Jeremiah 11: Covenant of Conscience

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Quick Insights

The covenant is an inner agreement between attention and imagination; when you fail to honor it, imagination fabricates realities that feel like curses.
Refusal to hear the inner voice is not just rebellion but a commitment to a habitual storyline that repeatedly produces its own consequences.
Collective conspiracies described are actually shared patterns of thought that reinforce one another, making escape difficult until consciousness changes.
The prophet figure represents awareness that witnesses betrayal, is wounded by it, and yet persists because exposed truth destabilizes the false world and opens possibility for righting the inner law.

What is the Main Point of Jeremiah 11?

At the core is a psychological principle: what you accept and obey inwardly shapes what manifests outwardly. A covenant in this sense is the practice of aligning attention with the creative imagining that produces life; breaking that covenant — listening instead to the small, selfish, or fearful imaginings — becomes the cause of suffering. Inner fidelity, not external ritual, is the operative power: when awareness chooses to obey its highest imagination, the landscape of experience changes; when it chooses disobedience, it constructs constraint and inner exile.

What is the Spiritual Meaning of Jeremiah 11?

The chapter read as states of consciousness unfolds like a drama in which the soul makes promises it then neglects. The 'voice' that calls to obey is the clarity of presence that knows its creative capacity; the people who do not hear it represent habit, distraction, and the ego's chatter that prefers known discomfort to the unfamiliar risk of transformation. When imagination runs unchecked toward fear and fragmented desire, it builds altars to what is not life-affirming. Those altars are internalized loyalties to small satisfactions that look like gods because they promise immediate comfort yet steal the future. Over time they harden into structures of thought that claim streets and cities within the mind, multiplying justifications and rituals that defend the old story. The experience of conspiracy and plotted harm describes how separate self-stories collude to suppress higher awareness. Critics and persecutors are the psychological defenses that arise when a person begins to embody an inconvenient truth; they do not spring from some cosmic spite but from the threatened equilibrium of the psyche's established systems. The prophet's vulnerable posture as a lamb or ox points to the humility required to be the living witness. Witnessing your own inner exile often feels like exposure and invites opposition from parts of you that profit from remaining in darkness. This pain is, paradoxically, a necessary clearing because recognition breaks the spell of unconscious compounds of belief. Judgment and promised visitation are the inevitable corrective of misaligned imagination. Not as a vindictive act from above but as the natural consequence of sustained inner disobedience: if one habitually imagines scarcity, betrayal, or smallness, the mind arranges evidence until its narrative is supported. The 'not hearing' that precedes calamity is an ethical phrase for ignoring the creative faculty; the remedy lies in a new covenant enacted by attention. Reclaiming authorship means changing the imaginative acts that previously produced the condition one calls trouble, and doing so with the steady authority of feeling one already is the new state.

Key Symbols Decoded

The covenant is the concentrated practice of attention and assumption—the compact by which consciousness promises to remember its creative power and to act accordingly. Altars and incense are the rituals and repeated inner gestures that sustain a given identity; they become habitual offerings to whatever inner image one serves. Baal and other gods symbolize competing narratives: the small will, fear-driven patterns, or socialized desires that demand sacrifice of authenticity. The prophet who warns is the inner awareness that sees consequences before they fully unfold; his exile and the plots against him mirror how bringing truth into the light often triggers resistance from invested parts. The tree and its fruit are a metaphor for identity and its expressions: when the tree is tended by right imagination, its fruit is health and freedom; when malicious intent or neglect undermines it, the branches break and the fruit is attacked. The slaughterhouse images are the felt helplessness of being misunderstood or betrayed, and the declared visitation on persecutors represents the inevitable psychological realignment that follows exposure—patterns that harm will exhaust themselves when held in conscious light. In every case, the symbols point inward to states of mind rather than to external persons or places.

Practical Application

Begin by making a simple inner covenant: identify a single, affirmative assumption you will test for a week, then live from it in imagination before acting. Each evening close your eyes and imagine a scene that implies the fulfilled assumption with sensory detail and feeling; rehearse not as wish but as current reality until the body remembers. Notice the altars you maintain—automatic reactions, indulgent justifications, repeated complaints—and refuse to feed them by redirecting attention to the new inner decree. When habitual thoughts arise that would drag you back, listen to the prophet within: name the thought, feel the body response, and let it pass without reinforcement. Practice as if you were a gardener tending a tree: prune the branches of belief that only produce bitterness, water the roots by dwelling on the imagined outcome, and protect the young shoots of new identity from old conspirators inside the mind. When criticism or hostility appears, understand it as expected resistance and steady the feeling of the desired state rather than answering in kind. Over time the coordinated acts of imagination and attention reconstitute your world, because consciousness that is obeyed creates its own lawful manifestations.

The Inner Drama of Covenant and Conscience

Read as a psychological drama, Jeremiah 11 becomes a map of inner life — a scene in which a single consciousness discovers a covenant with itself, breaks it, and suffers the predictable consequences. The book’s language of covenant, commands, idols, plots and judgment is not a report of external history but a portrait of states of mind and the creative powers that move within them.

The chapter opens with a summons to hear “the words of this covenant.” In interior terms the covenant is the moment of existential resolution: the “I” establishes a law — a promise to obey the inner voice that brought one out of darkness (the ‘land of Egypt,’ the ‘iron furnace’). That exodus is a symbolic awakening from primitive, unexamined life into the formative trial of self-formation. The iron furnace names the refining pressure of trial that forges character; it is the pressure under which imagination is taught to rule. The command for obedience — “obey my voice” — is therefore the instruction to heed the faculty of imagination as the creative principle in the psyche rather than let mere sensory habit dictate reality.

But the chapter immediately turns to the human response. The people “walked every one in the imagination of their evil heart.” Psychologically this is the central diagnosis: consciousness that abandons the covenant and identifies with reactive, habitual imaginings creates a world of fear, scarcity and idols. ‘Imagination of the evil heart’ is not moralizing language so much as descriptive: it names any imaginative habit that produces separation, shame, smallness or blame. These habitual imaginations are the primary creators of the suffering that follows.

The threat and the curse that follow are the natural law of consciousness: that which is imagined within will find expression outwardly. The passage that declares a curse on the one who disobeys is not a divine tantrum; it is the impartial result of inner activity. When the creative faculty is used to conjure self-limiting stories, those stories harden into circumstance. Hence the prophecy: the words of the covenant will be brought upon them because they refused to perform them. In other words, the power that could have reformed their inner life will, through neglect, be used to manifest what they imagine instead.

Next, the chapter uncovers a “conspiracy among the men of Judah” — an internal collusion of parts of the psyche that agree to betray the higher intention. A conspiracy is a useful psychological image: it reminds us that loyalty to the higher self can be undermined by a coalition of fear-driven states — shame, anger, lust for immediate gratification, social conformity. These parts recruit the individual to “go after other gods.” Those gods are not literal deities but imagined substitutes: the affirmation of self through money, status, sense-pleasure, the approval of others. Where one should be governed by the inner creative command, one instead erects altars to dozens of smaller gods — ‘‘according to the number of thy cities… according to the number of the streets.’’ This phrase shows how fragmentation multiplies: every corridor of daily life can have its own idol, its own story that demands feeding.

The instruction to “pray not thou for this people” reads as a paradoxical psychological counsel. It is not cruelty; it is a recognition that active attention to illusion is the means by which illusion sustains itself. To pray for a reality one secretly doubts is to expend imaginative energy on the very thing one does not want. The inner teacher here says: cease giving life and attention to the false scene. Stop using prayer as lament and begin using imagination as creative revision. In practical consciousness work, it is the difference between repeating the problem and rehearsing its correction.

The image of the beloved in God’s house who ‘‘hath wrought lewdness with many’’ is an image of the inner temple corrupted by the attractions of the lower imagination. The “holy flesh” that has passed from them pictures the loss of a sense of worth and sanctity that once informed every act. Where there was once a consecrated feeling — a sense that one is rooted in an inexhaustible source — there is now sensual rejoicing in what harms the self. Psychology calls this betrayal: the Self’s values are replaced by subordinate satisfactions.

Then arrive the most intimate images: the Lord calls the people “a green olive tree, fair, and of goodly fruit,” and yet “with the noise of a great tumult he hath kindled fire upon it, and the branches… are broken.” The green olive tree is the primordial identity, the imaginative canvas alive with potential. A tree planted by a wise hand signifies that the self was originally rooted in creative intention. But the tumult — the inner chaos of competing imaginings and the outward consequences of following them — ignites a destructive process. Branches broken means faculties severed: hope loses its strength, generosity turns brittle, clarity fractures into dull habits. The olive tree’s beauty is marred when the imagination is devoted to supporting illusions; consequence returns and the natural fruitfulness is interrupted.

Jeremiah’s sense of being “like a lamb or an ox that is brought to the slaughter” pictures the prophetic self in that moment of risking truth-telling. The prophet here is the witnessing awareness — the faculty that has seen the covenant and attempts to remind the whole psyche what it once chose. That witness is vulnerable because it invites revision: it calls the mind to repent (literally to change its thinking). The men who say “Let us destroy the tree with the fruit thereof” represent the parts of the personality that fear the fruit of inner transformation — the newness that would expose and displace their accustomed gains. These parts conspire to silence the inner witness so that old patterns can continue undisturbed.

Finally, the prophetic denunciation of the men of Anathoth — those who say “Prophesy not… that thou die not by our hand” — names the inner critics and persecuting voices who threaten to annihilate the voice of imagination that would free the self. The psychological outcome prophesied — famine, sword, no remnant —is simply the logical end of living by those persecuting patterns: a life thin of meaning, hungry for integrity, constantly under attack by one’s own parts.

But this chapter is not merely a bleak diagnosis; it contains the method and the stakes precisely so the reader can act. If imagination creates reality, then obedience to the creative command — the covenant — is the practice. To obey the voice that led out of ‘‘Egypt’’ and through the ‘‘iron furnace’’ is to adopt the discipline of revision: identifying every false inner scene and reimagining it into fidelity with the higher Self. Where the crowd within the mind erects altars to Baal (the gods of sense and opinion), the practicing imagination erects altars to the covenant: present-tense, specific, felt acts of assuming the fulfilled state.

The passage forbids futile intercession on behalf of those who persist in the old imaginal patterns, because help given to a belief strengthens the belief. Instead, the creative power of consciousness is directed to a different task: persist in the new assumption until the interior landscape rearranges and the outward life reflects the inner law. This is not magic but discipline: the prophetic voice, though lamb-like in appearance, requires courage to persist against the inner conspiracy until the branches of the tree, once broken, can be grafted back by deliberate imaginative activity.

In short, Jeremiah 11 dramatizes the law of inner causation. The chapter shows how a covenant with the creative faculty invites deliverance; how betrayal by the imagination produces idols, conspiracies and judgment; and how the prophetic faculty — the attentive, imaginal “I” — must patiently and courageously call the whole psyche back into obedience. To heed the covenant is to orient feeling and image to the fulfilled state; to break it is to seed the very calamities one later laments. The creative power within human consciousness is impartial and absolute: it delivers what is imagined. Jeremiah’s voice in this chapter is the interior tutor who declares the rule, diagnoses its violation, and compels the reader to take responsibility for the worlds they continuously bring forth.

Common Questions About Jeremiah 11

How does Jeremiah 11 relate to Neville Goddard's law of assumption?

Jeremiah 11 describes a covenant that requires obedience not merely in outward acts but in the inner assumption of God's promise, and its warning that the people "walked every one in the imagination of their evil heart" (Jeremiah 11) directly parallels the law of assumption: whatever state you assume in imagination hardens into experience. Neville Goddard taught that to assume the feeling of the wish fulfilled is to bring it into being; Jeremiah shows the flip side—false assumptions bring judgment. Practically, this chapter urges attention to the inner word you accept as true; by assuming the covenant's reality in feeling and imagination you align your consciousness with the promise, thereby enabling its realization.

What does Jeremiah 11 teach about inner speech and its power to shape reality?

Jeremiah 11 teaches that the speech and imagination of the heart precede outward events; when the nation "walked... in the imagination of their evil heart" their inner declarations shaped a destiny of exile and loss, illustrating that inner speech is causal. The covenant required an inner assent—an abiding assumption—that God would be their God, and failure to maintain that internal word brought consequence. Practically, this means your habitual inner monologue and the images you entertain are not neutral: they form the blueprint for experience. Change begins by consciously rewriting inner speech—affirming the fulfilled promise, imagining scenes that prove it true, and persisting until the new assumption governs feeling and action.

How do I meditate on Jeremiah 11 using Neville Goddard's imaginal act technique?

Begin by reading Jeremiah 11 to understand its demand for inner obedience to the covenant, then sit quietly and relax until your attention withdraws from the world; imagine a short, specific scene that implies the covenant is fulfilled for you—arriving home, receiving provision, or being accepted—and live that scene in present tense with sensory detail and emotion. Neville recommended entering a scene and persisting there until it feels settled; do this for a few minutes nightly, ending in a calm conviction rather than striving. If doubt arises, return to the scene with feeling, for repetition impresses the subconscious and converts assumption into the waking outcome (Jeremiah 11).

Can visualization exercises based on Jeremiah 11 help manifest covenant promises?

Yes; visualization grounded in Jeremiah 11 becomes effective when it turns imagination into a settled inner assumption of the covenant rather than a hopeful fantasy. Use the chapter as a reminder that God honors the inward word you live by, so craft short, vivid scenes in which the covenant is already fulfilled and feel the state as present reality. Avoid dwelling on failures or punishment described in the text; imagine the promise—safety, provision, return to a promised land—as real now, and persist until your feeling becomes habitual. Consistent, emotionally believable imaginings change the state of consciousness that produces outward events, thus aligning your life with the covenant's outcome.

Does Jeremiah 11 support faith as an inner assumption rather than external ritual?

Jeremiah 11 supports the view that faith is primarily an inner assumption by exposing a people who kept outward practices yet "went after other gods" and "walked... in the imagination of their evil heart," showing ritual alone failed because their inner assent contradicted the covenant (Jeremiah 11). The chapter affirms that God seeks obedience of the heart: the inward word you live by determines whether covenanted promises come to pass. True faith therefore is the settled assumption that God is and keeps His word, established in imaginal feeling and persistent conviction rather than reliance on ceremony. Cultivate that inner assumption and your outward life will align with the covenant's blessing.