Colossians 3: The Consciousness of the New Self

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Quick Insights

You are invited to inhabit an inner reality where the old reactive identity is dead and a new, chosen self is alive; imagination determines whether you live in fear or in the sense of being hidden and held. Seek the inner throne of higher feeling and thought; what you fix your affection on becomes the soil from which your outer life grows. Moral reforms are symptoms of deeper shifts in consciousness: anger, lust, greed, and divisive thinking dissolve when you consistently dwell in unity, mercy, and gratitude. Peace and thanksgiving are not just states to be achieved; they are the governing attitudes that shape perception, behavior, and what you call experience.

What is the Main Point of Colossians 3?

The chapter teaches that identity is a matter of inner orientation: to change life you must first change the place within you where you take residence. By placing your attention and feeling on what is higher, compassionate, and grateful, you effectively put off a worn-out self and put on a renewed identity that acts from wholeness rather than lack. This inner shift rearranges relationships, language, and work because imagination colors every action; when peace rules the heart, the outer world reorganizes around that ruling mood.

What is the Spiritual Meaning of Colossians 3?

The spiritual heart of the text describes a psychological resurrection: the death of an old self that lived by reactivity and separation, and the emergence of a self renewed in knowledge and likeness to its creative source. This is not an event to be waited for in time but a present act of imagination and allegiance. To be "risen" is to live as if the higher reality already holds you, to feel hidden in that unassailable center so that fear, jealousy, and compulsive cravings lose their authority. When you assume that inner posture, your perception changes; old scenes that once provoked anger or envy are reframed and no longer recruit your energy.

The call to mortify earthly members names the inner habits that maintain the old story—impulsive desire, coarse speech, divisive judgments—and offers an alternative process: substitution rather than suppression. Replace the story of lack with scenes of compassion, kindness, humility, and long-suffering imagined vividly until feeling follows. Forgiveness is practiced as a discipline of imagination: you rehearse the seeing and the speech of the peaceful self until those patterns become reflexive. In this way, moral life is a signpost of a transformed interior governance, where gratitude and the word of the heart dwell richly and guide speech, song, and action.

Key Symbols Decoded

Symbols become mental weather. The "old man" is the habitual narrative that believes scarcity and separation are true; it speaks in defensiveness, accusation, and hardened loyalties. The "new man" is a cultivated center of presence that imagines unity and reflects that imagination in speech and deed. ‘‘Putting on’’ mercy, kindness, and meekness describes an imaginative act of clothing the self with qualities you choose to inhabit; these garments alter posture, tone, and impulse and thus alter circumstances because your inner atmosphere is contagious.

The throne on high and the image of appearing with the life that is Christ point to an occupying of a sovereign mood. To sit with that sovereign feeling is to allow the imagination to issue the template for reality. Peace that rules in the heart is not passive but judicial: it decides what impressions receive trust and which are dismissed. Charity as the bond of perfectness names that integrative feeling which holds apparent opposites together and dissolves fragmentation into an experienced wholeness.

Practical Application

Begin each day by rehearsing an inner scene in which you are already the person you desire to be: peaceful, forgiving, grateful, and generous. Hold that scene with sensory detail and feeling until it displaces the usual internal dialogue of worry and complaint; act from the imagined posture in small moments—speak with patience, choose words that heal, and refuse the quick defense that your old story prescribes. When reactive feelings rise, label them briefly, imagine the opposite compassionate response as a real possibility, and enact that response internally until the nervous system learns a new habit.

In relationships, practice the discipline of seeing others as participants in the same inner life rather than mirrors of your old wounds. When you catch yourself judging, shift immediately into an inner song of gratitude or a silent offering of mercy, and notice how the tone of conversation and the choices you make alter the field between you. For tasks and work, do everything as if it were offered from that renewed center rather than for the approval of others; this changes motive, quality, and ultimately the fruit you harvest. Over time these imaginative acts accrete into a lived reality: the outer world reorganizes to match the inner rule, and you find that peace, forgiveness, and love are not only sentiments but the creative forces that sculpt your days.

Staging the New Self: The Psychology of Colossians 3

Colossians 3 reads like a staged drama of consciousness, a manual that maps how inner states become outer events. Read as inward psychology rather than external history, its sentences name the moves of the soul: rising, dying, dressing, ruling, speaking and acting. Each injunction is an instruction to the imagination, the faculty that composes experience from invisible feeling and assumption. The chapter describes the play that the mind performs and offers a method for changing the play until the world on the stage answers to a new script.

The opening lines, 'If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above,' introduce the radical premise: you are already in a higher state; your true life is seated 'above.' Psychologically this is not a relocation in space but an instruction to occupy a different frame of mind. To be 'risen' is to claim an identity not dictated by sensation, history or circumstance but by inner authority. 'Christ' in this register is the principle of creative awareness, the imagining I that fashions experience. To 'seek those things which are above' is to fix attention and feeling upon the chosen inner assumption until it becomes the governing reality.

'Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth' translates to the same practical discipline: direct desire, feeling and thought toward an imagined fulfillment rather than to the aching evidence of the senses. Affection is the lodestone of imagination; where it centers, consciousness organizes. The command is not moralistic repression but reorientation: deliberately attend to the inner scene you wish to inhabit and do not feed the contrary scene with your emotional currency.

'For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God' is a psychogram of transformation. To be 'dead' here is to be dead to the outer story - to the identity that external circumstances narrate. To be 'hid' with the creative principle is to conceal your real life in imagination until that hidden life matures and 'appears.' The promise that 'when Christ, who is our life, shall appear, then shall ye also appear with him in glory' describes the ascent from private assumption into public manifestation: when the inner state becomes vivid and natural, outer events align to reflect it.

The injunction to 'mortify therefore your members which are upon the earth' is a technical rehearsal in inner discipline. 'Members' are habits, urges and reactive parts of the self. To mortify them is to starve their life by refusing to dramatize them in imagination. The catalogue of sensuality, greed, and illicit desire are shorthand for the common mental scenes that keep people imprisoned: repeating those scenes keeps the body and world obedient to them. The psychological technology offered is simple: stop imagining the old script. If you stop mentally rehearsing shame, lust, resentment or coveting, those scenes lose their vitality and can no longer organize your outer life.

This movement from death to newness is expressed in 'put off the old man with his deeds; and have put on the new man.' Clothing and undressing are metaphors for self-concept. The 'old man' is an identity habitually assumed; the 'new man' is a renewed self-image shaped by knowledge after the image of the creative principle. Imagination is the tailor: you shed old garments by imagining the opposite until the sensation of the new clothes is natural. The chapter insists that identity is not fixed by biography; it is created by present assumption.

That the new image transcends division — 'neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision' — teaches that the imagination is not bound by categories. Psychological transformation dissolves limiting labels. The creative self is universal and undivided; identities based on external difference fall away when inner identity holds sway.

The practical injunctions that follow — put on mercy, kindness, humility, meekness, longsuffering — are precise prescriptions for the content of the inner assumption. Imagine yourself clothed with these qualities; rehearse scenes in which you feel them; speak to yourself in sentences that reinforce them. The chapter insists that virtues are not first moral choices but states of being to be assumed. 'Charity, which is the bond of perfectness,' names love as the integrating quality of consciousness; when love governs the imagination, it harmonizes all faculties and relationships.

'Let the peace of God rule in your hearts' names governance. To let peace 'rule' is to let a chosen inner state command perception and response. Rule implies a throne of attention: whatever sits there issues decrees. If peace occupies the throne, reactive disturbances are judged and overridden. This is an explicit statement of inner sovereignty: you can rule your inner republic by installing a ruling assumption and refusing to give power to contrary appearances.

'Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly' explains the mechanism by which inner rule is sustained. The 'word' is not mere doctrine but the living imaginal story you repeat and inhabit. Psalms, hymns and spiritual songs are forms of rhythmic imaginal reinforcement; they create grooves in consciousness that support the new state. The mind learns by melody and phrase; singing the inner story makes it memorable and automatic. The mind that rehearses a generous script will eventually perform it without strain.

'And whatsoever ye do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus' gives method to action: act from the imagined fulfilled state rather than as a supplicant to circumstances. The 'name' is the identity you accept for yourself. To act in that name is to behave as though the inner assumption is already true. This produces a subtle but decisive effect: others respond to the energy of a self-assured inner script, and events begin to structurally conform.

When the chapter addresses household roles — wives, husbands, children, fathers, servants — it is prescribing how inner states translate into relationships. These passages are not endorsements of external submission or hierarchy but directions about the posture from which you perform your roles. Submission, love, obedience and not provoking are all about the tone of imagination by which roles are enacted. If the wife assumes dignified selfhood and inner peace, and the husband assumes loving leadership, the drama of household life changes because each participant imagines a different ending. Children respond to the interior atmosphere parents generate; fathers who do not provoke create an environment where confidence and growth can emerge. Servants — those who serve in any relational sense — are asked to work from singleness of heart, doing for the inner Lord rather than for human applause. This turns daily tasks into sacred rehearsals.

The closing promise and warning — that you shall receive the reward of the inheritance, and that wrong doers receive for their wrong — frames moral causation as psychological law. There is no partiality because the imagination is impartial: what you habitually assume returns to you. This is not punitive theology but an account of how cause and effect operate in consciousness. Persist in an assumption and a corresponding bridge of outer incidents will form to support it.

Forgiveness, a theme woven throughout, functions as revisionary imagination. To forgive is to change the inner scene that replays an injury. By refusing to rehearse the grievance, you erase its vitality and thereby revise the past's hold upon you. Mercy offered in imagination rewrites the meaning of memory and so alters the future that memory would have produced.

Practically, Colossians 3 is a workshop. It asks you to: 1) acknowledge the risen self within (claim the creative center of your mind); 2) identify the scenes you habitually replay that keep you enslaved; 3) deliberately cease those rehearsals and replace them with vivid, emotional assumptions of the desired state; 4) sustain the assumption until it feels natural; 5) act from the assumed state in daily life; 6) allow the peace and the word you have planted to rule perception so that outer incidents re-form in service of the new inner story.

In sum, the chapter is a handbook of imaginal causation. It tells how consciousness dies to its old identity and is reborn by deliberate assumption, how morals are internalized as qualities of feeling, and how relationships change when people inhabit different inner scripts. The world you see is the theater of your assumptions; change the script within and the play without will rearrange itself to match the inner drama.

Common Questions About Colossians 3

Can Colossians 3 be used as a guide for manifestation practices?

Yes; understood inwardly, Colossians 3 functions as a spiritual manual for manifestation by directing attention to the imagined end and the qualities you must inhabit. The chapter asks you to put off the old affections and put on mercies, kindness, humility, and above all charity, which is the feeling-state that must dwell within you as the cause of outward change. Use the passage to discipline imagination: refuse to entertain thoughts that contradict the desired state, rehearse scenes where you already are the loving, peaceful, thankful person described, and let that assumed state govern your inner conversation until the subconscious accepts it and produces corresponding outer events.

Are there Neville-style lectures or meditations focused on Colossians 3?

There are meditations and talks modeled on Neville's technique that focus on passages like Colossians 3, but whether you follow a recorded lecture or craft your own practice, the method is the same: begin with a clear imaginal scene in which you are already risen and wearing the new self, concentrate on the feeling of mercy, peace, and gratitude, and repeat nightly until the state feels natural. Use short guided meditations that end in thanksgiving, or record your own affirmative scenes in the voice of the fulfilled self; the point is to inhabit the inner reality so the subconscious molds your life to match that assumed consciousness (Colossians 3:1–4).

What visualization or imagination exercises align with Colossians 3 teaching?

Practice imaginal scenes that place you in the reality of being "risen with Christ": imagine a specific moment where you act and feel as the new self—speaking kindly, forgiving freely, resting in peace and gratitude—attend to sensory detail and the inner tone of blessedness. Nightly, replay a short scene of having received what you seek and living from that outcome; in waking hours, revise any unpleasant memory by imagining its happy ending; use short, vivid scenes to cement virtues like mercy and meekness into feeling-memory, and conclude each exercise with thanksgiving so the subconscious accepts the state as completed (Colossians 3:12–15).

How do I use Colossians 3 to change my subconscious beliefs according to Neville?

Begin by treating Colossians 3 as a set of intentional imaginal commands: decide what inner state you must occupy, then daily enter the feeling of that fulfilled state in vivid, sensory scenes, especially in the relaxed twilight or before sleep when the subconscious is receptive. Confess and reject contrary thoughts as "old man" thinking, and refuse to feed them; instead, replay scenes that confirm the new belief until feeling becomes natural. Use scripture phrases as anchors to return to the assumed state, sing or speak them inwardly to deepen impression, and be patient—consistent assumption will rewrite the subconscious and produce outward evidence (Colossians 3:16).

How does Neville Goddard interpret 'set your minds on things above' in Colossians 3?

Neville taught that 'set your minds on things above' is an instruction to occupy your consciousness with the end already accomplished; it invites you to dwell in the state that corresponds to the desired reality rather than rehearsing lack. Reading Colossians 3 as an inner, psychological command, one sees that to be "risen with Christ" means to assume the mental state of the fulfilled self, to imagine and feel the truth of being hidden with Christ in God, and to mortify by disregard the old earthly self; this persistent imaginative assumption changes your inner world and thus the outer circumstances in which you live (Colossians 3:1-4).

What does 'put on the new self' mean from a Neville Goddard consciousness perspective?

To 'put on the new self' is to assume a new state of consciousness until it becomes your identity; you must live imaginally from the end, feeling and acting as the renewed person created after the image of Christ. This means deliberately abandoning old reactive patterns—anger, covetousness, harsh speech—and instead rehearsing inwardly the attitudes listed in Colossians: mercy, kindness, humility, patience, forgiveness, and love. Practically, you imagine a scene where you already embody these qualities, dwell in its feeling, and repeatedly impress that state upon your subconscious so it reorganizes your outer life to express the new self naturally (Colossians 3:9–14).