LITMIR.BIZ

      VIII

       THE ART OF CREATION

       Table of Content

      PASSING ON from the consideration of the more familiar forms of the application of Efficient Constructive Imagination, you are now asked to enter into a consideration of a still higher phase of that Creative Power which is a mode of manifestation of your Personal Power. Your Personal Power, in turn, is but a phase of the All-­Power—that POWER in which you live and move and have your being, and which is that ALL which is in All­Things, and in which All­Things are. You are now asked to consider the subject of your Creative Power in its higher phases of manifestation.

      Creation is an attribute of the highest Power of which you can have any knowledge, or of which you may dream. Whatever else the Supreme Power may be, or may not be, it must be conceived as Creative Power. The fact that the Power behind Creation must be Creative; and the fact that Creation must be the result of Power; must bring to the mind of the true thinker the conviction that in Creative Power is to be found Power in its most essential and elemental aspect. In Creation you participate with the Supreme Power!

      To “create” is to “bring into being; to cause, to produce.” Man may be said apparently to create in several ways, yet at the last he is found to be able to create in only one essential way; and that one essential way in which he can create is found to be the way in which the Ultimate Creative Power proceeds in its own creative work. It will be well for you to become convinced of the essential and elemental nature of your own Creative Power, in order that you may realize the majesty and dignity of the forces and energies which you call into play and operation in your own creative activities.

      First of all, you can create material objects by means of combining other material objects. Thus you bring into being houses, boats, railroads, shoes, and every other class of things which are manufactured or made from material things.

      Secondly, you can create material things by changing the arrangement of the constituent parts of other material things, as for instance, you create butter by means of churning cream, or you create ice by freezing water.

      Thirdly, you can create things by analysis or separation of the parts of other things, for instance, you create certain chemical substances by separating them from more complex substances of which they have formed a part; or you create a statue by cutting away the surrounding marble from about the form of the created thing.

      The above classification will be found roughly to include practically all the forms and phases of creation with which you are most familiar. But we have omitted from it its most essential element—that element which constitutes the spirit of all of your creative work, namely the element of Mental Creation. At the last, all of the above­mentioned forms of creation are discovered to be merely the objectification of the subjective Mental Creation.

      In the three forms of creation, above mentioned, you have merely employed the materials at hand, and formed new combinations with them. You brought none of these original materials into being. You merely found them in being and gave new objective forms to them. But how did you arrive at a knowledge of those forms which you afterward objectified? Here we come to the heart of the subject. The answer is: The forms of your creations, each, any, and all of them, existed in your mind before you objectified them. Your, creations, then, at the last, are seen to be Mental Creations in the sense that they were mentally designed and deliberately caused by you.

      Of course, if you merely threw the materials together without any design, then you cannot be said to have mentally created the new thing—in that case the latter was created, not by you, but by the forces of Nature. This, also, would be the case in the event that you discovered a chemical process “by accident” and without design, or where you unwittingly set into operation some of Nature’s forces, and thereby called into appearance certain new forms, arrangements, separations or combinations. But wherever and whenever you have deliberately employed your Creative Power toward definite ends, then your first step and stage has been that of Mental Creation.

      Everything that man has ever created, contrived, built, invented or manufactured has first been created in his mind as a Mental Image. The Brooklyn Bridge, the Eiffel Tower, the Pyramids, and also the simplest mechanical construction, each and all existed in the minds of their inventors, architects and builders before they took on objective form. There can be no such thing as constructive or creative work by man without the antecedent mental creation by means of mental images. Therefore, in its essential and elemental nature, all human creation is Mental Creation.

      Philosophers have carried this idea up to the realm of metaphysics, and have asserted that we are compelled to think of the Supreme Creative Power as having first formed the mental image of the Universe before the form of the physical world could have come into being. More than this, they hold that the actual creation of the “materials” of the Universe must have been mental, because the material substance could not have been present until it was called into being by the mental forces—that, at the last, the material world is but a “materialization” of previously existing mental images or forms, and that the very work of the “materialization” was performed by mental powers and energies, for there were no material powers present and existent in the beginning.

      Edward Carpenter illustrates this idea in the following statement contained in one of his books: “There is now a disposition to posit the mental world as nearer the basis of existence than is the material world, and to look upon material phenomena rather as the outcome and expression of the mental. In observing our own thoughts and actions and bodily forms coming into existence, we seem to come upon something which we may call a law of Nature, just as much as gravitation or any other law—the law, namely, that within ourselves there is a continued movement outwards, from feeling toward thought, and then to action; from the inner to the outer, from the vague to the definite; from the emotional to the practical; from the world of dreams to the world of actual things and what we call reality.

      “We may fairly conclude that the same progress may be witnessed both in our waking thoughts and in our dreams—namely, a continual ebullition and birth going on within us, and an evolution out of the Mind­stuff of forms which are the expression and images of

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