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The Power that Constructs and Forms Man and the Universe
Charles Fillmore
The question is often asked, “What is the greatest discovery of all the ages?” The answer is that it is the discovery of steam or electricity or the radio or the phonograph or some of those discoveries that the natural man can apprehend.
But it always comes to me that the greatest discovery is the creative power of man’s mind. That is, the formative power of thought. No other discovery is equal to that because it is the source of all activity, all consciousness, and everything that appears from your body to the great universe around you came from the creative formative power of Mind, and that is thought.
We are constructing that which exists in the Infinite Mind. That is, we are giving the law through which the one Mind expresses itself from the unmanifest to the manifest. People frequently say, “Well, why do you study the details of creation? Why not accept the whole thing on faith and trust God to work it out?” Our answer is, “God is Mind. Mind is working out a great problem and man is part of the problem. He is a co-worker with the Infinite Mind, and to be a co-worker he must know how Mind works. He takes his part in the great work.” Jesus said, “The Father worketh hitherto, now I work.” And he also said that he beheld what the Father did and he did in a like manner what the Father had worked out.
So if that was true of Jesus, it is true of every one of us. And as we study the man, the real man and the effect of the mind of man, we find that thought is working constantly and bringing forth results in our minds, our bodies, in our affairs. If this be true, that our minds through our emotions produce effects upon our bodies, we should see to it that these effects are constructive instead of destructive.
How shall we know the law of thought activity? Well, by studying and by asking of the one Mind what that law is. So we have, through inspiration and intuition and experimentation, found that there is a law of God; that we, as a race, have reached the place where we must understand the law of Mind—where we must know how to use this power because we are using it in destructive ways and getting results of our misuse. We are to know the truth and the truth shall set us free. So it is up to every one of us to know the law by and through which the mind works.
What is the foundation of that activity which we call the power of thought? Why, it is to know the principle that we have taken up in previous lessons. There is a realm from which man draws ideas and those ideas entering into his mind form the foundation of his thought. If he practices what we call the silence, he makes contact with that realm of ideas—and those ideas are showered upon his consciousness—and he can only use what he can radiate through the power of his thought. Man has been presented to me in a symbol which I might call the prism. Our scientists discovered that the ray of light contained all the colors of the rainbow and in order to break up that ray of light into those component parts, the ray had to be passed through a prism. That prism broke up the potentialities of the white ray of light and reflected on the screen there they found all the colors of the rainbow. Well, now man represents that prism. The white light of the spirit comes into man’s consciousness and leaves differentiated.
He throws out into the visible world the various colors, the seven colors, the primal colors of the rainbow. That’s only a part of the great work, of course, which the mind does. But if you could, think of yourself as the clear prism without a flaw and that this white ray of the divine Mind is coming in through the top ray and focusing upon what is called the pineal gland. That is the eye of faith.
We are told by physiologists that it is right in the center of the brain, this pineal gland, and it is like a half-opened eye. They assume that some way, in our evolution, we once had a third eye and they thought the third eye gave us a sight in every direction. Like a fly, we wouldn’t have to turn our heads around to see behind, or turn sideways to see things on the right of the left. But that all-seeing eye in us has been closed for some reason, and through the return to our primal all-seeing state, we are having these partial illuminations.
You may not realize it, but sometimes when you are in the silence, you feel like there is an electrical glow all about you. Sometimes it gets into your system. You feel the thrill of a higher life. You seem to be lifted up and carried on the very ethers. Now that is the descent into the consciousness of this white light. But you find that you have to interpret that. You get the idea but it is given to you to express those ideas and this expression is quite a problem.
We are, in our first illumination by the spirit, wonderfully lifted up, stimulated, and we think, “Why, I’ve got the whole thing. Everything is mine now.” But as you go on in your development, you will find that unless you incorporate that white ray, that light, into your consciousness and give it place, give it part of your very organism, it will dwindle away. Some people live in that light for a time and then they lose it and they wonder why. It is because they really haven’t thought into it; they haven’t made it a part of themselves.
Now that is the great secret of a well-balanced development. We must think out these propositions. In other words, we must become conscious. We must become aware of the God Mind, and in that way, we build into ourselves the divine ideas and they become part of the man. That is the creative power of our own thought. As we radiate this white light, it becomes to us an energy.
There is such a thing as thought transference. Our thoughts go out and affect others. Also, we feel the radiation of those with whom we associate. As we begin to develop in soul consciousness we become more sensitive to that. Some metaphysicians become so sensitive that they get nervous when they come in touch with what might be called adverse or discordant radiations. If an angry person sends out a thought, they feel it. If there is discord or inharmony in a house they feel the atmosphere of it. Now, if you don’t know the positive whole of your being, you let that sensitiveness carry you away. That is, you become so sensitive that you can’t live comfortably in the world.
What are you going to do about it? Some people think that it’s a form of spirituality. So it is, in one way, but if it withdraws your comfort, it isn’t really good for you. You have within you a positive power that will so poise you in this God Mind, this white light, that the radiations of other people and adversaries in houses or in places will have no effect upon you whatsoever.
Now, that is part of the thought development in the Christian metaphysician. He must so poise himself, establish himself firmly in the Christ Mind. We call this white light the Christ Mind. This is the light that shines frequently in the darkness and the darkness comprehends it not. But by opening your understanding, you do comprehend it and incorporate it. You become it, and that is the ongoing of the soul—through the use of the mind.
Now the natural man is rather incredulous, rather skeptical about the power of thought. He will admit that his thought moves his arms and his legs, but he won’t admit that it has anything to do with the movement of his digestion. It does—it affects the digestion. What we call the subconscious activities of the mind are affected by the conscious mind. The thoughts that enter into your mind affect your digestion and affect your circulation. Your heart is ruled by your mind, but not altogether. That movement may have been active at some period in your development and has become subjective. But under certain conditions, under certain emotions, your heart will go pity pat, won’t it? It stirs right up. You say, “Oh, I feel my heart thumping.” Why? Because your mind has had a thought of some kind, a thought of fear, or some great emotion that has started the thought that controls the action of your heart.
So we find, as metaphysicians, we have to take these mental conditions into our science. When we find people that have what they call heart trouble and the doctor says that they have this kind of heart disease or that kind—the doctors have a lot of names for these little ills that all originate in the mind, really—we have to take that matter up and use the constructive power of thought in connection with our divine source. We must know in such cases that there is absolutely nothing to fear. We must assure our patient that he is not going to be injured and that the trouble he anticipates won’t come to pass. Nine-tenths of our fears never come to pass.
I once heard of a man who said that he lived a long time. He was an old man and had seen a great deal of trouble most of which had never come to pass. And that’s the way it is with most of us. We see a great deal of trouble. We anticipate it, and it never comes to pass. Nine-tenths of it doesn’t come to pass.
Well, what causes us to carry this burden of anticipated evil and worry about things? It is all in our minds. Right in the mind we can build up these conditions, these fears and the fear of hatred or grief, until you charge your whole system with it. How do you do it? Through a continual impulse that you are pouring out through the mind. Then, the mind is a real battery. We talk about dynamo. Well, the mind is the greatest dynamo! If you could lay hold of a galvanic battery that would shock you up to the supreme volt, it wouldn’t be anything compared with the voltage that you send out in your own thoughts, especially when you get to thinking high thoughts.
When you begin to think about spiritual things your mind becomes tremendously dynamic. You are affecting every cell in your organism. How careful, then, we should be—what we think, how we think and especially about things that bring adverse conditions. Now, we must lay down fundamentals: that we should understand the truth, that there is one good mind, that God is not evil, that he doesn’t think evil towards us, that there is no evil eye. And there is no power in evil of any kind that can affect us adversely. It doesn’t make any difference whether it is the devil or malicious animal magnetism or some person who is sending us evil thoughts. It doesn’t make a bit of difference what it is. Know that there is, right with you at all times, a mind that is essentially good, that is charged with ideas of good and that it never created an adverse to that good.
Well, people say, “Where did all of this appearance of evil come from? I know that I have evil thoughts and I sometimes do evil things, and if I am the offspring of Infinite Good, where did I ever get these evil tendencies?” Well, our answer is, “You are a free agent. You can think whatever you want to think.” That is the only way God could make us conscious beings—through the freedom to think as we will to think. You can think independent of the Infinite Source. You can think independent of these divine ideas. But, if you do that, you are apt to build up a consciousness that is out of harmony with the universal law. That’s the way evil has come about.
We are told in the allegory of Genesis that the Lord God, Jehovah, the I AM, told this Adam man, this man who was becoming conscious of himself, that he mustn’t eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And people have thought that he was referring to a real tree. In a way, it is a tree. The Garden of Eden in man’s consciousness is his body. Our body is a wonderful garden. You’ll plant every thought that you express in some part of your body. Your body is the soil through which the mind plants the thoughts. So, in Genesis we are told to increase and multiply and replenish the earth. This is the earth—your body.
The increase and multiplication take place in your mind, and if you depart from one principle you do not get your light directly from Infinite Mind. You get it from some other source. You may get it from the sense side. You may get it from sensation and if you are not careful, sensation will become so attractive that you will forget the light, the light of the Spirit, and will be submerged in sensation. And sensation always has its positive and its negative. In other words, when you enjoy sensation, you say, “How pleasant this is. I just love this.” But that is something which we call reaction. It is the feeling of becoming infatuated with your high sensation and the reaction you call pain. One is pleasure and the other is pain. One is good and the other is not so good—evil.
There is the source of good and evil. Neither of those really exists in Infinite Mind. Infinite Mind knows only the perfection which it is. We speak of this tree of the knowledge of good and evil. You can find that tree in your garden, your mind. We are told in the allegory that there is a tree of life in the midst of the garden and a tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
We are told by physiologists that we have two nervous systems—the motor system and the sympathetic system. The motor nervous system is composed of a great central trunk running down the center of the spinal column called the spinal cord and these branches, nerves, run out in every direction. If you have ever seen a picture of the nervous system, you will say at once, “That looks exactly like a tree, exactly like a tree.” Well, that is the motor system. That is the tree of life. Now the tree of life or the motor system in the human body has no sensation whatever. You might cut your spinal cord and you would never know it. You would lose, of course, the control of the parts of the body corresponding to it. But there is no sensation.
So where is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil? That is in the sensory nervous system. That’s in front. That is where all the emotions are. Its central home is the solar plexus, and it is like a tree also. Now the sensational tree or nervous system and the motor system cross and meet. They are the connecting link, so physiologists say. And they bring forth a certain energy and radiate a force at the end of the nerves. And, then, it is at the end of the nerves that we feel sensation.
I might work this out for you and show you that the Bible is absolutely correct in its symbology and that we find everything in ourselves that we find in the world about us. But the real Garden of Eden is in man’s body. But…it is something more than mere nerves and brain cells, but these are the vehicles of mind. So we have sensory nerves responding to sensory ideas. But back of that are spiritual ideas. And, as I say, when we get this wonderful man into action and get wrong results, we immediately say, “That is evil!” And when we get good results, we say, “That is good.” So we have our good and our evil. And this sensation in us is governed by an identity.
Every one of these nerve centers has its focal point around which it works, and that focal point is presided over by an identity. In scripture, the identity that controls the nervous system is called one of evil. It is really Satan, for it becomes adverse. That is what Satan is—an adverse state of consciousness to the one life. But it has its place, and when we understand the law and use it, and begin to spiritualize this evil—this sensation—it gives us new and more beautiful sensations than we ever had on the physical plane. We are up into spiritual consciousness and as I say, we get beautiful results from lifting up sensation and straightening it out.
But first we must stay our emotion…and when the light of the Christ begins to flow into you, you will find yourself, if you are not careful, looking upon evil in a hard way. You want to get away from it. But where did it come from? All there is to know is to remember you made it and now you have got to unmake it. You have got to set it right. And here comes the hard part of the Christian metaphysician’s ongoing.
You cannot get on—you cannot raise your powers to a higher degree—until you get out of your ideas the clamping down the power of evil. No one who is conscientious and self-righteous and really pure at heart is apt to clamp down and restrain his faith until he loses all power, until the body is starved out and it dies, dies of inattention, dies for lack of life. What should you do?
You should withdraw all condemnation. Paul said, “There is now no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus.” So we, in our thoughts, look upon this sense man as good. We say, “There is only good and all things must be good.” The evil, the error, the sickness, the disease, the death that comes through an ignorant use of sensation, has as its foundation good.
We must find that good and deny the evil. Get rid of it. So let us enter into the absolute truth. Then we become kind. We have mercy on ourselves, our bodies. We won’t hold them any longer in and under condemnation. Withdraw all condemnation. Don’t condemn yourself for your sins. Some people say, “Then I’ll never reform if I don’t condemn myself, condemn my sin.” Well, that condemnation never leads to reform. It’s found that in our prison, the penalty and punishment that the law puts those criminals through hardens them. And that is exactly what we do with the sinner within ourselves.
Now the carnal mind or this adverse sense consciousness that has built up—well, it might be called a film. You know that these motion pictures reflect onto the curtain’s little image. That image is constantly at work there! Well, the same thing is true in us. An image of sense in the mind will reflect itself out into the body. An image of condemnation in the mind will impress itself upon your body. It will stop, sometimes, the activities of a good function by just condemning it. Some people sometimes condemn some function like their stomach or they condemn their eyes, ears, or lungs by pronouncing them diseased and evil. “I’ve got such a weak stomach.” That is not true. Your stomach is good and strong. Why don’t you see it that way? Why don’t you see it as God sees it?
God made man and he gave him a perfect body consciousness. We are taking that consciousness and thinking it into these functions. Now your stomach is simply an idea in divine mind—an idea that digests other ideas, which makes other ideas its servant and uses them to carry on its work.
Now you must enter into the idea of that and see it as absolutely good. Pronounce it good and you can change a weak stomach to a strong stomach. You can change an inefficient stomach to an efficient stomach, one that will do good work. With every function, I don’t care what it is, be careful what you say about it because it is thinking. It is largely thinking the thoughts that you put into it.
This brings us to the consideration of what is called the conscious and the subconscious mind. We don’t dwell to any extent, as Christian metaphysicians, upon these psychological divisions of the mind, but they have their place. It is not always necessary to know all the details of thought. People analyze their thought until they split halves and get away from the one great central idea, which is that there is a divine Mind and that divine Mind is right here with all the ideas necessary to bring perfection into its man—its perfect man.
Then think of yourself as the perfect man expressing perfect ideas and thinking righteous thoughts. For as a man thinketh within himself, in his heart, so is he. And Shakespeare caught that idea also. He said, “There is neither good nor ill but thinking makes it so.” If you think ill of your neighbor you will begin to radiate a thought of that ill, whatever it may be. If you think condemnation to your neighbor or yourself, you get the reaction. You will bring forth according to your thoughts. Well now, how are you using this wonderful formative power which God has given every one of us? Are you using it in a Christ way? Are you saying to those who seem to be doing evil, “Forgive them, Father, they know not what they do.” Or do you believe in enemies, setting up that thought of enmity in yourself and sending it out? We get it back.
It is found that the thought emanation or the radiations of thought travel in circles. There is always a limit to the force of thought. It goes out, and when it reaches its limit through the attractive power of the mind, it comes right back. But in its journey it usually takes on some other thoughts just like it. When it comes back, it returns sometimes with a terrible force.
So, we reap what we sow. If you sow a good thought, and if you believe in yourself as good and only think good and radiate that kind of thought, that kind of thought goes out. And people everywhere catch your radiation, your good thought. And they add to it. Thoughts are like birds of a feather. They get together and then if you send out a good thought, it will return loaded with good.
Jesus laid down that law of giving, you remember: Give and it shall be given unto you. It will be poured into your being—that is, the very center of your consciousness. We have, distributed all through our organism, these thought centers and they are thinking all the time. When you develop to a certain point you feel these centers acting through your whole body consciousness. You can line them all up with the one central idea of their divine perfection.
You will sit with the Son of Man on his throne, judging the twelve tribes of Israel. That’s what Jesus meant. That seems a mystical saying but it has to do with the twelve centers of consciousness in man. This is but one of the phases of thought. The central idea is that we shall, every one of us, know ourselves as sons of the living God. God is here, and God is working through us for a good purpose. We get into wrong states of mind by condemning ourselves. We think that, in some way, a great creative force has thrown us out into the world without our permission and we get rebellious of it. We get out of tune with the whole world and with ourselves. That is an inefficient and foolish state of mind. When you once understand the truth, you quiet that kind of thought right away. And then you will find peace and harmony again in your thinking and your affairs will straighten out. Your health will be restored and you will be what is called a new creature in Christ Jesus by seeing through Mind.
“Be ye transformed by the renewal of your mind,” said Paul, and he also said, “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.” Some people think that is sacrilegious that we should have that wonderful mind of God in us that Jesus had, but it’s logical, it’s true. There is only one Mind, so why shouldn’t we have that mind in us?
How will we ever reform? How will we ever get out of our sins and shortcomings unless we have this one Infinite Mind in us? That same mind that Christ Jesus had? Begin now to reach right out and in and lay hold of that one Mind. Let us say today that we have in us the same Mind that was in Christ Jesus. It is true, but have you the courage and fearlessness to say it? If you have, you will get somewhere, but if you side step, if you think, “Oh well, maybe someday I will have the courage to say that. I don’t know. I’m not going to do it right away,” then your progress may be delayed. Don’t put it off. Now is the day of salvation!
Now is the day in which we are, to every person, saved. But you’ll find that you have to do something in this salvation. That’s your work—you must cultivate your own little plot of ground. And don’t just put your ideas away off in the ethers. I remember one of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s children talking about idealists. He said he knew a man who was an idealist. His mind soared to Empyrean heights and would go down into Plutonian depths, but he never went to heaven. Well, that means that these idealists are looking to a great heaven somewhere and a deep hell somewhere and yet they never put their religion into practical operation. They never delivered the goods.
Now we believe in delivering the goods in this matter of religion. People say, “Christianity is a fake.” That’s what the people of the world are proclaiming today—that “our civilization is going to pieces and that Christianity has not saved us, and there is no prospect of its saving us, so we are not looking to it even for help.” Has Christianity really ever been tried? I say, “No.” People have not understood Christianity. They have not understood the power. They don’t know about Christianity as a science.
Christianity is science of the Mind, science of thought. When the people begin to lay hold of this power of Mind and line up with it, we find that it will straighten out all their affairs. Then we are going to have a new civilization on this earth. We are the first roots of that new civilization and it is based upon the civilization that is established in the heavens—in the ethers and Jesus Christ is the head of this planet. He, the cosmic Mind, created us. It was through his work that we came into existence. We are his children and we must recognize him as our parent. We came forth through his mind. And if we work and work in line with that Mind, we will be successful in all our work. We’ll come to this new understanding, this new place, this new joy. We will be restored to the kingdom, the kingdom of the heavens.
Now let’s—right here today—make a conscious union from the spiritual side which is Christ mind. Let’s hold that we do have that mind, that we do think the thought of the Christ. We acknowledge the Christ in all our ways.
Transcribed with light edits by Paula Schneider on June 24, 2018.
