Affliction Ends in the Mind

Neville's Inner Vision

Nahum 1:9 confronts you with a question you must answer in the sanctuary of your own awareness: what do you imagine against the LORD—the I AM within you? God is not a distant judge but the very consciousness you inhabit. To imagine opposition to that awareness is to entertain a belief in separation, a pattern you have accepted as real. The line about an utter end is not a threat outside you; it is the inner decree your mind can make about any troublesome image. When you cling to the old fear, you allow it to rise again, because you have affirmed its possibility. But if you revise that image and assume a state in which the old affliction has already ended, you change the movement of your inner life. The “second time” refers to the habitual recurrence of your prior dream; you disarm it by deciding the old pattern has ceased within you, and thus it cannot reproduce itself in your world. The discipline is to dwell in the I AM, to let the sense of completion fill your field of vision, and to let the new image declare what is true about you now.