In visualizing, or making a mental picture, you are not endeavoring to change the laws of Nature. You are fulfilling them. Your object in visualizing is to bring things into regular order both mentally and physically. When you realize that this method of employing the creative power brings your desires, one after another, into practical material accomplishment, your confidence in the mysterious but unfailing law of attraction, which has its central power station in the very heart of your word/picture, becomes supreme. Nothing can shake it. You never feel that it is necessary to take anything from anybody else. You have learned that asking and seeking have receiving and finding as their correlatives. You know that all you have to do is to start the plastic substance of the Universe flowing into the thought-molds your picture-desire provides.
Chapter 2 — How to Attract to Yourself the Things You Desire
The power within you which enables you to form a thought picture is the starting point of all there is. In its original state it is the undifferentiated formless substance of life. Your thought picture forms the mold (so to speak) into which this formless substance takes shape. Visualizing, or mentally seeing things and conditions as you wish them to be, is the condensing, the specializing power in you that might be illustrated by the lens of a magic lantern. The magic lantern is one of the best symbols of this imaging faculty. It illustrates the working of the Creative Spirit on the plane of the initiative and selection (or in its concentrated specializing form) in a remarkably clear manner.
This picture slide illustrates your own mental picture — invisible in the lantern of your mind until you turn on the light of your will. That is to say, you light up your desire with absolute faith that the Creative Spirit of Life, in you, is doing the work. By the steady flow of light of the will on the Spirit, your desired picture is projected upon the screen of the physical world, an exact reproduction of the pictured slide in your mind.
Visualizing without a will sufficiently steady to inhibit every thought and feeling contrary to your picture would be as useless as a magic lantern without the light. On the other hand, if your will is sufficiently developed to hold your picture in thought and feeling, without any “ifs,” simply realizing that your thought is the great attracting power, then your mental picture is as certain to be projected upon the screen of your physical world as any pictured slide put into the best magic lantern ever made.
Try projecting the picture in a magic lantern with a light that is constantly shifting from one side to the other, and you will have the effect of an uncertain will. It is as necessary that you should always stand back of your picture with a strong, steady will, as it is to have a strong steady light back of a picture slide.
The joyous assurance with which you make your picture is the very powerful magnet of Faith, and nothing can obliterate it. You are happier than you ever were, because you have learned to know where your source of supply is, and you rely upon its never-failing response to your given direction.
When all said and done, happiness is the one thing which every human being wants, and the study of visualization enables you to get more out of life than you ever enjoyed before. Increasing possibilities keep opening out, more and more, before you.
A business man once told me that since practicing visualization and forming the habit of devoting a few minutes each day to thinking about his work as he desired it to be in a large, broad way, his business had more than doubled in six months. His method was to go into a room every morning before breakfast and take a mental inventory of his business as he had left it the evening before, and then enlarge upon it. He said he expanded and expanded in this way until his affairs were in remarkably successful condition. He would see himself in his office doing everything that he wanted done. His occupation required him to meet many strangers every day. In his mental picture he saw himself meeting these people, understanding their needs and supplying them in just the way they wished. This habit, he said, had strengthened and steadied his will in an almost inconceivable manner. Furthermore, by thus mentally seeing things as he wished them to be, he had acquired the confident feeling that a certain creative power was exercising itself, for him and through him, for the purpose of improving his little world.
When you first begin to visualize seriously, you may feel, as many others do, that someone else may be forming the same picture you are, and that naturally would not suit your purpose. Do not give yourself any unnecessary concern about this. Simply try to realize that your picture is an orderly exercise of the Universal Creative Power specifically applied. Then you may be sure that no one can work in opposition to you. The universal law of harmony prevents this. Endeavor to bear in mind that your mental picture is Universal Mind exercising its inherent powers of initiative and selection specifically.
God, or Universal Mind, made man for the special purpose of differentiating Himself through him. Everything that is, came into existence in this same way, by this self-same law of self-differentiation, and for the same purpose. First the idea, the mental picture or the prototype of the thing, which is the thing itself in its incipiency or plastic form.
The Great Architect of the Universe contemplated Himself as manifesting through His polar opposite, matter, and the idea expanded and projected itself until we have a world — many worlds.
Many people ask, “But why should we have a physical world at all?” The answer is: Because it is the nature of originating substance to solidify, under directivity rather than activity, just as it is the nature of wax to harden when it becomes cold, or plaster of Paris to become firm and solid when exposed to the air. Your picture in this same Divine substance in its fluent state taking shape through the individualized center of Divine operation, your mind; and there is no power to prevent this combination of spiritual substance from becoming physical form. It is the nature of Spirit to complete its work and an idea is not complete until it has made for itself a vehicle.
Nothing can prevent your picture from coming into concrete form except the same power that gave it birth — yourself. Suppose you wish to have a more orderly room. You look about your room and the idea of order suggests boxes, closets, shelves, hooks and so forth. The box, the closet, the hooks, all are concrete ideas of order. Vehicles through which order and harmony suggest themselves.
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.
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