#95: Destiny

Destiny

A Lecture in the Voice and Spirit of Neville Goddard

You have long believed that destiny stands apart from you, that it is something fixed and final, written somewhere beyond your reach and visited upon you by birth, by chance, or by the will of another. Yet this night you are to know the truth that liberates you from every such belief. Your destiny is your accepted concept of yourself. It is not a road laid out before you; it is the very road you are already walking because you have consented to be the traveler you now appear to be.

Whatever you have quietly accepted as true of yourself is even now shaping every circumstance, every event, every condition that surrounds you. The world you see is not the cause of your concept; your concept is the cause of the world you see. You are not the victim of your destiny. You are its author, and you have been authoring it moment by moment with every silent acceptance of who you believe yourself to be.

Consciousness is the only reality. There is nothing outside of it that can enter it and nothing within it that can remain unexpressed. Therefore your accepted concept of yourself must objectify itself. It must clothe itself in the garments of your daily experience. If that concept is one of limitation, limitation appears. If it is one of freedom, freedom appears. There is no other law. There is no other creator. Your destiny is not decided in some distant court; it is decided in the quiet court of your own acceptance.

You are always accepting some concept of yourself. Even when you protest against your conditions you are still accepting the concept that those conditions are real and that you are the one to whom they happen. Protest does not change the concept; it only confirms it. The only way to change your destiny is to change the concept you are willing to feel as true. And this change is not accomplished by words spoken to another or by affirmations repeated to the wind. It is accomplished by the simple, direct feeling of being the new concept now.

Feel yourself to be what you desire to be, and you have already accepted the concept that will become your destiny. The feeling does not have to be loud. It does not have to be dramatic. It has only to be natural. When you feel yourself to be already the one you long to be, the old concept loses its grip and the new one takes its place. In that moment destiny begins to rearrange itself around you. Not because you have forced anything, but because you have changed the only thing that was ever capable of determining your experience: your concept of yourself.

The senses will argue against the new concept. They will present the old evidence with great conviction. Yet the senses are only reporting what the old concept has already produced. They cannot report what the new concept is about to produce until the new concept has been accepted. Therefore you do not argue with the senses. You simply withdraw your attention from their report and give it wholly to the feeling of the new concept. In that withdrawal the old destiny loses its nourishment and the new destiny begins to quicken.

You are not asked to believe that something will happen. You are asked to feel that it has already happened in the only place where anything ever happens: in consciousness. When you feel yourself to be secure, you have accepted the concept of security, and security must appear. When you feel yourself to be loved, you have accepted the concept of being loved, and love must appear. When you feel yourself to be free, you have accepted the concept of freedom, and freedom must appear. The appearance may not be immediate in the outer world, but it is already immediate in consciousness, and consciousness is the only womb from which destiny is born.

Before Abraham was, I AM. Your awareness of being is prior to every concept you have ever accepted. It is the unconditioned reality that allows itself to be conditioned by whatever you consent to feel as true. You have been conditioning it with concepts of lack, of age, of weakness, of unworthiness. Now you may condition it with concepts of abundance, of vitality, of strength, of worth. The I AM itself does not resist. It simply becomes what you accept. Your destiny is therefore never a punishment or a reward imposed from without. It is the faithful expression of the concept you have chosen to live from.

Many have said that destiny is fixed and that man cannot alter it. They have looked upon the outer appearance and concluded that what is seen must always be. Yet the outer appearance is only the past concept made visible. It has no power to continue itself once the concept that sustains it has been withdrawn. When you cease to accept the concept of yourself as limited, the limitation you have called destiny begins to dissolve. When you accept the concept of yourself as the one you desire to be, a new destiny begins to form. There is no other magic. There is no other secret.

You cannot serve two concepts at the same time. You cannot feel yourself to be both the old and the new. To accept the new you must release the old. This release is not a struggle. It is a simple turning of attention. You take your attention from the problem, from the condition, from the evidence of the senses, and you place it upon the pure feeling of being what you wish to be. In that turning the old concept is left without support and the new concept is given all the support of your attention and your feeling. Destiny follows the concept that is nourished. It cannot do otherwise.

The circumstances of your life are too closely related to your conception of yourself not to have been produced by it. You may deny this for a time. You may point to events that seem to have come upon you without your consent. Yet closer inspection will always reveal that somewhere in your consciousness you were accepting a concept that made those events possible. When you change the concept, you change the possibility. The events that once seemed inevitable lose their necessity because the state that required them no longer exists.

It is your destiny to rise to higher and higher states of consciousness. This is not something you must earn by struggle. It is something you accomplish by acceptance. The higher concept is already present within you as a possibility. It waits only for your acceptance. When you feel yourself to be the greater one, you have accepted it, and the greater destiny begins to unfold. You do not have to know how it will unfold. You only have to know that it must unfold because consciousness always expresses what it has accepted.

The feeling of the wish fulfilled is the bridge between the old concept and the new. It is the moment in which you die to the one and live to the other. In that feeling the future is already present. The events that will appear tomorrow or next year are already determined by the concept you accept tonight. Therefore tonight is not a preparation for destiny. Tonight is destiny in the making. What you accept in feeling tonight you will experience in form tomorrow.

You need not wait for signs before you accept the new concept. Signs follow. They do not precede. The world will not tell you that your concept has changed before you have felt it changed within yourself. The world will only confirm what you have already accepted. So you do not look to the world for permission to feel yourself great, or loved, or free. You look within and you feel it. In the feeling the permission is granted by the only authority that matters: your own consciousness.

There is no destiny apart from the concept you are willing to live from. There is no fate that can override your acceptance. There is no power in heaven or on earth that can make you experience what you refuse to accept as true of yourself. Conversely, there is no power that can withhold from you what you have truly accepted. Life is not partial. It does not bargain. It simply gives form to the concept you have made your own.

When you accept a new concept of yourself you do not add something to what you are. You simply allow what you already are in your deeper self to express itself without the limitation of the old concept. The I AM is infinite. Your acceptance determines how much of that infinity you will permit to appear in your world. A small concept permits only a small destiny. A great concept permits a great destiny. The choice is always yours because the acceptance is always yours.

You may feel that you have tried before and failed. Yet what you called failure was only the persistence of the old concept. You tried to add the new while still nourishing the old. You cannot succeed in that way. The old concept must be left behind completely. When you feel yourself to be the new one and no longer feel yourself to be the old one, success is not a future event. It is the present fact of your changed acceptance, and the outer world must in time reflect that fact.

The change in destiny may at first be felt only as an inner shift, a quiet sense that something has already moved even though nothing visible has yet appeared. Trust that inner shift. It is the evidence that the new concept has been accepted. The visible change must follow because there is no other law. Consciousness always objectifies its accepted concepts. It cannot do otherwise, and it never fails to do so.

You are not asked to understand how the new destiny will come. You are asked only to accept the concept from which it must come. Understanding belongs to the old concept that wants to manage and control. Acceptance belongs to the new concept that simply is. When you are willing to let the new concept be, without questioning its ways, its ways reveal themselves. The bridge of incidents appears. The means arrange themselves. But these are effects, not causes. The cause remains the accepted concept of yourself.

Tonight you can begin to live from the concept you desire. You do not have to wait for the world to change first. You change the concept, and the world follows. You feel yourself to be what you long to be, and you continue in that feeling until it becomes the most natural thing in your life. When it is natural, it is no longer something you are trying to believe. It is something you are. And when you are it, your destiny is already expressing it.

There is no one to change but self. There is no destiny to change but the destiny created by your concept of self. When that concept is changed, everything that seemed fixed begins to move. The giants that once towered over you become grasshoppers because you are no longer a grasshopper in your own sight. You have accepted a greater concept, and the greater concept has dwarfed the old limitations.

You are the potter. Your accepted concept is the clay. Life is the wheel that turns without ceasing. What you put upon the wheel must take form. If you put upon it the concept of yourself as small, small things appear. If you put upon it the concept of yourself as the one you desire to be, that one appears. The wheel does not choose. It only turns. The choice is always in the clay you offer.

Do not look back upon the old concept with regret or with fear that it will return. The past has no power except the power you give it by accepting it again. When you have truly accepted the new concept, the old one is already dead. It may linger for a little while in memory, but it has no life in consciousness. Without life in consciousness it cannot produce life in your world. Your destiny is therefore not haunted by what you were. It is shaped only by what you are now willing to feel yourself to be.

The great secret is not in doing. It is in being. You cannot do the things of the greater concept until you are the greater concept. But when you are the greater concept, the things do themselves. They appear without strain because they are the natural expression of what you have accepted. Destiny is not a series of efforts. It is a series of acceptances. What you accept, you experience. What you experience confirms the acceptance. And so the wheel turns.

You stand tonight at the threshold of a new acceptance. The old concept has brought you as far as it can. It has given you all the experience it contains. If you are weary of that experience, you need only accept another concept. There is no barrier between you and the new concept except the belief that there is a barrier. When you drop that belief and simply feel yourself to be what you desire to be, the barrier is gone. The new destiny is already in motion.

Consciousness does not argue with itself. It does not say that a thing is too good or too great. It simply becomes what it is given to become. Give it the concept of yourself as free, and it becomes free. Give it the concept of yourself as abundant, and it becomes abundant. Give it the concept of yourself as the fulfilled one, and it becomes fulfilled. There is no limit to what it will accept. There is only the limit of what you are willing to feel as true.

Your destiny is not something you are waiting to discover. It is something you are now creating by the concept you are now accepting. Change the concept and you change the creation. This is the law that cannot be broken because it is the very nature of consciousness itself. To know this is to be free from every anxious thought about the future. The future is only the present concept extended. When the present concept is changed, the future is already changed.

Feel it done. Accept it as so. Live from the new concept as though it were already the fact of your life. In that living the destiny you once feared is replaced by the destiny you have chosen. And you will discover, as all who have discovered it before you, that there is no destiny other than the one you accept. There is only the I AM forever becoming what you consent to be.

Tonight the choice is yours, as it has always been. You may continue with the old concept and continue with the old destiny. Or you may accept the new concept and enter the new destiny. The power is not in the stars. It is not in circumstances. It is in your acceptance. And your acceptance is as free tonight as it has ever been.

You are the one you have been waiting for. Your destiny is the one you are now willing to feel yourself to be. Accept it. Feel it. Live it. And watch as the world you once thought fixed rearranges itself around the new and greater concept of yourself. This is the truth that sets you free. This is the destiny that is already yours the moment you accept it.