Psalm 57: Refuge for the Conscious Heart

Compare with the original King James text

🔍 Explore Verse Ranges in Psalms 57

Quick Insights

The psalm stages a move from fear to refuge, showing how an inner sanctuary steadies the stream of imagination and dissolves perceived danger.
The hostile images are projections of anxious expectation; naming them allows the conscience to disarm them and invert their power.
Mercy and truth describe a felt assumption aligned with calm certainty, which the psyche then expresses outwardly as changed circumstance.
The repeated summons to exalt and wake is the practice of deliberately occupying a higher state until the body and world follow suit.

What is the Main Point of Psalms 57?

At its heart the chapter teaches that consciousness is the field where rescue happens: by assuming the attitude of safe refuge and praising an inevitable good, one stabilizes the heart, neutralizes inner enemies, and allows imagination to shape experience into deliverance.

What is the Spiritual Meaning of Psalms 57?

The opening cry for mercy is not merely petition; it marks the admission that the emergency is first interior. When terror arises, the first conscious act that alters reality is to turn inward and cultivate a sense of shelter. The 'shadow of wings' functions as an inner posture of assurance, a felt safety that becomes the container for all subsequent thinking. Remaining in that posture until the threat 'is overpast' models the spiritual discipline of sustained assumption, where time is given for the imagined state to impregnate outer events. The imagery of lions, spears, and nets maps the architecture of anxious expectation. These are not literal beasts but charged beliefs that stalk the mind: anticipatory hostility, self-rejection, and the fear of entrapment. When the psalmist says the pit becomes their captor, the drama describes how negative attention often falls into the very snare it intends for another. The psychological drama shows that enemies are created by the imagination held in fear, and also that they can be dissolved by a conscious reversal in feeling and attention. Praise and exaltation are active processes of attention that elevate the state of consciousness. To 'be exalted above the heavens' is to take up the attitude of sovereignty over one’s inner kingdom. Singing, waking the psaltery, and early rising are metaphors for disciplined creative attention. They signal making inner music—deliberate, repeated imagining—so that mercy and truth are not distant attributes but present forces that color perception and catalyze change. This is the lived process: steady the heart, assume the outcome, repeat with feeling until the world rearranges itself to match the inner reality.

Key Symbols Decoded

The wings represent a felt shelter, the inward posture of being covered by a creative power; it is the mental image you return to when chaos threatens. Lions and sharpened teeth are the projection of hostile thought forms, the mind’s dramatizations of doubt and malice which only have power while entertained. The net and pit are symbolic of circular thinking and self-sabotage, traps woven from repeated fearful expectation. Selah, the pause, is the intentional break in the narrative where one withdraws attention from the feared story and reenters the sanctified frame of confidence. Mercy and truth together name the harmonized imagination and feeling—the mercy softens resistance, while truth, as practiced assumption, holds the form until manifestation occurs.

Practical Application

Begin by noticing the dramas that feel most urgent and render them into images or short phrases; this externalizes the force so it can be addressed. Quietly adopt an inner posture of refuge, a brief sensory scene—the cool shade under wings, a steady heartbeat, sunlight on the face—and rest in that image with feeling until tension subsides. Pause often, even for moments labeled selah, to interrupt spirals of fear and to re-anchor in the chosen scene. When hostile thoughts arise, name them for what they are and refuse the rehearsal; instead, follow with a short, vivid act of imagination that expresses the outcome you trust. Move beyond intermittent hope into an embodied assumption by practicing small acts of praise and exaltation: sing silently, write the feeling of victory, speak aloud the conviction that mercy is present. Repeat these acts deliberately at the start of your day, in the quiet before outer events demand response, so that the inner state becomes your first language. Over time this steady reorientation of attention rewrites the psychological landscape, and the patterns of reality will align with the heart you have fixed.

The Inner Drama of Refuge: Trust, Mercy, and the Rise to Praise

Psalm 57, when read as the theater of consciousness, unveils a precise psychological drama: a single mind confronting its own inner enemies and recovering by the sovereign action of imagination. The psalm is not a remote history of events in a valley; it is the map of an inward assault and the method of deliverance available to every human consciousness.

The opening cry, 'Be merciful unto me, O God,' is the needy self addressing its own Higher Imagination. 'God' in this reading is the creative I AM within consciousness, the faculty that generates states and returns them to the world as experience. Mercy here names the coming alignment with that power: a surrender of frantic, sensory-based expectation to the tender, corrective action of the inner Creator. When the psalmist says, 'my soul trusteth in thee; yea, in the shadow of thy wings will I make my refuge,' the image is psychological and tactical. The shadow of wings signifies the sheltering assumption, the mental posture in which one imagines protection. To 'make refuge' there is to assume safety at the level of feeling and to dwell there deliberately until the outer evidence conforms.

The calamities that must be 'overpast' are temporary states of fear and accusation. They appear as external forces because the mind has given them shape. The promise, 'He shall send from heaven, and save me from the reproach of him that would swallow me up,' describes how the higher faculty dispatches validating impressions into the subjective world—images and inner assurances from 'above' (higher consciousness) that dismantle the accusing scenario. 'Selah,' the pause, marks a conscious suspension: stop the narrative of fear, let the imagination stabilize in the higher mood. This pause functions as the practical reset in the creative act.

The metaphors that follow make the conflict more sinister: 'My soul is among lions: and I lie even among them that are set on fire.' Lions are archetypal fears—powerful, prowling anxieties that threaten identity. To be among lions is to inhabit a consciousness where fear stalks as dominant imagery. The phrase 'set on fire' suggests those aspects of mind inflamed by passion, envy, or hatred—inner voices quick to react, ready to bite. 'Sons of men, whose teeth are spears and arrows, and their tongue a sharp sword' translates naturally to hostile thoughts and speech: criticism, rumor, inner accusation, and the mind's tendency to weaponize language against itself. These are all psychological agents that appear to have teeth but in fact are constructs; they become dangerous only insofar as the imagination nourishes them.

The psalmist then prays, 'Be thou exalted, O God, above the heavens; let thy glory be above all the earth.' Exaltation is a deliberate elevation of the imaginative idea above the realm of sensory evidence. Heaven and earth become levels of consciousness: 'heavens' stand for visionary, intuitive states; 'earth' for the world of sense. To lift the glory of imagination above both is to maintain the assumption of the desired end as the governing reality. The mind orders itself so that creative inner sight rules outer appearances, not the other way round.

When the psalm describes others preparing a net and digging a pit, only to fall into it themselves, the text is exposing a fundamental law of mental causation: the trap laid by fear returns to the trapper. A psychological enemy constructs an image of your failure; the natural working of imagination reproduces that image back upon its source. If you expect to be trapped, you will act in ways that confirm entrapment; if you persist in the assumption of rescue, the trapper's plot dissipates into its own consequence. The 'Selah' inserted after this image is again a reminder to pause and to turn attention from the entrapment story to the repairing imagination.

'My heart is fixed, O God, my heart is fixed: I will sing and give praise.' Here the drama moves toward method. 'Fixing the heart' is the discipline of assumption. It is the choice to hold one feeling as dominant until it governs action and thought. Praise and song are not mere gratitude; they are the sustained imaginings—melodies of feeling and thought—that harmonize the mind's faculties. 'Awake up, my glory; awake, psaltery and harp' personifies the creative faculties: glory is the sovereign imaginative power; psaltery and harp are the instruments of thought and feeling. Waking them means intentionally arousing the creative faculty and using thought and feeling in concert to compose the scene of deliverance.

'I myself will awake early. I will praise thee among the people: I will sing unto thee among the nations.' The commitment to 'awake early' points to a practical detail: the first imagining of the day sets the mental tone that will govern subsequent experience. To 'awake' the creative senses early—before reactive, sensory concerns dominate—is to plant the seed-state from which outer circumstances can grow. Singing among the people and nations symbolizes expressing the inner affect in the world of relationships; when the internal harmony is established, it broadcasts outward and attracts confirming testimonies.

'For thy mercy is great unto the heavens, and thy truth unto the clouds.' Mercy and truth here work together. Mercy is the softening, imaginative acceptance; truth is the consistent assumption held with conviction. 'Unto the heavens' and 'unto the clouds' are images of expansive belief: mercy colors the inner picture while truth fixes it into expectation. The creative mind that allows mercy to reframe experience and truth to cement the assumption releases a transformational power. That power does not depend on external facts; it depends on the sustained imagination that feels already fulfilled.

Finally, the closing repetition—'Be thou exalted, O God, above the heavens: let thy glory be above all the earth'—returns the drama to its central axiom: imagination, when deliberately ennobled and fixed, governs reality. The psalm prescribes not a passive waiting for rescue but an active assumption of the rescue already provided by the higher imagination. It insists on two operative moves: first, withdraw identification from aggressive thought-forms (the lions, nets and pits, tongues like swords), and second, assume the protective, exalted posture under the wings of creative consciousness. The 'wings' are not physical shelter but a persistent mood of safety and sovereignty.

Practically, what this psalm teaches about the creative power operating within human consciousness is procedural. Recognize the threatening appearances as productions of imagination; pause (Selah) and refuse to feed them. Turn the mind to the higher self and imagine protection and vindication as already operative. Awaken the instruments—feeling and thought—to sing the new state repeatedly and deliberately, especially at the threshold moments of the day. Hold the heart fixed in the new assumption until it rules perception. As outer events relent, remember that the pit laid by the enemy is often the very instrument that undoes him: the concentrated attention he gave to creating your downfall becomes the force by which his own image collapses when redirected into praise.

Read psychologically, Psalm 57 becomes both diagnosis and prescription. It diagnoses the inner attackers—fear, accusation, hostile speech—and it prescribes an imaginative therapy: shelter in the higher idea, fix the heart, awaken the creative faculties, sing the new reality into being, and let the world mirror that inner settlement. The drama ends not with physical conquest but with a transformed consciousness whose exalted imagination has rendered the old threats impotent and has fulfilled the promise of mercy that was petitioned in the first line.

Common Questions About Psalms 57

How does Neville Goddard interpret Psalm 57?

Neville reads Psalm 57 as an account of inward states rather than an outward event, showing how imagination shelters and delivers the soul; the plea for mercy and refuge under the wings becomes an instruction to assume the feeling of being already protected and provided for (Psalm 57:1). The lions and snares are seen as transient doubts and hostile impressions to be ignored while one dwells in a chosen inner reality. To him the cry, the fixed heart, and the praise are methods: fix your consciousness on the desired state, entertain it in feeling, and let praise affirm that the assumption is accomplished (Psalm 57:7,11).

Can Psalm 57 be used as a manifestation prayer or affirmation?

Yes; Psalm 57 can be used as a manifestation prayer when its language is taken into present-tense assumption and felt as true now. Begin with the petition for mercy and refuge and rest in the sensory feeling of protection and victory (Psalm 57:1). Speak or think the psalm as an affirmation of inner safety and triumph, allowing the heart to be fixed in that state until the imagination thoroughly convinces you. End with praise as evidence of the assumed reality, repeating the inner image until it governs your state and outer circumstances begin to conform (Psalm 57:7,11).

How can I practically apply Psalm 57 in a daily Neville-style practice?

Begin each practice by calming the body and creating an imaginal scene in which you rest securely under the shadow of wings, feeling undeniably safe and sustained (Psalm 57:1). Hold that feeling for several minutes until the heart is fixed; narrate silently in present tense that mercy and truth surround you and that you are singing with inner praise (Psalm 57:7,11). Use short sessions throughout the day and a longer evening session, entering the state as if the desire is fulfilled and letting praise close the session. Persist until the assumed state becomes your dominant consciousness and life aligns with it.

Which verses in Psalm 57 best reflect Neville's 'assume the feeling' technique?

Verses that most clearly mirror the assume-the-feeling practice are the opening plea for mercy and shelter and the declaration of a fixed heart and praise; for example, the appeal to be merciful and make refuge 'in the shadow of thy wings' invites one to assume protection now (Psalm 57:1), while the repeated fixing of the heart and awakening praise corresponds to holding the imaginal scene until it feels real (Psalm 57:7). The confident exaltation of God's glory over the earth reads as the victorious conclusion of a sustained inner assumption that has already been accepted (Psalm 57:11).

Are there guided meditations or audio teachings that apply Psalm 57 to changing consciousness?

Yes, there are guided practices that use Psalm 57 as a scaffold for altering consciousness: recordings that begin by having you breathe and imagine the shelter described in the psalm, then lead you to feel the safety and protection as present, dwell in the scene until the heart is fixed, and close with vocal or silent praise (Psalm 57:1,7). If you prefer self-guided work, create an audio track of the psalm spoken in the present tense with restful background tones, use it while relaxed or drifting to sleep, and let the repeated felt scenes reprogram your state until outer life reflects that inner assurance.