Welcome to the Inspirational Living podcast, brought to you in part by Book of Zen, makers of inspirational fashion and gift ideas. Visit them online at BookofZen.com. Today’s podcast has been edited and adapted from The Power of Awareness, by Neville Goddard, published in 1954.

Humanity’s chief delusion is its conviction that there are causes other than our own state of consciousness. All that befalls you — all that is done by you, all that comes from you — happens as a result of your state of consciousness.

Your consciousness is all that you think and desire and love, all that you believe is true and consent to. That is why a change of consciousness is necessary before you can change your outer world.

Rain falls as a result of a change in the temperature in the higher regions of the atmosphere. So, in like manner, a change of circumstance happens as a result of a change in your state of consciousness.

To be transformed, the whole basis of your thoughts must change. But your thoughts cannot change unless you have new ideas, for you think from your ideas.

All transformation begins with an intense, burning desire to be transformed. The first step in the “renewing of the mind” is desire. You must want to be different (and intend to be different) before you can begin to change yourself.

You must make your future dream a present fact. You do this by assuming the feeling of your wish fulfilled. By desiring to be other than what you are, you can create an ideal of the person you want to be and assume that you are already that person. If this assumption is persisted in until it becomes your dominant feeling, the attainment of your ideal is inevitable.

The ideal you hope to achieve is always ready for an incarnation, but unless you yourself offer it human parentage, it is incapable of birth. Therefore, your attitude should be one in which having desired to express a higher state, you alone accept the task of incarnating this new and greater value of yourself.

In giving birth to your ideal, you must bear in mind that the methods of mental and spiritual knowledge are entirely different. This is a point that is truly understood by probably not more than one person in a million.

You know a thing mentally by looking at it from the outside, by comparing it with other things, by analyzing it and defining it (by thinking of it); whereas you can know a thing spiritually only by becoming it (only by thinking from it).

You must be the thing itself and not merely talk about it or look at it. You must be like the moth in search of the flame, who spurred on with true desire, plunges at once into the sacred fire, folding its wings within, till it becomes one color and one substance with the flame.

Just as the moth in its desire to know the flame was willing to destroy itself, so must you in becoming a new person be willing to die to your present self.

You must be conscious of being healthy if you are to know what health is. You must be conscious of being secure if you are to know what security is.

Therefore, to incarnate a new and greater value of yourself, you must assume that you already are what you want to be and then live by faith in this assumption, which is not yet incarnate in the body of your life, in confidence that this new value or state of consciousness will become incarnated through your absolute fidelity to the assumption that you are that which you desire to be.

This is what wholeness means, what integrity means. They mean submission of the whole self to the feeling of the wish fulfilled, in certainty that that new state of consciousness is the renewing of mind which transforms.

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