IX
THE SECRET OF CREATIVE EXPRESSION
In the heart of each and every one of us lies buried the seed of creative expression, but the awareness of it is what makes some geniuses or mystics, while others never rise to great heights. No one need be destines to oblivion. We are all born with exactly the same inheritance from our Father. All that God has to give, He gives to everyone alike. The only difference between one man and another lies in the measure of his awareness of his relation to God, and the knowledge with which to become co-Creator with God.
There is but one Creator in the universe,--one Mind, one Person, one Being. We are that Creator, that Person, that Being in the measure that we know we are.
We must know the universe and its underlying principle for only
through knowing, through having a scientific foundation under our
knowing and an awareness of God dynamically—not abstractly—can we become creators.
Following is an extract from The Divine Iliad which is The Word of God —an inspired message given to man, which I have interpreted for man’s understanding.
“I am the Knower of the Known.
“I am the sexless Knower of the Known. In Me is the Consciousness of all-knowing. And that is My power.
“In Me, the unconditioned One, is the Whole. There are no parts, nor are there beginnings, nor endings in Me, the One Conscious Whole.
“I am the dual Thinker of unfolding parts of the Known, the Imaginer of imaged forms which emerge from My knowing, through My thinking, to manifest My knowing.
“My dual thinking divides My knowing Light into pairs of sex-divided mirrors of the two opposed lights of My thinking. These electric mirrors of divided light reflect My Light and Life in them for manifesting My knowing and the One life of My Being. Forever and forever they interchange the dual reflected lights of My thinking for manifesting the continuance of My thinking, yet they are not My Light, nor are they My Life.
“Nor are they My Being. I, My all-conscious Being, alone live. And I alone think.
“Again I say, all thinking is My thinking. Also I say, when man thinks at all he thinks with Me as One, imagines with Me as One, and builds his images with Me as One.
“And when man is inspired by exalted thinking know thou that it is I in him who am thinking as One within him.
“For I am the source of ecstasy and inspiration in man. Behold in Me the silent Voice which man may hear who hath inner ears to hear. And I am the Light which man may see who hath eyes of the Spirit to see.
“For I say that in-so-far as man knows the ecstasy of inspiration in him he hears My Voice and sees My Light in him. He then knows the mighty rhythms of My balanced thinking and thinks with Me.”
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That is the keynote—the very crux of power in man—the KNOWING of the Creator within him; hearing His mighty rhythms and being in tune with those rhythms, with the vibrations of the light-waves of God’s thinking from which he is extended and which he manifests by his thinking.
Be not forgetful of those underlying principles—of the fact that there is a fulcrum under every lever or wave of motion, and that man cannot get along without that fulcrum. A mechanic who desires to lift a ten-ton rock with a crowbar can do so only by putting it upon a still fulcrum.
The power is in the still fulcrum and not in the moving lever nor in the expression of power extended from the fulcrum. God sayeth: “Seek Me, know Me, be Me—be the fulcrum of thine own power.”
Desire is the very basis of Creation. God desires. Without his desire to express His knowing, there would be no universe of matter and space.
Without desire in man, there would be no form, no product, no
separation of idea into its many parts. God’s idea is to divide the
formlessness of His One Whole Idea of Creation, to take it apart for
multiplication into many forms. Thinking does that. We think our
knowing into many parts, then set those parts into motion to express the balance and the power of the centering fulcrum of the One still Light from which each wave of us is extended.
Now what we do with those extending waves of our thinking is what we make of ourselves. We can be what we desire to be. We are the product of our own thinking, but our thinking is what our knowing is. We think idea but we do not create idea. We produce something but that product of idea is not the idea itself. It is but the bodily form of the idea. The idea still remains in the formless Light of God, is the inspired Mind of the creative thinker who manifest God. Man creates nothing but form and motion to simulate the idea which never leaves Mind, never is separated from Mind. Idea is cosmic. It cannot become matter, but it can assume material form to simulate the cosmic idea. A watch manifests the idea of time, but it is not time. It is a product that simulates that idea, but it is not the idea. It also manifests mechanical principles, but the mechanical principles are not there. The wheels and other parts of the
watch simulating that idea are there, but the idea is not. I, as a sculptor, produce a monument. The idea of the monument never leaves my Mind.
The plaster, clay, or bronze forms and symbols manifest the idea of that product but they are not the idea which they simulate.
An ignorant man can see those same forms as well as I, but they mean nothing to him. Another Mind can be reinspired by it and reflect the inspiration which is in my Mind. My Mind is an extension of the Mind of God, for there is but one Universal Mind. In that sense, my monument is not my creation alone. I am but an interpreter of the Creator—a co-Creator with God. The entire material universe is but a manifestation of God’s divine Idea. The Idea itself is within the One Light and never becomes a party of the two lights of motion which electrically record the Idea in form of matter.
Yet we continue to create product in a material universe which is just a complexity of light-waves of matter and has no meaning whatsoever as idea. Then we wonder why there is so much mediocrity in the world. Product without knowledge and inspiration behind it can never become an enduring masterpiece.
It is as though a mechanic tried to lift a ten-ton rock with no fulcrum under his crowbar—or like science trying to do marvelous things with its levers of motion, denying the Spirit as its fulcrum of knowledge. Science studies effect rather than cause. It can prove effect of motion and matter but it cannot prove the cause of effect in the laboratory, so it relegates cause to metaphysics. Until science takes God in as co-Creator, it will never know the cause of the many complex effects. But science must know the cause. Science is at the crossroads where it must include the spiritual Source of its material effects.
Religion is at the crossroads also. Religion and science are as two
opposites, but in the voidance of their opposition, unity will come to
both—science the creator, religion the creator. They will have new
knowing, new comprehension; disunity will become unity. A marriage between science and religion will remake our civilization.
There are millions of people concentrating upon producing product in matter, when the secret of creation is not in effects of matter but in the cause of those effects. For that reason we must reverse our creative process from product to the Source of the product. To do that, we must have knowledge. We must know the WHY of things. One cannot produce anything whatsoever in excess of one’s knowing. One cannot be an interpreter of anything which he, himself, is not. To interpret God’s idea, one must be that which he interprets. To the extent that he knows God in him, he is God. Knowing god, he can act the part to the extent of his knowledge. The greater the actor, the greater his ability to become the character he simulates. The greater the character, the greater the art produced by him.
So be that which you are creating. One cannot produce enduring thingsunless one has that knowing and that awareness of Being in Him from which his source of inspiration comes. There is but one Creator, one Thinker, one Being, in the universe. The nearer you come to becoming that One, the greater your ability to create, and the more enduring your creation will become.
Consider the musician who thinks only of his skill and technique in
playing the piano. His product may be harmonious and rhythmic sound, but it is not art. Sound, even though rhythmic, does not reinspire or uplift another to the great heights of creative genius. To leave God out of any creative expression is like digging an empty well. To take God in is like producing an ever-flowing well. The power of the Creator whom one is interpreting comes from the Soul. Without that, music is nothing. Without that spark of creative genius which comes from the Soul of a sculptor, his monument would be nothing but bronze or stone.
Likewise, the products of shops or factories would be nothing but forms and bodies of matter. Civilization is living too much in the body—too much in the flesh. It is not trying to give creative expression to its ideas with a fulcrum of spiritual power under it.
Civilization is an instrument in the hands of the Creator, working
instinctively as animals work instinctively toward the one purpose of seeking for something for their bodies. Man is doing the same thing, also, to too great an extent—seeking for something for his body.
There is a power within the body—a power that you and I can have for the asking—for the desiring: and we must learn to use that power to upbuild ourselves. That is the thing we must do instead of just building the body alone. Before we build any product, we must build our inner Selves up to the level of the product. We must desire to produce. No man can produce anything greater than he, himself, is.
Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” is his product printed on paper. It can be played by a musician who is sufficiently inspired to reflect that great interpretation of a mood, but unless he has the soul of a Beethoven he can never reproduce that sonata as Beethoven produced it.
The greatest of sculptor geniuses, like Praxiteles and Michelangelo, and the great masters in music, could not have created their masterpieces unless they, themselves, were superior to that which they produced. We have very few geniuses, but countless technically-skilled parrot minds who repeat what they are taught without knowing in their Souls what they repeat.
What are skills? What do they mean? They do not mean Mind. They come by work. Anyone can develop a skill to play a musical instrument, to paint, to draw or to sculpture. There can never be a greater painting than the painter of it, however, nor can there ever be a greater product than the thinker of that product. Skilled people who lack Soul are mere automatons like machines, or like animals which display marvelous skills. Spiders are skilled automatic machines. They create marvelous webs instinctively, but have no more knowledge of what they are creating than an adding machine knows what it is doing. Countless skills are known in the animal kingdom, but there is no genius in the animals which manifest those skills. The genius of their creation is God, their Creator.
The beaver builds a dam. He builds it because he has built it for
countless centuries, and he continues to build it instinctively and
automatically, becoming a part of Creation—not co-Creator with God but an automatic extension of God’s thinking, expressing God’s idea in form, purely as an automaton. The idea of that dam is a part of the whole idea of Creation, extended through the Creator and through His Creation. It automatically takes place as a part of the work of the Creator Himself, supplemented only by the desire of the beaver to have that means of protection and food. The spider has the desire for something to catch flies and that desire is answered by the Creator.
Man has gone beyond that point, beyond that state of instinctive
control. He has begun to think, and every thinker thinks with God
because there is only One Thinker. If a man thinks at all, he is thinking with his creator. If he creates he is creation with his Creator. If he knows, it is because of the one Light of the creator which is within him. Whatever knowledge he has is measured by his awareness of God within him.
I shall give you a rule by means of which you can check your relation to the two universes in which you live. You can gain much by applying this rule to every act. We live in two universes—the universe of sensing and the universe of knowing. The universe of sensing is effect of cause. The universe of knowing is cause. We cannot know anything that we can see or feel or touch. Things which our senses respond to, we cannot know.
They are effects. You cannot know a sunset sky because it is a fleeting effect. But you can comprehend it because you know its cause. On the other hand, you cannot sense that which you cannot see. You can know that which you cannot see, but you cannot sense it. I can sense the fact that there are many people here. I can see your bodies, but I cannot see you—the Person who centers those bodies. I can know you, and I can know you as a Being, but I cannot sense you. So we can sense God’s body, which is His universe, and thus be electrically aware of it, but we cannot know the universe of motion. We can, however, know God, the
Creator of it.
I know the head of a great industry. I knew him as an office boy who studied shorthand at nights to equip himself for a better position. He soon became secretary to the president, and finally vice-president of one of the greatest industries in the country. One day I asked him the secret of his success. He answered: “I have always wanted to be the man higher up, and I have always prepared myself to be the man higher up. I found that I could always become that man for there is more room at the top but very little room for the multitude who crowd the bottom. I am still equipping myself for the man higher up, for I find that the top of the ladder of success reaches into the high heavens, which is still far to go.”
It is not intended that any man remain where he is when he starts his career. He must always progress to the last days of his life, but he can progress only by continually becoming a greater person, one having more comprehension, more awareness of the Light, more power to create his productions by being greater than that which he produces.
The secret of all success lies in building ourselves. Never mind the
product, never mind the skills. They will come if we spend all our
energies in building ourselves. Each of us must learn to be the fulcrum of his own power by becoming more aware of the Light that comes to us gradually during the long journey from sensation to Consciousness, and from mediocrity to masterfulness. The only possible way to acquire power is to recognize it in one’s Self.
The kingdom of God is in every man. Seek it always. Let that search be one’s only purpose in life. When one does find it, all things else will be added unto him.
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