The Doré Lectures: Being Sunday addresses at the Doré Gallery, London, given in connection with the Higher Thought CentreTroward, T. (Thomas)
Religion
The Doré Lectures: Being Sunday addresses at the Doré Gallery, London, given in connection with the Higher Thought Centre
Troward, T. (Thomas)
New Thought
This being the rationale of the matter, why should we limit our
conception of the Divine ideal of ourselves? Why should we say,
"I am too mean a creature ever to reflect so glorious an image"--
or "God never intended such a limitless ideal to be reproduced in
human beings." In saying such things we expose our ignorance of
the whole Law of the Creative Process. We shut our eyes to the
fact that the Omega of completion already subsists in the Alpha
of conception, and that the Alpha of conception would be nothing
but a lying illusion if it was not capable of expression in the
Omega of completion. The creative process in us is that we become
the individual reflection of what we realize God to be relatively
to ourselves, and therefore if we realize the Divine Spirit as
the INFINITE potential of all that can constitute a perfected
human being, this conception must, by the Law of the Creative
Process, gradually build up a corresponding image in our mind,
which in turn will act upon our external conditions.
This, by the laws of mind, is the nature of the process and it
shows us what St. Paul means when he speaks of Christ being
formed in us (Gal. iv. 19) and what in another place he calls
being renewed in knowledge after the image of Him that created us
(Col. iii. 10). It is a thoroughly logical sequence of cause and
effect, and what we require is to see more clearly the Law of
this sequence and use it intelligently--that is why St. Paul says
it is being "renewed in knowledge": it is a New Knowledge, the
recognition of principles which we had not previously
apprehended. Now the fact which, in our past experience, we have
not grasped is that the human mind forms a new point of departure
for the work of the Creative Spirit; and in proportion as we see
this more and more clearly, the more we shall find ourselves
entering into a new order of life in which we become less and
less subject to the old limitations. This is not a reward
arbitrarily bestowed upon us for holding dogmatically to certain
mere verbal statements, but it is the natural result of
understanding the supreme law of our own being. On its own plane
it is as purely scientific as the law of chemical reaction; only
here we are not dealing with the interaction of secondary causes
but with the Self-originating action of Spirit. Hence a new force
has to be taken into account which does not occur in physical
science, the power of Feeling. Thought creates form, but it is
feeling that gives vitality to thought. Thought without feeling
may be constructive as in some great engineering work, but it can
never be creative as in the work of the artist or musician; and
that which originates within itself a new order of causation is,
so far as all pre-existing forms are concerned, a creation ex
nihilo, and is therefore Thought expressive of Feeling. It is
this indissoluble union of Thought and Feeling that distinguishes
creative thought from merely analytical thought and places it in
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