#17: Attention Is Creative

Attention Is Creative

A Lecture in the Voice and Spirit of Neville Goddard

You sit here this evening, perhaps feeling the weight of circumstances that will not yield. You look upon your world and see problems that persist, limitations that bind you, conditions that refuse to change. And you ask, in the quiet of your heart, why does this continue? I tell you now, with the calm certainty that comes from knowing the law: it continues because you have given it your attention. Attention is creative. What you give attention to, you give life to. Attention sustains the states in which you dwell, and therefore sustains the manifestations that appear around you.

Listen closely. This is not theory. This is the living truth of your being. The world you see is not fixed by some outer force. It is animated, moment by moment, by the attention you bestow upon it. Your attention is the sap of life itself. It flows toward whatever you turn it upon, and that thing lives. It grows. It takes form and substance in your experience. Withdraw the sap, and the thing withers. It loses its hold. It dissolves as though it had never been. This is the great secret placed in your hands tonight.

Man has always decreed his world by the things he attends to. He does not realize it, but every hour of every day he is choosing what shall live and what shall die in his experience. When you dwell upon your troubles, when you let your mind return again and again to the limitation, the lack, the difficulty, you are pouring life into it. You are sustaining that state. You are giving it the very power to continue its existence in your outer world. The condition seems so real, so stubborn, only because your attention has made it so. It has no life of its own. It lives only as long as you feed it with your attention.

But the same law that binds you can set you free. The identical power that sustains the unwanted can sustain the desired. For attention is creative in every direction. What you give attention to, you give life to. Turn your attention away from the problem, completely away, and you begin to starve it of the life it has been drawing from you. Become indifferent to it. Refuse to return to it in thought. Let the senses shout their evidence if they will; you simply withdraw the sap. In that very withdrawal the state begins to lose its vitality. It fades. It passes out of your world as though it had never claimed your attention.

Now turn your attention deliberately, consciously, to the state you wish to embody. Fix it there. Not lightly, not casually, but with the steady, narrow focus that gives power. Attention is forceful in proportion to the narrowness of its focus. When it is obsessed with a single idea, when it is held exclusively upon one feeling, one vision, one conviction, then it becomes mighty. It crowds out every rival. It discharges itself in action. It brings forth the manifestation that matches the state upon which it rests.

You do not need to struggle or strain. You need only to know what you want and then give that state your undivided attention. Feel yourself already in it. Dwell in the feeling of the wish fulfilled. Let that feeling monopolize your consciousness. Let it fill your mind so completely that every other thought is excluded. This is the attentive attitude. This is the secret of success in every department of your life. All progress depends upon an increase of attention. The ideas that dominate your consciousness, the states that possess your attention, these are the ones that move into expression.

Think of it. Every moment you are selecting. You are deciding, by the direction of your attention, what shall be sustained in your world. Most men allow their attention to be attracted from without. They let the senses dictate where it shall go. They see the empty bank account, the failing body, the broken relationship, and their attention rushes there like a servant obeying a master. And so the state is sustained. But you are not meant to be the servant of the outer world. You are meant to be its master. You direct your attention from within. You choose what it shall rest upon. You withdraw it from the old and place it upon the new.

Practice this tonight. Before you drift into sleep, take command of your attention. Do not let it wander idly over the events of the day as they appear to the senses. Reverse them if you will, but hold your attention firmly upon the feeling of the state you desire. Night after night, train it. Bring it back when it strays. Develop it as you would develop any faculty. Through repeated exercise, attention becomes controlled, concentrated, powerful. You will awaken within yourself a center of power you did not know you possessed. You will become conscious of your greater self, the real you that shapes worlds by the simple act of attending.

See how gentle yet how absolute this law is. Qualities die for want of attention. The unlovely states, the limiting conditions, the old patterns of failure, they have no power except what you give them. Withdraw your attention and they starve. They cannot live without the sap you alone can supply. On the other hand, the lovely, the noble, the abundant, the healthy, the free, these live and flourish when you give them your attention. They grow strong. They become your natural expression because you have sustained them with the creative power that is yours.

You may say, “But the evidence of my senses is so strong. How can I ignore what I see?” I answer you: the evidence of the senses is the out-picturing of where your attention has been. It is the harvest of yesterday’s attention. Do not fight it. Do not argue with it. Simply cease to give it life today. Turn your back upon it in consciousness. Become as one who has never known it. Place your attention so completely upon the new state that the old has no claim upon you. In that moment the creative act is complete. The new state is animated. The sap of life flows toward it, and in due season it will appear in your world as naturally as the sun rises.

This is not a matter of occasional effort. This is a way of living. You are always attending to something. Make certain that what you attend to is what you wish to sustain. When the old thought returns, when the memory of the limitation knocks at the door of your mind, do not engage it. Do not entertain it. Bring your attention back, gently but firmly, to the state you have chosen. Do this seventy times seven if necessary. Each time you do it, you are strengthening the muscle of attention. You are making it obedient to your will. Soon it will move with ease to the desired state and remain there. Soon the outer world will conform because the inner attention has been made steady.

You who feel stuck, who have struggled long with conditions that seem immovable, hear this: the stuckness is only the sustained attention upon the state of being stuck. Release it. Withdraw the life-giving attention. Let that state die of neglect. Then turn, with quiet certainty, to the state you would embody, and sustain it with your attention. Feel it. Dwell in it. Live in the consciousness of it as though it were already true. Let that feeling fill you until nothing else has room. This is the inner act that changes everything. This is how you become the master of your fate.

Attention is not passive. It is the most active power you possess. It is the spearhead of your creative force. When you learn to direct it at will, when you learn to hold it upon the feeling of the wish fulfilled without permitting distraction, then you walk in a new dimension. You no longer stand in shallow water. You launch out into the deep of life. You move as one who knows that the world is plastic in your hands, molded by the attention you choose to give.

Tonight, as you leave this place and go your way, take this truth with you as your own. Let it live in you. Let it become the governing principle of your inner life. What you give attention to, you give life to. Attention sustains states and therefore sustains manifestations. Choose wisely. Choose deliberately. Choose with the calm authority of one who knows the law.

You are the operant power. You have always been. The world you now inhabit is the out-picturing of where your attention has rested. The world you will inhabit tomorrow is being decided in this very moment by the direction you give your attention tonight. Withdraw it from the old. Place it upon the new. Sustain the desired state with the steady flow of your attention, and watch as it moves from within to without, from the invisible to the visible, from the state of consciousness to the world of form.

This is the great revelation. This is the key placed in your hand. Use it. Live by it. And you will discover, as surely as you are hearing these words, that attention is indeed creative. What you give attention to, you give life to. And what you sustain with your attention becomes your world.

Go now in peace, knowing that you are the master of your attention, and therefore the master of your life. The state you attend to tonight is the state that will greet you in the morning. Choose it with care. Sustain it with love. And the manifestations will follow as naturally as day follows night.

For attention is creative. What you give attention to, you give life to. Attention sustains states and therefore sustains manifestations. This truth, lived, will set you free.