Inner Worship, No Idols

Neville's Inner Vision

Notice that the commandment places the altar of your God in your own consciousness, and the grove and the image are imagined idols you plant in your mind. The 'not planting near the altar' is a discipline: keep the center of your awareness clear of attachments that pretend to stand between you and God. In Neville's terms, you are the one who builds the altar; the law simply reveals how your inner state reverberates in experience. If you permit a grove of symbols or a fixed image to sit near your awareness, you have allowed your imagination to produce a counterfeit worship. Real worship begins when you consciously withdraw from any mental idol and occupy the state of I AM—sufficient unto itself, complete, unadorned. The moment you refuse to set up images, you revise your inner weather; you do not resist external events as such, but you stop giving them the power to define your sense of divinity. Practice feeling your own I AM as the altar and imagine that every thought aligns with that reality, until no idol stands between you and your God within.