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Book Description
From 1912 to 1914, Genevieve Behrend's life
focused
solely on the wisdom and philosophy of the man who's influential and
compelling
ideas provided much of the groundwork to the spiritual philosophy known
today
as "New Thought".
As the awareness of Mental Science was taking
shape,
Thomas Troward (1847- 1916) imparted his personal insight to only one
pupil who
could perpetuate this knowledge and share it with the world.
Your Invisible Power was her first book and remains her most
powerful and
popular work.
Behrend presents the Troward philosophy at
its best
because of the way her incomparably direct, and dynamic personality
relates the
life-changing concepts on a personal level.
Behrend says, "We all possess more power and
greater possibilities than we realize, and visualizing is one of the
greatest
of these powers.
"These pages have been written with the
purpose
and hope that their suggestions may furnish you a key to open up the
way to the
attainment of your desires."
Contents: Order of Visualization; How to Attract to Yourself
the
Things You Desire; Mental and Physical Form; Mental Pictures;
Suggestions for Making Your Mental Pictures; Thought Power for the
Production of New Conditions; How to Increase Your Personal Faith;
Believing You Have Already Received.
FOREWORD
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.
Genevieve Behrend.
September 1921.
CHAPTER 1 - ORDER OF
VISUALIZATION
The exercise of the visualizing faculty keeps
your mind in order, and attracts to you the things you need to make
life more enjoyable in an orderly way. If you train yourself in
practice of deliberately picturing your desire and carefully examining
it, you will soon find your thought and desires come and proceed in
more orderly procession than ever before. Having reached a state of
ordered mentality you are no longer in a constant state of mental
hurry. Hurry is Fear and consequently destructive.
In other words, when your understanding grasps
the power to visualize your heart's desire and hold it with your will,
it attracts to you all things requisite to the fulfillment of that
picture by the harmonious vibrations of the law of attraction. You
realize that since Order is Heaven's first law, and visualization
places things in their natural element, then it must be a heavenly
thing to visualize.
Everyone visualizes, whether they know it or
not. Visualizing is the great secret of Success. The conscious use of
this great power attracts to you greatly multiplied resources,
intensifies your wisdom, and enables you to make use of advantages
which you formerly failed to recognize.
We now fly through the air, not because anyone
has been able to change the laws of Nature, but because the inventor of
the flying machine learned how to apply Nature's laws and, by making
orderly use of them, produced the desired result. So far as natural
forces are concerned, nothing has changed since the beginning. There
were no airplanes in "the Year One," because those of that generation
could not conceive the idea as a practical working possibility. "It has
not yet been done" was the argument, "and it cannot be done." Yet the
laws and materials for practical flying machines existed then as now.
Troward tells us that the great lesson he
learned from the airplane and wireless telegraphy is the triumph of
principle over precedent, and the working of an idea to its logical
conclusion in spite of accumulated testimony of all past experience.
With such an example before you, can you not realize that still greater
secrets may be disclosed? Also "That you hold the key within yourself,
with which to unlock the secret chamber that contains your heart's
desire? All that is necessary in order that you may use this key and
make your life exactly what you wish it to be, is a careful inquiry
into the unseen causes which stand back of every external and visible
condition. Then bring these unseen causes into harmony with your
conception, and you will find that you can make practical working
realities of possibilities which at present seem but fantastic dreams."
We all know that the balloon was the
forefather of the airplane. In 1766 Henry Cavendish, an English
nobleman, proved that hydrogen gas was seven times lighter than
atmospheric air. From that discovery the balloon came into existence,
and from the ordinary balloon the dirigible, a cigar-shaped airship,
was evolved. Study of aeronautics and the laws of aerial locomotion of
birds and projectiles led to the belief that mechanism could be evolved
by which heavier-than-air machines could be made to travel from place
to place and remain in the air by the maintenance of great speed which
would overcome by propulsive force the ordinary law of gravitation.
Professor Langley of Washington who developed much of the theory which
others afterward improved was subjected to much derision when he sent a
model airplane up only to have it bury its nose in the muddy water of
the Potomac. But the Wright Brothers, who experimented in the latter
part of the Nineteenth Century, realized the possibility of traveling through the air in a machine that
had no gas bag. They saw themselves enjoying this mode of
transportation with great facility. It is said that one of the brothers
would tell the other (when their varied experiments did not turn out as
they expected): "Its all right, brother, I can see myself riding in
that machine, and it travels easily and steadily." Those Wright Brothers knew what they wanted,
and kept their pictures constantly before them.
In visualizing, or making a mental picture,
you are not endeavoring to change the laws of Nature. You are
fulfilling them. Your object in visualizing is to bring things into
regular order both mentally and physically. When you realize that this
method of employing the creative power brings your desires, one after
another, into practical material accomplishment, your confidence in the
mysterious but unfailing law of attraction, which has its central power
station in the very heart of your word/picture, becomes supreme.
Nothing can shake it. You never feel that it is necessary to take
anything from anybody else. You have learned that asking and seeking
have receiving and finding as their correlatives. You know that all you
have to do is to start the plastic substance of the Universe flowing
into the thought-molds your picture-desire provides.
CHAPTER 2 - HOW TO ATTRACT
TO YOURSELF THE THINGS YOU DESIRE
The power within you which enables you to form
a thought picture is the starting point of all there is. In its
original state it is the undifferentiated formless substance of life.
Your thought picture forms the mould (so to speak) into which this
formless substance takes shape. Visualizing, or mentally seeing things
and conditions as you wish them to be, is the condensing, the
specializing power in you that might be illustrated by the lens of a
magic lantern. The magic lantern is one of the best symbols of this
imaging faculty. It illustrates the working of the Creative Spirit on
the plane of the initiative and selection (or in its concentrated
specializing form) in a remarkably clear manner.
This picture slide illustrates your own mental
picture - invisible in the lantern of your mind until you turn on the
light of your will. That is to say, you light up your desire with
absolute faith that the Creative Spirit of Life, in you, is doing the
work. By the steady flow of light of the will on the Spirit, your
desired picture is projected upon the screen of the physical world, an
exact reproduction of the pictured slide in your mind.
Visualizing without a will sufficiently steady
to inhibit every thought and feeling contrary to your picture would be
as useless as a magic lantern without the light. On the other hand, if
your will is sufficiently developed to hold your picture in thought and
feeling, without any "ifs," simply realizing that your thought is the
great attracting power, then your mental picture is as certain to be
projected upon the screen of your physical world as any pictured slide
put into the best magic lantern ever made.
Try projecting the picture in a magic lantern
with a light that is constantly shifting from one side to the other,
and you will have the effect of an uncertain will. It is as necessary
that you should always stand back of your picture with a strong, steady
will, as it is to have a strong steady light back of a picture slide.
The joyous assurance with which you make your
picture is the very powerful magnet of Faith, and nothing can
obliterate it. You are happier than you ever were, because you have
learned to know where your source of supply is, and you rely upon its
never-failing response to your given direction.
When all said and done, happiness is the one
thing which every human being wants, and the study of visualization
enables you to get more out of life than you ever enjoyed before.
Increasing possibilities keep opening out, more and more, before you.
A business man once told me that since
practicing visualization and forming the habit of devoting a few
minutes each day to thinking about his work as he desired it to be in a
large, broad way, his business had more than doubled in six months. His
method was to go into a room every morning before breakfast and take a
mental inventory of his business as he had left it the evening before,
and then enlarge upon it. He said he expanded and expanded in this way
until his affairs were in remarkably successful condition. He would see
himself in his office doing everything that he wanted done. His
occupation required him to meet many strangers every day. In his mental
picture he saw himself meeting these people, understanding their needs
and supplying them in just the way they wished. This habit, he said,
had strengthened and steadied his will in an almost inconceivable
manner. Furthermore, by thus mentally seeing things as he wished them
to be, he had acquired the confident feeling that a certain creative
power was exercising itself, for him and through him, for the purpose
of improving his little world.
When you first begin to visualize seriously,
you may feel, as many others do, that someone else may be forming the
same picture you are, and that naturally would not suit your purpose.
Do not give yourself any unnecessary concern about this. Simply try to
realize that your picture is an orderly exercise of the Universal
Creative Power specifically applied. Then you may be sure that no one
can work in opposition to you. The universal law of harmony prevents
this. Endeavor to bear in mind that your mental picture is Universal
Mind exercising its inherent powers of initiative and selection
specifically.
God, or Universal Mind, made man for the
special purpose of differentiating Himself through him. Everything that
is, came into existence in this same way, by this self-same law of
self-differentiation, and for the same purpose. First the idea, the
mental picture or the prototype of the thing, which is the thing itself
in its incipiency or plastic form.
The Great Architect of the Universe
contemplated Himself as manifesting through His polar opposite, matter,
and the idea expanded and projected itself until we have a world - many
worlds.
Many people ask, "But why should we have a
physical world at all?" The answer is: Because it is the nature of
originating substance to solidify, under directivity rather than
activity, just as it is the nature of wax to harden when it becomes
cold, or plaster of paris to become firm and solid when exposed to the
air. Your picture in this same Divine substance in its fluent state
taking shape through the individualized center of Divine operation,
your mind; and there is no power to prevent this combination of
spiritual substance from becoming physical form. It is the nature of
Spirit to complete its work and
an idea is not complete until it has made
for itself a vehicle.
Nothing can prevent your picture from coming into concrete form except
the same power that gave it birth - yourself. Suppose you wish to have
a more orderly room. You look about your room and the idea of order
suggests boxes, closets, shelves, hooks and so forth. The box, the
closet, the hooks, all are concrete ideas of order. Vehicles through
which order and harmony suggest themselves.
