Into the Inner Wilderness

Neville's Inner Vision

Consider the wilderness not as a place of distance from God, but as the quiet state of attention you occupy when the I AM withdraws from outward signals and turns inward. Being full of the Holy Ghost is not a status you earn by works; it is the steady awareness that you are consciousness itself, and Spirit moves through you as guidance. The forty days of testing are not a calendar of events but a pressure of thought—old doubts, the suggestion of lack, the pull to identify with appetite and fear. Each moment of hunger is a signal to return to the inner Presence, to refuse the story that you are defined by need, and to declare, I am spirit, I am full, I am led. To be led by the Spirit into the wilderness is to choose not the external road of reward but the inner road of awareness, where temptation transforms into imagination that redefines reality. The devil you confront is simply a habit of believing you are separate from God; you dissolve it by asserting your unity with the I AM and abiding in the felt sense of divine residence.