Control Your Inner Conversations

Neville Goddard 26-04-1971

The whole manifested world goes to show us what use we have made of God’s gift. Receiving a gift does not mean that we are going to use it wisely, but we have the gift. Everyone has the gift; and the world simply reflects the use of that gift.

In “The Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare puts these words into the mouth of Portia: “If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches and poor men’s cottages princes’ palaces. It is a good divine who follows his own instructions. I can easier teach twenty what were good to be done than to be one of the twenty to follow my own teaching.”

So you and I have been given a gift. To what use have we put it? In a book written in the First Century, written at the time of our Gospel, — it’s called the Hermetica, and this is a translation by Walter Scott. It is a wonderful series of four volumes; and in this he says: “There are two gifts that God has given to man alone, and to no other mortal creature, and these two gifts are Mind and Speech. And the gifts of Mind and Speech are essential and identical with Immortality. If they are used rightly, man will not differ in any respect from the immortals; and when he quits the body, these two will be his guides and they will lead him into the troop of the gods and. to the souls that have attained to bliss.”

Now he is not speaking of any outer speech, for you and I have had this experience, — I know I have many times. You have gone to a party, and many people you do not know, you meet them and the usual greetings: “Nice to know you,” “What a joy to know you,” “Pleased to meet you,” and the usual clichés; and then you have drinks and your little hors d’oeuvre, and then the party breaks up and they all separate. And you hear someone say, “What a creep,” “What a bore”; yet they were so pleased to meet them: “What a joy to know you.” The outer words did not conform whatsoever with what they were really thinking on the inside. And God sees, not the outer man; He sees the inner Man.

It’s the inner speech that is frozen in the world round about us. This whole vast world is but “frozen” inner speech. What are we saying on the inside? We may think that someone really understands us. You go along believing that they understand you, and some simple little thing happens and you realize they never really heard you. Not for one moment had they really heard you. Some little disruption, and then the whole thing is over; and then they turn against you as though you were the devil, when they formerly thought you were one who was “sent.” That is all in Scripture.

Read the 7th chapter of the Book of John and the 8th chapter of John: “And some said, he is a good man; and others said, no, he is leading people astray. Others said, why, he is mad, and he has a. devil.”

When he fed them with the loaves and the fish, — oh, they loved it, — getting things in the world. As long as they could have things and things and things, it was marvelous; and then he tells them of something entirely different: that they would go through “furnaces”, but the end would justify all the “furnaces” through which they would pass. The end would be God; they would awaken in the end, and they would awaken as God the Father. He didn’t tell them of the nature of the “furnaces.” He told them only of the end and that they would pass through “furnaces”; and passing through, they faltered. They could tell exactly what they were really doing on the inside.

As we are told in the 50th Psalms: “If a man orders his conversations aright, I will show him the salvation of God.”