Psalm 143: Strength and Weakness of Consciousness

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Quick Insights

A cry from a cramped consciousness seeking release, moving through overwhelm to focused trust.
The drama of persecution describes inner opposition, the dark imagination that flattens vitality and imposes deathlike stillness.
Turning inward to remember and imagine rekindles feeling, and reaching toward a higher presence restores direction and life.
The arc is a psychological rescue: acknowledge despair, remember creative agency, imagine guidance, and enact the renewed state.

What is the Main Point of Psalms 143?

This chapter is a psychological map showing how a disoriented state of consciousness becomes a sheltering, sovereign mind through directed imagination. It opens with honest admission of inner collapse, feeling persecuted by hostile thoughts that make life feel extinguished. From that low place the voice turns upward, not to escape reality but to reshape it by returning attention to what is steady and faithful, asking for instruction and light. The essential principle is that attention forms reality: if you willfully dwell on the lifeless, you remain undone; if you turn attention to an inner presence and rehearse the state of guidance, direction and rescue unfold as immediate psychological facts.

What is the Spiritual Meaning of Psalms 143?

The initial scene of being overwhelmed and dwelling in darkness is a precise description of a consciousness identified with its fears and losses. Psychologically, persecution is not merely external attack but an internal narrative that accuses, minimizes, and drains the will. In that moment the heart becomes desolate because attention has been hijacked by images of defeat. The remedy begins when the speaker names the condition and refuses to be judged by it, which is the first exercise of consciousness reclaiming sovereignty. Remembering the days of old and meditating on works functions as an imaginative technique: it retrieves memories of previous vitality, evidence of creative power, and uses them to animate present feeling. Stretching forth hands toward the source is an embodied act of reaching, which symbolizes directing attention and expectation to a sustaining idea. Thirsting for the presence is a felt demand for a different inner state, and asking to hear lovingkindness in the morning is a way of scheduling a new emotional tone at the start of experience. Psychologically this is reconditioning the first moments of the day so that the imagination becomes fertile ground rather than a battlefield. The invocation to be taught and led into uprightness describes a cooperative process whereby attention follows an imagined guidance. It acknowledges inability while asserting trust, which paradoxically empowers imagination to move. Deliverance here is not an external miracle but the shifting of identity from victim to learner and follower of a clarified intention. When one asks for quickening for the name's sake, it is an appeal to restore the felt quality of the self so that action flows from renewed inner life; enemies, then, are simply the outdated patterns cut off by the new sustained assumption of safety and direction.

Key Symbols Decoded

Darkness and the pit are psychological images for states where imagination has gone stilled and hope is absent; they describe the mind turned inward upon fear and convinced of collapse. To dwell in darkness is to habitually replay loss and thereby shut down creative feeling, while the pit signifies the complete surrender to that replay, an acceptance of futility that must be refused. Stretching forth hands, thirsting, and lifting up the soul are symbols of active orientation of attention. They are not passive wishes but inner gestures that reconfigure feeling. To hear lovingkindness in the morning means to condition the first reception of experience to be benevolent, thereby altering the tone of subsequent events. Enemies and afflictors are not literal antagonists but the recurring thoughts that oppose the desired state; cutting them off is the sustained practice of occupying the inner throne with a new, supporting imagination.

Practical Application

Begin by acknowledging the exact quality of your inner disturbance without shame, naming the heaviness and the images that press you down. Then deliberately bring to mind a memory or image of creative, sustaining reality that has authority over you, and hold that image until feeling follows thought. Use a simple ritual of reaching in posture or gesture while imagining the restorative presence, and make that the first short exercise each morning so the day is launched from a renewed assumption of guidance. When anxious narratives arise, speak inwardly as the voice that refuses judgment, asking for instruction rather than arguing with fear. Imagine a pathway appearing underfoot and see yourself walking it with a steady intention; let the imagination supply sensory detail and feeling tone, because the repeated felt experience rewires expectation. Persist in this inner rehearsal until the habitual oppressors lose their power and the mind naturally returns to the constructive state that creates a different lived reality.

The Inner Drama of Desperate Prayer: A Soul's Turn Toward Light

Psalm 143 read as a psychological drama reveals a single mind at war with itself, moving through states of oppression, petition, illumination, and renewal. Instead of an external courtroom and battlefield, the scene is staged entirely within consciousness. The speaker is the self that remembers and longs; the LORD is the higher consciousness, the abiding awareness or imaginational center that can re-form experience; the enemies are inner beliefs, habits, fears and memories that have gained authority. Places and acts in the Psalm—darkness, the pit, the land of uprightness, the morning—are inner landscapes and times of attention. The drama is, at its core, about imagination creating and transforming reality by shifting the felt assumption that governs experience.

The Psalm opens with an urgent interior address: hear my prayer, give ear to my supplications; in thy faithfulness answer me, and in thy righteousness. This voice is the conscious part that turns inward and speaks to the higher Self. Prayer here is not a request to an outside deity but an intentional act of attention and imagining. To 'give ear' is to focus; to ask for answer in 'faithfulness' and 'righteousness' names the quality needed in the imaginal act: constancy (faithfulness) and alignment with truth (righteousness). The speaker is asking the central imagining faculty to respond by assuming a posture that will change the felt reality.

Enter not into judgment with thy servant: for in thy sight shall no man living be justified. This line dramatizes two voices: the critic and the witness. Judgment is the censoring mind that measures and condemns. The plea is to forbid the censor from asserting dominion, because self-judgment only perpetuates the state one seeks to transcend. 'No man living be justified' suggests that external validation cannot alter the inner state; what justifies is the assumed state in the inward theater. When the higher attention refuses the inner judge's verdict, the imagination can remake the scene.

The enemy hath persecuted my soul; he hath smitten my life down to the ground; he hath made me to dwell in darkness, as those that have been long dead. The enemy is the battery of limiting beliefs and conditioned responses that press the conscious life to the floor. 'Darkness' and being 'like those that have been long dead' are metaphors for anesthesia of creative power—automatized thought, numbness, apathy. This is the state in which imagination is either asleep or enslaved to past impressions. The drama actor here experiences oppression: attention is fixed on loss, failure, injury, and the felt sense of contraction becomes the cause of corresponding outer events.

Therefore is my spirit overwhelmed within me; my heart within me is desolate. Memory and feeling compound the collapse: the imagination that could animate possibility is overwhelmed by cumulative negative impressions. The Psalmist now turns memory into a deliberate practice: I remember the days of old; I meditate on all thy works; I muse on the work of thy hands. Memory becomes method. Recollecting 'days of old' is not clinging to nostalgia but remembering moments when the higher Self was lived. Meditation and musing are imaginal rehearsals—an inner rehearsal of formative acts and outcomes already chosen by the center that is addressed as LORD.

I stretch forth my hands unto thee: my soul thirsteth after thee, as a thirsty land. The stretched hands are imaginative reaching: an act of attention projecting into the presence of the higher center. The thirst language names longing—an affective vacuum that seeks fulfillment only in the act of imagining being fulfilled. The image of the thirsty land captures how receptive expectation converts emptiness into readiness for the creative influx. This reaching is essential: imagination must be moved and held toward its chosen state for that state to appear as reality.

Selah. This pause is a technical device in the inner drama. Selah is a deliberate suspension of the inner monologue, an assumption held until it yields form. In psychological practice it is the steadying of the feeling of the wish fulfilled. The actor of consciousness waits inside the assumed reality instead of arguing about method. During Selah the mind ceases to rehearse the negative and remains in the experiential acceptance of the desired scene.

Hear me speedily, O LORD: my spirit faileth: hide not thy face from me, lest I be like unto them that go down into the pit. Urgency follows. Speed is not haste but immediacy of attention—an insistence that the imaginal orientation be re-stabilized now, because the longer one remains in the dark patterns the deeper the descent into the pit of despair becomes. The 'face' of the higher consciousness is the felt presence one assumes; when it withdraws—when attention is diverted—the ego slips back into old identifications and sinks into the pit, a psychological abyss where agency seems extinguished.

Cause me to hear thy lovingkindness in the morning; for in thee do I trust: cause me to know the way wherein I should walk; for I lift up my soul unto thee. 'Morning' designates the first assumption upon waking, the primary scene held by imagination that colors the whole day. To 'hear lovingkindness' in the morning is to awaken to benevolent expectation. Trust is the willingness to assume the higher story despite contradictory sensory evidence. 'Cause me to know the way' asks for inner revelation—the attending faculty to guide the will. Lifting the soul is the act of centering attention in the chosen identity from which right action flows.

Deliver me, O LORD, from mine enemies: I flee unto thee to hide me. Deliverance is an imaginal extraction: turning the focus from the army of old impressions to the shelter of the higher presence. To flee and hide is not physical escape but psychological reversion: withdrawing attention from the objective world of evidence and entering the sanctuary of inner assumption. There the destructive thoughts cannot pursue because the mind no longer provides them fuel.

Teach me to do thy will; for thou art my God: thy spirit is good; lead me into the land of uprightness. Now the Psalmist asks for discipline and alignment. 'Teach me' is an appeal for imagination to adopt new scripts; 'thy will' represents the higher purpose already realized in consciousness. The 'land of uprightness' is integrity—an inner state in which imagination and action are congruent. To be led into this land is to allow the higher organizing principle to redesign behavior, perception, and outcome through sustained assumption.

Quicken me, O LORD, for thy name's sake: for thy righteousness' sake bring my soul out of trouble. Quicken speaks to enlivening—reviving the dormant creative faculty. 'For thy name's sake' points to invoking the quality of the higher Self as cause; calling on that quality summons its power. Bringing the soul out of trouble is the process by which the felt assumption is shifted from lack to fullness, and as a result the outer scene adapts to the inner fact.

And of thy mercy cut off mine enemies, and destroy all them that afflict my soul: for I am thy servant. The final request frames psychological surgery: cutting off enemies is terminating the authority of limiting beliefs. To 'destroy' is to eradicate the imaginal habits that reproduce pain. The declaration 'I am thy servant' expresses surrender of small-self will to the directing presence—the imagination that knows itself as creator. Service here is not subjugation but the conscious yielding to the creative source within.

Throughout, the mechanism is clear: imagination feelingly assumes, attention sustains, memory becomes rehearsal, and inner speech addresses the higher center to secure a new posture. The Psalm's verbs—hear, remember, meditate, stretch, flee, teach, quicken, cut off—describe progressive interior acts that alter the field of expectation. This is biblical psychology: the sacred language becomes a map of mental operations rather than a chronicle of external events.

Practical sense emerges from this reading. When darkness presses, do not invite judgment; instead remember instances of presence and rehearse them until the Selah—your pause of assumption—becomes unshakable. Begin mornings by 'hearing lovingkindness' through grateful imagining; flee from the siege of fear by deliberately hiding attention in the felt certainty of the higher Self. Ask to be taught: allow imagination to supply scenes of the 'land of uprightness' and follow the actions those scenes compel. 'Cut off enemies' by refusing to entertain the old narratives; where attention goes, life consolidates, so withdraw investment from the enemy images and invest it in renewal.

Psalm 143, then, is a blueprint for reclaiming creative sovereignty. The LORD is not a remote judge but the living center of imagination; the enemies are the internalized past; the pit is a consumptive posture of attention. The work is psychological and imaginal: to turn supplication into assumption, to transform memory into rehearsal, to use the pause of Selah to hold the felt end. When this inner drama is enacted, reality outside inevitably rearranges itself to correspond to the new inner state, for imagination is the fertile soil from which all experience grows.

Common Questions About Psalms 143

Can I use Psalms 143 as a manifestation prayer or visualization script?

Yes — Psalm 143 can be used as a manifestation prayer by treating its language as sentences of assumed consciousness rather than petitions for later. Select lines that mirror your desired state, such as seeking guidance or deliverance, and repeat them as present-tense assumptions while building the inner scene until feeling completes the picture; for example, imagine being led into the land of uprightness and feel its calm reality (Ps. 143). Make the prayer brief, vivid, and finished, then dismiss doubt by occupying the natural activities of the day. The power lies not in words but in living the imagined outcome until it hardens into fact.

Are there Neville-style guided meditations or readings based on Psalms 143?

Yes; one can craft Neville-style guided meditations from Psalm 143 by using its phrases as present-tense affirmations and building a short inner scene that produces feeling. Begin with the psalmist's cry for the morning hearing (Ps. 143:8), imagine the voice of guidance entering as a sensed assurance, then move into the "lead me into the land of uprightness" scene (Ps. 143:10) where you feel settled, safe, and right. Keep the meditation brief, sensory, and finished: see the end, live the feeling, and dismiss all contrary thought. Over time the rehearsal becomes a state of consciousness that reforms outer events; Neville recommended repeated, relaxed assumption until the new state hardens into fact.

How do you revise past failures in the light of Psalms 143 using Neville's techniques?

To revise past failures with Psalm 143, dismiss judgment and rehearse an imaginal scene where you have already been led into the upright life the psalm seeks; refuse to re-experience defeat by affirming 'enter not into judgment' as a command to attention and then live the scene in sensory detail until the feeling of victory replaces old regret. Use the psalm's request for quickening as your inner declaration of change (Ps. 143:11), repeat the new state in the quiet hours, and act from that renewed consciousness. In this practice the past is overwritten not by denial but by occupying the fulfilled state, which, by the law of assumption, becomes your present fact.

Which verses in Psalms 143 align with Neville's 'I AM' and law of assumption teachings?

Several lines in Psalm 143 read like direct teachings of the "I AM" and law of assumption: the plea "enter not into judgment" (Ps. 143:2) teaches refusal of outer evidence and maintaining the inner decree; the longing for morning hearing (Ps. 143:8) instructs the assumption upon waking and the occupation of the desired state; "teach me to do thy will... lead me into the land of uprightness" (Ps. 143:10) functions as imagining the end already given; and "quicken me" (Ps. 143:11) is the consciousness of life already present. Read as psychology, these verses guide attention, not circumstance, toward the present feeling of the fulfilled desire.

How does Neville Goddard interpret Psalms 143 in terms of consciousness and inner assumption?

Neville reads Psalms 143 as a map of states of consciousness: the psalmist's distress is an outward condition reporting an inner state, and the prayer is the deliberate assumption of a new feeling. Phrases like "enter not into judgment" instruct us to refuse outer evidence and remain in the sovereign imagination where God, the "I AM," answers. The cry for morning guidance (Ps. 143:8) becomes the practice of assuming the desired awareness upon waking, keeping attention fixed on the imagined end. In this view Scriptures speak as psychological laws: the soul thirsting after God describes the hunger of attention, and assuming the fulfilled state remakes circumstance.