Inner Captivity, Inner Return

Neville's Inner Vision

I behold this line as a symbol of the mind under pressure. The deportation is not a history chapter but an image of inner states withdrawing from the city of consciousness we call Jerusalem—the place where I dwell as awareness. Eight hundred thirty-two persons are not bodies removed from a city; they are thoughts, identifications, fears, and attachments that the mind allows to leave its field of attention. The eighteenth year of Nebuchadnezzar marks a timing in which a long habit of attention is displaced; yet every act of shifting attention is only a movement within I AM. The world you call 'outside' is the stage upon which your inner state acts itself out, and the return is always possible wherever you commit your awareness. See that the deportation creates space; space invites a new alignment with the I AM—the hidden city within you where all exiles go to be refined, not banished. By recognizing that this is an inner drama, you reclaim sovereignty: none of these departures can touch your essential self, which is always whole, and always home in God.