#99: The Truth That Sets You Free

The Truth That Sets You Free

A Lecture in the Voice and Spirit of Neville Goddard

You have long believed that freedom lies in the changing of your outer world. You have thought that if circumstances were different, if conditions improved, if events turned in your favor, then you would be free. Yet no matter how you have labored to rearrange the things round about you, the sense of bondage has remained. This is because you have sought freedom in the world of effects while remaining ignorant of the cause. The truth that sets you free is this: consciousness is cause. Your own awareness of being is the sole and only cause of all that appears in your world. There is no other cause. When you know this, truly know it, you are free.

You are conscious of being. That awareness is not a product of the world; the world is a product of that awareness. All that you see, all that you experience, all that seems to happen to you or for you or against you, is but the out-picturing of the state of consciousness you are entertaining. Consciousness is the first and only cause-substance of the phenomena of life. Nothing has existence for you save through the consciousness you have of it. Therefore, when you turn from the appearance of things to the subjective center, you discover that you and your world are one. The rich man and the poor man, the healthy man and the sick man, the free man and the bound man are not different substances; they are different arrangements of the same cause-substance—your consciousness.

Man’s chief delusion is his conviction that there are causes other than his own state of consciousness. He believes the world moves by its own power, that events have independent life, that conditions are fixed and final. But the world moves with motiveless necessity. It has no motive of its own; it is under the necessity of manifesting your concept, the arrangement of your mind. Your mind is always arranged in the image of all you believe and consent to as true. When you consent to the belief that you are a victim of circumstance, that belief hardens into fact and the world obliges by reflecting it. When you withdraw that consent and assume the feeling of being cause, the arrangement changes and the world reflects the new order.

This is the truth that sets you free. You are not at the mercy of what seems to be. What seems to be is at the mercy of what you are conscious of being. You need not struggle against the evidence of your senses, for that evidence is only the shadow cast by your inner state. To know consciousness is cause is to know that you stand behind all appearances as their author. The circumstances that once frightened you now lose their power, for you see them as effects that must follow the cause you have set in motion. You no longer say, “If only this would change, I would be free.” You know that as you change in consciousness, the things must change, for they have no life save the life you give them by your attention and your consent.

You are free the moment you cease to attribute cause to the things seen. The things seen are never cause; they are always effect. Health does not cause well-being; well-being in consciousness causes the manifestation called health. Wealth does not cause security; the feeling of security in consciousness causes the manifestation called wealth. Freedom does not come from changed conditions; changed conditions come from the consciousness of freedom. When this reversal is complete in you, you walk through the world as one who knows he is its author. You are no longer the slave of your assumptions; you are their master. You determine your assumptions by the state you consent to occupy in consciousness, and the world has no choice but to reflect that state.

Consider what this knowing does to the sense of self. You have thought of yourself as a being living in a world that is independent of you. Now you know yourself as the awareness in which the world lives. You are the conceiver; the world is your conception. Before you are conscious of being this or that, you are conscious of being. That pure awareness is the father. What you are conscious of being is the son, bearing witness of the father. You and your father are one, yet the father is greater than the son, for consciousness is ever greater than any particular conception it entertains. When you rise to the feeling of being only consciousness, formless and faceless, you transcend the limitations of your present conception of yourself and stand in the freedom of pure cause.

This freedom is not a future attainment; it is a present realization. You are free now if you will but know that you are cause. The bondage you feel is the bondage of believing yourself to be effect. You have said, “I am poor because of conditions,” “I am sick because of what happened,” “I am bound because of what others have done.” Each such statement is a denial that consciousness is cause. Each such statement keeps you in the prison of second causes. The moment you withdraw these statements and assume the feeling that you are cause, the prison doors open. You do not need to force the doors; you need only to know they were never locked except by your own belief in outer causation.

The Bible, read psychologically, is the drama of this discovery. It is the story of man awakening to the fact that his awareness of being is the Lord, the only God, the only cause. “I AM hath sent me.” “Be still and know that I AM God.” These are not statements about a being outside yourself; they are revelations of your own awareness as the operant power. When you know I AM is cause, you know there is no other God to whom you can turn, no other power to which you can appeal. You are the one who decrees, and that which you decree in consciousness comes to pass. You are free because you are the decree itself.

To live in this truth is to live without anxiety over results. Results are inevitable when consciousness is established as cause. You do not labor to make things happen; you assume the state in which they have already happened and persist in that assumption until it hardens into fact. The assumption, though false to the senses, if persisted in, will harden into fact, for consciousness is the only reality and it must objectify itself. You are not asked to deny the evidence of your senses forever; you are asked only to deny that the evidence is cause. The evidence is effect. Change the cause and the effect must follow.

You are free when you no longer react to appearances as though they were independent powers. The man who reacts to lack as though lack were cause remains poor. The man who reacts to illness as though illness were cause remains sick. The man who reacts to opposition as though opposition were cause remains bound. But the man who knows consciousness is cause withdraws his reaction from the appearance and places it upon the desired state. He assumes the feeling of the wish fulfilled and, by so doing, sets in motion the only cause there is. The appearance then has no choice but to rearrange itself in harmony with the new cause.

This knowing transforms your daily experience. You rise in the morning not as one who must face a hostile or indifferent world, but as one who goes forth to express the state he has assumed. You walk through your day aware that every encounter, every event, every condition is but the echo of your own inner arrangement. You do not ask, “What will happen to me today?” You know that what happens is the inevitable out-picturing of what you are conscious of being. If you are conscious of being free, events must unfold in the freedom of that consciousness. If you are conscious of being secure, events must reflect that security. There is no other law.

The doubts that arise are the echoes of the old belief in second causes. When appearances seem fixed and unyielding, you are tempted to return to the delusion that consciousness is not cause. But the truth remains unchanged. Appearances are only the out-picturing of former states of consciousness. They have no power to perpetuate themselves once the cause is withdrawn. Persist in the knowledge that consciousness is cause, and the appearances must dissolve or rearrange. They cannot do otherwise, for they have no life of their own.

You are free the moment you accept that you are the potter and the world is the clay. The clay has no voice in what it shall become; it yields to the hand of the potter. Your consciousness is the hand; your assumptions are the pressure you exert upon the clay. When you know this, you no longer complain of the clay. You simply change the pressure, change the state, and the clay takes the new form. This is not effort in the usual sense; it is the effortless assumption of the feeling of the wish fulfilled. The feeling itself is the cause, and the world is compelled to record it.

In the quiet of night, when you turn from the day’s appearances and rest in the knowledge that consciousness is cause, you experience a profound release. The burdens you carried were never in the conditions; they were in the belief that conditions were cause. When that belief is surrendered, the burdens fall away of themselves. You sleep in the peace of knowing that the only operative power in your world is your own awareness of being. You wake in the certainty that the day will unfold according to the state you have assumed. This is freedom—not the absence of conditions, but the absence of the belief that conditions can bind you.

You are free when you know that every man is yourself pushed out. The one who seems to oppose you is bearing witness to a state of consciousness you once entertained or are still entertaining. When you change the state, the witness changes. You do not need to change the man; you need only to change the cause of which he is the effect. This knowledge frees you from the endless labor of trying to change others. You change yourself in consciousness, and the world, being yourself pushed out, changes with you.

The truth that sets you free is not a new acquisition; it is the recognition of what has always been so. You have always been cause. You have always been the awareness in which your world lives. You have only believed yourself to be effect, and that belief has made you slave to your own creations. Now, in the knowing that consciousness is cause, the slavery ends. You stand revealed to yourself as the one who decrees, the one who assumes, the one whose awareness objectifies itself as the conditions of your life. This is the truth. This is what sets you free.

Tonight, as you assume the feeling of being cause, as you rest in the quiet certainty that your consciousness is the only power, you will find the world already beginning to rearrange itself in harmony with that knowing. You are not becoming free; you are free. You are not approaching the truth; you are the truth that sets you free. Consciousness is cause, and you are consciousness. In this realization there is no longer any room for bondage, for there is no longer any power outside yourself to which you can be bound. You are free. You have always been free. You are now awake to the freedom that is your very being.