#170: The Secret of Psychological Time

The Secret of Psychological Time

A Lecture in the Voice and Spirit of Neville Goddard

You have waited. You have believed that between the moment you desire a thing and the moment it appears in your world some interval of time must pass. You have called this interval psychological time, and you have accepted it as necessary. You have said to yourself that circumstances must arrange themselves, that the way must be prepared, that the hour has not yet come. And so you have continued to live in the consciousness of not yet having, while looking forward to a future in which you will have. But I tell you that this belief in an interval is the very thing that keeps your desire suspended before you and never within you.

Creation is finished. All states already exist. The thing you seek is not being brought into being; it is already there, complete and perfect, in the depths of your own consciousness. What you call delay is not a property of the desire itself. It is not a property of life. It is the time it takes for you to accept, without reservation, that the state you desire is your present state. When that acceptance is complete, the interval vanishes, for there was never any interval in consciousness. There is only the state you are occupying and the world that faithfully reflects it.

You are aware of being. Before you are aware of being this or that, you are simply aware. This awareness, this I AM, is unconditioned. It is not bound by the clock or the calendar. It does not move from a past into a future. It is forever in the present. When you assume a state, you are not creating something new in time. You are simply becoming aware of being that which already is. The assumption is the act of selecting, from the infinite storehouse of states, the one you wish to make your own. And because the storehouse is already full, the selection is instantaneous in consciousness even when the senses continue to report the old condition.

The senses are always reporting the past. They can only report what has already been objectified. When you look at your world and see that your desire is not yet there, you are looking at the objectification of a former state. You are not seeing the future. You are seeing the present reflection of what you were conscious of being yesterday or last week or last year. If you continue to live in the feeling of the old state, the reflection will continue to show you the old state. The so-called delay is your own persistence in the consciousness that denies the wish.

When you assume the feeling of the wish fulfilled, you are no longer looking backward. You are occupying the state whose reflection you desire to see. In that moment the psychological interval begins to close, because you have ceased to feed the old state with your attention. The new state, now nourished by your feeling, begins to objectify itself. The bridge of incidents that leads from where you were to where you now are in consciousness starts to unfold. You do not construct the bridge. You do not know its details. You simply walk upon it by remaining faithful to the feeling of the end. The end has already willed the means. Your only task is to remain in the end.

Many of you believe that you must do something in the outer world to bring your desire to pass. You believe you must find the right person, the right opportunity, the right circumstance. But these are not causes. They are effects. They are the ways in which the assumed state objectifies itself. When you look to them as causes, you are still living in the consciousness of lack. You are still saying, “It is not yet.” The moment you assume the feeling that it is already so, you release the desire from the necessity of being brought about by outer means. The means appear, but they appear as consequences, not as prerequisites. You move through a series of events that seem perfectly natural, yet each event is the inevitable unfoldment of the state you have accepted as real.

The secret of psychological time, then, is that there is no such time. What you experience as time is the measure of your resistance to the acceptance of the end. The more completely you accept the wish as an accomplished fact, the shorter the interval appears. When acceptance is total, the interval disappears altogether. You find yourself living in a world where the thing you desired is already present, and you cannot remember the moment when it was not. This is not imagination in the sense of fantasy. This is the simple recognition that consciousness is the only reality and that what you are conscious of being, you are.

Consider the feeling that would be yours were you already in possession of your desire. That feeling is not something you will have in the future. It is a present possibility. It is a state of consciousness that already exists within you. When you capture it, when you let it fill your mind and your body so that it feels natural and inevitable, you have crossed the only interval that ever existed—the interval between knowing about the state and living in the state. From that moment the outer world begins to rearrange itself around the new center you have established in consciousness.

You may ask how long this rearrangement will take. But that question reveals that you have not yet fully assumed the end. The one who has assumed the end is not concerned with time. He is concerned only with the feeling of already having. He knows that the moment the feeling is fixed, the end is fixed, and all that lies between is but the unfoldment of what is already accomplished. He does not wait. He lives. He does not hope. He knows. And because he knows, the world cannot help but bear witness to his knowing.

The Bible speaks of this when it says, “It is finished.” The end is always finished in consciousness before it appears in form. The cross is not the end of the story. The resurrection is the revelation that what was finished in consciousness must appear in the flesh. You too have finished your cross the moment you accept the end as true. The carrying of the cross is the period in which you persist in the assumption despite the evidence of the senses. But the resurrection is certain, for consciousness never fails to objectify the state with which it is united.

You are the awareness in which all states live and move and have their being. You are not the state. You are that which assumes the state. Therefore you are greater than any state you have ever occupied or will occupy. When you realize this, you cease to be anxious about time. You know that you can assume any state you desire, and that assumption is the only creative act. The state you assume will draw to itself everything necessary for its expression, because every state is complete in itself. It contains within it the plan of its own unfoldment. You do not need to add anything to it. You need only to be it.

Many of you rise in consciousness during a quiet moment and feel the reality of your desire. Then you return to your daily activities and allow the old feeling of not having to reassert itself. Each time you do this, you lengthen the interval. You are feeding the old state and starving the new one. The secret is persistence in the new feeling. Not a strained effort, but a quiet, natural assumption that this is now who you are. You do not argue with the senses. You simply withdraw your attention from their report and give it to the feeling of the wish fulfilled. In time the senses will have no choice but to report the new condition, because consciousness has only one language—the language of feeling—and it speaks that language whether the feeling is of the old state or the new.

There is no need to ask how the thing will come. The how is contained within the end itself. When you accept the end, you have accepted the means, though you may not yet see them. The man who assumes the feeling of wealth does not need to know the particular transactions that will increase his fortune. The woman who assumes the feeling of being loved does not need to know the particular person or circumstance through which love will appear. Life knows its own ways. Your only responsibility is to assume the feeling and to remain faithful to it.

You may find, in the beginning, that the assumption feels unnatural. This is because you have for so long assumed the opposite. But the unnaturalness is only the measure of your former belief. As you persist, the new feeling becomes natural. It becomes your dwelling place. And when a state becomes natural to you, its objectification is inevitable. You do not force it. You simply are it, and the world adjusts.

The interval you once called psychological time was never anything more than the time required for you to become natural in the assumption of your desire. Some desires require only a moment of acceptance. Others, because of long habit, require longer persistence. But the principle is always the same. There is no power in time itself. Time is the servant of consciousness, not its master. When consciousness changes, what appeared as time rearranges itself.

Tonight, as you prepare for sleep or as you sit quietly, choose one desire. Do not argue with it. Do not qualify it. Do not wonder if it is possible. Simply assume the feeling that would be yours were it already an accomplished fact. Let that feeling fill you. Let it be the dominant mood of your mind. If doubts arise, do not fight them. Simply return to the feeling. The doubts are the old state trying to reassert itself. They have no power except the power you give them by your attention. Withdraw your attention, and they fade.

As you maintain this feeling, you will notice a strange thing. The world does not immediately change, but your attitude toward the world changes. You begin to see possibilities where before you saw only obstacles. You begin to feel a quiet confidence that does not depend on outer evidence. This is the beginning of the end. The outer evidence must follow, for it has no choice. It is the shadow of the inner state, and shadows must follow the objects that cast them.

You are not working to make something happen in time. You are simply occupying a state that already exists. The occupation of the state is the doing. Everything else is the automatic consequence of that doing. When this becomes your settled conviction, psychological time loses all meaning. You no longer wait for your desire. You live from it. And living from it, you discover that it was never future. It was always present, waiting only for you to claim it as your own.

The one who knows this walks through the world as though the thing he desires is already his. He is not arrogant. He is not anxious. He is simply natural. And because he is natural in the assumption, the world finds it natural to give him the evidence of his assumption. There is no struggle. There is only the quiet certainty that consciousness is the only reality and that what you are conscious of being, you must express.

You have sought many things in your life. You have sought them in time. Now seek them in consciousness. Assume the consciousness of already having them, and you will discover that there was never any need to wait. The waiting was the illusion created by your refusal to assume. The moment you assume, the waiting ends, even if the senses have not yet confirmed it. For the confirmation of the senses is not the reality. The reality is the state of consciousness, and that state, once assumed, is already the fact.

Tonight you can end the interval. Tonight you can assume the feeling of the wish fulfilled and know that the assumption itself is the creative act. All else follows. There is no power on earth that can prevent the objectification of a state that is fully occupied in consciousness. The only power that ever seemed to prevent it was your own divided attention—your own lingering in the old state while attempting to claim the new.

Be still and know that you are the I AM in whom all things already exist. Be still and feel yourself to be the one you desire to be. Let the feeling be without effort, without strain, without the thought of how or when. Simply let it be. And in that letting, the secret of psychological time is revealed: there is none. There is only the eternal now of consciousness, and in that now all things are already accomplished.

You are that now. You are the awareness in which the end is always finished. Assume it. Feel it. Live from it. And the world you once waited to see will rise before you as the inevitable and natural expression of the state you have claimed as your own. There is no other way. There never was. There never will be. Consciousness is the only reality, and you are its author and its finisher.