Psalm 113: The Consciousness of Praise and Exaltation

Compare with the original King James text

🔍 Explore Verse Ranges in Psalms 113

Quick Insights

Praise is the deliberate turning of attention toward an inner Presence that reorients consciousness and creates a new experience of reality.
Sustained awareness of the higher self, maintained from waking to sleeping, raises ordinary perception into dignified identity and authority.
True humility is an active imagination that stoops to the felt reality of lack so it can redeem and transfigure that very scene into abundance.
The psychological arc moves from low self-image and barrenness to dignity and fruitfulness when imagination assumes the fulfilled state and lives from it.

What is the Main Point of Psalms 113?

At its heart this chapter describes a psychological principle: the mind that praises and assumes the presence of a higher state reshapes experience. Praise here is not mere words but the sustained inner posture of recognition and gratitude directed toward an essential identity. When consciousness consistently chooses that elevated awareness, it lifts what was small, needy, or barren into a new order. The process depends on a humble will that enters into the felt lacks without capitulating to them, then imagines and lives from the realized end until the outer world must reflect the inward truth.

What is the Spiritual Meaning of Psalms 113?

Praise functions like attention informed by conviction; it is the soul aligning itself with its own creative center. Psychologically, praise clears the inner landscape of doubt and reinforces the feeling of presence. Saying yes inwardly to the imagined state is the act by which the content of consciousness is rearranged. This rearrangement is not intellectual assent but a felt identity, a temperament that colors every moment from dawn to dusk, making the presence habitual and therefore powerful. There is a paradoxical humility described that is central to psychological transformation. To humble oneself does not mean to diminish the imagination; it means to enter faithfully into the situation of lack without identifying with it. The imaginal will stoop into the 'dust' of feeling poor or barren and lift that scene by holding the opposite reality in mind. This humble stooping is creative: it acknowledges the current condition long enough to renegotiate it from within, replacing resignation with imaginative authority. The chapter's promise of reversal—poor to honored, needy to seated with princes, barren to joyful mother—is the natural consequence of interior transmutation. When the self-concept is elevated and continually inhabited, behavior and circumstance begin to conform. Inner acts of praise and assumption reframe memory and anticipation, and through this reframing the imagination gives birth to new outcomes. Practically, the spiritual work is the steady cultivation of an inner identity that already embodies the desired reality, so that the outer life becomes a faithful reflection.

Key Symbols Decoded

The imagery of rising and setting of the sun is the daily practice of maintaining awareness: it points to continual consciousness rather than intermittent belief. To praise from morning to evening is to keep attention fixed on the chosen inner state through the rhythms of life, making it second nature. The 'name' or identity that is praised acts as the conscious self you elect to inhabit; praising it is the discipline of identifying with that inner authority. Dust and the dunghill are metaphors for low self-regard, shame, and conditioned limitation; they describe the felt field the imagination overturns. Princes and the place among people represent the sovereign self-image and social efficacy that emerge when imagination is reassigned. The barren woman made a joyful mother evokes dormant creative potential that, once imagined as fulfilled and treated as present, brings forth literal and symbolic offspring—projects, relationships, states of being—that were not evident before the inner change.

Practical Application

Begin each day by settling quietly and directing attention to the inner Presence you choose to praise. Allow gratitude and recognition to form a living feeling in the body, and hold that feeling as the background of experience while engaging with ordinary tasks. When moments of doubt or low feeling arise, do not react by fighting the feeling; instead, stoop gently into it with the imagination, converse with it as one would a child in need, and then imagine the situation already resolved with specific sensory detail until the feeling shifts. In the evening, review moments that appeared to contradict your assumption and revise them in imagination as if they had unfolded from your higher state. See yourself in the scene as honored, nurtured, and creative; feel the relief and joy as actual. Practice this steady rotation of praise, humble engagement, and revision until the new self-concept becomes effortless. Over time, outer circumstances will begin to align with the inner reality because consciousness has already enacted the change that the world now mirrors.

Divine Reversal: Praise That Lifts the Lowly

Psalm 113 reads like a short, concentrated stage-play of inner life: a chorus calling to attention, an exalted Presence who at once abides on high and stoops to the low, and a dramatic reversal in which nothingness is made fertile. Read psychologically, the characters are not people in history but states of consciousness and the action is the creative work of imagination.

The opening cry, 'Praise ye the LORD. Praise, O ye servants of the LORD, praise the name of the LORD,' is a summons to the faculties of attention, memory, feeling and will to recognise their source. The word 'servants' names those subordinate parts of mind that habitually do the bidding of outer circumstance: the anxious thinker, the reactive feeling, the habit-bound chooser. Here they are invited to do what redeems them: praise. Praise, in inner language, is the act of deliberate acknowledgement — to look upon the creative Self and affirm its sovereignty. It is not mere ritual; it is recognition, the cognitive movement that aligns all lower functions with the sovereign power of imagination.

'Blessed be the name of the LORD from this time forth and for evermore.' Psychologically this is the proclamation that once a new conception of self is assumed and established, it becomes a permanent mode of consciousness. 'From this time forth' marks the decisive moment of assumption; 'for evermore' points to the continuity that attends a state fully accepted and lived from within. The drama of transformation always hinges on the moment we internalise the new name — the new identity — and refuse to be moved by outer evidence.

'From the rising of the sun unto the going down of the same the LORD's name is to be praised.' The rising and setting of the sun map the cycle of attention across the day. Every waking hour offers the opportunity to affirm the inner Presence. This line says: from dawn's first imagination to the evening's recollection, praise is the practice that preserves the state. It is an instruction: let the creative faculty be honoured in the mornings of aspiration and the evenings of reflection. The cycle of praise keeps the field of consciousness fertile.

'The LORD is high above all nations, and his glory above the heavens.' Here the Psalm dramatizes the vertical structure of the psyche. 'High above all nations' names a transcendent aspect of mind that is not confined by the fragmented opinions, conditions, and limiting identities (the 'nations') that crowd the horizontal plane of social life. The glory 'above the heavens' is the luminosity of imagination beyond sensory categories. It is the awareness that the power which fashions experience is not found in the shifting crowd of outer things but above them: in that luminous center from which subjective realities form.

Yet the text immediately offers a paradox: 'Who is like unto the LORD our God, who dwelleth on high, Who humbleth himself to behold the things that are in heaven, and in the earth!' This line stages the central creative mystery: the same Imaginative Presence that rests on high descends and identifies with the content of experience. Psychologically, the divine act is not remote transcendence alone but incarnation — the high faculty of mind lowers itself to inhabit and look upon earthly states, to taste them from within. This is the mechanism of transformation: the elevated state does not annihilate the low; it enters it, perceives it, and by that intimate attention changes it.

The next verse is pure psychological alchemy: 'He raiseth up the poor out of the dust, and lifteth the needy out of the dunghill; That he may set him with princes, even with the princes of his people.' 'Poor' and 'needy' name the impoverished states of self — shame, despondency, lack, the identity that says 'I am nothing.' 'Dust' and 'dunghill' are metaphors for the dreary, reductionist self-image. The creative faculty's act of raising is the imaginal assumption: by entering and presiding over those low states, the higher self re-frames and elevates them. When you assume, in living feeling, the reality of a richer identity, that very act sets the formerly poor state among 'princes' — dignified possibilities of character and circumstance. Transformation is not a moral scolding; it is a re-scripting of inner narrative until the character formerly cast as pauper acts and is treated as prince.

'He maketh the barren woman to keep house, and to be a joyful mother of children.' The barren woman is the psyche that believes itself unproductive, a will closed to creativity. Imagination is the midwife that opens the womb of possibility. In practical terms, when the mind assumes the state of fulness and sustains it, potentials long deemed sterile begin to bear fruit. Projects that seemed impossible give birth; relationships become fruitful; the inner life multiplies its expressions. Joy accompanies this productivity because the newly created forms are recognized as extensions of a redefined self.

Behind these lines is a consistent psychological method. First, identify the sovereign faculty (the LORD) within — the imaginative center that 'dwelleth on high.' Second, call the lesser parts to praise; praise is both acknowledgement and alignment. Third, allow the imaginative center to stoop: bring the high self into the low scene and feel from within its assumed reality. Fourth, persist in the inner act until the world of outer senses reshapes to reflect the inner reality. This is the creative arc: assumption, feeling, persistence, and letting go in grateful trust.

The 'who is like unto the LORD' question serves as an appeal against despairing comparisons. The mind that habitually measures itself against external standards experiences defeat; the imagination that knows itself as sovereign measures by inner standard and so dissolves envy and lack. Nations and heavens are the myriad competing identities and beliefs; the Psalm calls the reader to sovereign identification with the creative center rather than submission to those transient rulers.

'Praise ye the LORD' returns at the close not as a ritual echo but as a practical injunction. Praise is the technology of inner change. It is the disciplined act of attention that honours the assumption already made. When the lower servants praise, they stop rebutting the new state with contrary evidence. Praise closes the gap between feeling and fact because it keeps consciousness oriented toward the chosen reality.

The psychological drama of Psalm 113 therefore resolves into an operating principle: imagination is the hidden agent that both transcends and enters the world of sense, and by conscious, felt assumption it recreates the inner and outer life. The poor are not permanently poor; the barren are not forever sterile. These are temporary roles enacted in the theatre of mind. The divine act — the descent of imagination into condition — raises the scene to a new identity. The operative verbs in the Psalm — to praise, to bless, to raise, to lift, to make fruitful — are not metaphors of piety but verbs of transformation that describe what happens when attention and feeling align behind a new assumption.

Practically applied: when a part of you identifies as lacking, call the servants (your attention, memory, emotion) to praise the inner Presence. Quietly assume the state of plenitude: feel the dignity, the warmth, the competence of the 'prince' you wish to be. Stay with that feeling until it becomes the normal weather of your mind. Do this from morning to evening: let the rising sun meet an imaginal rehearsal and let the setting sun receive the gratitude of fulfilled feeling. Expect not necessarily immediate outer spectacles, but know that inner occupation prepares a new place for you; external means will conform in time.

Psalm 113, then, is less a hymn about an external deity than a manual for psychological craft. It teaches how the human imagination, acknowledged and invoked, elevates the lowly and fills the barren. The chorus of servants learns to praise because praise is the engine whereby the sovereign within is recognised, given scope, and allowed to act. The drama is both accessible and urgent: in the theatre of your own consciousness, assume the higher role, let the Presence descend and look upon your life, and watch as what was once dust becomes a throne.

Common Questions About Psalms 113

How would Neville Goddard interpret Psalm 113 in light of the Law of Assumption?

Neville Goddard would read Psalm 113 as scripture describing the inner reversals enacted by assumption: the kingdom of imagination lifts what appears low to its true estate, for what you assume to be true in consciousness becomes your outer fact. The psalm’s language about God humbling Himself to behold heaven and earth and raising the poor from the dust maps to the creative act within — the I AM who dwells in you assumes a state and then glorifies it; see especially the reversal verses (Psalm 113:7–8). Practically, the psalm invites you to praise the imagined state until it is accepted as your reality.

Can Psalm 113 be used as an affirmation or imagining exercise to manifest blessings?

Yes; Psalm 113 can be used as a scriptural seed for affirming and imagining the desired state by speaking and, more importantly, feeling its truth as already accomplished. Use select phrases as present-tense declarations and translate them into first-person scenes: imagine being lifted from dust, seated with princes, or receiving joyful increase, then dwell in the sensory reality of that scene until conviction replaces doubt. Repeat at a quiet hour or at the rising of the sun to anchor the assumption (Psalm 113:3). The psalm’s tone of praise accelerates acceptance because praise embodies the fulfilled feeling of the wished-for state.

What specific lines of Psalm 113 best map to Neville's teaching on consciousness creating reality?

Lines that most clearly mirror the teaching that consciousness creates reality are those that speak of divine reversal and intimate attention: 'The LORD is high above all nations' points to the sovereign imagination that rules experience; 'who humbleth himself to behold the things that are in heaven, and in the earth' speaks to inward attention that creative consciousness gives; and most pointedly 'He raiseth up the poor out of the dust, and lifteth the needy out of the dunghill' and 'He maketh the barren woman to keep house' describe the transformation from lack to plenty when assumption occupies the throne (Psalm 113:4, 113:5, 113:7–9). These lines become practical keys to assume and feel.

How do I meditate on Psalm 113 to embody the 'lifted from the dust' reversal promised in the psalm?

Begin by finding a restful, twilight state of relaxed attention, as if drifting to sleep; breathe slowly and let the outer world fade. Silently intone the essence of the verse in present tense—see and feel yourself lifted from dust to dignity, seated with princes, joyous and provided for—and replay a short, vivid scene in first person where every detail confirms the reversal. Hold that scene until it acquires emotional reality; discharge with inner praise and gratitude as the psalm models, for praise cements the assumed state (Psalm 113:7–8). Repeat nightly until the feeling becomes your natural state.

Are there Neville Goddard lectures or notes that apply Psalms (specifically 113) to manifestation practice?

Neville Goddard treated many Psalms and scriptural passages as dramatizations of inner states, and while there may not be a widely known lecture titled only for Psalm 113, his lectures and books demonstrate how to read any psalm as a technique of assumption; search his talks for terms like 'Psalm,' 'praise,' or 'imaginal acts' and consult his practical works such as Feeling Is the Secret and The Power of Awareness for method. In other words, the application exists throughout his teachings: take the psalm’s imagery, make it a first‑person scene, feel it real, and persist until the outer world conforms.