Mercy Feeds the Inner Enemy

Neville's Inner Vision

Your 'enemy' is a figure within your own consciousness, a voice saying you are separate and in need of protection. When you give him bread and water, you are not feeding a person so much as nourishing the part of you that fears lack and attack. In Neville’s terms, you revise your inner story by assuming the state of generosity; you imagine the relief or warmth he would feel and you feel that feeling now. The coal-strewn phrase hints at the transformative heat of mercy touching your own I AM, dissolving hostility rather than producing punishment. The harsh wind and the backbiting tongue mark inner weather: when you refuse to feed the storm with resentment, the wind shifts and the tongue becomes quiet in your awareness. To dwell on the corner of the housetop, rather than in a wide house with discord, is to choose an inner habitation of peace. And when 'good news from a far country' arrives, notice that the impression of distant betterment has already been born in you. Your state colors every event; mercy, imagined and felt, reshapes all you meet.