Deuteronomy 11

Choosing Life: The Covenant Drama of Remembering and Obedience

Deuteronomy 11 read as a psychological drama reveals a map of inner movement: from bondage to possession, from wandering to dwelling, from fear to settled conviction. The chapter stages a dialogue of consciousness with itself, an exhortation to take up a way of being that brings inward states into outward expression. Every place and person named can be read as a state of mind, every promise and warning as an operative law of imagination and attention. Read this way, the text ceases to be merely historical law and becomes a blueprint for creative living within consciousness.

The opening command—‘‘love the LORD thy God, and keep his charge, and his statutes’’—is an injunction to live in a single dominating state. The LORD here is the center of awareness, the I AM that governs perception. To love this center is to identify with a chosen self-image and its inner law. The statutes are not external rules but the steady habits of thought and feeling that sustain that identity. The mind is asked to hold one orientation ‘‘alway’’—constancy of feeling is the womb in which imagined realities gestate.

The narrative of ‘‘what he did in Egypt’’ and ‘‘how he made the water of the Red sea to overflow them’’ dramatizes the reversal of identification. Egypt represents the external, sensory-identified life—where identity is measured by environment, habit, and inherited story. The Red Sea is the psychological barrier that separates the old identity from the new. To cross it is to pass the threshold of faith in imagination: when the inner authority moves, that which pursues (fear, habit, the opinion of others) is overwhelmed. The ‘‘mighty hand’’ is the concentrated imagination that acts decisively when the self is assumed in a new way; miracles are the immediate consequences of a decisive inward change.

The wilderness episodes stand for the interior trials that attend any genuine transformation. In the desert the psyche learns to rely on the chosen center rather than on the conditions it formerly depended upon. These are not punishments but refining experiences—periods when the new claim is rehearsed and strengthened until it no longer depends on visible evidence.

Dathan and Abiram—devoured when the earth ‘‘opened her mouth’’—are the dramatized fate of resistant thought-forms. They are the self-states that insist on rebellion against the chosen identity: jealousy, complaint, self-justifying narratives. When the center of consciousness is firmly assumed and its statutes obeyed, these rebellious constructs collapse into themselves. The ‘‘earth opening’’ is not a divine punishment from without but the natural implosion of an idea that has no place in the new field of attention.

‘‘But your eyes have seen all the great acts of the LORD’’ is a call to memory as creative material. Memory here is not static recall but the reservoir of previous inner states that can be re-evoked to re-establish confidence. The chapter asks the reader to lay up these recollections ‘‘in your heart and in your soul’’—to make them habitual imagery and inner speech that guide action. Internal evidence, not external proof, becomes the ground for moving forward.

The promise to ‘‘possess the land’’ maps onto taking dominion over inner territory. The ‘‘land’’ is a psychological landscape that will reflect whatever consciousness occupies it. Possession means inhabiting a state so fully that the outer world becomes a mirror to that inward stance. ‘‘Every place whereon the soles of your feet shall tread shall be yours’’ is the law of attention: wherever you place the feet of your consciousness—your focused sensation and inner speech—becomes the scene of experience.

The contrast between Egypt and the promised land clarifies two ways of living. Egypt—where seed was sown and watered by the foot—represents habitual labor in the sensory world, a life of doing to achieve. The promised land, ‘‘a land of hills and valleys’’ that drinks the ‘‘rain of heaven,’’ describes a life that is sustained by receptive inner states and cycles of imaginal sowing and harvest. The ‘‘rain of heaven’’ pictures the rhythms of consciousness: first attention (first rain), maturation (latter rain), and the fruitfulness that follows. To hearken to the statutes is to arrange inner life so that appropriate ‘‘rains’’ fall—the right ideas, affections, and expectations that nourish intent.

The warning to beware of a deceived heart and to avoid ‘‘serving other gods’’ names the danger of divided attention. Other gods are competing imaginal identities—fear, scarcity, self-pity—into whose service the heart can slip unnoticed. When attention fragments, the receptive channels close: ‘‘he shut up the heaven, that there be no rain.’’ The spiritual principle is plain: inner fidelity is the condition for outer fertility. Broken attention invites drought; sustained assumption invites plenty.

Practical techniques are embedded in the symbolic prescriptions: ‘‘lay up these my words in your heart and in your soul, and bind them for a sign upon your hand, that they may be as frontlets between your eyes.’’ This is instruction in inner talk and sensory rehearsal. Bind the chosen ideas to the hand (action) and to the frontlets between the eyes (sight, imagination); make the phraseology of your chosen identity intrinsic to your perception and behavior. Write them upon the doorposts and gates—mark the thresholds of entering and leaving states so that transitions become ritualized and conscious. Teach your children—address the subordinate voices of the mind regularly: when sitting, walking, lying down, rising up—so the subconscious learns the new language by repetition.

The chapter’s social imagery—driving out nations before you, causing fear—depicts how an inner identity, when assumed without contradiction, reorganizes the field of perception. ‘‘There shall no man be able to stand before you’’ is the effect of a self that no longer yields to negative suggestion. It is not domination of others but the corrosion of hostile ideas; dread and fear are mental neighbors who vacate when their opposite is firmly lived.

The choice set before the people—‘‘a blessing and a curse’’—is the book’s central psychological thesis. Attention is the agent that pronounces blessing or curse upon experience. To obey the commandments is to choose blessing: a steady interior persuasion that generates conditions congenial to the assumed state. To turn aside is to affirm a contrary world. Mount Gerizim and Mount Ebal—where blessing and curse are proclaimed—are the two altars within consciousness where judgments are declared. The public reading is the inner decree: what you recite within will come to pass outside.

Crossing the Jordan is the archetype of dying to a previous self and being reborn into the assumed identity. Jordan is the threshold that must be deliberately crossed; lingering at its banks invites relapse. The text’s repeated call to ‘‘observe to do all the statutes and judgments’’ is the psychological counsel to persist: imagination without persistence is a flash that fades. The creative power of consciousness operates through sustained feeling, habituation of inner speech, and the sensory vivification of the chosen scene.

Two operative principles emerge: first, feeling is the medium of creation. To ‘‘love’’ God—i.e., to abide in the chosen center—is to maintain a dominantly felt state. Feeling, not cold intellectual assent, impresses the deeper layers of mind that shape experience. Second, repetition and ritual fix the content of consciousness. Writing on doorposts, teaching children, binding signs on hands—these are symbolic of repeated attention, nightly revision, and waking reaffirmation that program the subconscious field.

This reading insists that the miraculous events and territorial promises are not primarily external transactions but descriptions of inner operations. The ‘‘land flowing with milk and honey’’ is the psychological harvest that follows imaginal faithfulness; ‘‘no rain’’ is the predictable result of attention diverted. Those who wish to ‘‘possess’’ must perform the art of inner occupation: choose an identity, dwell in it, speak it, feel it, and let the old states be swallowed or dissolve when they cannot coexist with the new orientation.

In practical terms the chapter encourages a discipline of attention: select a central feeling-claim, rehearse it in sensory detail, bind the claim to action and sight by ritualized reminders, teach the subordinate voices daily until they accept the new story, and persist through the wilderness trials until the inner landscape yields to the imagined settlement. When this is done, outer circumstances will not be arbitrary; they will be faithful reflections of an inner constitution.

Thus Deuteronomy 11, read as biblical psychology, is a manual for creative consciousness. Its promises and warnings are the laws by which imagination translates into world. The covenant it offers is not between two beings but a covenant within: a pledge by the conscious self to occupy a state so fully that the environment must conform. The drama of conquest and covenant, blessing and curse, is enacted in the theater of the mind; the laws laid down are the working rules by which imagination shapes reality.