#171: The Acceptance of Magnitude

The Acceptance of Magnitude

A Lecture in the Voice and Spirit of Neville Goddard

You have often felt the stirring of a desire so vast that a quiet resistance rose within you before the desire could even take root. You did not speak it, yet in the secret depths you measured the desire against your present world and found it too large, too far beyond anything you had ever sustained. This measurement, this secret judgment of magnitude, is the only reason the desire has not yet embodied itself. The desire carries no judgment of its own size. The judgment belongs entirely to you, and it is this judgment that conditions the desire and holds it at arm’s length from your world.

Consciousness, your own awareness of being, is the sole reality. It outpictures with perfect fidelity only what it has accepted as natural to itself. When you accept a state as too great for you, you are in that very moment defining the boundaries of your awareness. You are declaring that your own wonderful consciousness is not spacious enough to contain the desire. Yet your consciousness is the one and only God, and within it every magnitude is already contained. There is nothing too great for the awareness that now sustains your body, moves your thoughts, and gives you the power to feel. The limitation is never in the desire. The limitation is only in the narrowness of what you have so far accepted as natural.

When a desire is modest and fits comfortably within your present conception of yourself, you feel no resistance. You assume it easily. You feel it as already so, and it often appears with little effort. The small desire succeeds because it does not challenge the estimate you have placed upon yourself. But the moment the desire would require a larger measure of yourself, the resistance appears. You begin to compare the desire with your present circumstances, your present resources, your present history. This comparison is the conditioning that robs the desire of its creative power. You are not asked to shrink the desire to fit your present self. You are asked to expand your acceptance until the desire feels as natural as the breath you draw.

The acceptance of magnitude is not achieved by effort or by loud declaration. It is achieved by quietly withdrawing attention from every evidence that denies the desire and resting in the simple feeling that the desire is already fulfilled and that this fulfillment is the most natural thing in the world. In that rest the desire ceases to be something you must struggle to attain. It becomes something you already are. The feeling of naturalness is the bridge. Once the great desire feels natural, it is no longer a future event. It is a present fact in consciousness, and every fact in consciousness must objectify itself in your world.

You are at this very moment drawing into your world everything you have accepted as natural to you. If you have accepted lack as natural, lack continues to appear. If you have accepted a modest state as natural, the modest state continues to appear. Only when you accept a greater state as natural does the greater state appear. The law is not partial. It does not make exceptions for desires that seem too magnificent. It simply reproduces in form whatever you have accepted in consciousness. Therefore the whole question reduces itself to this: what magnitude have you accepted as natural to the being you are?

Many have assumed the feeling of the wish fulfilled and yet seen no change, because all the while they were secretly measuring the desire against their present self and finding it too large. The assumption was made with the surface mind, but the acceptance was withheld in the deeper feeling. The surface assumption is soon contradicted by the deeper judgment, and the desire remains suspended between the two. Only when the deeper feeling agrees with the assumption does the desire take root. The agreement is felt as a quiet release, a sense that the matter is already settled and requires no further anxious thought. This release is the sign that acceptance has occurred.

Do not speculate upon the manner in which the desire will appear. The manner is not your concern. Your concern is only the acceptance of the magnitude. When acceptance is complete, the desire embodies itself by ways you, as man, know not of. Its ways are past finding out. Man looks at the outer and judges by appearances. Your awareness looks only at what it has accepted and brings that acceptance into form without regard to seeming obstacles. The obstacles are themselves only the out-picturing of previous acceptances. When the new acceptance is established, the old obstacles lose their support and quietly disappear.

Tonight, when you are alone, take the desire that has seemed largest to you and feel it not as something you will one day possess but as something that already belongs to you and has always been natural to you. Do not argue with it. Do not wonder how it can be. Do not measure it against your present circumstances. Simply rest in the feeling that it is so and that it could not be otherwise. Feel the quiet certainty, the absence of strain, the sense that the great thing is already accomplished and is merely waiting to be recognized in the outer world. This feeling, maintained, is the acceptance of magnitude.

As you persist in this feeling, the desire loses its quality of greatness. It becomes ordinary, inevitable, a simple expression of the being you are. What once appeared as a mountain becomes a level path. What once seemed foreign becomes familiar. This change in feeling is the change in consciousness, and the change in consciousness is the only change that matters. The outer world must in time reflect the new state, for the outer world is only the shadow of the inner acceptance.

You may discover that doubts return when the outer world shows no immediate alteration. The old habit of regarding the desire as too large will whisper again. These doubts are not obstacles to be fought. They are merely the residue of the former state attempting to reassert itself. Return quietly to the feeling of natural acceptance. Do not reason with the doubt. Do not affirm against it. Simply feel again that the magnitude is natural to you and therefore already accomplished. The doubts, having no nourishment, fade of themselves.

There is a profound peace that accompanies the acceptance of magnitude. It is the peace of knowing that you are no longer at war with the size of your own desires. You have ceased to stand outside the greater state, measuring and judging. You have entered it by feeling it as natural, and in that entry the burden of how and when falls away. You go about your daily affairs in the quiet certainty that the thing is already done. This certainty is not presumption. It is the simple recognition that consciousness, having accepted, must objectify what it has accepted.

The acceptance of magnitude is also the end of comparison. You no longer look at what another possesses or has failed to possess and measure your desire against it. Another’s acceptance or rejection has nothing to do with you. Your world is fashioned solely from what you have accepted as natural to your own awareness. When you accept a great desire as natural to you, you discover that the same awareness can accept other great desires with equal ease. The capacity for magnitude, once awakened, does not limit itself to a single desire. It extends itself to every desire that is presented to it.

You are not asked to become worthy of the great desire. You are asked only to accept it as already natural to the awareness that you are. Worthiness is not a condition that must be met. It is a judgment you have imposed upon yourself, and this judgment is what makes the desire appear too large. When the judgment is dropped, the desire takes its rightful place as an expression of your being. You discover that you were always worthy, not because you earned worthiness but because worthiness was never the issue. The only issue was acceptance.

In the acceptance of magnitude you cease to be the limited self that measures and withholds. You become the self in whom all magnitudes are at home. This shift is felt as an expansion, a quiet enlargement of your sense of what is possible for you. The enlargement is not imaginary. It is the actual expansion of consciousness, and every expansion of consciousness is followed by a corresponding expansion in the things that surround you. Opportunities appear without strain. Circumstances arrange themselves in harmony with the accepted state. The world, which seemed fixed, reveals itself as plastic to the new acceptance.

The ancient statement that to him that hath shall be given, and from him that hath not shall be taken even that which he hath, is not a statement of arbitrary reward and punishment. It is a simple description of the law of acceptance. What you have accepted as natural to you is multiplied and confirmed in your world. What you have rejected as too great for you is withdrawn, not by any external power but by your own refusal to contain it. The law is impersonal and exact. It gives you only what you have accepted, and it withholds only what you have declined to accept.

You cannot serve two masters in this matter. You cannot accept the magnitude with one part of your feeling and deny it with another. The acceptance must be complete. When it is complete, there is no room left for the old measurement of size. The desire stands before you no longer as a question but as a fact. And facts, once established in consciousness, move with the inevitability of natural law into the outer world.

As this acceptance becomes your habitual state, you will find that the very quality of your days changes. You no longer live in the tension of waiting for something great to happen. You live in the quiet knowledge that the great thing has already happened in consciousness and is now in the process of appearing. This knowledge frees your attention for the present moment. You perform your daily tasks with a new ease, because the background of your mind is no longer occupied with the question of whether the desire is too large. The question has been answered by the acceptance itself.

The acceptance of magnitude is not a technique to be applied only to one desire and then forgotten. It is a new manner of being. Once you have felt the relief of accepting a great desire as natural, you will find yourself accepting other areas of your life with the same freedom. The small self that once measured everything and found most things too large begins to dissolve. In its place stands the self that can contain any magnitude without strain. This self is your true self, the awareness of being that was never limited except by its own acceptances.

Tonight, and in the nights that follow, return to the feeling that your greatest desire is already natural to you. Do not force the feeling. Do not demand immediate evidence. Simply rest in the quiet certainty that the magnitude has been accepted and therefore the embodiment is inevitable. In this rest the old boundaries of your self expand. The desire that once seemed too great becomes the new normal. And in that new normal you discover that you were never too small for the desire. You were only unaccustomed to accepting the magnitude that has always been possible to the awareness you are.

This is the acceptance of magnitude. This is the simple act that turns what appeared impossible into what is now inevitable. And this is the truth that, once felt, leaves you forever changed in your estimate of what is natural to the being you are.