Before You Begin: A Warning About Power

A practice that gathers attention and deepens conviction deserves respect. It can become a discipline of freedom. It can also strengthen the very attachments a person hoped to escape. Whatever great powers or unusual capacities someone hopes to gain, power alone cannot reveal what is worth serving.

The first danger is an unexamined desire.

Imagine a person who wants to become rich and famous. They learn to inhabit the feeling of recognition. They become increasingly devoted to the identity of someone admired, influential, and beyond ordinary limitations. Yet they never ask who taught them that this was the life they should want.

Their chosen destination may still belong to the same world of fear: fear of insignificance, fear of scarcity, fear of being forgotten. The desired life has changed its appearance while keeping its old center. A more impressive identity can become a more demanding master.

In the spiritual language of this guide, becoming enslaved to unseen forces means surrendering one’s direction to influences whose hold on desire remains unrecognized. Culture, status, inherited expectations, and spiritual temptation can all enter this examination. A seed can be planted so early that its later growth feels like one’s own unquestionable will.

This warning calls for discernment, rather than suspicion about hidden agents. A desire’s origin may remain unclear; its hold on attention can still be examined.

Ask what a desired reality demands that you worship. Does it require applause to keep you whole? Does it promise freedom while making your existence dependent on possession, recognition, or control? Would losing its rewards also mean losing your direction?

The freedom to tune consciousness remains incomplete until the practitioner examines the destination.

For this reason, The Godward Way places God the Father at the center of every tuning. Within this way, the Father is the Creator: the fixed point present in all dimensions at once, through every state and every changing arrangement of experience. States vary. Allegiance can remain.

Attachment to Him means keeping the direction of one’s being Godward while desires, sensations, roles, and circumstances change. Whatever is received remains an offering. Whatever is lost can also be offered. The practitioner has a way to return when an attractive state begins to claim the whole of life.

The warning against serving wealth in Matthew 6:24 belongs to this question of allegiance. Jesus speaks as a Jewish teacher within the life and scripture of his people; the Gospel of Matthew carries that Jewish scriptural world into its account. The passage asks whom a person serves. Its later Christian reception does not erase that setting.¹

Before assuming any state, be willing to offer the desire for it. A desire that cannot be offered has already begun to govern the practice.

Begin with this order of devotion: the Father holds the center; every possible experience remains beneath Him.