CHAPTER XV.

THE CREATIVE POWER OF THE IDEAL, OR THE EXTERNALIZATION OF THOUGHT.

IN the Kabalistic scheme of creation, called the ten Sephiroth, or Emanations, and which contains the key to all arcane philosophy, the first emanation from the "Unknown" is pure thought. This is the Christ of whom Paul so often speaks, the starting-point, the Crown of all existence. This divides into two rays, a Father and Mother ray: a masculine and active, a feminine and reactive potency; the one pure intelligence, the other wisdom. The union of these in all their correlations is necessary to the existence of everything in earth and heaven. Existence and thought are identical. All being (or substance) by a law of necessity assumes form. A thought of a thing, by a law of evolution inherent in its nature, assumes form in an idea, which is the living image of the thought. It is the form, or first expression, of the thought. But an idea tends to a further externalization, in fact, to become an actuality in the world of sense. This is the true conception of the law of creation. It is the successive stages in the externalization of thought, first as a living image or soul of a thing which we call an idea. It is being, or thought, becoming visible in a form and as a form. Then it passes still further outward (or downward) and ultimates itself in the material world, or comes to a manifestation on the plane of sense. All mind is essentially creative, and the subjective tends to become objective, and the ideal to pass into the actual. As God creates the world by that effort of Will and Thought,- which Plato calls the Divine

Idea, and Swedenborg and the Gospel of John, the Word,—so we, as being in the image of God, can, in a certain proper sense, create. With a certain intensity of will and thought, the images that arise are subjective. They are called hallucinations, or creatures of the imagination. They are by no means destitute of reality, for all the objects of nature are only a mental picture more or less vivid. To us, as in our dreams, they are as real as any of the visible objects of the world around us. With a more intense and intelligent concentration of the will, the intellectual ideas take shape in the cosmic matter, the mother principle of things, and become concrete, objective, and visible entities. Here is the greatest of secrets, the deepest of all mysteries, explained, -the law of creation. In this way God perpetually creates the world in us and through us.

All ideas distinctly formed in the mind respecting ourselves tend to a full realization in the body. The spiritual and ideal form tends to a further externalization in a material shape. The condition of the body is always the material shaping of the controlling idea. But the developing of the idea, or evolution of the spiritual image in the body, is not always, nor generally, instantaneous, but is progressive. The creation of the world instantaneously by the divine fiat is not now entertained by thinking men anywhere. It is a tenet that has passed out of science and philosophy. In fact, creation is not now an accomplished event. It is not a thing done, but one that is in the process of being done. The divine idea is not yet fully realized or actualized. The world is an unfinished picture. As the Platonists would say, it is in a state of becoming. The divine idea, the universal divine life, a mysterious power of order and arrangement, is at the very centre and heart of things, struggling to work itself out into a complete material expression. Universal nature is moved from within by the Universal Mind, of which our minds are a part.

In giving treatment to the body, which is our world, it is not so much our aim to impart life to it from without-though this can be done- -as it is to aid the inner life, the real conscious self, and the true idea of our being in its birth into actuality or a material expression. The body, which is the external shell of our being, becomes fixed. The tschamping, shampooing, or massage may remove the hardness of the shell so that it can more readily take shape from the inward idea. All motion, all progress, all development, is in the direction of the least resistance, as James Hinton demonstrated. To remove obstructions, to break up the fixedness of the body, which is the characteristic of old age, to accelerate the process of excretion and disintegration, is to aid the process of the reformation of the body from within. In the germ of the animal body, as in the seed of the plant, there is the living idea of the future organism. And that idea forms the body after the pattern of itself. It is function (or idea) that creates its appropriate organ, and not the organ that makes the function. For instance, the heart is made to beat, and this action commences before its tissues are formed, even when it is only a fluid mass of protoplasmic jelly. So it is always the function, the idea, which creates its organic expression. Thus it is, and of necessity must be, in regard to the whole body.

If we will form the true idea of man, and apply it to ourselves, and hold it steadfastly in the mind, and believe in its realization, by one of the deepest and most certain laws of our nature, it will tend to re-create the body after the pattern of that mental type. Creation is a begetting, and nature means that which is born. It is the product of the divine idea expressing itself in our minds on the plane of sense. The renewal of the body by the creative power of the divine idea of man is the true palingenesis or regeneration. (Matt. xix. 28.)

It seems to be a divine law that all animal bodies are renewed at least once a year. The crab and the lobster annually cast

off the old shell, and a new one forms from within. The serpent sheds his skin, and this is the last step in the renewal of his body. Birds cast off their feathers, and this takes place by a cause or force that acts from within outward, and it is the last stage in the process of their renewal. The ox and the horse shed their hair in spring. The tree renews itself once a year, and a new one grows around the older ones, which in time decay, leaving the trunk hollow. Perennial plants die down to the root, where the infant plant-germ remains, and starts into life with youthful vigour in the spring. All these phenomena are illustrations of a general law of life that is called rejuvenescence. Man should move forward in this divine order. If we keep the mind ever young, the body can be left to take care of itself. Man, in health, casts off the external shell once a year, for there is nothing in the animal world that is not in man. He " renews his youth as the eagles;" but what the new body shall be depends on the character of the controlling idea and fixed belief, for the outer shell will shape itself into its material expression. As God creates the world by the Divine Idea, so we, in the same way, create our bodies, which are a microcosm, or world on a small scale. Every step in the disintegrating and renewing process is influenced by the governing idea, for the body exists, like everything else, in thought, and is what we think it to be. It is formed after the pattern of the image which we form of ourselves in the mind. If that is the divine and true idea of man, it will make our humanity divine, a thing of health, and harmony, and beauty, even in its ultimate manifestation in the body. If Jesus, as Swedenborg affirms, made his humanity divine even to its ultimates, it was effected by maintaining in thought, and steadfastly holding before his mind, the divine idea of man. Every new and higher conception which we form of the inward nature of man, and consequently of ourselves, by an undeviating law, tends to an outward bodily expression. It is the living germ, the seed of a new state, having a divine

creative potency in it. A seed is one of the most marvellous things in nature. It is the embodiment of the idea of the future plant, containing in it a conatus or tendency to develop, under the proper conditions of soil and air, in the external world. So the kingdom of heaven, or the true spiritual condition of man, in its incipiency, is like a grain of mustard which a man plants in a field, and which afterward becomes unfolded into a tree, “bearing fruit and yielding seed after its kind.” (Luke xiii. 19.) It is the business of the psychological physician to plant in the mind of the patient the fruitful idea of a better condition. He is like the husbandman that goes forth to sow, and often, from a single idea that finds lodgement in the interior mind, there is afterwards reaped an abundant harvest. (Matt. xiii. 3-9.) The kingdom of heaven, says Jesus, is also like leaven, which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal (the sheah was a peck and a half) until the whole was leavened. (Matt. xiii. 33.) If we can impart a new life to a patient, however little it may seem to be, it will propagate itself and multiply itself until it reduces the whole organism to its own nature. If our mode of thought is on a higher range, and our spiritual state above his, it will be easy to do this, on the principle that water runs down hill, or descends from a higher to a lower level. And whatever can be done at all by the psychological method, can be done easily and without laboured effort. "The Father, who dwelleth in us, he doeth the works."

In the application of this important law to self-cure, we need to fix in our minds the change we know ought to be effected, or form the idea of the state to which we aspire, and in a measure we have already become what we desired to be. It is our right and privilege to believe this. As an artist said to Emerson, "A man cannot draw a tree without becoming in a certain sort a tree," so we cannot form the true idea of an animal without becoming in some degree that animal. In forming the true conception of a child, so that we could paint