Awaken the I AM Within

Neville's Inner Vision

To read the line as Neville would, you must see the cry as a call within your own consciousness. Awake, why sleepest thou, O Lord? arises as a demand your awareness makes upon itself: return to full fidelity, let no fragment of yourself be lost to dream. In this psychology, God is not a distant actor but the I AM—your living awareness that thinks, loves, and feels. Sleep is not a breach of divinity but a mistaken notion that you are apart from the I AM. Cast us not off for ever becomes a revision: I am not cast off from the divine; I merely forgot to feel its nearness. When you assume the very state you seek—the awakened I AM—the sense of abandonment dissolves and mercy flows in the immediacy of your experience. The past of separation yields to the certainty that the future is formed by one constant conviction: I exist in the presence of God now. This is prayer as a shift of consciousness, a trust that the divine life is operative in the breath you are drawing, here and now.