Inner Burnt Offering of Fowls

Neville's Inner Vision

Take this rite as an inner law. The fowl is a tiny fragment of your nature you are willing to surrender to the flame of awareness. The wringing of its head is the moment you refuse to feed the old impulse with belief in its vitality. The draining of the blood at the altar’s side marks the release of that impulse’s life from your self-image. Plucking away the crop and casting aside the feathers signifies freeing the appetite that kept the habit alive. Then you cleave the wings—your faculties of thought and feeling open in concert—yet you do not separate them from the One; you do not divide your will from the divine will. The bird is burned on the altar, and the aroma it leaves behind is the sweet savour to the LORD, a sign that your consciousness has offered itself wholly to spiritual awareness. In this inner worship there is no distance: you attend to the I AM, and the world becomes a projected harmony of that realized unity.