The living picture of the world grows within the mind. The world as it appears to us is like a 3D painting in which each person participates. Each color, each line that appears within it has first been painted within a mind, and only then does it materialize without.
In this case, however, the artists themselves are a portion of the painting and appear within it. There is no effect in the exterior world that doesn’t spring from an inner source. There is no motion that doesn’t occur within the mind. The great creativity of consciousness is our heritage. It doesn’t belong to mankind alone, however. Each living being possesses it and the living world consists of a spontaneous cooperation that exists between the smallest and the highest, the greatest and the lowly, between the atoms and the molecules and the conscious, reasoning mind.
All manner of insects, birds and animals cooperate in this venture, producing the natural environment. This is as normal and inevitable as the fact that our breath causes a mist to form on glass if we breathe on it. All consciousness creates the world, rising out of feeling-tone. It is a natural product of what our consciousness is. Feelings and emotions emerge into reality in certain specific ways. Thoughts appear, growing on the bed already laid. The seasons spring up, formed by ancient feeling-tones, having deep and abiding rhythms. They are the result, again, of innate creative aspects that are a portion of all life.
These ancient aspects lie, now, deeply buried in the psyches of all species, and from them the individual patterns, the specific blueprints for new differentiations, emerge.
The body of the earth can be said to have its own soul, or mind. Using this analogy the mountains and oceans, the valleys and rivers and all natural phenomena spring from the earth’s soul, as all events and all manufactured objects appear from the inner mind or soul of humanity.
The inner world of each man and woman is connected with the inner world of the earth. The spirit becomes flesh. Part of each individual’s soul, then, is intimately connected with what we call the world’s soul, or the soul of the earth.
The smallest blade of grass, or flower, is aware of this connection, and without reasoning comprehends its position, its uniqueness and its source of vitality. The atoms and molecules that compose all objects, whether it be the body of a person, a table, a stone or a dog, know the great passive thrust of creativity that lies beneath their own existence, and upon which their individual floats, distinct, clear and unassailable.
So does the human individual rise up in victorious distinctiveness from the ancient and yet ever-new fountains of its own soul. The self rises from unknowing into knowing, constantly surprising itself. As you read these sentences, for example, some your knowledge is conscious knowing and is instantly available. Some is unconscious, but even the unconscious knowledge is knowing in its own making.
You always know what you are doing, even when you don’t realize it. Your eyes knows it sees, but it can’t see itself except in a mirror or reflection. In the same way the world as you see it is a reflection of what you are, a reflection not in glass but in 3D reality. You project your own thoughts, feelings and expectations outward, then you perceive them as the outside reality. When it seems to you that others are observing you, you are observing yourself from the standpoint of your own projections.
You are a living picture of yourself. You project what you think you are outward into flesh. Your feelings, your conscious and unconscious thoughts, all alter and form your physical image. This is fairly easy for you to understand.
It’s not easy, however, to realize that your feelings and thoughts form your exterior experience in the same way, or that the events that appear to happen to you are initiated by you within your mental or physic inner environment.
Your body doesn’t just happen to be thin or fat, tall or short, healthy or not. These characteristics are mental, and are thrust outward by you upon your image. I don’t mean to be facetious, but you were not born yesterday. Your soul was not born yesterday, in those terms, but before the annals of time as you think of time.
The characteristics that were yours at birth were yours for a reason. The inner self chose them. To a large extent, the inner self can even now alter many of them. You didn’t arrive at birth without a history. Your individuality was always latent within your soul, and the “history” that is a part of you is written within unconscious memory that resides not only within your psyche, but is faithfully decoded into your genes and chromosomes, and filled within the blood that rushes through your veins.
You are aware, alert and participating in many more realities than you know as your soul expresses itself through you. That consciousness of your usual daylight hours, the ego consciousness, rises up like a flower from the ground of the “underneath”, the unconscious bed of your own reality. Though you are not aware of it, this ego itself emerges, then falls back again into the unconscious, from which another ego then rises as a new bloom from the springtime earth.
You do not have the same ego now that you had 10 years ago or even one year ago, but you’re not aware of the change. Ego rises out of what you are, in other words. It’s part of the action of your being and consciousness, but as the eye can’t see its own shifting colors and expressions, as it is not aware that it lives and dies constantly as its atomic structure changes, so you are not aware that the ego continually changes, dies, and is reborn.
Physically the structure of a cell retains its identity, even while the matter that composes it is continually altered. The cell rebuilds itself in line with its own pattern of identity, yet is always a part of emerging action, alive and responding even in the midst of its own multitudeness of deaths.
So psychological structures form to which various names are given. The names are meaningless, but the structures behind them are not. Such psychological structures also retain their identity, their pattern of uniqueness, even while they change constantly, die and are reborn.
The eye rises out of the physical structure. The ego rises out of the structure of the psyche. It can’t see itself, as the eye cannot. Both look outward-in one case away from the physical body, and in the other case away from the inner psyche to the environment.
The creative body consciousness creates the eye. The creative inner psyche creates the ego. The body forms the eye in the splendid wisdom of its great unconscious knowing. The psyche brings forth the ego that perceives psychologically as the eye perceives physically. Both the eye and the ego are formations focused toward perception of exterior reality.
Your experience in the world of physical matter flows outward from the center of your inner psyche. Then you perceive this experience. Exterior events, circumstances and conditions are meant as a kind of living feedback. Altering the state of the psyche automatically alters the physical circumstances.
There is no other valid way of changing physical events. It might help you if you imagine an inner living dimension within yourself in which you create, in miniature psychic form, all the exterior conditions that you know. Simply put, you do exactly this. Your thoughts, feelings and mental pictures can be called incipient exterior events, for in one way or another each of these materialized into physical reality.
You change even the most permanent-seeming conditions of your life constantly through the varying attitudes you have towards them. There is nothing in your exterior experience that didn’t originate within you.
Interactions with others happen, of course, yet there are none that you don’t accept or draw to you by your thoughts, attitudes, or emotions. This applies in each area of life. In your terms, it applies both before life and after it. In the most miraculous fashion are you given the gift of creating your experience.
In this existence you are learning to handle the inexhaustible energy that is available to you. The mass condition of the world, and the situation of each person in it, is the materialization of man’s progress as he forms his world.
The joy of creativity flows through you as effortlessly as your breath. From it most minute areas of your outer experience spring . Your feelings have electromagnetic realities that rise outward, affecting the atmosphere itself. They group through attraction, building up areas of events and circumstances that finally coalesce, so to speak, either in matter as objects – or as events in “ time”.
Some feelings and thoughts are translated into structures that you call objects; these exist in your terms in a medium you call space. Others are translated instead into psychological structures called events, that seem to exist in a medium we call time.
Space and time are both root assumptions, which simply means that man accepts both, and assumes that his reality is rooted in a series of moments and a dimension of space. So your inner experience is translated in those terms.
Even the duration of an event or object in space or time is determined by the intensity of the thoughts or emotions that give it birth. Duration in space is not the same as duration in time, however, though it may seem that this is the case. An event or object that exists briefly in space may have a much greater duration in time. It may have far greater importance and intensity, existing in your memory, for example, long after it has disappeared in space. Such an event or object does not merely exist symbolically within your mind or memory—but in your terms its actual reality continues as a time event.
Nor is its reality in space annihilated as long as it exists within your mind. Here is an example: A child has been told not to play with a doll. The order is disobeyed. The child, wittingly or unwittingly, breaks the doll and it’s finally thrown away. The doll exists in time quite vitally as long as the child remembers it.
If the doll sat on the dresser and this is also vividly recalled, then the space in which the doll sat still carries the impression of the doll, through other objects may be placed there. You react, therefore, not only to what is invisible to your physical eyes in space, or to what is directly in front of you in time, but also to objects and events whose reality is still within you, though they may seem to have disappeared.
Basically you create your experience through your beliefs about yourself and the nature of reality. Another way to understand this is to realize that you create your experiences through your expectations. Your feeling-tones are your emotional attitudes toward yourself and life in general, and these generally govern the large areas of experience.
They give the overall emotional coloration that characterizes what happens to you. Period. You are what happens to you. Your emotional feelings are often transitory, but beneath there are certain qualities of feeling uniquely your own, that are like deep musical cords. While your day to day feelings may rise or fall, these characteristic feeling-tones lie beneath.
Sometimes they may rise to the surface, but in great long rhythms. You can’t call these negative or positive. They are instead tones of your being. They represent the most inner portion of your experience. This doesn’t mean that they are hidden from you, or are meant to be. It simply means that they represent the core from which you form your experience.
If you have become afraid of emotion or the expression of feeling, or if you have been taught that the inner self is no more than a repository of uncivilized impulses, then you may have the habit of denying this deep rhythm. You may try to operate as if it did not exist or even try to refute it. But it represents your deepest, most creative impulses; to fight against it is like trying to swim upstream against a strong current.
These feeling-tones then, pervade your being. They are the form your spirit takes when combined with flesh. From them, from their core, your flesh arises.
Everything you experience has consciousness, and each consciousness is endowed with its own feeling-tone. There is great cooperation involved in the formation of the earth as you think of it, and so the individual living structures of the planet rise up from the feeling-tone within each atom and molecule.
Your flesh springs about you in response to these inner chords of your being, and the trees, rocks, seas and mountains spring up as the body of the earth from the deep inner cords within the atoms and molecules, which are also living. Because of this creative cooperation that exists, the miracle of physical materialization is performed so smoothly and automatically that consciously you are not aware of your part in it.
Once you learn to get the feeling of your own inner-tone, then you are aware of its power, strength and durability, and you can to some extent ride with it into deeper realities of experience.
The incredible emotional richness and variety and splendor of physical experience is the material reflection of this inner feeling-tone. It pervades the events in your life, the overall inner direction, the quality of perception. It fills up and illuminates the individual aspects of your life, and largely determines the persuasive subjective climate in which you live in.
It is the essence of yourself. Its sweeps are broad in range, however. It doesn’t determine, for example, specific events. It paints the colors in the large “landscape” of your experience. It is the feeling of yourself, inexhaustible.
In other terms it represents the expression of yourself in pure energy, from which your individuality rises, the You of you, unmistakably given identity that is never duplicated.
This energy comes from the core of BEING, from ALL That IS, and represents the source of neverending vitality. It is Being, Being in You. As such, all of the energy and power of Being is focused and reflected through you in the direction of your three dimensional existence.
While your feeling-tone is uniquely yours, still it is expressed in a certain way that is shared by all consciousness focused in physical reality. So in those terms you spring from the earth as all the other creatures and natural living structures. You are, while physical, a portion of nature, therefore, not apart from it.
Trees and rocks possess their own consciousness, and also share a gestalt consciousness, even as the living portions of your body. The cells and organs have their own awareness, and a gestalt one. So the race of man also has individual consciousness and a gestalt or mass consciousness of which you individually are hardly aware.
The mass race consciousness, in its terms, possesses an identity. You are a part of that identity while still being unique, individual and independent. You are confined only to the extent that you have chosen physical reality, and so placed yourself within its context of experience. While physical, you follow physical laws, or assumptions. These form the framework for corporeal expression.
Within this framework you have full freedom to create your experience, your personal life in all of its aspects, the living picture of the world. Your personal life, and to some extent, your individual living experience, help create the world as it is known in this moment we call time.
You create your own reality. There is no other rule. Knowing this is the secret of creativity.
The ego is a very specialized portion of your greater identity. It is a portion of you that arises to deal directly with the life that the larger You is living. The ego can feel cut off, lonely and frightened, however, if the conscious mind lets the ego run way with it. The ego and the conscious mind are not eh same thing. The ego is composed of various parts of the personality—it is a combination of characteristics, ever-changing, that act in unitary fashion—the portion of the personality that deals most directly with the world.
The conscious mind is an excellent perceiving attribute, a function that belongs to inner awareness but in this case is turned outward the world of events. Through the conscious mind the soul looks outward toward the world of events. Through the conscious mind the soul looks outward. Left alone, it perceives clearly.
In certain terms, the ego is the eye through which the conscious mind perceives, or the focus through which it views physical reality. But the conscious mind automatically changes its focus throughout life. The ego, while appearing the same to itself, ever changes. It is only when the conscious mind becomes rigid in its direction, or allows the ego to take on some of its own functions, that difficulties arise. Then the ego allows the conscious mind to work in certain direction and blocks its awareness in others.
And so it is from your larger identity that you form the reality that you know. It’s up to you to do this with joy and vigor, clearing your conscious mind so that the deeper knowledge of your greater identity can form joyous expressions in the world of the flesh.
You Are The Light That You Always Have Been 