#96: Reverence

Reverence

A Lecture in the Voice and Spirit of Neville Goddard

You have imagined all your life, yet your world remains largely unchanged from what it was. You have pictured better circumstances, greater health, more harmonious relationships, and the fulfillment of many desires, but these pictures have remained pictures and nothing more. The reason is simple, though it has remained hidden from you. You have treated imagination as a casual play of the mind, a pleasant or anxious daydream to occupy idle moments, a thing to be taken up and laid down at will without any sense of its sacred nature. And because you have approached it so lightly, it has returned to you in like manner—light, fleeting, without power to rearrange the facts of your life.

Imagination is not a casual faculty. It is the holy creative power of the one consciousness, the very activity by which all things are made visible. It is not something you possess among other faculties; it is the I AM in the act of expressing itself. When you imagine, you are not amusing yourself with mental images. You are standing in the holy place where creation begins and ends. To treat this power as ordinary is to stand upon holy ground with your shoes on, unaware of where you are. The result is that your imaginal acts lack the weight of reality and pass as dreams pass, leaving the outer world untouched.

You are conscious of being. That consciousness is God. And the way this consciousness expresses itself, the only way it brings forth anything, is by imagining. Therefore, every act of imagination is an act of God. It is the creator conceiving and bringing forth its own likeness. When you realize this, even for a moment, a feeling of reverence rises naturally within you. It is not a forced emotion, not something you manufacture by effort. It is the quiet recognition that you are about to do the holiest thing of which you are capable: you are about to let the infinite assume the form of your desire. In that recognition the whole tone of your inner act changes. What was once a half-hearted wishing becomes a sacred assuming. What was once scattered attention becomes gathered devotion.

This reverence is not solemnity in the usual sense. It is the awe that fills you when you know you are in the presence of the creative power itself. It is the feeling that accompanies the knowledge that your creator is your own awareness of being, and that this awareness has never ceased to love what it has made. When you imagine with this feeling alive in you, you are closest to the source of all creation. And when you are closest to that source, your imaginal acts carry the authority of the source. They no longer beg for fulfillment; they declare it. They no longer hope; they know. The outer world, which is only the mirror of consciousness, has no choice but to reflect what has been assumed in this holy manner.

Consider how you have imagined in the past. You have seen yourself in a desired state, then turned away from it to argue with the evidence of your senses. You have felt the wish for a moment and then permitted the mind to question how it could come to pass. You have treated the imaginal act as a tentative experiment rather than as the decisive act of creation. And so the state you desired remained a picture and did not become your dwelling place. But when reverence enters, all questioning ceases. You do not ask how. You do not debate possibility. You simply know that you are standing in the place where all things are possible because you are in the presence of the only power that creates. The feeling of reverence silences the reasoning mind and leaves you alone with the pure feeling of the wish fulfilled. In that silence the assumption sinks into the deep of yourself and becomes your new natural state.

You may wonder why some imaginal acts have seemed to work while most have not. The answer lies in the degree of reverence present. When an imaginal act carried a quiet sense of the sacred, even if only for a little while, it had power. When it was done casually, as one more mental exercise or hopeful thought, it had none. The power was never in the technique. The power was always in the attitude with which you approached the act itself. Reverence transforms the act from mental play into divine creation. It is the difference between a man idly sketching on paper and a man who knows he is shaping the very substance of reality.

This feeling of reverence is not something you must strain to produce. It arises of itself when you remember who is imagining. You are not the little self of daily concerns imagining a better little self. You are the infinite I AM imagining itself into a new state of being. The very fact that you can imagine at all is proof that the creator is alive in you and is willing to assume any form you give it in love. To remember this is to feel reverence. To forget it is to imagine without power. So the first step in any imaginal act is to pause and remember. Let the thought arise: I am about to do what only God can do. I am about to assume a state that will harden into fact because I am the power that gives fact to all states. In that remembrance the heart grows still, the mind becomes single, and the act that follows is no longer casual.

When you imagine with reverence, you do not force the image. You dwell in it. You linger in the feeling of the fulfilled desire as one lingers in a holy place. There is no hurry, because you know the creative power needs no assistance from your anxious efforts. There is no anxiety, because you know that what you have assumed in this spirit must come to pass. The outer world may remain unchanged for a time, but you are not disturbed. You have done the holy thing. You have planted the seed in the only soil that grows anything. Now you rest in the certainty that the harvest is already secured.

Many have found themselves unable to sustain an assumption because they approached it without this inner attitude. They tried to feel themselves into a state while still regarding the act as an ordinary mental exercise. But the state refused to become natural because the attitude that would have made it natural was absent. Reverence supplies that attitude. It makes the assumption feel not like something you are doing but like something you are being. It changes the imaginal act from a means to an end into the very end itself. You no longer imagine in order to get something. You imagine because in the act of imagining with reverence you are already one with the thing imagined. The getting follows as a matter of course, but the joy is in the sacred act itself.

Tonight, when you withdraw from the world of the senses, do not begin by trying to change anything. Begin by remembering what you are about to do. Let the feeling of reverence fill you before a single image forms. Know that you are entering the holy of holies of your own being. Know that the power that created the universe is the power with which you are about to create your personal world. Then, and only then, assume the feeling of your wish fulfilled. Do not argue with it. Do not qualify it. Do not wonder whether it is working. Simply dwell in it with the quiet adoration that comes from knowing you are doing the holiest thing a man can do. Remain there until the feeling of naturalness possesses you. When it does, you may open your eyes or fall asleep, but you will have left behind you the old man who imagined casually and will have assumed the nature of the new man who imagines as God imagines—with reverence, with love, and with the certain knowledge that what is assumed in this spirit must externalize itself.

The world you see tomorrow will be the faithful reproduction of the state you occupied tonight. If you occupied it with reverence, the reproduction will be rich and harmonious. If you occupied it casually, the reproduction will be as casual as your attitude. There is no other law. Consciousness is the only reality, and the way consciousness expresses itself is by assuming states. The quality of the assumption is determined by the attitude with which it is made. Reverence is the attitude that makes every assumption a divine act and therefore an irresistible one.

You may be tempted to think that this is too simple, that something so quiet and inward cannot be the key to the transformation of your life. But you have tried the complex ways. You have tried effort and planning and struggling with appearances. And the result has been the world you now see. The simple way remains untried because it has been hidden by the very complexity of your searching. But it is not hidden from the one who is willing to remember that imagination is holy. To such a one the way stands open at every moment. It stands open now. You have only to cease treating the creative power as a casual servant and begin to approach it as the master of all creation that it is. When you do this, even once, you will feel the difference. And when you feel the difference, you will never again be content to imagine without reverence.

The feeling of reverence, once awakened, does not leave you. It becomes a permanent tone of your consciousness. You move through your days aware that every imaginal act is sacred, and this awareness keeps you from wasting the power on trivial or negative states. You become selective, not from effort but from love. You would no more imagine a state you do not desire than you would speak profanely in a temple. The whole of life becomes a continual act of worship, not in the sense of religious observance, but in the sense of continual recognition that the creator is at work in you and as you. And because this recognition is constant, your world becomes the constant expression of the states you assume with reverence.

There is no need to wait for special times or special moods. The holy place is within you at every moment. You may enter it in the midst of the busiest day by a simple act of remembrance. Pause, feel the awe that you are the creator in the act of creating, and then assume the state you desire with the dignity that belongs to such an act. The outer circumstances may remain the same for a little while, but inwardly you have already moved. And the outer must follow the inner, for there is no other order of creation.

You have been told that faith is the substance of things hoped for. But faith is born of reverence. When you revere the power you are using, you cannot help but have faith in its working. Doubt is the child of casualness. Reverence is the mother of certainty. When you imagine with reverence, you do not hope that your assumption will harden into fact. You know that it is already fact in the only world that matters—the world of consciousness—and that the visible world has no choice but to conform. This knowledge is not arrogant. It is the quiet certainty of one who has stood on holy ground and knows he has been in the presence of the only power there is.

So tonight, and every night, and in every quiet moment of the day, remember what you are doing when you imagine. Remember that you are not playing with mental pictures. You are exercising the holiest power in the universe. Approach it with the reverence that is its due, and it will reward you with the only reward worth having: the certain knowledge that you are the creator of your own reality and that you have only to assume with love and awe the state you desire in order to see it made visible. This is not a promise for the future. It is the description of what is already happening whenever you imagine with reverence. The only question is whether you will continue to treat the holy as common or whether you will, from this moment, give to imagination the reverence that transforms it from a dream into the very substance of your life. The choice is yours, and the power is yours, and the time is now.