1 Corinthians 11: Communion of Consciousness

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Quick Insights

A gathering is first an inner alignment; how we appear outwardly signals what we hold inwardly and shapes the shared atmosphere.
Authority and submission are psychological roles, not merely social rules, that organize inner hierarchies of attention and belief.
The communal meal and its disorder reveal how neglected inner examination allows fragmented imaginations to manifest sickness, division, and diminished vitality.
Spiritual responsibility begins with self-judgment: the imagination that remembers and reveres creates healing, while unexamined appetite produces judgment that feels external but originates within.

What is the Main Point of 1 Corinthians 11?

At its heart the chapter teaches that consciousness organizes society: visible customs, symbols, and behaviors reflect inner orientations of power, reverence, and neglect, and the imagination is the workshop where honor or dishonor toward oneself and others is first enacted and then realized in bodily and communal consequence.

What is the Spiritual Meaning of 1 Corinthians 11?

The first scene is about image and identity. When a person assumes the role of speaker, leader, or intercessor, they are projecting a state of consciousness that claims authority or reflects submission. Covering, uncovering, long hair, and other markers are not merely external demands but expressions of how the self honors or diminishes its source of creative identity. In psychological terms, the head and its coverings map to which inner voice is being listened to: whether one is identifying with grounded, centered source-awareness or with scattered, anxious selfhood that seeks affirmation through appearance. The second scene shifts to the body of the group and the sacramental meal. What should be a deliberate, remembered act of union becomes a theater of division when imagination splinters into private appetites and competitive scarcity. Eating before others, indulgence, and neglect reveal interior landscapes where reverence for the whole has been displaced by self-serving narratives. Illness, weakness, and sleep are presented here as natural consequences of inner discord; they are the psychosomatic expressions of a consciousness that has not judged itself and therefore externalizes judgment as chastening. A deeper layer concerns angels and the unseen. These represent elevated states of attention, conscience, and witness that respond to decorum of the inner temple. To live as if unseen witnesses are present is to cultivate an imagination that preserves dignity. Conversely, to act without inner restraint invites complications because the psyche enacts consequences that align outer circumstance with inner law. Thus the moral law is psychological — not imposed from outside but arising from the consistent imaginative state one maintains.

Key Symbols Decoded

Head coverings and hair function as symbols of inner orientation: a covered head speaks of deliberate humility before a higher unity and an uncovered head signals identification with independent selfhood. The shame and honor language tracks whether the imagination aligns with an integrative source or with contentious egoic fragments. The Lord's supper is a mirror symbol, a ritual of remembrance that anchors a living identity; to partake unworthily is to participate in an imagined story that contradicts the living truth one seeks, thereby producing illness and division. Divisions among the gathered are not sociological problems alone but psychic fault lines where competing imaginations enact rival realities. The houses where people eat separately indicate private theaters of belief where different scenarios are being rehearsed; these separate rehearsals eventually consolidate into bodily and social outcomes. In short, every outward symbol decodes into an inward state: gestures, customs, and rituals are the language through which the imagination speaks and thus creates.

Practical Application

Begin with private, honest examination of the scenes you habitually play in imagination: notice the roles you assume when you speak, when you sit in groups, when you eat, or when you observe ritual. Before entering any communal space rehearse in your mind a silent posture of unity and reverence, visualizing yourself as both individual and integral presence, so that your outer behavior stems from an inner settled state rather than from reactive craving. When you participate in shared meals, conversations, or ceremonies, practice slowing and remembering. Bring to mind the image of shared wholeness and allow gestures of restraint and waiting to arise naturally from that picture; this trains the imagination to honor the group field and reduces the split that produces sickness and division. If tension arises, treat it as a prompt to return inward: acknowledge the competing story, imagine its peaceful resolution, and hold the image of restored courtesy and mutual recognition until your body and actions follow. Over time this disciplined imagining reshapes habit, mends relationships, and turns communal practice into a living mirror of inner harmony.

The Psychology of Sacred Order: Ritual, Authority, and the Drama of Communion

Read as inner drama, 1 Corinthians 11 is a staged instruction about how states of consciousness meet, submit, disguise themselves, and finally produce form through imagination. Paul’s language of headship, covering, division, and the Lord’s supper becomes a psychological manual: it describes how the knowing center, the creative imagination, the feeling life, and the communal mind interact in the theater of the self, and how their alignments or misalignments create health, sickness, unity, or decay.

The opening axiom — that the head of every man is Christ, the head of woman is man, and the head of Christ is God — names a vertical chain of states rather than a literal hierarchy of persons. 'God' is the originating I AM, the unmanifest source. 'Christ' is the individuated creative self, the active faculty of imagining and willing that brings potential into expression. 'Man' here represents conscious awareness, the self that acts and names. 'Woman' functions as receptive imagination and feeling, the fertile faculty that conceives and gives birth to inner ideas. Read psychologically, the passage is saying: the origin of creation is in the supreme I AM; the creative principle (Christ) flows into conscious doing (man), and through feeling and imagination (woman) it is conceived and made real. These are not genders to be policed but modes of consciousness playing their parts.

Head covering becomes an image-language for how we identify with or conceal our creative source. When the text says a man praying with his head covered dishonors his head, it points to a state in which the acting self obscures its source. Covering the head is the psychological act of denying one’s divine identity — of hiding the I AM under doubt, fear, or false humility. Conversely, the woman who prays with her head uncovered dishonors her head: when the receptive imagination exposes itself without the proper inner recognition or alignment it loses its inward authority; it is as if the imagination acts without being gathered to the higher source. The injunctions about hair as a glory and covering as a power are symbolic: hair is the outward sign of an inner power, a glory conferred by alignment; covering is the assumed mask that allows imagination to work in the presence of higher attentions.

'Because of the angels' reads as the presence of attending states — watchers or formative forces that are sensitive to the way imagination conducts itself. Angels are not distant beings; they are the subtle attendant aspects of consciousness that witness and amplify whatever idea is entertained. When imagination takes modest, reverent form it is 'covered' correctly before the attendants; when it is unregulated it disturbs those attendant forces and produces confusion.

The chapter’s shift to the assemblies and their disorder turns the inward drama outward. The community meeting is a communal dream: a shared state in which each participant brings to the table his or her dominant inner idea. When Paul reproves them for divisions, he is addressing the phenomenon of multiple, competing states vying for attention in the same inner theater. Each person brings a different script, and the sameness of place does not make the state one. The presence of factions is unavoidable — 'heresies' or divergent states are necessary for clarity — because oppositions disclose which beliefs are true to the creative center. In psychological terms, conflict is the exposure of fragmented imputation; it shows where integration is still needed.

The Lord’s supper is the chapter’s central allegory for the sacred imaginative act of assumption and inner consumption. To take bread, to break it, to drink the cup, is to perform the inner rite of assuming a new identity, of tasting and digesting a new state. Every time you enact this rite within — accept a new inner conviction — you are 'showing the Lord’s death until he come.' The death is the letting go of the old self; the coming is the establishment of the new imagined reality. Thus the sacrament is a psychological technique: a repeated, consecrated assumption that aligns feeling and thought with the Christ-state until it manifests.

To eat and drink unworthily is to assume without inner coherence. It is to mouth the words, to simulate the imagination, while secretly clinging to counter-beliefs. The phrase 'not discerning the Lord’s body' becomes literal in consciousness: the one who fails to perceive that all members of the body are aspects of the same creative consciousness will continue to entertain contradictions. These contradictions are fertile ground for sickness and sleep — inner dissipation which shows up as weakness, physical illness, and the metaphorical sleep of the soul. Many lie weak because their imaginal life is fractured; they speak of being spiritual but live dividedly.

'Let a man examine himself' is a psychological prescription. Self-examination means to look for contradictions between what one assumes in imagination and what one professes in life. If your inner banquet is to be a true creative meal, it must be consistent: the bread and cup you eat are the assumptions you make when you dwell in the imagined scene as though it were already true. When you do this properly, you are not judged by outer circumstances; you are chastened inwardly when your assumptions are false, and this chastening corrects you so you will not be condemned by the world of appearances. In other words, inner alignment reduces outer correction.

The chapter’s stark statement that many are 'weak and sickly and sleep' because they eat unworthily is a sober observation of cause and effect in inner life. Imagination that is inconsistent breeds the very states it fears. Fearful imaginings, resentments, jealousies, and half-believed desires congeal into bodily and social maladies. Sleep is not merely physical death but spiritual slumber — the state in which the creative self is inert, allowing old, reflexive beliefs to dictate outcomes. The remedy is to judge oneself: to apply inner discernment, to let the old scripts die, and to steadfastly assume the new scene until it is lived.

Paul’s admonition to 'tarry one for another' and that those who are hungry should eat at home, is practical psychological counsel for communal imagination. Do not bring your unintegrated hungers into the shared sacred space. If you come to the communal creative act with confusion or competing hungers, you will contaminate the collective scene. Better to work privately — to rehearse and assume in solitude — until you can join the communal assumption in harmony. Community works only as long as its members share a disciplined assumption; otherwise, a group becomes a gallery of conflicting imaginations that cancel one another out and produce the very lack they fear.

Throughout the chapter runs the creative principle: imagination creates and must be treated as the operative god. The chain of headship is an instruction on direction: allow the creative I AM to flow downward into the acting self and be conceived in imagination; allow imagination to be reverent and gathered; allow the communal rite to be a reconstructed inner act. When these elements are aligned, the 'body' — the outer world — will reflect the new unity. When they are not, divisions incubate false births: ideas that mature into suffering, into institutions and habits that perpetuate pain. The biblical language thus becomes a precise map of the inner laboratory in which thoughts are fertilized, gestated, and delivered as life conditions.

Read as biblical psychology, 1 Corinthians 11 invites a disciplined, imaginative practice: know the source (the I AM), identify and assume the Christ-state (the creative self), direct the conscious mind to act coherently, and let the receptive imagination conceive in dignity and power. Attend to the attendants — the subtle states that witness — and do not scatter imagination in public ritual until you have first resolved the contradictions within. The Lord’s supper is not a relic but an ongoing technique: assume and consume inwardly the reality you desire, reverently and without hypocrisy, and you will see the power of imagination transmute the outer world. In that way, the words about headship, covering, and judgment become not commands about bodies, but precise psychological instructions on how to create, together and individually, the life you call into being.

Common Questions About 1 Corinthians 11

How would Neville Goddard interpret Paul's teaching on head coverings in 1 Corinthians 11?

Neville would read Paul’s discussion of headship, covering and hair as a description of states of consciousness rather than a mere dress code; the “head” is a principle of dominion or ruling thought and the “covering” is the assumed inner consciousness of Christ resting upon you. In this view a woman’s “glory” (hair) and a man’s need to be uncovered point to appropriate outer expression of an inner assumption, and the angels and order Paul mentions become symbols of spiritual law and consequence. Read inwardly (1 Cor. 11:3–15), the passage instructs you to assume the consciousness that reflects divine order and live from that assumed state until it manifests outwardly.

What does 1 Corinthians 11 teach about the Lord's Supper from a Neville Goddard perspective?

From Neville’s method the Lord’s Supper is the inward act of assuming and feeling the presence of Christ’s sacrifice and living from that inner fact; the bread and cup are reminders to enter the state wherein Christ is alive within you. Paul’s warning about eating and drinking unworthily speaks to mistaken assumptions and unbelieving states that produce sickness and loss (1 Cor. 11:23–29). Practically, the Supper calls you to examine your consciousness, correct conflicting beliefs, and partake mentally and emotionally of the reality you desire, so that the communal symbol becomes a continuing practice of inner communion rather than only an outward ritual.

What imaginative practices or meditations align Neville Goddard's method with the themes of 1 Corinthians 11?

Begin with a quiet, seated revision where you imagine the Supper as a living scene in which Christ speaks and you accept His presence; feel the bread and cup as symbols of a realized inner state. Practice nightly assumption: imagine being covered by the Christ consciousness, calmly presiding over your thoughts and relationships, and see yourself acting from that centered place. Use Paul’s command to examine yourself (1 Cor. 11:28) as a meditative checklist—notice any contradicting beliefs and replace them with a vivid, felt scene of unity and right order. Persist in these imaginal acts until they become your natural state and daily behavior.

How can Bible students apply Neville's consciousness principles to 1 Corinthians 11 to manifest spiritual realities?

Apply Neville’s principles by first acknowledging Scripture as intimate instruction about consciousness, then examine your state as Paul commands (1 Cor. 11:28). Quietly assume the end result—unity with Christ, humility, and the inward covering—until the feeling of that state is real. Use imaginative acts: replay the Supper as a fulfilled inner scene, revise any memory that contradicts your desired peace, and persist each day in the felt sense of being “covered.” By living from the end rather than demanding outward proof, you allow the inner change to produce the outer manifestation Paul links with blessing or chastening.

Does Neville Goddard view Paul's regulations in 1 Corinthians 11 as literal instructions or metaphors for inner states?

Neville would emphasize metaphor and inner law while acknowledging social custom, seeing Paul's regulations as practical symbols teaching how consciousness governs experience. The literal customs served to instruct first-century believers, but the spiritual import—headship as ruling thought, covering as assumed consciousness, the Supper as inner communion—is primary (1 Cor. 11:2–16, 23–29). Thus the directives operate on two levels: outward order that fosters communal life and inward truth that changes destiny. Those who take the text inwardly will find the transformative power Paul intended, for it is the inner assumption that brings the outer to pass.