#199: The End of Psychological Lack

The End of Psychological Lack

A Lecture in the Voice and Spirit of Neville Goddard

Can psychological lack be brought to an end? Most decidedly it can. For what you call lack is not a circumstance that has been thrust upon you by forces outside yourself. It is a state of consciousness which you have assumed and which you continue to assume every time you feel yourself to be insufficient, every time you look upon your world and see it as lacking in some necessary thing. As long as you remain in that state, no change of circumstances can ever satisfy you, for the state itself will simply clothe itself in new garments of want. The end of psychological lack, therefore, is not the acquiring of more things; it is the rising out of the state in which lack is felt to be real.

You are conscious of being. That is the one and only reality. Whatever you are conscious of being, that you express. If you are conscious of being the man who lacks time, or love, or recognition, or health, or means, then that consciousness is faithfully out-pictured in the circumstances round about you. The world is not withholding from you; it is simply mirroring the state from which you view it. Change the state, and the mirror must change. This is not a hopeful theory; it is the law of your own being. You cannot be conscious of lack and at the same time express its opposite. The two states cannot occupy the same place in consciousness at the same moment.

Most men believe that if only the outer picture were altered, the inner feeling of lack would disappear. They strive to change the reflection while still standing before the same mirror. They do not see that the feeling of insufficiency is the cause, not the effect. A man may possess great wealth and yet remain in the psychological state of lack if he is conscious of being one who has not enough. Another may have little in the way of possessions and yet be free of psychological lack because he is conscious of being already fulfilled in the thing that matters to him. The outer measure is never the measure of the state. The state is measured only by what you feel yourself to be in the quiet of your own awareness.

Consider how subtly this psychological lack clothes itself. It is not always the dramatic cry of poverty. It appears as the quiet conviction that you are not yet ready, that you must wait for the right moment, that you must first overcome some imagined obstacle, that others have what you lack and therefore you are behind. It appears as the feeling that love is missing, or that success is delayed, or that the body is not what it should be. In each case the form is different, yet the state is the same: you are conscious of being separated from the fulfillment you desire. You have assumed the position of one who stands outside the kingdom and looks in, rather than the position of one who is already within.

This state of psychological lack is sustained by attention. Whatever you give your attention to, you keep alive in consciousness. If your attention is constantly returning to the evidence of lack, you are watering the very plant you wish to uproot. The senses will always present the old picture, for the senses are the servants of the state. They cannot show you what you are not conscious of being. To end psychological lack you must withdraw attention from the evidence of the senses and place it upon the new state you desire to occupy. You must become conscious of being the man who has no psychological lack, the man in whom the desire is already fulfilled, the man who walks in the naturalness of having rather than in the tension of wanting.

This rising in consciousness is not an act of will in the ordinary sense. It is an act of assumption. You assume the feeling of the wish fulfilled until that feeling becomes natural to you. When it is natural, you no longer strive to feel it; you simply are it. The old state of lack loses its grip because you have ceased to feed it with your attention and your conviction. You have, in effect, died to the man who was conscious of insufficiency and have been born anew as the man who is conscious of wholeness. This is the true psychological end of lack: the putting off of the old garment and the putting on of the new.

In the Scriptures it is said that the prodigal son, after wasting his substance in a far country, came to himself and returned to his father. The far country is the state of psychological lack, the state in which man believes himself separated from his good and therefore squanders his attention upon the evidences of want. To come to himself is to remember who he really is: not the limited self who lacks, but the awareness of being in whom all things already exist. The return to the father is the return to the consciousness of I AM, the consciousness that knows no lack because it is the source of all that appears. When you make this return, even while the outer circumstances remain unchanged for a little while, the psychological lack has already ended, for you have ended the state that produced it.

You may ask how long this new state must be maintained. There is no measure of time in consciousness. The moment the assumption becomes natural, the work is done. Some men find the feeling in a single evening of quiet attention; others must persist for a longer period because the old state has been so long and so deeply assumed. But persistence is not struggle. It is simply the gentle returning of attention to the new feeling whenever the old feeling presents itself. You do not fight the old; you simply assume the new until the new becomes the only reality you know.

The feeling you seek is not excitement or emotion in the usual sense. It is the quiet, deep conviction that you are already the one you desire to be. It is the inner sensation of having arrived, of needing nothing more to complete you, of being at home in the state of fulfillment. When this sensation is yours, you can walk through the same streets, meet the same people, and confront the same apparent limitations, yet you will no longer be moved by them in the old way. The psychological lack has lost its power over you because you no longer live in the state that gave it power.

This assumption is the true meaning of the command to seek first the kingdom of heaven. The kingdom is not a place; it is a state of consciousness. When you seek first the consciousness of being already fulfilled, all the things that belong to that state are added unto you without your having to struggle for them. The adding is not your concern. Your concern is only to assume the state and to remain faithful to it. The how of its manifestation is not your responsibility; it is the responsibility of the deeper self, the awareness that knows ways you as man do not know.

Many who hear this truth still cling to the belief that they must do something in the outer world to end their lack. They believe that assumption is too simple, too inward, too mystical to be practical. Yet the simplest truth is always the most practical, for it goes directly to the cause. To change the outer without changing the state is to labor in vain. The outer is the shadow; the state is the substance. When the substance is changed, the shadow must follow. This is not a matter of faith in the ordinary sense; it is a matter of knowing the law of consciousness. You know that you express what you are conscious of being. Therefore you know that when you change what you are conscious of being, expression must change.

The subtle temptation is to assume the new state for a little while and then to return to the old state to see if anything has happened. This returning to the old state to check results is the very act that re-establishes the old state. You cannot serve two masters. You cannot live in the consciousness of fulfillment and at the same time live in the consciousness of lack. One must die that the other may live. The death of the old state is not dramatic; it is simply the withdrawal of attention and conviction from it. When you no longer believe in the reality of lack, lack loses its reality for you.

In the silence of night, when the outer world is quiet, you have the greatest opportunity to assume the new state. In that silence you can close the door upon the evidence of the senses and turn your attention inward. There you can feel yourself to be the man who has transcended psychological lack. You can feel the quiet satisfaction of one who needs nothing because he already possesses all in consciousness. You can dwell in that feeling until it becomes the dominant mood of your mind. When you fall asleep in that mood, you are sowing the seed of the new state, and in the morning you rise as one who has already begun to live from it.

As you persist in this practice, you will discover that the feeling of lack grows weaker and the feeling of fulfillment grows stronger. The change is not always sudden. Often it is gradual, like the dawn that comes before the full light of day. But the direction is certain. Every time you assume the new state you weaken the old. Every time you weaken the old you make room for the new to express itself more fully in your world. The circumstances that once seemed to confirm lack begin to rearrange themselves. Opportunities appear where none were seen before. People and events move to support the new conviction, not because you have forced them, but because the state you now occupy compels them.

The end of psychological lack is therefore not an event in time; it is a change in identity. You cease to identify yourself with the limited self who lacks and you begin to identify yourself with the awareness of being who includes all things. This awareness is not a future attainment; it is your true nature now. You have simply forgotten it in the long habit of assuming smaller states. The reminder comes whenever you assume the feeling of the wish fulfilled and discover that the feeling is real, that it has substance, that it has the power to rearrange your world.

You are not asked to deny the present appearance in a foolish or irresponsible way. You are asked only to cease giving it the power of reality in your consciousness. The appearance is the result of a former state. When the state is changed, the appearance must in time reflect the change. Your responsibility is not to make the appearance change by outer effort; your responsibility is to make the state change by inner assumption. The appearance then takes care of itself.

In this understanding you are freed from the burden of psychological lack. You no longer feel that you must struggle against circumstances or wait upon time. You know that the only time that matters is the present moment in which you assume the new state. You know that the only circumstance that matters is the state of consciousness from which you view all circumstances. When that state is one of fulfillment, psychological lack has ended, even if the outer picture has not yet fully adjusted itself. The adjustment is inevitable, but the freedom is immediate.

This night you can begin the end of psychological lack. You need not wait for a more convenient season or for conditions to improve. Conditions improve only after the state has changed. Go within, shut the door upon the old evidence, and assume that you are already the man in whom lack has no place. Feel the naturalness of that assumption. Do not strain to feel it; simply rest in it as you would rest in the knowledge that you are alive. When the feeling is natural to you, you have assumed the state. When you have assumed the state, the psychological lack has already begun to end.

The world will bear witness to this change in its own time and in its own way. You do not need to know the way. You need only to know the state. For consciousness is the only reality, and the state you occupy in consciousness is the state that must be expressed. Choose, therefore, the state in which psychological lack has ended. Assume it with the quiet certainty of one who knows that what he assumes, he expresses. And in that assumption you will discover that you are not a being who lacks; you are the awareness of being in whom all things are, and in whom lack has no reality whatsoever.