Inner Warning to Awakening

Neville's Inner Vision

To me this narrative is the inner parable of consciousness. The LORD’s speaking to Manasseh and to his people is the I AM within, the awakened awareness that already knows truth. Their refusal to hearken mirrors the mind clinging to familiar stories and avoiding a real change of state. When I resist that inner calling, the mind orders up captains of circumstance—the host of the king of Assyria—as if to pry me from my old self. The thorny path and fetters are not punitive so much as the steady pressure of belief I refuse to release, pushing me toward a symbolic Babylon: a moment when I must observe my life from a deeper center. Providence, understood in this light, guides me by turning attention back to my own imagination until I revise the scene I entertain. If I truly hear the inner voice and consent to a new assumption of who I am, the exile dissolves and a different reality takes root. The warning is not punishment, but a call to awaken, to exercise dominion of the I AM, and thereby align outward events with an inner truth.