#193: The State of Inner Freedom

The State of Inner Freedom

A Lecture in the Voice and Spirit of Neville Goddard

You seek to be free from the conditions that press upon you, yet you remain bound because you have not yet entered the state of inner freedom. All that you behold in your world is the faithful out-picturing of the state you are now conscious of occupying. You cannot continue to be conscious of bondage and at the same time enjoy freedom, for consciousness is the only reality and it solidifies itself in the circumstances round about you. The appearances that seem to imprison you have no life of their own; they live only as long as you are aware of being bound by them. When you cease to be conscious of limitation, the very things that once held you lose their power and begin to dissolve.

You are not the conditioned self you have accepted as your identity. You are the awareness of being, the I AM that stands behind every conception you hold of yourself. This awareness is forever free, for it is the conceiver and not the conception. Before any outer freedom can appear, you must rise in consciousness to the naturalness of being free. You must leave behind the old conception of yourself as subject to conditions and assume the nature of the free state. This is the new birth of which you have been told. Except you be born again, except you leave the old man and put on the new, you cannot enter the kingdom of freedom. The kingdom is not a place in space; it is a state of consciousness, and that state is freedom itself.

To enter this state you do not argue with appearances. You do not try to change the outer world by force or by supplication to some power outside yourself. You simply take your attention away from that which seems so real and fixed, and you begin to feel yourself to be free. Feel it to the point where the feeling is natural, where it no longer requires effort, where you can rest in the quiet knowledge that you are free. In that moment the two have agreed: the awareness of being and the state of freedom have become one. And because you have made the agreement, you must express it. The outer world has no choice but to conform to the state you have assumed, for the world is forever reflecting the consciousness that beholds it.

Many continue to walk in bondage because they believe the evidence of their senses to be final. They look upon the circumstances and say, “This is real; therefore I am bound.” Yet the circumstances are not the cause; they are the effect. They are the shadow cast by the inner state. As long as you react to the shadow, you keep it alive. When you become indifferent to the appearance and dwell instead in the feeling of freedom, the shadow begins to fade. Indifference is not denial in the sense of fighting the condition; it is the quiet withdrawal of attention from that which you no longer wish to sustain. You turn your attention to the I AM and you feel it to be free. In this turning you are born anew.

The truth that sets you free is not a truth about the world; it is the truth of what you are. You are told that you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free. The truth is that your awareness of being is God, and God is not bound. When you know yourself to be that awareness, untouched by any condition, you stand in the liberty wherewith you were free from the beginning. You no longer petition for freedom; you claim it as your present state. You rise in consciousness to the point where you can say with quiet certainty, “I AM free,” and you rest in that claim until it becomes the dominant feeling of your life. Then the outer conditions must rearrange themselves, for they have no power to resist the state that has assumed command.

Consider what it means to be free in consciousness. It means that you are no longer moved by the opinions of others, no longer disturbed by the seeming power of circumstances, no longer identified with the limitations that once defined you. You walk through the same streets, you meet the same faces, you encounter the same pressures, yet something within you has changed. You no longer feel yourself to be at their mercy. You feel instead a quiet release, a sense of standing above the stream of events, a knowledge that nothing can bind the I AM that you are. This inner release is the state of freedom, and from it flows every outer expression of liberty.

You may ask how long you must persist in this feeling before the outer world changes. The answer is that you persist until the feeling is natural. You do not count the days or watch the signs. You simply continue to assume the state until the state assumes you. Then you move as a free being moves, you speak as a free being speaks, you react as a free being reacts. And because you have become one with the state, the world must bear witness to it. The signs always follow; they never precede. You do not look for them. You look only to the feeling of freedom within you, and you let that feeling be your dwelling place.

There is a moment in every man’s experience when he must decide whether he will continue to serve the old conception or rise to the new. You cannot serve two masters. You cannot remain conscious of bondage and expect to enjoy freedom. The moment you choose the new state, the old begins to lose its grip. At first the senses will cry out that nothing has changed. They will present the same evidence of limitation. But you have been told not to judge after the appearance. You have been told to judge righteous judgment, and righteous judgment is to see the world as it must be when consciousness is free. You persist in the assumption in spite of the evidence, for the evidence is but the old state trying to reassert itself. It has no power over you once you have withdrawn your attention from it.

As you prepare to sleep tonight, take this feeling of freedom with you into the deep. Let the last thing you are conscious of be the quiet knowledge that you are free. Do not argue with the conditions that seem to surround you. Do not rehearse the reasons why freedom appears impossible. Simply feel yourself to be free. Feel it as you would feel the naturalness of breathing. Let the feeling fill the interval between waking and sleeping. In that state the agreement is made, and the Father within you, which is your own awareness, begins to draw the circumstances that correspond to freedom. You may not see the change at once, but the change has already begun in the depths of your being, and it must come forth.

The world will try to pull you back into the old state. It will present new difficulties, new reasons to doubt. But these are not obstacles; they are tests of your assumption. Every time you are tempted to return to the feeling of bondage, you simply remember who you are. You remember that you are the awareness of being, and that awareness is free by nature. You do not fight the temptation; you ignore it. You turn once more to the feeling of freedom and you rest there. In time the old reactions grow weaker, and the new state becomes your permanent dwelling place. Then you discover that you are not merely free from certain conditions; you are free in the midst of all conditions, for the state of freedom does not depend upon the absence of limitation. It depends upon the presence of the feeling that you are free.

You will find that as this inner freedom deepens, your whole relationship to life changes. You no longer strive to get free; you rest in the freedom that is already yours. You no longer fear the future or regret the past, for both are seen as shadows cast by states of consciousness, and you have chosen the state that casts no shadow of bondage. You move through your days with a quiet dignity, a sense of being master in your own house, for you have found the house of consciousness to be the dwelling place of freedom itself. The circumstances that once frightened you now appear as opportunities for the free state to express itself more fully. You do not force them to change; you simply remain free, and they change of their own accord.

This is not a freedom that must be won by effort or maintained by vigilance. It is the freedom that belongs to the I AM, the freedom that is revealed the moment you cease to identify yourself with the garment of conditions. The garment may still be worn, but you know yourself to be the wearer and not the garment. You can put it off and put on another at will, for you have discovered that all garments are assumed states, and the assumption of the free state is the assumption of your true nature. In this discovery the whole world is transformed, not because the world has changed, but because you have changed your relationship to it. You are no longer in the world as a slave to appearances; you are in the world as a free being through whom the free state expresses itself.

Tonight, as you close your eyes, let the words “I AM free” be more than words. Let them be the feeling that possesses you. Let them be the state in which you fall asleep. And in the morning you will rise not as one who hopes for freedom, but as one who knows himself to be free. The day will unfold differently because you have assumed a different state. The people you meet, the tasks you perform, the challenges that arise will all be met from the level of freedom rather than from the level of bondage. And gradually, almost imperceptibly at first, the outer world will begin to confirm what you have assumed. For consciousness is the only reality, and when consciousness is free, freedom must appear.

You are not asked to believe something that is not true. You are asked to believe something that is eternally true: that your awareness of being is free and that you have the power to assume any state you desire. The state of inner freedom is not a distant goal; it is your present possibility. You enter it the moment you feel yourself to be free in spite of all that seems to deny it. You remain in it by refusing to be moved from the feeling. And you express it by living as though it were already the fact, for in consciousness it is already the fact. The outer confirmation is inevitable, for the world can do nothing but bear witness to the state you occupy.

Stand, therefore, in the liberty where you are free. Do not look back to the old state. Do not measure your progress by the changing of circumstances. Measure it only by the deepening of the feeling that you are free. When that feeling is established, when it has become natural and effortless, you will know that the work is done. The outer world may still seem to lag behind, but it is already moving. It is moving toward the fulfillment of the state you have assumed, for there is no power in heaven or on earth that can prevent the expression of a consciousness that has claimed its freedom.

You are free now. Not when the conditions change, but now, in this moment, as you feel yourself to be free. The conditions will follow, for they have no choice. They are the servants of consciousness, and consciousness has assumed the state of freedom. Rest in this knowledge. Let it be your dwelling place tonight and every night. And in the quiet certainty of the I AM that is free, you will discover that the whole world has become a new world, for you have become a new man.