Psalms 79: Lament as Shifts in Consciousness

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Quick Insights

The chapter reads as a portrait of inner devastation, where previously sacred parts of the self have been invaded and desecrated by hostile beliefs and fears.
It describes the neglected dead within us—unprocessed grief and shame—exposed to predatory thoughts and left without rites of integration.
A pleading voice arises, asking how long suffering will persist and calling for radical inner intervention and a remaking of identity.
The arc moves from accusation and lament to petition for cleansing, restitution, and the restoration of gratitude and witness in the world.

What is the Main Point of Psalms 79?

At the center of this consciousness drama is the recognition that imagination creates the conditions of inner life: when attention allows hostile narratives to occupy the sacred inner place, the self is profaned and left in ruins; by consciously turning attention and imaginative feeling toward restoration, one calls into being forgiveness, justice, and renewed identity, transforming desolation into praise.

What is the Spiritual Meaning of Psalms 79?

The opening lament is the voice of awareness naming a catastrophic inner takeover. What was once held as holy—self-respect, core values, a sense of belonging—has been infiltrated by accusations and images that strip dignity. Those dead bodies are the parts of the psyche that have been abandoned: hopes, aspirations, relationships, and losses that were never mourned or integrated. Exposed to scavenging thoughts, they appear as raw fuel for shame, self-recrimination, and projection. This is not a historical accusation but a present-state diagnosis: when imagination permits the enemy images to camp in the inner temple, the scene of life becomes a landscape of ruins. The cry How long? is the turning point from passive suffering to active petition. It signals a refusal to let the hostile scenario define eternal reality. The plea for intervention is simultaneously a reorientation of attention: calling on the power that imagines and feels to take responsibility, to sweep out the debris, and to reinstate the holy within. Asking not to be remembered for former iniquities is an appeal to amend the story we habitually tell about ourselves—requesting an inner reprieve that makes tenderness and mercy the operative currents, so that humiliation and reproach no longer have jurisdiction. The latter movement toward restitution and thanksgiving reveals the law of inner compensation: the mind that seeks cleansing and restoration sets in motion the reversal of the outer symptoms. Justice imagined as restoration returns dignity to those parts once shamed; mercy imagined as swift and tender alters the nervous habit of punishment. The promise of praise and witness at the close is the natural fruit of a mind that has recovered its sanctuary: when the imagination reinhabits the temple with feelings of worth and gratitude, life outwardly reorganizes to reflect the inner reconciliation.

Key Symbols Decoded

The invading nations stand for intrusive images and internal critics that take up residence in the theater of consciousness. Temple and Jerusalem are metaphors for the inner sanctuary and the seat of identity, sanctified by attention and feeling; their defilement signals the loss of reverent regard for the self. The dead bodies given to birds and beasts describe unprocessed aspects of experience left to be consumed by base anxieties and degrading narratives, becoming fodder for more fear. Pleading for remembrance and deliverance deciphers into a deliberate practice of revision and supplication: to imagine differently about what happened, to feel the correction, and to refuse the verdicts imposed by trauma. The language of pouring out wrath and rendering reproach sevenfold translates into the psyche's demand for proportionate rebalancing—where injustices are acknowledged and healed until restoration feels complete—and the final image of thanksgiving indicates the reintegration of the self, now willing to testify and to offer praise as evidence of its reclaimed life.

Practical Application

Begin by sitting with the lament voice and naming the inner ruins without minimizing. Allow the felt loss to be present long enough to be known, then employ the imagination to enact a burial rite for what was left unburied: envision gathering each abandoned piece of yourself, honoring it with a light and a blessing, and laying it to rest in a protected place within. Follow this with a revision practice where you intentionally imagine the temple restored—see the walls rebuilt, feel the warmth of sanctuary, and speak in the present tense as if the restoration has already occurred, aligning emotion with the picture until it resonates as true. When shame or reproach surfaces, address it as an invader rather than an innate identity. Imagine a corrective presence that rescues the threatened parts, restores dignity, and returns what was taken. If a sense of injustice cries out for revenge, redirect that energy into imagining balanced restitution and the reparation of relationships within the self; let fullness and proportional healing replace vindictiveness. Keep a daily posture of gratitude as the concluding act: by rehearsing thankfulness from the recovered center, you cement the restoration and broadcast an inner witness that reshapes outer circumstance into concord with the renewed inner state.

Echoes of Ruin: A Community’s Lament and Plea for Justice

Psalm 79, read as a psychological drama, maps the interior theatre where imagination and identity struggle for possession of the mind. The language of invasion, slaughter, and desolation describes not foreign armies but states of consciousness: unbelief, neglect, self-reproach, and dissociated parts of the psyche that have been allowed to lie unburied. Reading the Psalm as inner history turns every noun into a personae and every verb into a movement of attention. The result is not a record of events outside you but a script showing how the creative faculty of consciousness is lost, mourned, appealed to, and finally reclaimed.

The first image is striking: 'the heathen are come into thine inheritance; thy holy temple have they defiled.' In psychological terms, the 'inheritance' is the original capital of being—our inborn sense of presence, creativity, and authority. The 'holy temple' is imagination, the inner sanctum where identity and 'I AM' dwell. 'Heathen' names the invading attitudes: doubt, shame, fear, cynicism. These attitudes do not belong in the sanctuary; when attention abandons the temple, they move in and establish dominance. The defilement is the misuse of imagination—letting it replay accusations, replay old failures, and magnify lack instead of using it to create.

'They have laid Jerusalem on heaps' dramatizes the collapse of the inner citadel. Jerusalem stands for the integrated center that holds competing impulses in a coherent selfhood. To see Jerusalem in ruins is to witness fragmentation: values and virtues that once organized life have been dismantled by a succession of negative assumptions. The 'dead bodies of thy servants' given to fowls and beasts are the parts of the self—faith, courage, loving appetite, creative intent—that were abandoned, exposed, and scavenged by base habits and predatory thoughts. When we do not bury what dies—when we do not mourn, revise, and reintegrate—those lost parts provide food for instincts, gossip, addiction, and rumination.

The repetition, 'their blood have they shed like water round about Jerusalem; and there was none to bury them,' pictures energy (blood) drained away by continual reactivation of loss. The life-blood of purpose runs as water because it is wasted in endless grief that never moves toward reclamation. 'None to bury them' signals the absence of inner ceremony—no ritual of revision, no conscious closure that allows transformation. Psychologically, burial is symbolic work: naming what died, feeling it fully in imagination, then rewriting the end so that resourceful qualities can be reborn in another form. The Psalm makes the cost of neglect visible: shame before 'neighbours,' isolation, and derision—the externalization of inner failure.

The cry that follows—'How long, LORD? wilt thou be angry for ever? shall thy jealousy burn like fire?'—is the trusting self speaking to the present 'I AM' within. The 'LORD' here is not an external deity but the knowingness that has the power to remold reality: the consciousness that says I AM. The cry is the heart's urgent petition: how long will I remain hostage to these intruders? The petition then dramatizes an inner demand for purification: 'Pour out thy wrath upon the heathen that have not known thee' translates to a call that the corrective power of attention be turned against false beliefs. 'Wrath' here is not petty vengeance but the energizing force that removes counterfeit ideas and makes the sacred again.

Yet the Psalm moves swiftly from vindication to penitence: 'O remember not against us former iniquities: let thy tender mercies speedily prevent us: for we are brought very low.' This turn is crucial psychologically. Restoration is not merely the expulsion of false images: it is also the forgiving revision of the past. 'Remember not' is the instruction to stop rehearsing mistakes; it names the operation of revision—revising earlier scenes that established the current misery. 'Tender mercies' are the imaginative gestures that step in to prevent old patterns from recolonizing the mind: an imagined end in which the self is whole, the feeling of the wish fulfilled, an insistence on the new state so that the old has no purchase. The admission 'we are brought very low' is humility: recognition of defeat that precedes the creative act.

The Psalm's request, 'Help us, O God of our salvation, for the glory of thy name: and deliver us, and purge away our sins, for thy name's sake,' centers on two principles of biblical psychology. First, help is a turning of attention to the present I AM, the creative awareness that changes scenes, not a pleading to anything outside. Second, 'purge away our sins' names inner purification—the removal of misidentifications—so that consciousness can again act from uncorrupted imagination. 'For thy name's sake' implies that the identity of I AM must be demonstrated. In other words, the world within must reflect the original, unstained sense of being if reality is to be altered.

The concern 'Wherefore should the heathen say, Where is their God?' exposes fear of public testimony: the portion of the psyche that worries what others will think if one does not live up to ideals. The remedy requested—'let him be known among the heathen in our sight by the revenging of the blood of thy servants which is shed'—is a psychological vindication. It asks imagination to restore the vitality of the oppressed inner qualities. 'Revenging the blood' is symbolic restitution: qualities sacrificed to fear are re-awakened, given voice, and their influence reclaimed. The vengeance is restorative and proportional; to 'render unto our neighbours sevenfold into their bosom their reproach' describes the law of return: the mind's acts produce patterns that come back in measure. When imagination corrects itself, outer projections—shame, accusation—refract back to their source and lose power.

The Psalm prays that 'the sighing of the prisoner come before thee; according to the greatness of thy power preserve thou those that are appointed to die.' Here the 'prisoner' is a suppressed longing, an imprisoned desire for wholeness that has been quietly pleading beneath defensive layers. The call to bring that sigh before the I AM is an instruction to consciously attend to what has been silenced. 'Preserve those that are appointed to die' paradoxically calls for the salvation of the necessary endings—patterns that must cease to exist—while rescuing from final ruin whatever can be transformed into life. Psychological alchemy recognizes that some structures must die so new forms can arise. The prayer asks for discrimination and power sufficient to carry out that transformation.

The Psalm culminates in a turn toward gratitude and witness: 'So we thy people and sheep of thy pasture will give thee thanks for ever: we will shew forth thy praise to all generations.' This closing is the creative posture that seals the work. Once the temple is re-cleansed and buried things revised, the mind chooses to embody and testify to the restored identity. 'Sheep of thy pasture' is the trustful state, those who know they will be fed when they return to their inner source. The final act is imaginative testimony: holding the inner state of gratitude and praise until it communicates itself outwardly, changing perception and thereby altering experience.

Practically, this Psalm spells a method: first identify the invaders (doubt, shame, fear), name what has been desecrated (the temple of imagination), feel the loss (mourn the dead servants), refuse to continue the old rehearsals (do not bury the dead by forgetting—actively revise), call upon the present I AM (invoke the creative awareness), ask for purgation (dis-identification from false stories), and embody the restored state with thanksgiving. The central creative power is imagination: it both desecrates when misused and sanctifies when rightly employed. The transformation promised in the Psalm occurs not because some external judge acts, but because consciousness rewrites the script.

Seen this way, Psalm 79 is not a cry for external deliverance but an instruction manual for inner deliverance. The 'revenging' words become metaphors for psychological justice: false accusations and injurious patterns will collapse by their own logic once imagination refuses to feed them. The 'sevenfold' return is the compensatory rhythm of inner law—what you sustain you become; what you reject returns to its source. When imagination assumes the feeling of the wish fulfilled and dwells in the new scene—the cleansed temple and the rebuilt Jerusalem—what once seemed a ruin becomes a monument. The ending of the Psalm points to the finality of that shift: a consciousness that has reclaimed its temple will, through gratitude, broadcast that wholeness to every generation of thought it touches.

Common Questions About Psalms 79

How do you apply Neville Goddard's imaginal acts to the communal lament in Psalm 79?

Begin by treating the lament as a description of a present feeling to be transformed rather than a fixed fate; imagine the exact scenes you want to see reversed—streets cleared, bodies honored, neighbors restored—and inhabit the belief that restoration has already occurred (Psalm 79). Create vivid, sensory scenes of deliverance and thanksgiving, feel the emotion of relief as if real, and repeat these imaginal acts until the feeling adheres. Neville taught that persistence in the assumed state rewrites experience, so lead the communal consciousness from victimhood into gratitude, letting the inner evidence of change become your guide and proof.

What 'I AM' or affirmation phrases can be drawn from Psalm 79 in Neville Goddard's system?

Draw affirmations from the psalm’s movement from desolation to trust, framing them in the present tense of being: I AM restored and my city is at peace; I AM the object of tender mercy and protection; I AM a bearer of praise that changes nations; I AM vindicated and my neighbors recognize goodness; I AM the shepherded flock, preserved by infinite power (Psalm 79:13). Speak and feel these I AM statements as inner realities, allowing each to dissolve the contrary impression of lack. Neville taught that such assumed declarations, felt as true, reconstitute the inner state that brings outward manifestation.

What is Psalm 79 about and how can Neville Goddard's teachings reframe it for manifestation?

Psalm 79 is a communal lament over a desecrated sanctuary, slaughtered servants, and a people in disgrace pleading for God’s swift mercy and vindication (Psalm 79:1–9). Read inwardly, the scene describes a collective state of consciousness needing correction rather than merely historical events; Neville taught that imagination and assumption are the operative powers that alter outer circumstance. To reframe it for manifestation, enter the prayer’s end—the restored city and thankful people—as an accomplished fact in your imagination, feel the relief and praise now, and persist in that assumed state until the inner witness confirms it. The external will follow the inward reality you sustain.

Can Psalm 79 be used as a guided meditation to heal a city using Neville's 'assumption' method?

Yes; use Psalm 79 as a framework for a guided assumption meditation by first calming the mind and acknowledging the lamenting images, then deliberately shifting into an imaginal scene of the city healed and the people honoring truth and mercy (Psalm 79:9). Narrate the transformation inwardly: visualize rebuilt temples of peace, burials honored, neighbors reconciled, and express heartfelt thanksgiving as if present. Hold the scene with sensory detail and the conviction that it is accomplished, ending by letting go in faith rather than effort. This disciplined assumption turns prayer into an inner decree that calls forth outward evidence.

How does Neville Goddard's concept of inner witness relate to the plea for restoration in Psalm 79?

The inner witness is the silent, felt confirmation that your assumption has been accepted; when Psalm 79 cries for deliverance, the inner witness responds by allowing you to feel the answered prayer within before external proof appears (Psalm 79:13). Turn the psalm’s plea inward and assume the state of restored people giving thanks; attend to the subtle assurance, the peace or joy that testifies inwardly. Neville taught that this witness is the bridge between imagination and reality: persist in the assumed feeling until the inner confirmation is unmistakable, and the outer events will align to mirror that inner verdict.