Jeremiah 24: Figs of Consciousness

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Quick Insights

Two contrasted inner climates are shown: one fertile and open to correction, the other rotten with refusal, each shaping destiny.
Imagination and acceptance act as gardeners: what you nurture inwardly will be built and planted, or uprooted and scattered.
Exile can be a gracious reorientation when the heart submits; remaining comfortable in illusion leads to fragmentation and loss.
States of consciousness not only describe experience but enact it; the interior condition issues forth consequences in the world of form.

What is the Main Point of Jeremiah 24?

This chapter teaches that the psyche holds two powerful creative attitudes: a receptive, malleable readiness that allows healing and reconstruction, and a hardened, self-justifying stance that multiplies suffering. The images of good and bad fruit are metaphors for inner postures; imagination and feeling choose which inner seed will ripen into outer circumstance. When consciousness assumes the state of return, repair, and rootedness, life reorganizes to match that inward conviction. When consciousness clings to pride, blame, or despair, it animates dispersion, reproach, and decay.

What is the Spiritual Meaning of Jeremiah 24?

Seen as an inner drama, the good figs are the parts of the self that, though displaced and humbled, remain teachable and longing for wholeness. Exile here becomes a form of inner schooling: removed from familiar props, the self that will listen learns to imagine a restored landscape. The promise to set eyes upon them for good is nothing mysterious beyond the capacity to hold a benevolent attention toward an altered identity. Attention is the hand that plants; sustained imagination is the water that causes new shoots to rise. To give a heart to know the inward source is to choose feeling before facts, to cultivate a state of knowing rather than proving. The corrupt cluster of fruit represents those aspects that refuse correction, that sanitize their conscience with excuses and cling to appearances. This refusal does not merely isolate but catalyzes a chain of consequences: projection, exile, and the scattering of inner coherence into outward calamity. The threats of sword, famine, and pestilence are symbolic descriptions of the kinds of inner starvation that follow closed-mindedness: the famine of meaning, the pestilence of resentment, the sword of disconnection. The drama shows that inner reality is not private; it radiates and organizes circumstances according to the quality of its imaginative acts. The chapter's promise and warning together emphasize a simple operative law: imagination accepted as true becomes the scaffolding of lived reality. To be carried into a place of testing is not a punishment in itself but an invitation to recompose identity. Conversely, preserving a self-image that denies pain or responsibility breeds compromise and eventual collapse. Spiritually, the work is to recognize which basket we habitually live from and to practice the gentle, persistent reorientation of feeling and assumption toward restoration and gratitude. That inner shift is not moralizing but practical—an applied change in the way we imagine ourselves and others, which then re-scripts relational and material outcomes.

Key Symbols Decoded

The two baskets of figs are simple containers of state: one holds ripe receptivity, the other contains spoiled resistance. The act of viewing them beside the temple signals that consciousness is always presented before the altar of awareness, where judgment and choice naturally occur. Good fruit signals imagination aligned with humility and openness; bad fruit signals imagination fortified by denial and bitterness. Captivity and exile are metaphors for any circumstance that strips identity of props, compelling the ego to either soften or harden. Building and planting speak to the creative faculties: when the interior is congenial, imagination builds new structures of meaning and plants the self in new soils; when interior life is corrosive, it pulls up roots and precipitates dispersal. Reproach and curse describe the external echo of inner discord, the social weather that arises from a poisoned inner climate.

Practical Application

Begin by noticing which basket you live from in the small moments: do you imagine return, repair, and a heart that can learn, or do you rehearse injury, blame, and inevitability? Practice deliberately assuming the state you wish to realize, not as wishful thinking but as a felt conviction. Use quiet moments to visualize your inner landscape being rebuilt: see the roots going down, feel the softening in the chest, hear the internal voice change from accusation to welcome. When resistance arises, address it with curiosity rather than condemnation; name the fear and imagine it being held and transformed. Translate inner practice into life by acting on the imaginal shift: speak as someone being rebuilt, make choices consistent with being planted rather than uprooted, accept small reversals as schooling rather than proof of identity. If reproach or separation appears, respond from an assumed state of repair—offer generosity, seek reconciliation, and sustain the feeling of restoration even before results are visible. Over time this disciplined use of imagination and feeling alters habit, rewires expectation, and creates realities that correspond to the basket you choose to nourish.

Two Figs, Two Destinies: The Inner Drama of Exile and Restoration

Read as a drama enacted within human consciousness, Jeremiah 24 is a compact parable about how states of mind bear fruit, how attention and imagination determine destiny, and how interior exile can be both punishment and preparation for return. The prophetic scene places two baskets of figs before the temple: one basket with very good figs, the other with very bad figs that cannot be eaten. Around this image gather figures whose literal names point to psychological roles: Nebuchadrezzar the captor, Jeconiah the taken, Zedekiah the unrepentant, Babylon the place of exile, and the temple as the inner sanctuary. Each element is a stage, habit, or posture in the theatre of the psyche.

The temple is inner attention, the still center where consciousness can observe itself. To have the figs set before the temple is to bring the visible results of inner life into the place of witnessing. The prophet sees; the witnessing faculty distinguishes. The two baskets are not two peoples so much as two tendencies already present in the one human mind — the tendency to create life-giving assumptions and the tendency to harbor toxic assumptions. The figs are the fruit of imagination: desires given form as expectation, judgments that feed subsequent perception, character produced by repeated mental acts.

The first basket, full of good figs, represents those imaginal states that, though currently 'taken captive' and seemingly in exile, are inherently creative toward restoration. The captives in Babylon are not cursed in this reading; they are receptive. Their removal from Jerusalem symbolizes a detachment from the old identity and its public validations. This detachment functions as interior suspension — a clearing out that permits a new form to be assumed. The narrative voice says: like these good figs, so will I acknowledge them that are carried away captive of Judah, whom I have sent out of this place into the land of the Chaldeans for their good. Note the paradoxical grammar: exile as purpose, captivity as preparation. Psychologically, this is the state in which a person loses the old props — social approval, habit patterns, the familiar story about who they are — and is therefore finally capable of imagining a different future.

Concretely, the good figs are those imaginal acts that create potency. They are 'first ripe' because they embody ripe awareness and a readiness to be inwardly transformed. Even though they look like prisoners to the unseeing eye, the interior intelligence recognizes them as chosen for growth. The promise, 'I will set mine eyes upon them for good,' is the language of attention and intention. In human terms, when attention is turned toward a seedlike state — a yearning, a surrendered longing, an assumption that the self can be different — that attention becomes the sustaining force that builds, plants, and nurtures. 'I will build them, and not pull them down; and I will plant them, and not pluck them up' reads as the psychology of persistence: a sustained assumption hardens into new character. This is not coercion from outside; it is the inward law that imagination sustained by attention actualizes its own image.

'I will give them an heart to know me' reframes spiritual language into psychological transformation. The 'heart' is not merely emotion but the imaginative capacity to know the creative center. To be given a heart is to have one's affective life realigned so that appreciation, trust, and openness become the baseline from which perception and action arise. 'They shall be my people, and I will be their God' becomes: the self recognizes itself as the source of its world; consciousness is no longer outsourced to circumstances. Return with the whole heart means full assumption — not a casual wish, but a persistent inner posture that imagines and feels itself already at home in the desired state.

The second basket, the rotten figs, dramatizes the opposite interior economy. These are assumptions that cannot be assimilated; they are judgments that harden into resentment, fear, and delusion. They 'cannot be eaten' because they do not nourish; they sour the appetite for life and feed only anxiety. The text links these figs to the leadership that remains in the land and to those who flee to Egypt — that is, to those who cling to old securities, who substitute external alliances for the inner realignment that truly sustains. Psychologically, the rotten figs are self-images defended by projection: blame is exported, responsibility externalized, and the imagination is used to confirm deficiency instead of possibility.

The prophetic verdict follows the law of creativity: a hardened expectation of scarcity or victimhood scatters consciousness into fearful narratives and thus experiences dispersion — 'I will deliver them to be removed into all the kingdoms of the earth for their hurt.' This is not a cosmic punishment dished out by a remote power but the inevitable outcome of negative imagining. When a person imagines limitation and identifies with it, the psyche begins to manufacture confirming experiences: relationships that mirror suspicion, events that mirror helplessness, and a life thinned by self-fulfilling prophecy. Pestilence, famine, sword—these archaic images stand for inner starvation, conflict, and dissolution that follow from a corrupt imagination that can no longer be digested.

The scene of Nebuchadrezzar taking Jeconiah is a brief parable of authority and identification. Nebuchadrezzar, the figure who seemingly seizes, is in psychological terms the dominant belief or cultural narrative that claims the mind. Jeconiah, the taken, is the person who allows identity to be defined by external definitions — titles, lineage, reputation — and so is vulnerable to being uprooted when those external props collapse. The good captives, however, are those whose core sense of self is not bound to transient externals; in their inner exile they are free to be reconstituted by imagination's new law.

Central to the chapter is the notion that creative power operates within human consciousness and that attention determines which internal 'figs' are made alive. The prophet’s 'seeing' functions as the exercise of consciousness observing and naming its own fruit. Naming is itself an act of imagination; it fixes perception and allows intention to focus. Once attention rests, imagination can operate unimpeded to shape feeling, thought, and eventual external expression. The repeated formulations — build, plant, give heart — map onto a psychological process: clear the field (detachment), assume the end (imaginative act), feel the reality of the end (affective alignment), and persist with the assumption until it becomes fact.

Importantly, the chapter offers a tender correction to the modern tendency to equate success with outward comfort. The good figs are not those who remain in Jerusalem with all its familiar comforts; they are those receptive to inner change. Conversely, those who cling to the old name and the old defensive structures become the rotting fruit. Exile becomes, paradoxically, the safe laboratory for a new self to be born: when a person loses the old identity, imagination can more freely plant the new. The 'return' promised to the good figs is therefore not a mere restoration of the old but a resurrection into a new relationship with the self as creative agent.

Practically, this chapter invites a discipline of attention: identify which figs you are cultivating. Are your habitual imaginal acts nourishing or souring you? Which assumptions about yourself are captive to external validations, and which quietly await the attention that will transform them? The text suggests a method more than a moral imperative: set the eyes upon what you want to be — dwell on it, feel its inner reality, and allow the imagination to inhabit that state until it becomes you. That is the building, planting, and giving of a new heart.

Finally, this prophetic picture points to mercy rather than arbitrary judgment. The divine voice does not annihilate the bad figs for sport; it merely reports the natural outworking of interior life. The good figs are acknowledged even in exile because their inner stance predisposes them to restoration. The bad figs are declared 'bad' not because they are irredeemably evil but because they are closed to the transforming attention that makes return possible. The line between captives and castaways is the line between receptivity and resistance. Where the imagination turns inward and aligns with the end it desires, captivity becomes tuition and exile becomes the soil out of which a new harvest grows.

Common Questions About Jeremiah 24

What do the two baskets of figs in Jeremiah 24 symbolize?

The two baskets of figs in Jeremiah 24 portray two inward conditions presented to the prophet as God’s seeing of men: one basket of very good figs, one of very evil figs (Jeremiah 24). Read inwardly, they symbolize opposing states of consciousness rather than mere external fate. The good figs are those carried into exile yet acknowledged by the LORD for their future restoration, representing the heart that yields and imagines its return to God; the bad figs are those left to judgment, the hardened outward mind whose assumptions bring dispersal and ruin. The vision teaches that God judges and redeems according to inner orientation, the imaginal state that precedes visible change.

How can the message of Jeremiah 24 be used as a manifestation practice?

Use Jeremiah 24 as instruction to inhabit the 'good figs' state: first know the end—the restoration and acknowledgment you desire—and assume its feeling as present. Enter imaginative scenes where you are already brought back, built and planted, feeling a heart to know me receiving fulfillment (Jeremiah 24). Persist in that inner conviction through daily revision of events and night-time dwelling until the inner witness accepts it. Judge no outward contradiction; treat adverse facts as temporary. By making the good fig your constant imaginal occupation, you align consciousness with the creative power that converts inner states into outer manifestation.

How does Jeremiah 24 speak to the inner remnant and spiritual restoration?

Jeremiah 24 points to an inner remnant—those carried into exile yet acknowledged and destined for restoration—indicating spiritual restoration begins in the hidden heart. The promise to give them a heart to know me is the transformation of consciousness: when you assume knowingness, you become that remnant and are rebuilt and planted (Jeremiah 24). Restoration is not only return to a place but the inward return to God as proximate consciousness; the remnant is the perpetual core that imagines rightly and therefore attracts rebuilding. Attend to that inner company within you, cultivate its assumptions daily, and the outward circumstance will answer to the change inside.

What practical imaginal exercises align Jeremiah 24 with the law of assumption?

Begin with a brief quiet where you picture the basket you desire: see yourself as the good fig being built, planted, and acknowledged by God, and feel the gratitude and peace of that completion. Create a short scene of return—walking into the promised house or receiving reconciliation—and rehearse it until it impresses the senses. Use revision each evening to reframe the day into the good-fig outcome, and practice a one-minute feeling-state in the morning to fix the assumption. Repeat consistently until the inner state becomes natural, for the law of assumption acts only when the imaginal state is sustained and accepted as fact.

How would Neville Goddard interpret the 'good figs' and 'bad figs' in terms of consciousness?

Neville Goddard would say the good figs are states assumed and sustained in imagination, and the bad figs are states assumed in the outer senses that doom experience to match them. For Neville, consciousness is causative: to be carried away yet acknowledged by God means the person has entered an imaginal state that God recognizes and will fulfill (Jeremiah 24). The bad figs are those who persist in external identification and fear, producing removal and reproach. Thus salvation and judgment are not primarily historical events but the harvest of assumed states; change the inner scene and the basket of your life will be seen by God as good and returned to you.