Hi Friends,
What I have to offer this morning is text, audio and printable PDFs of Your Invisible Power by Geneviève Behrend, published in 1921. It's a classic New Thought book on Mental Science. I'm also collecting biographical information for a Geneviève Behrend profile page. What I've got will show here.
If you're an Eric Butterworth fan, you will especially like Your Invisible Power because both Butterworth and Behrend studied Thomas Troward, a prominent New Thought writer. Behrend was a student of Troward and Butterworth praised him greatly in Lecture 6 of Antecedents of New Thought. Drawing from Troward, both give clear and practical explanations of how human beings actively participate in their own evolution (flow) and in human progress. Even the title of their best-known books are similar: Your Invisible Power and Discover the Power Within You.
So I very much recommend reading/listening to Eric Butterworth’s talk about Troward and then reading Geneviève Behrend’s Your Invisible Power. My sense is that Butterworth’s foundation will prepare you for the magic that many have found in Geneviève Behrend’s short book.
Sunday, June 11, 2023
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Your Invisible Power
by
Geneviève Behrend
Published 1921, First Edition
Forward
These pages have been written with purpose and hope that their suggestions may furnish you a key to open up the way to the attainment of your desires, and to explain that Fear should be entirely banished from your effort to obtain possession of the things you desire. This presupposes, of course, that your desire for possession is based upon your aspiration for greater liberty. For example, you feel that the possession of more money, lands or friends will make you happier, and your desire for possession of these things arises from a conviction that their possession will bring you liberty and happiness.
In your effort to possess you will discover that the thing you most and ultimately need is to “Be,” always (not spasmodically) your best self-that self which understands that the mistakes of those you love are simply misunderstandings. Your feeling that greater possessions, no matter of what kind they may be, will, of themselves bring you contentment or happiness, is a misunderstanding. No person, place or thing can give you happiness. They may give you cause for happiness and a feeling of contentment, but the joy of Living comes from within. Therefore, it is here recommended, rather than otherwise, that you should make the effort to obtain the things which you feel will bring you joy, provided, as previously stated, that your desires are in accord with the joy of Living.
It is also desired, in this volume, to suggest the possibilities in store for all who make persistent effort to understand the Law of Visualization and make practical application of this knowledge on whatever plane he or she may be. The word “effort,” as here employed, is not intended to convey the idea of strain. All study and meditation should be without strain or tension.
It has been my endeavor to show that by starting at the beginning of the creative action or the mental picture, certain corresponding results are sure to follow. “While the laws of the Universe cannot be altered, they can be made to work under specific conditions, thereby producing results for individual advancement which cannot be obtained under the spontaneous working of the law provided by Nature.”
However far the suggestions I have given you of the possibilities in store for you through visualizing may carry you beyond your past experience, they nowhere break the continuity of the law of cause and effect.
If through the suggestions here given anyone is brought to realize that their mind is a center through and in which “all power there is” is in operation, simply waiting to be given direction in the one and only way through which it can take specific action (and this means reaction in concrete or physical form), then the mission to which this book is dedicated has been fulfilled.
Try to remember that the picture you think, feel and see is reflected into the Universal Mind, and by the natural law of reciprocal action must return to you in either spiritual or physical form. Knowledge of this law of reciprocal action between the individual and the Universal Mind opens to you free access to all you may wish to possess or to be.
It must be steadfastly borne in mind that all this can only be true for the individual who recognizes that they derive their power to make an abiding mental picture from the All-Originating Universal Spirit of Life (God), and can be used constructively only so long as it is employed and retained in harmony with the Nature of the Spirit which originated it. To insure this there must be no inversion of the thought of the individual regarding their relationship to this Universal Originating Spirit which is that of a son or daughter, through which the parent mind acts and reacts.
Thus conditioned, whatever you think and feel yourself to be; the Creative Spirit of Life is bound to faithfully reproduce in a corresponding reaction. This is the great reason for picturing yourself and your affairs as you wish them to be as existing facts (though invisible to the physical eye), and live in your picture. An honest endeavor to do this, always recognizing that your own mind is a projection of the Originating Spirit, will prove to you that the best there is, is yours in all your ways.
Geneviève Behrend, September 1921
