#175: The End of Psychological Effort

The End of Psychological Effort

A Lecture in the Voice and Spirit of Neville Goddard

You have labored in the attempt to assume the feeling of the wish fulfilled. You have set yourself to produce within your mind and your body the sensation that the thing you desire is already so. You have repeated words. You have closed your eyes and strained to see. You have commanded yourself to believe. And at the end of each such attempt you have risen from your chair or from your bed more weary than when you began, and the thing desired has remained as far from you as it was before. This weariness is not the price of success. It is the proof that success has not yet come. For the true assumption is without psychological effort. It is without strain upon the mind and without tension in the body. It is the quiet, natural, effortless knowing that you are already the one you desire to be.

Effort arises only when you are still conscious of being the one who has not. You stand in the old state and you try to drag yourself into the new. But consciousness does not move from one place to another by force. It simply changes its conception of itself. When the change is complete there is no one left to make effort. There is only the new man, and the new man does not labor to be himself. He is himself. The old man labors because he is trying to be what he is not. The labor is the evidence that the old man is still present and is still regarded as real.

When you truly assume, you do not add a new feeling to your present consciousness. You surrender the present consciousness altogether. You let it go. You cease to be the one who lacks and you become the one who has. This becoming is not a process. It is an instantaneous shift in the center of your awareness. One moment you are aware of being poor, sick, lonely, or unsuccessful. The next moment you are aware of being rich, well, loved, or accomplished. Between these two moments there is no interval of effort. There is only the dropping of the one and the rising of the other. The effort you have known has been the attempt to hold on to the old while reaching for the new. This holding on is what tires you. Release the old completely and the new is there without any work on your part.

You are told that consciousness is the only reality. This means that whatever you are conscious of being is the only thing that is real to you. If you are conscious of being the fulfilled one, then fulfillment is the only reality. If you are conscious of being the one who must struggle to fulfill, then struggle is the only reality. You cannot be conscious of both at the same time. The moment you introduce effort you have introduced the consciousness of not yet being. You have divided yourself. You have become two men: the one who desires and the one who must labor to obtain. This division is the source of all psychological conflict and all psychological weariness.

The assumption is the end of division. It is the end of the two. It is the recognition that there is only one consciousness and that this one consciousness is now the fulfilled state. In this recognition there is rest. There is no need to push the mind. There is no need to pull the feeling into place. There is no need to watch anxiously to see whether the assumption is taking hold. The assumption has taken hold the moment you have ceased to be anything else. This cessation is not something you do by force. It is something you permit. You permit the old conception of yourself to die. You give it no further attention. You withdraw the life that you have been giving it by your interest in it. And when the old dies from lack of attention, the new is revealed as the only living reality.

This is why you are told to enter into your rest. The rest is not physical idleness alone. It is the rest of consciousness from all labor to become. It is the Sabbath in which no work is done because no work is needed. The creative power within you does not require your effort. It requires only your acceptance. When you accept without reservation that you are already what you desire to be, the creative power moves without hindrance. It moves because it is no longer opposed by your belief in the opposite state. Your belief in the opposite state was the only wall between you and your desire. When that wall is taken down by your complete assumption, the thing desired flows into form as naturally as water flows when the dam is removed.

You may say that you have tried to assume completely and have failed. But if effort was present in your attempt, then the assumption was not complete. The presence of effort is the proof that some part of you still believed in the reality of the old state. You were still serving two masters. You were still giving some attention, however small, to the evidence of the senses. You were still wondering how the thing would come or when it would come. This wondering is effort. It is the mind reaching into the future or into the past instead of resting in the present fact of the assumption. The assumption is always now. It is not a promise for tomorrow. It is the present consciousness that you are the fulfilled one. When this is truly felt, there is no room left for wondering. There is only the calm, settled, effortless awareness that it is so.

Consider the difference between trying to remember a fact and simply knowing it. When you try to remember, you strain. You search. You labor. But when the fact is known, you do not try. You simply know. The assumption is meant to be this kind of knowing. It is meant to be as natural as knowing your own name. When you know your name you do not repeat it to yourself with effort in order to convince yourself that it is yours. You rest in the knowledge. In the same way, when you have assumed the state of the fulfilled one, you rest in the knowledge that you are he. You do not work to maintain the knowledge. You do not fear that it will slip away if you relax your grip. The knowledge maintains itself because it is now the very structure of your consciousness.

The body participates in this rest. When the mind labors to assume, the body grows tense. The shoulders tighten. The breath becomes shallow. The face sets itself into lines of concentration. All of this tension is the physical expression of psychological effort. It is the body helping the mind to force something that cannot be forced. When you truly assume, the body relaxes of itself. The shoulders drop. The breath deepens. The face softens. These physical changes are not produced by an act of will. They are the natural consequences of the mind ceasing to strive. The body is always the servant of consciousness. When consciousness rests, the body rests. When consciousness labors, the body labors with it.

You do not have to wait for some special time or place to enter this rest. You can enter it in the midst of your daily activities. When you become aware that you are once more making effort, stop for a moment. Do not condemn yourself for having fallen back into the old habit. Simply stop. Let the effort cease. Feel the body relax. Feel the mind grow quiet. Then, without any force, without any repetition, without any anxious watching, simply be the one you desire to be. Say to yourself in the silence, if words are needed at all, “I am he.” Say it without emphasis. Say it without the intention of convincing yourself. Say it as one who states a fact that is already established. Then continue with your day. You will find that the assumption has been impressed more deeply in this moment of relaxed acceptance than in hours of strained effort.

The world will begin to reflect this new consciousness without any help from you. You will not have to plan the ways and means. You will not have to push people or circumstances into position. You will not have to watch anxiously for signs that your assumption is working. The signs will appear of themselves because the assumption is now the cause, and the world is the effect. Cause and effect are not two separate things. They are one movement. When the cause is established in consciousness without effort, the effect follows with the same absence of effort. This is the naturalness that you are told to seek. It is not a naturalness that you produce by practice. It is the naturalness that appears when all practice has ceased and only the simple assumption remains.

Doubt will still arise from time to time. It will arise because the old consciousness has not yet completely faded. It will whisper that the assumption is not true, that the evidence of the senses is against it, that you are deceiving yourself. Do not argue with these whisperings. Do not try to overcome them by greater effort. Effort spent in fighting doubt is still effort, and it still keeps you in the consciousness of division. Simply let the doubt be there without giving it your attention. Your attention is the substance that gives life to any state. When you withdraw attention from the doubt, the doubt loses its substance. It fades as a shadow fades when the light is turned away from it. At the same time, give your attention wholly to the assumption by resting in it. The assumption will grow stronger as the doubt grows weaker, until the doubt has no more reality for you than a dream that is remembered from the night before.

This withdrawal of attention from the unwanted and this resting in the wanted is the whole of the law. There is nothing else to do. There is no other technique. There is no higher method. There is only this simple, effortless change of consciousness. All the words that have been written and all the lectures that have been given are only attempts to lead you to this one fact: that assumption is effortless when it is complete, and that effort is the sign that the assumption is not yet complete. When you see this clearly, you will no longer be disturbed by the presence of effort in yourself. You will recognize it at once as the signal that you have momentarily returned to the old state. You will not fight it. You will simply abandon it. You will return to the rest. And in the return to the rest the assumption will be re-established without any labor on your part.

As this becomes your constant practice, you will discover that action itself changes its quality. You will no longer act from the desire to make something happen. You will act from the knowledge that the thing has already happened in consciousness. Your actions will therefore be free from anxiety. They will be free from the strain of trying to produce results. They will be the natural, spontaneous expressions of the state you now occupy. And because they are free from strain, they will be far more effective than the strained actions of the past. The world responds to relaxed certainty as it never responds to anxious effort. When you move through your days in this relaxed certainty, doors open before you that you did not even know existed. Opportunities appear that you could not have planned. People behave toward you in ways that you could not have forced. All of this happens without your having to lift a finger to make it happen. It happens because your consciousness is now the cause, and the cause operates without interference from your old belief in effort.

The end of psychological effort is therefore not the end of action. It is the end of action born of lack. It is the end of action whose purpose is to change a world that you still believe to be independent of your consciousness. When you know that the world is your consciousness out-pictured, you no longer act upon the world. You act from the consciousness, and the world arranges itself accordingly. This is the difference between the old way and the new. In the old way you used effort to change effects. In the new way you rest in the cause, and effects change of themselves.

You are not asked to believe this without proof. You are asked only to test it. Tonight, when you lie down to sleep, do not take with you the labor of assumption. Take with you only the rest. Let the body lie in perfect relaxation. Let the mind be without any intention to make something happen. Simply assume, in the most natural way imaginable, that you are already the one you desire to be. If words come, let them be few and without force. If images come, let them be received without any attempt to hold them or to make them vivid. If no words and no images come, do not be disturbed. The assumption is not in words or images. It is in the simple, quiet, effortless feeling that you are he. Rest in this feeling as you would rest in your own bed. And in this rest let sleep come when it will. You will awaken in the morning with the assumption more deeply established than it has ever been before. And as the days pass, you will find that the world begins to bear witness to this establishment without any further effort from you.

This is the peace that you have sought. It is not the peace that comes when your desires are at last fulfilled by the world. It is the peace that comes when you have ceased to make any demand upon the world because you have assumed the fulfillment in consciousness. In this peace there is no anxiety about tomorrow. There is no regret about yesterday. There is only the calm, certain, effortless awareness that you are already the fulfilled one, and that the world, in its own time and in its own way, must reflect what you are. This peace is the end of psychological effort. It is the beginning of the life that is lived from the end. It is the life in which all things are possible because nothing is any longer opposed by the belief that effort is necessary.

You are that one in whom effort has ended. You are that one who rests in the assumption as in his own being. You are that one of whom it was said, “Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” The rest is here. It is now. It is your own consciousness when you have ceased to strive and have simply become what you desire to be. In this becoming, without effort, without strain, without the long labor of trying, your world is made new. And you walk in it as the one who has found himself to be the Lord of his own creation, needing no effort to sustain what he has assumed, for what he has assumed is now himself.