Inner Shepherds and Mind Encampment

Neville's Inner Vision

In this moment, Jerusalem is your interior state of consciousness. The shepherds and their flocks are the faculties you take as authorities—imagination, memory, perception, will—watching over your life. When you accept a state as true, they pitch their tents around your inner city, encircling it with the atmosphere that verifies that belief. To be fed by them means you are nourished by the thoughts and habits that correspond to your present sense of self. If you dwell in lack or fear, the encampment feeds lack; if you awaken to peace, wholeness, and divine order, the same encampment feeds those realities. The instruction is not to resist the shepherds but to revise the scene: command the encampment to surround a new, desired state and let your imagination sustain that atmosphere. Your I AM—the awareness that you are—becomes the governor of the camp, and your imagination is the power by which the city is made new. The verse thus invites inner construction: realize you are feeding yourself by the state you admit as real.