Luke 11: Consciousness of Strength and Weakness

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Quick Insights

Prayer is not a petition to an external authority but a disciplined orientation of inner attention that brings imagined states into experience.
Persistence and insistence in asking reveal how sustained feeling and expectation reshape the psyche and thus the manifest world.
Opposition, accusation, and the return of the unclean spirit describe cycles within the mind where neglected inner content reasserts itself until it is truly transformed.
Light, eye, and the key of knowledge point to clarity of awareness: what is focused and inhabited becomes the organizing principle of perception and outcome.

What is the Main Point of Luke 11?

The chapter teaches that consciousness is the creative laboratory: what is imagined, felt, and held with conviction becomes the architecture of lived reality. Prayer, asking, seeking, and knocking are progressive states of attention that move desire from surface wishfulness into the sustained inner conviction that births corresponding outer events. Inner purification, vigilance over where the eye rests, and persistent imaginative action are the practical moves by which the psyche lays claim to a different experience.

What is the Spiritual Meaning of Luke 11?

Prayer as taught here is an act of intentional assuming. To pray is to rehearse a scene inwardly until the feeling of the wish fulfilled saturates the organism. The invocation of Father, the coming of the kingdom, daily bread, forgiveness, and deliverance are stages in which the imaginal faculty is trained to accept supply, reconciliation, and protection as present facts of consciousness rather than distant hopes. When one learns to live already in the state desired, the outer world rearranges to reflect that inner law. The insistence story at midnight dramatizes how persistence acts on the subconscious threshold. The neighbor who will not rise becomes a symbol of resistant habit; the petitioner who persists embodies the will to continue assuming until resistance yields. This is less about coercion and more about sustaining the internal scene so thoroughly that the nervous system yields and memory, attention, and expectation rewire toward the new possibility. In practice, repetition is not mere nagging but the deliberate cultivation of conviction. The passages about unclean spirits and seven others returning describe the fate of untransformed content. If unresolved fears or secret resentments are merely cleansed superficially, absence only creates a vacuum that old patterns will refill, often multiplied. True change requires the entering of a stronger presence — a differing imaginative conviction that occupies the interior house so completely that there is no room for the old chains to return. Otherwise the last state becomes worse, a warning that avoidance or cosmetic reform cannot substitute for inner re-creation.

Key Symbols Decoded

The friend at midnight is the stubborn, habitual part of consciousness that guards resources and resists new orders; the petitioner is the focused imagination that will not accept lack. Bread is the everyday supply of attention and satisfaction, the simple felt sense of being provided for, while the Holy Spirit is the inward power or presence that transfigures desire into actuality when called and received. Beelzebub and divided houses are metaphors for internal conflict: when intentions are split, no single causal stream can produce coherent results, and fragmentation invites failure. The light and the single eye point to unified attention. An eye that is single means an integrated center of perception, where desire, belief, and feeling converge; when the eye is evil or divided, the same organ throws the whole body into darkness, meaning the whole life reflects the confusion within. The key of knowledge that has been taken away signals lost access to imaginative authority — those who hoard forms and doctrines without entering the living experience of assumption withhold the means of transformation from themselves and others.

Practical Application

Begin with a short imaginative practice that reorders the inner scene: choose a simple desire or daily provision and create a vivid, sensory mental scene of it already fulfilled, then hold the feeling of fulfillment for a few minutes each day until it becomes natural. If resistance arises, practice persistence exactly as the midnight petitioner did: return to the scene calmly and insistently, not as bargaining but as acceptance already in effect, noticing how repeated occupation softens the habitual no. Attend to the state of your eye by watching where attention habitually lands and deliberately redirecting it to a single, coherent assumption. When negative patterns resurface, welcome them without panic, sweep the inner space with the stronger assumption, and populate it with feelings and images that contradict the old story. Over time this sustained imaginative occupation becomes the stronger presence that prevents the return of what was cast out, and the outer circumstances will align with the new inner fact.

The Inner Drama of Persistent Prayer and Revealed Authority

Read as a psychological drama, Luke 11 describes inner mechanics — how consciousness imagines, sustains, resists, and finally transforms its world. The chapter opens with the prayer the disciples request: teach us to pray. That request is not about ritual words addressed to an external deity but about learning to employ the imagination — the faculty that speaks inwardly to shape outer experience. The 'Our Father which art in heaven' names the ground of being within us: awareness that is aware of itself. To say 'Hallowed be thy name' is to sanctify that awareness, to honor the source of creative feeling. 'Thy kingdom come; thy will be done, as in heaven, so in earth' is the inner act of aligning personal will with the creative law resident in consciousness. 'Give us day by day our daily bread' asks for the sustaining perceptions and assumptions that fed by imagination produce the events of each day. 'Forgive us our sins' asks for release from past hostile imaginings; forgiving those indebted to us releases the energetic hold of grievance. 'Lead us not into temptation; but deliver us from evil' is a caution against surrendering the imagination to sense-bound fear and habit. Everything in this prayer functions as an instruction for interior practice: assume the divine state, persist in it, nourish it, and clear out contrary beliefs.

The parable of the midnight friend makes the process explicit. The seeker at midnight represents the conscious self that needs to bring an assumed state into manifestation. The reluctant neighbor is the habitual mind, inert and resistant when roused by emergency; yet repeated insistence — importunity — disturbs the habitual's inertia until it concedes. Psychologically, this teaches persistence in the assumption. The neighbor finally rises, not from sudden moral inspiration, but because persistence has moved the habitual center. The lesson: steady inner insistence reprograms the conditioned center and wins external allowance for the newly assumed state.

The well-known injunction — ask and it shall be given; seek and ye shall find; knock and it shall be opened — shows the same dynamic in general. Asking is forming an assumption. Seeking is using imagination to explore feeling the state as already real. Knocking is persistent assumption, rhythmically rehearsed until the subconscious answers. The rhetorical questions about a father giving bread instead of a stone expose a fundamental conviction: the creative source in us responds to congruent feeling. A stone is the response of a mind that denies bounty; to imagine scorpion or serpent when requesting fish is to misimagine. The inner Father, the natural creative law, gives what matches the assumption of worth and expectancy. In short, the imagination provides nourishment only in the form of what is coherently assumed.

The casting out of a demon and the subsequent accusation by the onlookers signify phases of psychological purification and the shadow’s resistance. To cast out a 'devil' is to expel a limiting belief or obsession that has silenced expression (the dumb who then speaks). When an inner limiting pattern is dislodged, a voice returns — spontaneous speech, a freed capacity for direction and communication. The crowd’s accusation — that the work is done by Beelzebub — represents the rationalizing intellect, which mistakes higher psychological transformation for some external agency. This is the mind’s fear of lost control; it prefers attributing change to familiar causes rather than acknowledging the creative power within the self.

Jesus’ reply about a kingdom divided against itself names the structural truth: a fragmented consciousness cannot manifest unified reality. If one part of the mind seeks to create while another part clings to contradiction, the result is disintegration. The image of the strong man armed keeping his palace is the defensive pattern — a committed belief system that holds its territory. When a stronger imagination enters, it removes the earlier armor and claims the spoils. The implication is straightforward: a higher, coherent imagining will displace the lesser, fear-based holding patterns that previously dominated your conduct. The stronger imaginative act is the will aligned with the inner Father.

The parable of the unclean spirit who leaves, wanders, and returns with seven more spirits warns about the danger of an empty vacuum. When a negative pattern is expelled but nothing is put in its place — no new assumption, no enriched feeling — the mind is vulnerable to worse states reoccupying it. Change is not merely negation; it must be replacement. The remedy is intentional occupancy: when you remove a limiting belief, immediately assume and dwell in the new state you desire. Otherwise, the habit system will refill the vacancy with more intense versions of the old problem.

When the woman blesses the womb that bore Jesus and he replies that blessed are they who hear the word of God and keep it, the scene contrasts birth from the flesh with birth of state. 'Womb' represents the habitual conditioning that gave rise to a particular personality; but true blessing is hearing and keeping the creative word — the imaginative instruction that births new states. Inner incarnation matters more than biological lineage; the capacity to internalize and practice the creative word yields transformation.

The 'sign of Jonah' and references to Nineveh and the queen of the south depict response and repentance in consciousness. Jonah and Nineveh represent the capacity for radical inner turnaround; the sign is the inner experience of reversal — when a stubborn part of you repents and assumes humility, the life pattern shifts. The queen from the uttermost parts seeking Solomon contrasts an earnest traveler of perception drawn to wisdom; she stands as the aspect of consciousness willing to go far into imagination to obtain insight. Both images celebrate the responsive, flexible mind that knows how to change.

The candle, the eye, and the light of the body compress into one practical axiom: your attention governs content. The eye single — single-minded attention — makes the body full of light. If attention is scattered or 'evil' (meaning double-minded, tainted by contradictory assumptions), the interior becomes dark. The creative faculty turns according to where you look; keep the eye single by refusing divided assumptions. 'Be careful that the light which is in thee be not darkness' is a warning against misapplied imagination: a potent inner faculty used for fear or self-justification will only deepen your darkness.

The rebukes of the Pharisees and lawyers dramatize what happens when religious or moral forms govern behavior while the inner life remains unregenerate. Washing the outside of the cup while the inward is ravening speaks to attention to external appearances instead of intrapsychic transformation. Tithing mint and rue and failing judgment and love of God depicts the mind busy with minor rituals while skipping the essentials of imaginative reformation: compassion, justice, and honest interior seeing. Hypocrisy, then, is an interior split between image and reality. Building sepulchers for the prophets while having killed them is the intellectual formation that honors transformative ideas rhetorically while suppressing the living impulses they carry.

Finally, the lawyers taking away the key of knowledge allegorically indicts those who hoard insight in doctrine and thus prevent others from entering the practice of imaginative creation. The 'key' is the experiential method by which one assumes and inhabits new states; to remove it is to keep people in sleep. True knowledge opens doors within consciousness to new states; the chapter mourns how institutionalized teaching can obscure the practical process of assumption and the living presence of imagination.

Taken together, Luke 11 is a manual of inner mechanics: learn to address the divine source within, persist in assumption, align will with creative law, replace expelled limitations with new states, direct attention single-mindedly, and avoid substituting outer ritual for inner transformation. The characters are not people out there but scenes within the theater of mind — neighbors of habit, kings of fear, accusers of doubt, and citizens of a new kingdom. The miracles are intrapsychic changes: the dumb speaking, the house reclaimed, the light filling the whole body. The creative power is not a remote deity but your own disciplined imagination brought to bear with feeling and persistence. When you practice the prayer, insist like the midnight supplicant, refuse to let a vacuum invite worse states, and guard the eye of attention, the kingdom — the living, workable world you experience — will shift to match the inner assumption.

Common Questions About Luke 11

What does 'Ask, Seek, Knock' mean according to Neville Goddard?

'Ask, seek, knock' describes progressive acts of consciousness rather than mechanical requests: asking is forming a clear desire in imagination, seeking is entering a scene that implies the desire fulfilled and exploring that inner state, and knocking is persisting in that assumed state until the feeling of the answer becomes real (Luke 11:9). It teaches that outcome follows the conviction of the inner man; when you live in the end mentally and emotionally you open the inner door. The Scriptures thus encourage an inward, experiential prayer life where imagination and feeling are the instruments that bring the unseen to pass.

How does Neville Goddard interpret the Lord's Prayer in Luke 11?

Neville reads the Lord's Prayer as a roadmap for assuming the divine state within, teaching that 'Our Father' names the consciousness you must inhabit and 'Thy kingdom come' is the inward acceptance of that kingdom as present reality (Luke 11). He sees each petition not as begging but as declarations of an assumed state: daily bread becomes the inner supply felt and acknowledged, forgiveness clears the imagination so nothing blocks manifestation, and deliverance from evil protects the mind from contradictory images. Prayer, in this view, is the disciplined use of imagination to dwell in the desired state until it externalizes as experience.

Can Neville Goddard's technique of assumption be used with the Lord's Prayer?

Yes; Neville encourages using assumption as the operative means of prayer: take the words of the Lord's Prayer as statements to be inwardly assumed and lived, imagining 'Our Father' as your conscious identity and 'give us this day our daily bread' as the daily experience you inhabit (Luke 11). Begin with a clear, short scene that presupposes the answer, enter it with sensory detail and feeling, and persist in that state until it yields evidence. Forgiveness and protection petitions are handled by removing contrary imaginal scenes and refusing to dwell on their reality, thereby keeping the inner house furnished for the desired blessing.

What practical steps does Neville recommend to use imagination when praying like in Luke 11?

Begin by settling upon a single, specific end and compose a short, vivid scene that implies fulfillment, then assume that scene in a relaxed, sleepy state until you feel the reality of it; do this nightly and whenever doubt arises, feeling now the answer as if present (compare Luke 11:9). Clear contradictory images by forgiving and refusing to entertain negatives, keep the 'eye single' so attention is single-pointed, use sensory detail and emotion to deepen the assumption, and persist with gentle confidence rather than strain; the habit of living in the imagined end will transform your outer circumstances into agreement.

How do Jesus' teachings in Luke 11 relate to Neville's idea that consciousness creates reality?

Luke 11 shows Jesus teaching that the spiritual life is interior and creative: the eye as light of the body, the house cleansed yet vulnerable to reentry by worse spirits, and parables about persistence in asking all point to inner states determining outer events (Luke 11). This aligns with Neville's insistence that consciousness precedes manifestation; casting out devils is the change of state within, and a mind emptied of the true Lord invites lower imaginal states. Thus Scripture and this teaching unify: tend the imagination, assume the kingdom, persist in that state, and outer life will conform to the inner law.