Inner Idols, Outer Gods

Neville's Inner Vision

In Neville's voice, the 'gods' these nations made are not distant beings, but states of consciousness you entertain in the mind. Each high place you erect is an image-construction of power you have believed in—success, fear, opinion, or habit—and you have placed them where you daily dwell, in the rooms of your thought. When you believe in these images as real, you empower them to govern your life, much as the people of old acted as if their idols ruled their cities. The burning of children to Adrammelech signals the toll of living by these images: the old psyche eats its own future when it clings to external representations. However, the scripture does not condemn you for having built them; it invites you to withdraw allegiance from them and awaken to the I AM within—the single, indivisible awareness that animates all experiences. If you revise the image by assuming, 'I am the I AM, and this setting is held in the light of consciousness,' the idols crumble, and true worship arises as the felt realization that you are not the body or its story but the aware life behind it.