Inner City of Refuge

Neville's Inner Vision

Within the psyche, the ‘slayer’ is a state of consciousness that has lashed out, perhaps from buried fear or misbelief, toward a ‘neighbor’—an aspect of yourself you think you have harmed or denied. The wood-cutting scene is your daily thoughts, the hand that slips from the helve representing a thoughtless impulse that could strike and wound. Yet here you are not expelled from reality; you are offered sanctuary: the 'cities' are states of elevated awareness—the calm, nonjudging 'I AM' that watches your mind. When you realize the act was without hate in time past, you release the past and stop feeding the old pattern. To live is to remain within a refuge of non-resistance, where you no longer identify with the violent impulse but with the observer who can revise it. By choosing to imagine yourself already in the city of refuge, you reverse the energy of the act; you revise the scene in your mind, turning potential harm into a realignment of consciousness toward mercy and justice as inner harmony. The law thus becomes a law of inner accountability enacted in awareness.