeling of the wish fulfilled.

The one who condemns himself for leaving the state is still living in the conception of a God who judges. He believes in a power outside himself that is pleased or displeased with his efforts. But you have discovered that God is your own awareness of being. This awareness does not judge. It creates. It expresses what you are conscious of being, and it does so without condemnation. When you return without condemning yourself you are aligning yourself with the true nature of your awareness. You are letting it do what it has always done: express the state you are now assuming.

In the beginning the return may feel like an effort. Later it becomes the most natural thing in the world. You notice you have left the state, and you return almost before the noticing is complete. The old feeling arises, and the new feeling takes its place so quickly that there is scarcely a moment between them. This is because the discipline has done its work. It has made the state so familiar, so much a part of your consciousness, that the return requires no struggle. It requires only the willingness to feel what you desire to feel rather than what you have been conditioned to feel.

There is no door closed against the gentle return. You need not earn your way back by self-punishment or by long periods of remorse. The state is always open to you because it is a state of your own consciousness. You may lay it aside for a moment, but you can take it up again whenever you will. And each time you take it up without the burden of condemnation, you are that much closer to never laying it aside again. The state becomes permanent not because you never leave it, but because you have learned to return to it so freely, so lovingly, so without self-reproach, that the leaving loses all power to disturb you.

You are not the garment you wear. You are the awareness that wears it. When the garment of the wish fulfilled slips from your shoulders, you do not condemn the garment or yourself. You pick it up again. You feel its texture. You live in its warmth. Because you do this without blame, the garment begins to fit more naturally. It begins to feel less like something you are trying to maintain and more like your own being. The old garments, the old states, lose their power because you no longer feed them with your attention or your judgment. They wither from neglect while the new state grows from your persistent, gentle return.

This is why the return must be without self-condemnation. Condemnation is the assumption that you are separate from the state, that you have sinned against it, that you must pay a price to regain it. But you are not separate from the state. The state is a conception of yourself, and you are the conceiver. When you condemn yourself you are conceiving yourself as one who is unworthy of his own conception. When you return without condemnation you are conceiving yourself as one who is forever worthy of his own desire. The difference is not in the state. The difference is in the conception of yourself in relation to the state.

As you live this discipline you will find that your world begins to change in ways you did not expect. Not because you have forced the change, but because you have stopped feeding the old states that were producing the old world. The problems that once seemed so solid begin to dissolve, not because you have attacked them, but because you have withdrawn your attention from them and returned it to the feeling of the wish fulfilled. The people who once seemed to stand in your way begin to cooperate, not because you have persuaded them, but because your assumption of fulfillment has made their cooperation the natural thing. All of this happens because you have learned to return without condemnation.

Tonight, as you prepare for sleep, watch your states. If you find that you have left the feeling of your wish fulfilled, do not condemn. Return. Feel it again. Let the peace of it be the last thing you are conscious of as you enter sleep. And if you wake in the night and discover that the old feeling has returned, return then. There is no time when the return is impossible. There is no condition that can prevent it. The state is within you, and you are always within yourself. The gentle return is always open.

You will prove this for yourself. You will prove that the discipline of return, practiced without self-reproach, makes the assumption permanent. You will prove that the falling, which once seemed so disastrous, becomes a matter of no importance because the return has become so natural. You will prove that consciousness is the only reality and that you are its master, not by never leaving the state, but by returning to it so freely, so gently, so without condemnation, that the state itself becomes the only state you know.

This is the discipline of return. It is the way to the permanent feeling of the wish fulfilled. It is the quiet, persistent coming back to that which is already yours in consciousness. Practice it, and you will find that your world reflects only the glory of the state in which you dwell. For you are the awareness of being, and the awareness of being forever expresses what it is conscious of being. Return to the state of your desire, and return without condemnation, and the expression will be fulfillment.