Psalm 12: Strength and Weakness as Consciousness

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🔍 Explore Verse Ranges in Psalms 12

Quick Insights

A cry of inner alarm when integrity seems to vanish from the field of awareness and truth is drowned by flattering, double-tongued thought.
The drama names two opposing currents: corrupt, self-assertive speech that claims mastery, and a purifying presence that will correct and preserve what is true.
Suffering and quiet need are held in the imagination until an awakened will sets a different condition and brings safety to the vulnerable interior.
The ultimate authority in the psyche is revealed as the single, refined word that survives testing and returns the soul to a steady ground.

What is the Main Point of Psalms 12?

This chapter describes a psychological turning point: when honest qualities seem to disappear amid a chorus of half-truths and self-exaltation, the inner corrective power must rise and reestablish a purified imaginative statement. It teaches that the life of consciousness depends on the quality of speech and feeling we preserve; when deceit and vanity dominate the social mind, the soul's salvific word—clear, tested, and uncompromised—becomes the instrument that rescues the needy and restores order within.

What is the Spiritual Meaning of Psalms 12?

The opening lament is an awareness of the loss of moral and spiritual presence, a perception that what once held steady in the heart has diminished. Psychologically this is felt as the ceasing of a faithful inner companion, the aspect of self that maintained consistency and integrity. When that reliable center seems gone, the mind notices an increase of 'flattering lips'—thoughts and voices that mimic truth while aiming at advantage, and a double heart that oscillates between appearances. This stage is painful because imagination is both the source of confusion and the place where clarity can be made; recognizing the deceit is the first act of recovery. The text then gestures toward an inner adjudicator that will 'cut off' the deceitful tongue. This is not external punishment but an internal corrective: a refusal to affirm false claims and a withdrawal of attention from all persuasive but hollow narratives. When imagination refuses to feed vanity it begins to starve the lie. The promise to arise on behalf of the oppressed is the moment when the conscious will identifies with the afflicted part of the psyche—the needy, the poor in spirit—and reaffirms care, protection, and a new imaginative posture that counters the puffed-up ego. Finally, the declaration that the words of the true authority are like silver refined suggests an inner speech purified by repeated testing and restraint. Purification seven times describes a process of deliberate examination and refinement of belief until only essentials remain. As a lived practice this means cultivating an inner vocabulary of precise, honest statements and refusing the seductive ease of flattery. The preservation of that refined speech across a generation is the promise that a purified imagination can outlast the current confusion and seed a renewed collective consciousness.

Key Symbols Decoded

The 'godly man' who ceaseth is the steady moral center or faithful imagination that no longer dominates awareness; his apparent absence marks a stage where habit and distraction have usurped the place of integrity. Flattering lips and a double heart are not merely speech patterns but the energetic motions of a divided psyche—one side seeking favor and power through agreeable falsehood, the other oscillating with insecurity. The 'tongue that speaketh proud things' is the ego's voice of self-justification that insists on its sovereignty and claims immunity from correction. The 'lord' who arises for the oppressed is the conscious choice to align with vulnerability and inner truth rather than with appearance. The 'pure words' like silver tested in a furnace are symbols of affirmed imaginings that have been deliberately repeated, examined, and kept free from compromise. To preserve these words across a generation means to embody a way of thinking and speaking so regular and genuine that it becomes the cultural rhythm of one's inner life.

Practical Application

Begin by listening inwardly and naming the voices that dominate your imagination: which are flattering, which double-heart the truth, and which feel like the faithful center you miss. Practice refusing to consent inwardly to flattering narratives; when the puffed-up ego speaks, deliberately withhold your agreement and redirect attention to small, concrete statements of reality that you can inhabit. Use imaginative sentences as silver to be tested—repeat brief, believable affirmations of care and steadiness, watch for their proofs in feeling, and refine them whenever they reveal pretension or self-interest. When you notice the part of you that is poor in spirit or silently sighing, imagine a protective presence rising for that part. Give it words that are simple, precise, and compassionate, and act inside your imagination as if that protection is already true. Over time these purified inner words will stop feeding dishonest patterns and will instead create a field where truthful speech and steady feeling are preserved, resisting the exaltation of the baser currents and restoring an enduring sense of safety and integrity.

The Inner Drama of Truth: Faith, Falsehood, and the Power of Speech

Psalm 12, read as a psychological drama, stages a moment inside consciousness where the inner life cries out for rescue. The psalm opens with a plaintive inward cry: help is sought because the godly one seems to have ceased and the faithful have failed among the children of men. This first line names a psychic crisis: the integrity and fidelity of the higher self appear to disappear from the theater of awareness. The godly man and the faithful are not historical people but conditions of mind — steady attention, purity of imagination, and inner fidelity — that, when they withdraw, leave the subjective world exposed to the loud and flattering voices of a restless egoic chorus.

The scene that follows dramatizes the conversation of lesser states: flattering lips, double hearts, proud tongues. These are not moral indictments against neighbors but descriptions of how mind multiplies its lesser narratives. Flattery describes the persuasive surface of thought that seeks to manipulate circumstances and people to support the ego. The double heart is divided attention, the split between what one inwardly believes and what one outwardly performs. The proud tongue is the narrative voice that boasts of owning its words and freedom: our lips are our own, who is lord over us. This rhetorical question is the egoic declaration of autonomy, the moment mind claims authorship and refuses the inner sovereign that actually brings form into being.

The psalmist’s complaint — the faithful fail — is the felt consequence of believing the chatter. When attention abandons the deeper imaginal faculty and becomes reactive to outer impressions, the qualities that create and sustain the godly state seem to vanish. The scriptural remedy proposed is not social reform but an internal intervention: an arising. I will arise, saith the LORD, I will set him in safety. In psychological terms this signifies a decisive reclaiming of imaginative authority. The Lord is the sovereign imagination, the inner law that originates reality. When it arises, it rescues the oppressed center of being — the poor and the needy within — who have been battered by breathy judgments and the puff of opinions.

This salvific action is described as setting the needy in safety from him that puffeth at him. The puffing one is the wind of public opinion, the bluster of competitive mind, the transient currents that inflate themselves with borrowed prestige. They can only intimidate consciousness when imagination sleeps. The arising of the inner law is not a coercive act but a return to felt identity and to the power of the word as lived feeling. The needy part of the psyche — the part that longs for truth, beauty, and love — is thereby sheltered. This is the psychological process of reclaiming the center: the creative imagination enacts a boundary around the vulnerable core, restoring dignity and silence.

The psalm then turns to the qualitative nature of the divine speech: the words of the LORD are pure words, silver refined in a furnace of earth and purified seven times. Here the text moves from drama into doctrine of method. The words of the inner sovereign are not careless phrases but felt sentences refined by iteration and attention. The image of silver purified seven times signals completeness. To imagine is to speak, but the real creative word is an imaginative word matured by sustained feeling. The furnace of earth is the human condition: suffering, trials, and daily experience act as the crucible that tempers the imaginative word until it is unmixed with doubt, fear, or impatience.

Purity of word means congruence between inner assertion and sensory feeling. The mind that pretends finality without feeling produces only flattering lips; the mind that feels and knows produces pure words that, when assumed with conviction, command the mechanism of manifestation. The psalmist’s assurance that these words will be kept and preserved from generation to generation uses generational language to describe a timeless psychological law. Once the inner word is refined to purity, it becomes a preserved potential in the storehouse of consciousness. It survives the churn of passing opinions and becomes the seed of future reality.

Against this inner promise the psalm pictures the outer scene: the wicked walk on every side, the vilest men are exalted. These are not strangers to be fought but states in consciousness: fear, envy, falseness, attention invested in appearance and competition. They seem to dominate because they are noisy and because those who hold the power of quiet imagining have yielded. The drama here is simple and familiar: when the creator within sleeps, the created chaos outside seems to be lord. The remedy, however, is not to battle those outer phenomena; it is to resurrect the inner Lord whose words are pure and whose imaginative decree reorders the visible.

How does imagination operate in this psalm as creative power? First, prayer or cry for help is directed inward. Help, LORD is an appeal to the creative faculty. It is not begging God as an external agent but calling upon the sovereign state of imagination to take hold. Second, the arising of that sovereign is a reversal of attention: instead of being buffeted by flattering lips, the individual chooses to entertain and assume the inner words that are pure. Third, the purification process is practical: repeat, refine, feel. The sevenfold refinement is an allegory for persistent revision of inner speech until every phrase is congruent with feeling.

This methodology explains why faith may appear to fail and then be restored. The faithful do not abandon their function; consciousness has merely misplaced its allegiance. Restoration occurs when imagination is again used consciously to speak and feel the word until it becomes unassailable within. The protective action that arrises is not magic in the external sense but the inevitable outcome of one imaginal fact: feeling assumed and held becomes fact. The needy element of the self is lifted not by argument but by being cherished inwardly until it assumes its rightful shape.

Psalm 12, then, serves as a manual for the inner dramatist: observe the actors within, discern who speaks for truth and who speaks for vanity, and choose the voice that refines rather than inflates. The professing ego will always claim liberty of lips, yet that very claim is the sign of servitude to fleeting circumstances. The sovereign imagination speaks just once and with feeling; the multiple flattering tongues speak often but with emptiness. When you permit the sovereign voice to speak, it cuts off the flattering lips by withdrawing attention from them and investing instead in the pure word.

Finally, the psalm points to an ethical and practical outcome: when imagination governs, what was needy is placed in safety and the pure word is preserved. The inner world becomes a safe harbor irrespective of outer disorder. The wicked may walk on every side in the theater of life, but within the dominion of the purified imaginative faculty there is a preserved reality that endures across generations of thought and circumstance.

In practice this means: notice when your inner faithful states seem to fail; locate the flattering lips within you and refuse to heed their clamour; call inwardly on the sovereign imagination with specific, felt words; refine those words by returning to them until the feeling is pure and unshakable. As the inner words are purified they manifest as changed experience. The psalm thus teaches a psychology of creation: reality is not reformed by information or by external battle, but by the authoritative, felt word of imagination that arises, refines, and shelters the needy center until the outer world rearranges itself to reflect the inner decree.

Common Questions About Psalms 12

How does Neville Goddard interpret Psalm 12?

Neville Goddard reads Psalm 12 as an account of states within consciousness: the prevalence of flattering lips and a double heart describes outward speech divorced from inner assumption, while the Lord arising to set the needy in safety names the inward I AM that preserves true imagination; the words of the Lord as silver tried (Psalm 12:6) point to purified imagination and feeling. He teaches that Scripture is an allegory of states — when the godly fail outwardly, one must maintain the inner state of faith and assume the fulfilled man; the preservation of pure words is the discipline of feeling your declaration as already true, allowing assumption to harden into fact.

Where can I find a Neville Goddard-style commentary or PDF on Psalm 12?

Rather than chasing a single PDF, begin with collections of lectures and transcripts found in archives and student libraries, then apply the method to the Psalm yourself; the fastest way is to read the Psalm, note its images of flattery, double hearts, and the Lord's pure words (Psalm 12:2,6), and practice assuming the state those images point to. Many study groups and lecture repositories host Neville's transcripts and audio, but the most authentic commentary is produced by entering the described state and speaking from that inner assumption; create a short written meditation of your own and use it as your living commentary.

Can Psalm 12 be used as a manifestation meditation following Neville's methods?

Yes; use Psalm 12 as seed ideas and convert its images into felt assumptions: relax, enter the state akin to the Lord arising to save (Psalm 12:5), imagine with sensory detail the protection and safety already given, and feel the purity of words (Psalm 12:6) as an inner knowing rather than a wish. Visualize no more flattering lips or double hearts around you while living from the inner conviction that your case is settled; repeat the inner scene quietly until it dominates your consciousness, then go about your day living from that assumption so imagination can bring it into manifestation.

Which Neville Goddard lectures or recordings reference themes similar to Psalm 12?

Look for lectures and chapters that treat assumption, the I AM, and the purification of imagination—titles such as Feeling Is the Secret and The Power of Awareness address protecting the inner state and the creative authority of the assumed feeling, while talks on I AM and Assumption discuss the preservation of 'pure words' and the arising of the Lord as an inner power (Psalm 12:5-6). Listening to recordings about the unity of speech and feeling, and studying sessions on the elimination of doubt and divided states, will illuminate Psalm 12 as a manual for maintaining a single, creative consciousness.

What does 'flattering lips' and 'a double heart' mean in Neville's consciousness-based teaching?

Flattering lips describe speech that attempts to shape the world while the heart or assumption contradicts it; a double heart is divided consciousness, holding two mutually exclusive assumptions at once (Psalm 12:2-3). In practical terms, flattering lips are declarations without feeling, and the double heart is the split between what you say outwardly and what you feel inwardly. The remedy is unity: discipline your imagination until speech and feeling agree, thereby making your words silver tried (Psalm 12:6). When assumption and feeling are one, outer circumstances conform to the inner conviction instead of remaining a catalogue of contradictory statements.