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Chapter 3 — Relation Between Mental and Physical Form

Some persons feel that it is not quite proper to visualize for things. “It’s too material” they say. But material form is necessary for the self-recognition of spirit from the individual standpoint. And this is the means through which the creative process is carried forward. Therefore, far from matter being an illusion and something that ought not to be (as some metaphysical teachers have taught), matter is the necessary channel for the self-differentiation of spirit. However, it is not my desire to lead you into lengthy and tiresome scientific reasoning in order to remove the mystery of visualization and to put it upon a logical foundation. Naturally, each individual will do this in his own way. My only wish is to point out to you the smoothest way I know, which is the road on which Troward guides me. I feel sure you will conclude as I have, that the only mystery in connection with visualizing is the mystery of life taking form, governed by unchangeable and easily understood laws.

We all possess more power and greater possibilities than we realize, and visualizing is one of the greatest of these powers. It brings other possibilities to our observation. When we pause to think for a moment, we realize that for a cosmos to exist at all, it must be the outcome of a cosmic mind, which binds “all individual minds to a certain generic unities of action, thereby producing all things as realities and nothing as illusions.” If you will take this thought of Troward’s and meditate upon it without prejudice, you will surely realize that concrete material form is an absolute necessity of the creative process, also “that matter is not an illusion but a necessary channel through which life differentiates itself.”

If you consider matter in its right order as the polar opposite to Spirit, you will not find any antagonism between them. On the contrary, together they constitute one harmonious whole. And when you realize this you feel, in your practice of visualizing, that you are working from cause to effect, from beginning to finish. In reality your mental picture is the specialized working of the originating spirit.

One could talk for hours on purely scientific lines, showing, as Troward says, “that raw material for the formation of the solar systems is universally distributed throughout all space. Yet investigation shows that while the Heavens are studded with millions of suns, there are spaces that show no signs of cosmic activity. This being true, there must be something which started cosmic activity in certain places, while passing over others in which the raw material was equally available. At first thought one might attribute the development of cosmic energy to the etheric particles themselves. Upon investigation, however, we find this to be mathematically impossible in a medium which is equally distributed throughout space, for all its particles are in equilibrium, therefore no one particle possesses in itself a greater power of originating motion than the other.

Thus we find that the initial movement, though working in and through the particles of primary substance, is not the particles themselves. It is this something we mean when we speak of Spirit. The same power that brought universal substance into existence will bring your individual thought or mental picture into physical form. There is no difference of kind in the power. The only difference is a difference of scale. The power and the substance themselves are the same. Only in working out your mental picture it has transferred its creative energy from the universal to the scale of the particular, and is working in the same unfailing manner from its specific center, your mind.