Psalms 115

The Inner Drama of Trust: Choosing the Living God Over Idols

Psalm 115 read as a drama of consciousness is not a story about external deities and idols but an anatomy of the mind learning to trust its own highest center. The psalm opens with a protest: not unto us, O Lord, not unto us, but unto thy name give glory. Psychologically this is the moment of distinction between the small self and the higher Self. The small self, the ego that takes credit for appearances and achievements, is asked to stand aside. The glory is to be given to the name, the identifying principle within consciousness that represents the creative I AM. The scene is set inside the psyche: the foreground is the ego, busy taking credit, while the background is the higher knowing that actually orders all manifestation. The drama begins when attention is turned away from the ego and toward that inner name.

The psalm then asks, wherefore should the heathen say, where is now their God? Here the heathen are not foreigners in a distant land but parts of the mind that trust senses, opinion, and outer circumstance. They ask skeptically, asking where the living power is when outward evidence seems absent. This corresponds to the doubting faculty and the crowd of unexamined beliefs that live by what can be touched and measured. The psalm answers that our God is in the heavens: he has done whatsoever he hath pleased. Internally, heavens represent the higher states of consciousness: imagination, intuition, and the creative field where ideas originate. The declaration that the God of the psalmist has acted there is a way of saying that true causation occurs in the unseen imaginings, not in the visible effects. The creative intelligence has already acted; the visible world is only catching up.

The next section rails against idols, silver and gold, the work of men's hands. Idols are the concrete, sense-bound constructs we mistake for reality: roles, titles, acquired things, reputations, and mental images that claim autonomous power. They have mouths but speak not, eyes but see not, ears but hear not. Psychologically, idols are fixed imaginal forms that lack life; they are images that cannot respond because they are merely repetitions and habits. They are mute because they were formed by rote and now govern behavior without living connectivity to consciousness. The people who make them are like them; so is everyone that trusteth in them. This is an important pivot: our creations, when imagined as separate realities, reflect back the limitation of the consciousness that made them. Trusting what one has made into an idol is trusting a dead pattern rather than enlivened imagination.

The psalmist then names three groups: O Israel, O house of Aaron, ye that fear the Lord. These are not tribes but states of mind. Israel is the individuated consciousness that recognizes its destiny; the house of Aaron is the priestly center, the inner function that mediates between the invisible and the visible; those who fear the Lord are the reverent attitudes of caution and respect toward the creative power. Each is invited to trust in the Lord: he is their help and their shield. Trust here is not passive; it is an active assumption, a chosen stance of confidence in inner reality. The Lord as help and shield is imagination functioning as protection: it shelters from the panic of outer proofs, and provides the sustaining picture which propels manifestation. The priestly house, the right relationship of imagination to feeling, becomes the conduit through which higher ideas flow into concrete form.

He hath been mindful of us: he will bless us. Mindfulness is the human capacity to attend to the presence that formed the idea. When consciousness remembers its source—its own imaginative identity—the creative promise is activated. Blessing is not an external gift but the inward shaping of events to match the assumed state. The promise that the Lord will increase you more and more, you and your children, reads as the natural multiplication of imagined states. When a primary assumption is held in the imagination, derivative beliefs, choices, and behaviors align and grow. "You and your children" are the offspring of thought: subsidiary states, new habits, relationships, and circumstances that birth themselves from an initial imaginal seed.

Ye are blessed of the Lord which made heaven and earth. This line reverses a common misunderstanding: heaven and earth are not separate realms to be reconciled externally. Heaven is that inner creative realm; earth is the field of manifestation given to the children of men to inhabit and shape. To be blessed by the creator of both is to be given both the idea and the power to realize it. The mind that recognizes this is no longer at the mercy of appearances.

The stark verse, the dead praise not the Lord, neither any that go down into silence, introduces the critical distinction between conscious involvement and mechanical existence. The dead are patterns, automatisms, and identities that have lost the animating power of imagination. They continue to function but they cannot praise because praise implies recognition and active alignment with the creative center. Silence is the state of unconsciousness where no forming image is held. The drama now places the living agent—conscious attention—against these dead states. To bless the Lord from this time forth and for evermore is the resolve to remain as the living participant, to praise by assuming and to sustain that assumption.

Read as psychological process, Psalm 115 maps a sequence of internal transformations. First, withdraw honor from the lesser self that claims accomplishment. Second, identify the heavens of imagination as the site of true causation. Third, expose and renounce idols—static images and sense-traps—by recognizing their incapacity to respond or create. Fourth, gather the priestly functions of mediation (attention, feeling, disciplined imagination) into trustful cooperation with the higher Self. Fifth, allow mindfulness to fertilize the imaginal seeds so blessing multiplies into subsidiary realities. Sixth, choose life by rejecting the dead patterns of habituality and instead praise the creative center with sustained assumption.

In practical terms: when an inner conflict arises, name the idolatrous image you are serving—anxiety, lack, a role—and see that image for what it is: silent, fixed, and powerless to alter itself. Turn attention upward, into the heavenly faculty that conceives of the desired state as already accomplished. Assume the name, the identifying phrase of the higher Self: the quiet assertion of I AM that stands free of circumstance. From the seat of the house of Aaron—the inner priesthood—offer feelings of praise and gratitude as if the reality were already present. This is not ritual but psychological technology: the inward act that certifies a state as true. Continue until the blind idols begin to lose their dominance and the new pattern children themselves into outward expression.

The creative power operating within human consciousness is thus recast from an external miracle to a continuous imaginal activity. God in the heavens who hath done whatsoever he hath pleased is the imagination exercising sovereign choice. The earth given to the children of men is the daily world where those choices are enacted. Nothing prevents the alignment except misplaced trust in the dead. And the dead do not change: they praise not the Lord because they have no capacity for the new. The living, by contrast, praise and therefore change; praise is the psychological act that acknowledges the already-real in the unseen, and in doing so it reorganizes perception until outer scenes conform.

This psalm, then, is an instruction manual for inner sovereignty. It refuses literalism and insists that sacred language be read inwardly. Idols of silver and gold are nothing but beliefs held as facts; the Lord is the power of imagining with conviction; Israel and Aaron are qualities within us that either respond to that power or cling to the counterfeit. The ultimate movement is from silence to song: from the unmoving clay of habit to the living voice of assumption. When one takes this path, the mind becomes a workshop where new worlds are fashioned. The last line, praise the Lord, becomes not a final benediction but a continuing practice: an ongoing choice to live in the creative name and to let that name be the source of every subsequent form.