The Creative Moment

A Lecture in the Voice and Spirit of Neville Goddard

You move through your days reacting to what seems to be. A condition appears and you react to it. A door seems closed and you accept the closed door as final. A body feels limited and you react with fear or resignation. All the while there is another way, a moment in which you do not react at all. You act. You act by accepting in your own feeling the very opposite of what the senses report. That acceptance, that quiet inner act of feeling the desired state as real and present, is the creative moment. In that moment creation takes place. Everything else is but the unfolding of what you have accepted.

The natural man reacts to every appearance. He sees lack and he reacts with anxiety. He sees opposition and he reacts with resistance. He sees delay and he reacts with impatience. In all this reacting he is only re-creating the same patterns he complains of. He does not know that he is the operant power. He does not know that what he accepts in consciousness as true must externalize itself. He lives in the world of effects and never discovers the world of cause. But you, when you discover the creative moment, you leave the world of reaction and you enter the world of action. You act by accepting. You accept the end you desire as already accomplished in feeling, and that acceptance is itself the creative act.

One real creative moment is worth more than the whole natural life of reaction. In one such moment the work is done. The events of time then begin to arrange themselves in harmony with what you have accepted. You do not have to force them. You do not have to plan them. You have only to accept the feeling of the wish fulfilled, and the feeling itself sets everything in motion. This is why it is said that now is the acceptable time. The acceptable time is the time of acceptance. It is not some future hour or some special circumstance. It is any moment in which you turn from the appearance and accept in feeling the reality you desire. In that moment the day of salvation has dawned for you.

You may wonder what it means to accept an inner act. It means to feel the thing as done. Not to hope that it will be done, not to long for it to be done, but to feel it as already accomplished. The feeling may come as a quiet sense of relief, as though a great weight has been lifted. It may come as a natural knowing, as though the thing could not be otherwise. It may come as a gentle joy that needs no outward expression. Whatever form it takes, when the feeling is truly yours you have performed the creative act. The outer world has no choice but to conform to what you have accepted in consciousness.

Facts are the creations of imagining. They have no independent life. They persist only because you continue to accept them as real. When you withdraw your acceptance from an unwanted fact and give your acceptance to the fact you desire, the old fact loses its power. It begins to fade. The new fact, born of your new acceptance, begins to appear. This is not a battle between two powers. It is simply the law that consciousness always expresses what it accepts. You are not asked to fight the old. You are asked only to accept the new. In the creative moment you do exactly that.

The creative moment requires no special preparation. It does not demand that you be in a certain mood or in a certain place. It is available wherever you are, whenever you turn within and feel the desired state as real. You may be walking down a street. You may be lying upon your bed. You may be in the midst of activity. In an instant you can accept the feeling that all is well, that the desire is fulfilled, that the solution is already present. That instant is the creative moment. The acceptance you make there is registered in consciousness, and consciousness is the only reality.

You have accepted many things without knowing you were accepting them. You accepted the belief that certain things were difficult or impossible, and those beliefs became your experience. You accepted the belief that you were limited in health or in means or in opportunity, and the limitations appeared. Now you know the secret. You can accept the opposite. You can accept the feeling of ease where there was strain. You can accept the feeling of abundance where there was lack. You can accept the feeling of wholeness where there was limitation. Each acceptance is a creative act. Each one begins the rearrangement of your world.

The senses will often deny what you have accepted. They will continue for a time to report the old appearances. This is not a sign that your acceptance has failed. It is only the momentum of former acceptances. The senses are faithful servants. They report what has been accepted in the past. But when you persist in the new acceptance, when you return again and again to the feeling of the wish fulfilled, the senses begin to report the new instead of the old. They have no choice. They can only reflect what consciousness has accepted.

In the creative moment you discover that you are not at the mercy of time. Time is the interval between acceptance and appearance. When the acceptance is complete the interval shortens. When the acceptance is wavering the interval lengthens. But the creative act itself is always instantaneous. It is the feeling of fulfillment accepted now. Everything else is the natural consequence of that feeling. You do not need to know how the appearance will come. The how is not your concern. Consciousness is the way. When you have accepted the end, the way opens of itself.

This truth transforms your sense of self. You cease to be the man or woman who is pushed about by circumstances. You become the awareness that accepts or rejects. You are the one who decides what shall be accepted as real. And what you accept as real becomes the reality you live. This is not a burden. It is a freedom. It is the freedom to choose the states you will occupy in consciousness. Choose the state of fulfilled desire. Accept it in the creative moment. And you will find yourself expressing that state in the outer world.

The creative moment is the moment in which you know yourself as the creator rather than the creature. You are not begging some outside power to grant you what you want. You are exercising the power that is your own being. You are accepting in feeling what already exists in the realm of consciousness, and consciousness is the only realm that matters. The outer world is but the shadow of what has been accepted within. Change the acceptance and the shadow must change.

You will find that as you live from this understanding the old reactions grow weaker. Something arises that would once have caused anxiety, and you find yourself smiling inwardly. You turn at once to the creative moment. You accept the resolution as real. You feel the harmony or the supply or the health. You do not argue with the appearance. You simply accept the opposite in feeling. And you continue your day in the quiet certainty that the acceptance has done its work.

There is no effort in this. The creative moment is not an act of will. Will belongs to the natural man who tries to force things into being. The spiritual man simply accepts. He feels the end as true and he rests in that feeling. The acceptance itself carries the power. It is the permission given to the infinite to bring forth what has been accepted. In this there is no strain, only the quiet joy of knowing that the work is done.

The Bible speaks again and again of this moment. It tells you that now is the day of salvation. Salvation is not something that happens after death or after long striving. It is the acceptance now of the fulfilled desire. It is the feeling that the thing you seek is already yours. When this feeling is yours, you have entered the acceptable time. The events of your life then begin to testify to what you have accepted.

You may have thought that creation requires long labor and careful planning. But the labor is in the acceptance. Once the acceptance is complete the labor is over. The planning belongs to the outer world, not to you. You have only to accept the end. The means appear without your knowledge. People you have never known play their parts. Circumstances you could not have arranged arrange themselves. All because you performed the one creative act: the acceptance of the inner feeling of fulfillment.

This is the secret that has been hidden in plain sight. It is not reserved for the few. It is the birthright of every man. The moment you accept it you begin to live it. You find the creative moment in the midst of ordinary days. You use it for the ordinary things as well as the great. You accept the feeling of peace in the midst of confusion. You accept the feeling of order in the midst of seeming disorder. You accept the feeling of love where there seemed to be none. Each acceptance is creative. Each one begins the transformation of your world.

The old facts may linger for a time. They were sustained by your former acceptances. When you no longer feed them with your feeling they lose their vitality. They fade as the new facts, born of your new acceptances, grow bright. You do not have to destroy the old. You have only to accept the new. In the creative moment you do exactly that, and the old loses its power over you.

You are building your world from within, moment by moment. Every accepted inner act is a stone in that living structure. The more consistently you accept the states that delight you, the more beautiful and harmonious your world becomes. The choice is always before you. You can react to what seems to be, or you can act by accepting what you desire to be. The creative moment is the moment of action. It is the moment in which you know yourself as the creator of your experience.

In the quiet of your own being this truth reveals itself. You do not need another to tell you when the acceptance is complete. You feel it. There is a sense of completion, a quiet certainty that nothing more needs to be done. The problem that once loomed large has been solved in consciousness. The desire that once seemed far away is now felt as present. This is the feeling that creates. This is the creative moment.

You will discover that this understanding changes not only what you experience but who you know yourself to be. You are no longer the limited self that reacts to every wind of circumstance. You are the awareness in which all circumstances are born and in which they can be changed by a simple act of acceptance. This is the dignity of your true nature. This is the power that was given you from the beginning.

The creative moment is always now. It does not wait for a better time or a better condition. It is present in this very instant. You have only to turn within and accept the feeling of the fulfilled desire. Feel it as real. Feel it as natural. Feel it as done. In that feeling the creative act is complete. The world you live in begins at once to reflect what you have accepted.

You are free to choose what you will accept. No outer condition can prevent you. The power is in your own feeling, your own acceptance. Use it tonight. Use it in the small things and in the great. Accept the end you desire as already true in consciousness. Rest in that acceptance. And know that in the creative moment you have performed the act that creates all things.

From this night forward you will remember that every time you accept an inner act as real you have entered the creative moment. You have done the work of creation. And your world, in ways you may not yet see, has already begun to conform to what you have accepted. This is the truth that sets you free. This is the truth by which you live when you know who you are. You are the awareness that accepts. Accept the best. Accept it now. And know that in your acceptance the kingdom is at hand.