Chapter IV
THE CREATIVE POWER OF THE IDEAL
W. John Murray
The
Realm of Reality
Divine Science Publishing Assoc.
New York, 1922.
“Be not conformed to this
world; but be ye transformed by the
renewing of your mind, that ye may
prove what is that good, and
acceptable, and perfect will of
God.”
--Romans 12:2
[45] I think
it is Shakespeare who says, “It is
the mind that makes the body rich,”
and he might truly have added, “It
is the mind that makes the body
young.” We have known men and women
who were positively old at fifty; that
is, they were more decrepit in mind and
body than many others whom we know who
have reached their seventieth, and even
their eightieth years. We used to think
that this was due, largely, if not
entirely, to physiological conditions;
but in the light of the new psychology we
are beginning to realize how very
important a part the mental plays in the
matter of premature old age, as in all
other things. It seems too bad that just
as a man has acquired enough wisdom to be
of use to himself and others he should
become suddenly smitten with a belief in
old age, and thus nourish a thought that
casts a cloud over his life. [46] If
there is one thing more than another
which the new psychology is doing it is
the revealing of this as neither
necessary nor wise.
We are
learning that we hasten the
disintegrating processes of old age
through auto-suggestion just as much as
we hasten these processes by overwork and
dissipation--if not more so. It is not
enough when a man reaches what is called
middle life that he slow up in his labors
and discontinue his dissipations. He must
cultivate youthful thoughts as surely as
he must cultivate youthful companions. A
man may spend fewer hours at his desk
after his fiftieth year, but if he spends
more hours at his club talking with old
cronies and speculating as to the length
of time he has remaining before
decrepitude seizes upon him, he has not
improved matters much.
This is now
as much an established fact as that the
ship-builder builds the ship or the
house-builder builds the house. The
ship-builder uses wood and steel, nuts
and bolts, rivets and ropes, and in
addition to these the house-builder
requires bricks and mortar and other
materials, but in the construction and
carrying on of these enterprises of their
physical bodies they each use the
properties by which they are surrounded
in the form of oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen
and the like. That for a time this
building and repairing work is carried on
by subconscious processes is true, but
this does not prevent these processes
being greatly aided by conscious
co-operation. This is the lesson that the
New Spiritual Psychology [47] has come to
teach.
On the
principle that while God supplies us with
food He will not eat it for us, it is
safe to assert that while God has
equipped us with mental faculties He
expects us to exercise these faculties
for ourselves, in accordance with His law
of Creative Intelligence. If the
ship-builder and the house-builder should
take the materials by which they are
surrounded and scatter them here, there,
and everywhere, we should have neither
ships nor houses, but by the intelligent
assembling of these component parts we
have ships to sail in and houses in which
to live.
Man, then,
in the generation and regeneration of
what is called his “earthly
tabernacle,” or the instrument
through which he functions on the
objective plane, must act with the same
degree of intelligence as do the builders
of ships and of houses. These useful
members of society cannot throw wood and
steel, nuts and bolts, bricks and mortar
together indiscriminately and construct
ships and houses, no matter how well they
are supplied with these essentials.
The same law
which forbids the component parts of
ships and houses and foods from being
thrown together indiscriminately to
result in good ships, houses, and
physical constitutions, operates on the
higher plane of the mental, for Law, to
be Law, must be so in all phases. There
is a law by which mind acts upon the body
as certainly as an alkali acts upon an
acid, and if this mental action is not
operating constructively it is operating
destructively; [48] for mind action is as
incessant as the flow of the waters of
Niagara. When one thinks of the untold
centuries of the ceaseless energy of
Niagara going to waste, and of the
comparatively few years in which it has
been used to generate electric power, one
is furnished with some idea of the
tremendous Power of Mind and the
comparatively little use we have made of
it. It were nothing at all that an
immense body of water poured itself over
the Falls if no constructive direction
were given to it. It would be marvelous
to see, but of no practical benefit.
In every man
there are undreamed of possibilities; but
unless he realizes this he is much like a
watch with all its mechanism in perfect
order, but which does not record the time
because it has been allowed to run down.
Many a man considers himself “all
run down,” when what he needs is to
be wound up with the stem-winder of a New
Idea. Perhaps nothing is so encouraging
as the discovery that each man, like each
watch, has a main-spring upon which all
his movements depend, and this
main-spring is the subconscious mind. The
difference between the main-spring of a
watch and the subconscious mind of a man
is the difference between that which is
subject to destruction and that which
goes on forever. When Paul admonishes us
to become transformed by the renewing of
our mind, it is his way of telling us to
charge the subconscious mind with such
directions as we wish it to carry out in
objective experience.
[49] It is
now the opinion of some of the most
advanced thinkers that the subconscious
mind is that which stands between the
conscious and the superconscious,
receiving its impressions now from one
and again from the other. Its purpose is
not to create but to obey, and so
faithful is it in the performance of this
duty that, like an office boy in the
employ of a firm in which there are
several members, it will carry out orders
given to it by each member of the firm,
even when these orders seem to be
contradictory. It might seem from this
illustration that the subconscious mind,
like the office boy, is an automaton when
it comes to obeying orders, and in one
sense it is. When an employer said to an
office boy who remarked that he thought a
certain thing ought to be done in a
certain way, “You are not paid to
think, you are paid to do what you are
told,” he had the attitude toward
that boy which every individual ought to
have toward the subconscious mind. It is
not paid to think, it is paid to serve
Thought, whether that Thought is prompted
by suggestions from without, through the
avenue of the senses, or from Within,
through the channel of spiritual
Perception.
The
importance of this aspect of the
subconscious mind cannot be too strongly
emphasized, for it not only explains how
we are constantly producing in our lives
that which is undesirable, but it
furnishes us with an idea of how we may
bring into our lives that which is most
desirable by simply reversing the
machinery of the mind. [50] If we are not
perfectly satisfied with the conditions
of our lives, and few persons are, we are
confronted with the necessity of either
becoming “reconciled to our
fate,” as some believe we
should, or becoming masters of our
fate, as some believe we can.
Between the
two extremes of being reconciled to
one’s fate and being master of it
there is a great gulf, but we are now
learning that it is not an impossible
gulf, like that which separated Dives
from Lazaus, for if we cannot cross it on
the surface, nor bridge it in the air, we
can still use the subway of the
subconscious, which is always the
shortest line between the two points of
the Relative and the Absolute. On the
plane of the Relative all phenomena are
more or less limited and imperfect, while
on the plane of the Absolute all is
unlimited and perfect. This is because
the original Idea of a thing, like the
original phraseology of a language,
suffers from the attempt to translate it
into visible manifestation. Those of us
who are able to read the Greek poems only
in their English translations are told
that we have no conception of their
beauty as it expresses itself to those
who read them in the original.
One of the
most difficult exercises at school is the
re-translation of something back into its
original language, and it is this
exercise which suggests the method by
which we are to return to our original
perfectness as the conscious sons and
daughters of God. When it becomes better
known that the visible world, with all
that it contains, [51] including our own
bodies, is a poor translation of that
spiritual universe of God’s Ideas,
we shall labor more diligently to
re-translate ourselves into that Ideal
State. If, on the plane of the relative,
circumstances are not to our liking, and
what we want to do is to change those
circumstances to other and more desirable
ones, we must do exactly what we do in
simple arithmetic when we are uncertain
about our calculations.
When things
are not working out satisfactorily we do
not go on writing figures in the hope
that an accumulation of figures will
solve the problem; rather do we, for the
moment, look away from all figures to the
principle and, working out from this, get
our correct answer. In mathematics this
method could be called working on the
plane of the absolute, and it is in a
similar way to this that all the problems
of life must be solved. On the plane of
the relative there are moral, mental,
physical and financial problems to be
solved, and to attempt to solve these by
ordinary means is to be as unsuccessful
in the future as we have been in the
past. We can no more cure moral or
physical diseases with just will-power,
and without God-Power, than we can
produce electric light without a dynamo;
nor can we solve our financial problems
by lying and dishonesty. “Except
the Lord build the house they labor in
vain that build it,” says the
Scriptures. Except as any problem,
mathematical or metaphysical, is working
out according to Principle, it is not
solved at all.
[52] The
Creative Power of the Ideal depends then
upon our conscious co-operation with the
Absolute in Divine Science, which is God;
and the easiest way to do this is to
learn to think as God thinks; and as God
never thinks in terms of the relative and
the negative, but always in terms of the
Absolute and the Positive, it is plain
that the creative power of the Ideal
through us rests with the kind of mental
pictures we form. When I speak of the
Ideal I do not mean that which exists
only in imagination or fancy, and which
we feel to be unattainable. I mean that
which is back of all that we call real,
and which is the very substance of the
so-called real.
We speak of
men as being men of high ideals or of low
ideals, as the case may be, meaning by
this that they are men of fine thoughts
on the one hand or coarse thoughts on the
other, and that their ideals exhibit
themselves in their moral conduct, in
their physical appearance, and in their
very circumstances. Now, conduct,
physical conditions, and financial
circumstances can be created only by
thinking, and hence the creative
power of the ideal consists in equipping
the original thought with sufficient
strength to project itself into
manifestation.
The physical
sciences all assure us that the starting
point of everything in the world is the
invisible nucleus which gathers around it
by the law of attraction whatever is
necessary to its complete manifestation
in form. If our thought nucleus is one of
fear, it will at once attract unto [53]
itself the same quality of thought which
is constantly emanating from other minds,
for there is a mental contagion as there
is a moral and a physical contagion. If
our thought nucleus is one of sickness or
poverty, it will coalesce with other
thoughts of sickness and poverty until it
registers in us as the finished product
in bodily discomfort. This is on the
principle that the smoke from one chimney
may scarcely be noticed, but when it
unites itself with the smoke from many
chimneys it may almost conceal the
sun.
But if the
creative power of the Ideal operates in
this manner on the plane of the negative,
it will operate also on the plane of the
positive. If our thought nucleus be one
of health or happiness, purity or
prosperity, then by the same law of
attraction it will draw around itself
thoughts of a similar character, until
these register in our daily life in
expressions after their kind. This is as
much a law as that a magnet will attract
a needle, and we must learn how to make
intelligent use of it. If the
subconscious mind is not “paid to
think,” but to carry out orders,
then we must see to it that we give only
such orders to it as we wish it to
execute.
And we must
be so sure at the outset that we know
what we want that we shall not be
constantly countermanding our orders by
persistently changing our minds. When we
know what we want, we next need to
know if this exists on the plane of the
Absolute, for if it does not it can never
manifest itself on the plane of the
relative. [54] All the things that are
really worth having exist on the plane of
the Absolute, for in God is Life, and
Love, and Beauty and Supply. And the
knowledge that these exist on the plane
of the Absolute, from which they can
never become separated, enables us to
impress the Idea of these on the
subconscious mind, and this in turn
expresses these in us as the finished
products of our mental picture.
The creative
power of the Ideal, then, consists in
suggesting to the subconscious mind
whatever we desire and know to be in the
Absolute Divine Mind awaiting our
intelligent demand upon it. The
suggestion of health or happiness, purity
or prosperity is a seed which, if watered
and nurtured by similar suggestions, will
inevitably germinate into those things
which rejoice the soul, strengthen the
mind, heal the body and replenish the
resources.
Chapter
5
* * * * *
The Realm of Reality
Table of
Contents
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Northwoods Divine Science Resource
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