Spiritual Creativity

by Eugene Halliday

A power with potential capacity to feel itself cannot actually feel itself unless it encounters a resistance to its effort. Upon this fact depends the solution of the whole problem of human evolution.

Man is a modality of sentient power, a way in which universal energy manifests itself to itself. Universal energy can act particularly only in the particular; that is, only in the individual being which serves as a point of focus for the universal.

Infinite power, if it were to remain infinite, would not manifest itself to itself. Whatever its infinity of possibilities, these would remain eternally hidden in the mystery of its own infinity. But such an infinity would not realise its capacities; it would be in a state of infinite inhibition. To itself, as a power able to feel its own condition, it would experience itself as totally self-frustrated. Such frustration of its own potentialities for action would be to it what we, in human terms, would call total intolerability. We have no grounds for thinking that the infinite power should have remained in this state of infinite inhibition, and we have the evidence of our own presence in existence to demonstrate that it did not do so.

We are all ways of expression of the infinite sentient power. Whatever the motivating principles of our actions, they are derivations of this infinite power. Our rules, where rules exist, are finite copies of the rules of the infinite. The most obvious of these rules is that every motion initiated within a field of power begets another motion acting in the opposite direction. This second motion, the reaction to an initiating action, is the means whereby a latent capacity to feel becomes aware of itself.

If it were not for this reaction to our initiating action, we would not be aware of our existence. We owe it to this motion of reaction that we have whatever sense of identity we possess. Insofar, then, as we treasure our own self, our sense of being an individual being with some purpose in life, we are logically required to be deeply thankful for those oppositions which we have encountered, as the very means by which our self-value has been brought into being.

If we thoroughly understand this principle, we shall be able to bring about that peculiar change of orientation of our mental energies, the metanoia, the change of direction of energy application which, if faithfully followed, leads inevitably into total self-determination and freedom.

FREE TOTAL SELF-DETERMINATION is what is meant by “spiritual creativity”. It cannot be attained without the willed conscious embracing of the great law of the Infinite Sentient Power, source of all beings. This law is the law of the AFFIRMATION OF ALL NEGATIONS. We are to bring ourselves to be able to say ‘Yes’ to everything to which naturally, as to our pleasure mechanisms, we would prefer to say ‘No’.

The things to which we tend to say ‘No’ are the things which oppose our will. But it is precisely these things that make it possible for us to know that we have a will. Thus it is to those things that resist us that we are required by our own intelligence to be most grateful. That is if we have the insight to prefer wholeheartedly to become in reality that which otherwise will remain hidden inside us as an eternally unsatisfied potentiality.

Opposition, however it comes to us, in whatever form, is the means of the discovery of our true self-creativity and ultimate delight in existence.

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