The Creative Process in the Individual - Thomas Troward
This, then, is the sort of body which the instructed would contemplate as
that in which he was to attain resurrection. He would regard it, not as an
illusion, but as a great reality; while at the same time he would not need
to trouble himself about its particular form, for he would know that it
would be the perfect expression of his own conception of himself. He would
know this because it is in accordance with the fundamental principle that
external creation has its root in the Self-contemplation of Spirit.
Those passing over with this knowledge would obviously be in a very
different position from those who passed over with only a subjective
consciousness. They would bring with them powers of selection and
initiative by which they could continue to impress fresh and expanding
conceptions upon their subjective mind, and so cause it to carry on its
work as the seed-ground of the whole individuality, instead of being shut
up in itself as a mere circulus for the repetition of previously received
ideas; and so in their recognition of the _principle_ of physical
resurrection they would have a clear and definite line of auto-suggestion.
And because this suggestion is derived from the undeniable facts of the
whole cosmic creation, it is one which both subjective and objective mind
can accept as an established fact, and so the suggestion becomes effective.
This suggestion, then, becomes the self-contemplation of the individual
spirit; and because it is in strict conformity with the generic principle
of the Original Creative Activity, of which the individual mind is itself a
product, this becomes also the Self-contemplation of the Originating Spirit
as seeing itself reflected in the individual spirit; so that, by the basic
law of the Creative Process, this suggestion is bound sooner or later to
work out into its corresponding fact, namely, the production of a material
body free from the power of death and from all those limitations which we
now associate with our physical organism.
This, then, is the hope of those who pass over in recognition of the great
truth. But how about those who have passed over without that recognition?
We have seen that their purely subjective condition precludes them from
taking any initiative on their own account, for that requires the presence
of objective mind. Their subjective mind, however, still retains its
essential nature; that is, it is still susceptible to suggestion, and still
possesses its inherent creativeness in working out any suggestion that is
sufficiently deeply implanted in it. Here, then, opens up a vast field of
activity for that other class who have passed over in possession of both
sides of their mentality. By means of their powers of initiative and
selection they can on the principle of telepathy cause their own subjective
mind to penetrate the subjective spheres of those who do not possess those
powers, and they can thus endeavor to impress upon them the great truth of
the physical ultimate of the Creative Process--the truth that any series
which stops short of that ultimate is incomplete, and, if insisted upon as
being ultimate, must become self-destructive because in opposition to the
inherent working of the Universal Creative Spirit. Then, as the perception
of the true nature of the Creative Process dawned upon any subjective
entity, it would by reason of accepting this suggestion begin to develop an
objective mentality, and so would gradually attain to the same status as
those who had passed over in full possession of all their mental powers.
But the more the objective mentality became developed in these discarnate
personalities the more the need of a corresponding physical instrument
would assert itself, both from their intellectual perception of the
original cosmic process, and also from the inherent energy of the Spirit as
centered in the ultimate ego of the individual. Not to seek material
manifestation would be the contrary of all we have traced out regarding the
nature of the Creative Process; and hence the law of tendency resulting
from the conscious union of subjective and objective mind in the individual
must necessarily be toward the production of a physical form. Only we must
recollect, as I have already pointed out, that this concentration of these
minds would be upon a principle and not upon a particular bodily shape. The
particular form they would be content to leave to the inherent
self-expressiveness of the Universal Spirit working through the particular
ego, with the result that their expectation would be fixed upon a _general
principle_ of physical Resurrection which would provide a form suited to be
the material instrument of the highest ideal of man as a spiritual and
mental being. Then, since the subjective mind is the automatic builder of
the body, the result of the individual's acceptance of the Resurrection
principle must be that this mental conception will eventually work out as a
corresponding fact. Whether on this planet or on some other, matters not,
for, as we have already seen, the physical body evolved by a soul that is
conscious of its unity with the Universal Spirit is bound to be in
conformity with the physical laws of _any_ planet, though from the
standpoint of the conscious ego not limited by them.
In this way we may conceive that those who have passed over in possession
of both sides of their spiritual nature would find a glorious field of
usefulness in the unseen in helping to emancipate those who had passed over
in possession of their subjective side only. But from our present analysis
it will be seen that this can only be effected on the basis of a
recognition of the principle of the Resurrection of the Body. Apart from
the recognition of this principle the only possible conception which the
discarnate individual could form of himself would be that of a purely
subjective being; and this carries with it all the limitations of a
subjective life unbalanced by an objective one; and so long as the
principle of physical resurrection is denied, so long the life must
continue to be merely subjective and consequently unprogressive.[7]
But it may be asked why those who have realized this great principle
sufficiently to carry their objective mentality into the unseen state are
liable to the change which we call death. The answer is that though they
have realized _the general principle_ they have not yet divested themselves
of certain conceptions by which they limit it, and consequently by the law
of subjective mind they carry those limitations into the working of the
Resurrection principle itself.
They are limited by the race-belief that physical death is under all
conditions a necessary law of Nature, or by the theological belief that
death is the will of God; so then the question is whether these beliefs are
well founded. Of course appeal is made to universal experience, but it does
not follow that the universal experience of the past is bound to be the
universal experience of the future--the universal experience of the past
was that no man had ever flown across the English Channel, yet now it has
been done. What we have to do, therefore, is not to bother about past
experience, but to examine the inherent nature of the Law of Life and see
whether it does not contain possibilities of further development. And the
first step in this direction is to see whether what we have hitherto
considered limitations of the law are really integral parts of the law
itself. The very statement of this question shows the correct answer; for
how can a force acting in one direction be an integral part of a force
acting in the opposite direction? How can the force which pulls a thing
down be an integral part of the force which builds it up? To suppose,
therefore, that the limitations of the law are an integral portion of the
law itself is a _reductio ad absurdum_.
For these reasons the argument from the past experience of the race counts
for nothing; and when we examine the theological argument we shall find
that it is only the old argument from past experience in another dress. It
is alleged that death is the will of God. How do we know that it is the
will of God? Because the facts prove it so, is the ultimate answer of all
religious systems with one exception; so here we are back again at the old
race-experience as the criterion of truth. Therefore the theological
argument is nothing but the materialistic argument disguised. It is in our
more or less _conscious_ acceptance of the materialistic argument, under
any of its many disguises, that the limitation of life is to be found--not
in the Law of Life itself; and if we are to bring into manifestation the
infinite possibilities latent in that Law it can only be by looking
steadily into the _principle_ of the Law and resolutely denying everything
that opposes it. The Principle of Life must of necessity be Affirmative,
and affirmative throughout, without any negative anywhere--if we once
realize this we shall be able to unmask the enemy and silence his guns.
Now to do this is precisely the one object of the Bible; and it does it in
a thoroughly logical manner, always leading on to the ultimate result by
successive links of cause and effect. People will tell you that the Bible
is their authority for saying that Death is the will of God; but these are
people who read it carelessly; and ultimately the only reason they can give
you for their manner of interpreting the Bible is that the facts prove
their interpretation to be correct; so that in the last resort you will
always find you have got back to the old materialistic argument from past
race-experience, which logically proves nothing. These are good
well-meaning people with a limited idea which they read into the Bible, and
so limit its promises by making physical death an essential preliminary to
Resurrection. They grasp, of course, the great central idea that Perfected
Man possesses a joyous immortal Life permeating spirit, soul and body; but
they relegate it to some dim and distant future, entirely disconnected from
the present law of our being, not seeing that if we are to have eternal
life it must necessarily be involved in some principle which is eternal,
and therefore existing, at any rate latently, at the present moment. Hence,
though their fundamental principle is true, they are all the time mentally
limiting it, with the result that they themselves create the conditions
they impose upon it, and consequently the principle will work (as
principles always do) in accordance with the conditions provided for its
action.
Unless, therefore, this limiting belief is entirely eradicated, the
individual, though realizing the fundamental principle of Life, is bound to
pass out of physical existence; but on the other hand, since he does take
the recognition of this fundamental principle with him, it is bound to bear
fruit sooner or later in a joyous Resurrection, while the intermediate
state can only be a peaceful anticipation of that supreme event. This is
the answer to the question why those who have realized the great principle
sufficiently to carry their objective mentality into the unseen world are
still liable to physical death; and in the last analysis it will be found
to resolve itself into the remains of race belief based upon past
experience. These are they who pass over in sure and certain hope of a
glorious Resurrection--sure and certain because founded upon the very Being
of God Himself, that inherent Life of the All-creating Divine Spirit which
is the perpetual interaction of the Eternal Love and Beauty. They have
grasped the Life-giving Truth, only they have postponed its operation,
because they have the fixed idea that its present fruition is an absolute
impossibility.
But if we ask the reason for this idea it always comes back to the old
materialistic argument from the experience of past conditions, while the
whole nature of advance is in the opening up of new conditions. And in this
advance the Bible is the pioneer book. Its whole purport is to tell us most
emphatically that death is _not_ the will of God. In the story of Eden God
is represented as warning man of the poisonous nature of the forbidden
fruit, which is incompatible with the idea of death as an essential feature
of man's nature. Then from the point where man has taken the poison all the
rest of the Bible is devoted to telling us how to get rid of it. Christ, it
tells us, was manifested to bring Life and Immortality to light--to abolish
death--to destroy the works of the devil, that is the death-dealing power,
for "he that hath the power of death is the devil." It is impossible to
reconcile this life-giving conception of the Bible with the idea that death
at any stage or in any degree is the desire of God. Let us, therefore,
start with the recognition that this negative force, whether in its minor
degrees as disease or in its culmination as death, is that which it is the
will of God to abolish. This also is logical; for if God be the Universal
Spirit of Life finding manifestation in individual lives, how can the
desire of this Spirit be to act in opposition to its own manifestation?
Therefore Scripture and common-sense alike assure us that the will of God
toward us is Life and not death.[8]
We may therefore start on our quest for Life with the happy certainty that
God is on our side. But people will meet us with the objection that though
God wills Life to us, He does not will it just yet, but only in some dim
far-off future. How do we know this? Certainly not from the Bible. In the
Bible Jesus speaks of two classes of persons who believe on Him as the
Manifestation or Individualisation of the Spirit of Life. He speaks of
those who, having passed through death, still believe on Him, and says that
these _shall_ live--a future event. And at the same time He speaks of those
who are living and believe on Him, and says that they shall never die--thus
contemplating the entire elimination of the contingency of death (John xi.
25).
Again St. Paul expresses his wish not to be unclothed but to be clothed
upon, which he certainly would not have done had he considered the latter
alternative a nonsensical fancy. And in another place he expressly states
that we shall not all die, but that some shall be transmuted into the
Resurrection body without passing through physical death. And if we turn to
the Old Testament we find two instances in which this is said to have
actually occurred, those of Enoch and Elijah. And we may note in passing
that the Bible draws our attention to certain facts about these two
personages which are important as striking at the root of the notion that
austerities of some sort are necessary for the great attainment. Of Enoch
we are expressly told that he was the father of a large family, and of
Elijah that he was a man of like nature with ourselves--thus showing us
what is wanted is not a shutting of ourselves off from ordinary human life
but such a clear realization of the Universal Principle, of which our
personal life is the more or less conscious manifestation, that our
commonest actions will be hallowed by the Divine Presence; and so the grand
denouement will be only the natural result of our daily habit of walking
with God. From the stand-point of the Bible, therefore, the attainment of
physical regeneration without passing through death is not an
impossibility, nor is it necessarily relegated to some far off future.
Whatever any one else may say to the contrary, the Bible contemplates such
a denouement of human evolution as a present possibility.
Then if we argue from the philosophical stand-point we arrive at precisely
the same result. Past experience proves nothing, and we must therefore make
a fresh start by going back to the Original Creative action of the Spirit
of Life itself. Then, if we take this as our starting point, remembering
that at the stage of this _original_ movement there can be no intervention
by a second power, because there is none, why should we mentally impose any
restriction upon the action of the Creative Power? Certainly not by its own
Law of Tendency, for that must always be toward fuller self-expression; and
since this can only take place through the individual, the desire of the
Spirit must always be toward the increasing of the individual life. Nor yet
from anything in the created substance, for that would either be to suppose
the Spirit creating something in limitation of its own Self-expression, or
else to suppose that the limiting substance was created by some other power
working against the Spirit; and as this would mean a Duality of powers we
should not have reached the Originating Power at all, and so we might put
Spirit and Substance equally out of court as both being merely modes of
secondary causation. But if we see that the Universal Substance must be
created by emanation from the Universal Spirit, then we see that no
limitation of Spirit by substance is possible. We may therefore feel
assured that no limitation proceeds either from the will of the Spirit or
from the nature of Substance.
Where, then, does limitation come from? Limiting conditions are created by
the same power which creates everything else, namely, the
Self-contemplation of Spirit. This is why it is so important to realize
that the individual mind forms a center from which the self-contemplating
action of Spirit is specialized in terms of the individual's own mode of
thinking, and therefore so long as the individual contemplates negative
conditions as being _of the essence_ of his own personality, he is in
effect employing the Creative Power of the Self-contemplation of Spirit
invertedly, destructively instead of constructively. The Law of the
Self-contemplation of Spirit as the Creative Power is as true in the
microcosm as in the macrocosm, and so the individual's contemplation of
himself as subject to the law of sin and death keeps him subject to that
law, while the opposite self-contemplation, the contemplation of himself as
rejoicing in the Life of the Spirit, the Perfect Law of Liberty, must
necessarily produce the opposite results.
Why, then, should not regeneration be accomplished here and now? I can see
no reason against it, either Scriptural or philosophical, except our own
difficulty in getting rid of the race-traditions which are so deeply
embedded in our subjective minds. To get rid of these we require a firm
basis on which to receive the opposite suggestion. We need to be convinced
that our ideal of a regenerated self is in accord with the Normal Standard
of Humanity and is within the scope of the laws of the universe. Now to
make clear to us the _infinitude_ of the truly Normal Standard of Humanity
is the whole purpose of the Bible; and the Manifestation of this Standard
is set before us in the Central Personality of the Scriptures who is at
once the Son of God and the Son of Man--the Great Exception, if you will,
to man as we know him now, but the Exception which proves the Rule. In
proportion as we begin to realize this we begin to introduce into our own
life the action of that Personal Factor on which all further development
depends; and when our recognition is complete we shall find that we also
are children of God.
CHAPTER IX
CONCLUSION
We are now in a position to see the place occupied by the individual in the
Creative Order. We have found that the originating and maintaining force of
the whole Creative Process is the Self-contemplation of the Spirit, and
that this necessarily produces a Reciprocal corresponding to the idea
embodied in the contemplation, and thus manifesting that idea in a
correlative Form. We have found that in this way the externalization of the
idea progresses from the condensation of the primary nebula to the
production of human beings as a race, and that at this point the simple
_generic_ reproduction of the idea terminates. This means that up to, and
including, _genus homo_, the individual, whether plant, animal, or man, is
what it is simply by reason of race conditions and not by exercise of
deliberate choice. Then we have seen that the next step in advance must
necessarily be by the individual becoming aware that he has power to mold
the conditions of his own consciousness and environment by the creative
power of his thought; thus not only enabling him to take a conscious part
in his own further evolution but precluding him from evolving any further
except by the right exercise of this power; and we have found that the crux
of the passage from the Fourth to the Fifth Kingdom is to get people so to
understand the nature of their creative power as not to use it
destructively. Now what we require to see is that the Creative Process has
always only one way of working, and that is by Reciprocity or Reflection,
or, as we might say, by the law of Action and Re-action, the re-action
being always equivalent and correspondent to the action which generated it.
If this Law of Reciprocity be grasped then we see how the progress of the
Creative Process must at length result in producing a being who himself
possesses the power of independent spiritual initiative and is thus able to
carry on the creative work from the stand-point of his own individuality.
Now the great crux is first to get people to see that they possess this
power at all, and then to get them to use it in the right direction. When
our eyes begin to open to the truth that we do possess this power the
temptation is to ignore the fact that our power of initiative is itself a
product of the similar power subsisting in the All-originating Spirit. If
this origin of our own creative faculty is left out of sight we shall fail
to recognize the Livingness of the Greater Life within which we live. We
shall never get nearer to it than what we may call its _generic_ level, the
stage at which the Creative Power is careful of the type or race but is
careless of the individual; and so at this level we shall never pass into
the Fifth Kingdom which is the Kingdom of Individuality--we have missed the
whole point of the transition to the more advanced mode of being, in which
the individual consciously functions as a creative center, because we have
no conception of a Universal Power that works at any higher level than the
generic, and consequently to reach a specific personal exercise of creative
power we should have to conceive of ourselves as transcending the Universal
Law. But if we realize that our own power of creative initiative has its
origin in the similar faculty of the All-Originating Mind then we see that
the way to maintain the Life-giving energy in ourselves is to use our power
of spiritual initiative so as to impress upon the Spirit the conception of
ourselves as standing related to It in a specific, individual, and personal
way that takes us out of the mere category of _genus homo_ and gives us a
specific spiritual individuality of our own. Thus our mental action
produces a corresponding re-action in the mind of the Spirit, which in its
turn reproduces itself as a special manifestation of the Life of the Spirit
in us; and so long as this circulation between the individual spirit and
the Great Spirit is kept up, the individual life will be maintained, and
will also strengthen as the circulation continues, for the reason that the
Spirit, as the Original Creative Power, is a Multiplying Force, and the
current sent into it is returned multiplied, just as in telegraphy the
feeble current received from a distance at the end of a long line operates
to start a powerful battery in the receiving office, which so multiplies
the force as to give out a clear message, which but for the multiplication
of the original movement could not have been done. Something like this we
may picture the multiplying tendency of the Originating Mind, and
consequently the longer the circulation between it and the individual mind
goes on the stronger the latter becomes; and this process growing habitual
becomes at last automatic, thus producing an endless flow of Life
continually expanding in intelligence, love, power and joy.
But we must note carefully that all this can only proceed from the
individual's recognition that his own powers are a derivative from the
All-originating Spirit, and that they can continue to be used
constructively only so long as they are employed in harmony with the
inherent Forward Movement of the Spirit. Therefore to insure this eternally
flowing stream of Life from the Universal Spirit into the individual there
must be _no inversion_ in the individual's presentation of himself to the
Originating Power: for through the very same Law by which we seek Life--the
Life namely, of reciprocal action and re-action--every inversion we bring
with us in presenting ourselves to the Spirit is bound to be faithfully
reproduced in a corresponding re-action, thus adulterating the stream of
Pure Life, and rendering it less life-giving in proportion to the extent to
which we invert the action of the Life-principle; so that in extreme cases
the stream flowing through and from the individual may be rendered
absolutely poisonous and deadly, and the more so the greater his
recognition of his own personal power to employ spiritual forces.