Manifestation with Belief and Imagination
Thoughts become things!
“Thoughts become things, so choose the good ones!” - Mike Dooley (paraphrased)
Belief systems are considered a core component of our existence because our underlying beliefs fundamentally shape what we think is possible and what we believe we deserve - which directly impacts manifestation outcomes.
This reminds me of the first Hermetic principle - the Principle of Mentalism. It’s axiom states: “The All is Mind; The Universe is Mental”. And from Wayne B. Chandler’s Ancient Future:
The Hermetists of ancient Kmt (Egypt) stated that the All, that which we call God, is truly unknowable, for only the All itself can comprehend its own nature and being. The question then is, how does one identify the unidentifiable? The key to this question is humankind’s unconditional acceptance of the unknowability of the All. Though the essential nature of the All is unknowable, there are certain truths arrived at through reason, with which humans must be content:
The All must be All that really is. There can be nothing existing outside of the All, else the All would not be the All.
The All must be infinite, for there is nothing else to define, confine, bound, limit, or restrict the All. It must be infinite in time, or eternal — it must have always continuously existed, for there is nothing else to have ever created it, and something can never evolve from nothing. It must exist forever, for there is nothing to destroy it, and it can never “ not be,” even for a moment.
The All must be immutable, or consistent, in its real nature to never change, for there is nothing to work changes upon it; nothing into which it could change, nor from which it could have changed. This the ancients held as the supreme truth, and that everything else is subject to changes, especially things on Earth.
I will further digress with Ancient Future as it, in a way, explores our God concept or should I say the God concept of our ancient ancestors:
If the three truths stated previously acknowledge the various characteristics of the All, then perhaps reason can provide a guideline by which the All can be identified in its most transcendental form. Is the All purely matter? The answer would have to be no; for nothing rises higher than its own source, and it has just been established that matter is subject to constant change, reflecting rampant inconsistency and instability. Physical science testifies that matter is no more than an illusion — it is merely energy, power, or force combined at various vibrational frequencies.
But defining the All as pure power, force, or energy would not be totally accurate either. Energy or force as it relates to the All reflects only a residual component of its totality because energy and force are perpetually in a position of random flux in that they are always controlled by an outside influence, even when they appear to be moving of their own volition. Thus, there is no intrinsic intelligence in pure force or the power that guides or directs it. This is not the case with the All. What is perceived as energy and force in nature is but an outward manifestation, or projection, of the mind of the All. This is the feature that allows the definition of the All as Infinite Living Mind. Now, the term spirit is used as a means of general identification of the mind.
Most modern images of God are based on the line from the Book of Genesis, which reports that “God created man in his own image.” Ironically, people have looked at themselves and projected their own image onto God, rather than allowing God’s image to be primary. Instead of assuming that Genesis refers to God as a physically anthropomorphic being, we could instead assume that the human, or that which constitutes the essence of human, is a spiritual being: imperishable, infinite, and constant, like God. Thus, if spirit is living mind, then humans, like the All, have the ability to create and endure through the power of mind, only on a more minute plane of existence. This is the world’s best-kept secret. This was the religious reality of antiquity, which today is unknown by most, forgotten by many, and practiced by few.
What exactly is spirit? As previously indicated, spirit, which means “real essence” in the Hermetic context, is simply a title that humans have given to the living mind. Because spirit transcends our understanding, in our present state of consciousness, human beings must accept that it cannot be explained or defined. One theory is that God or the All is the universe, but this is pure conjecture and holds no basis in fact.
The theory probably arises from the fact that the universe is the largest tangible reality that humankind may mentally grasp and physically explore, but it is still matter that is subject to perpetual transformation. The universe seems all-pervasive in its nature or essence; it is connecting, binding, multidimensional with its neutron stars, black holes and quasars, but it is not the All. The mere fact that humans may understand and explore the physical universe disqualifies it as the character of the All, which cannot be perceived nor remotely grasped by humankind. The conclusion is obvious: the universe is a creation of the All.
Spiritualists, metaphysicians, and philosophers theorize that the All created the universe from its own substance, but this is also inaccurate because according to the ancient Hermetists, the All cannot be subtracted from nor divided. Furthermore, if it were so, would not each particle in the universe be aware of its being the All? Would not we, as spiritual entities, be born with an innate awareness of our universal connectedness or oneness with all life and with the All itself?
Some theologians and religious aspirants who acknowledge the fact that spirit or living mind dwells within every human being, setting us apart from other animal life forms, proclaim that “I am [or we are] God.” But this, too, is an erroneous assumption, comparable to a tiny human corpuscle claiming “I am the body.”
The process by which the All creates is very simple, and its comprehension can be facilitated by the second Hermetic axiom, that of Correspondence — “as above, so below” — that is based on the belief that there is a working correspondence existing among the many planes of the universe. According to the Law of Correspondence, an examination of the human process of creation will illuminate that of the All. Humans create in many ways. We create by utilizing materials from outside of our beings, such as metal, wood, clay, or combinations of materials. This type of creation does not apply to the All, for “there is nothing outside of the All.” Human beings also create from inside, biologically, by the transformation of genetic substance into new beings. Once again, this is not possible for the All, which can neither transfer nor subtract, reproduce nor multiply itself.
The manner of human creation that corresponds to that of the All is the human ability to create mentally, to imagine. As we create mentally, we use no outside materials, nor do we reproduce ourselves; yet the spirit of thought, or living mind, pervades our mental creations. Thus, according to the Law of Correspondence, we can assume that the All creates mentally. This is the key to the Hermetic riddle: “The All is Mind; The Universe is Mental.”
Just as the reader may create a mental universe of her own, so the All creates universes in its mentality. The major difference between the two processes is that the human universe is the mental creation of a finite mind, whereas that of the All is the creation of an infinite mind. Therefore, that which is accepted to be the universe is just one mental creation of the All: “The All creates in its Infinite Mind countless Universes, which exist for eons of time — and yet, to the All, the creation, development, decline and death of a million Universes is as the time of the twinkling of an eye.” Creation does not take place within time; rather, time is an effect of creation.
This conception of time would, to Western culture, be considered a spatiotemporal impossibility. But the ancient Hermetists held that time is a mere illusion, subject to spatial manipulation by the wise who understood its inconstancy. But in order to grasp the dynamic mechanism within which the All creates, it is imperative to explore the concept of time and how it manifests itself in Western civilization. The misunderstanding of time as linear is directly related to the inability to understand the divine. Dr. Kamau Johnson, a Howard University psychologist who has done extensive research into human perceptions of time, points out,
“To the surprise of many, the sense of linear time presently experienced in the Euro-Americas has not always been the reigning orientation of time. According to Egyptian mythology, Thoth [Hermes ] . . . was the divider and measurer of time . . . by observing successive patterns in nature, the Egyptians came to perceive time as cyclic. The sun, moon, and seasons returned with unfailing patterns and periodicity. As did their observations of the planets. So the concept of a cyclic worldview reflected the reliance on natural cycles . . . clever devices were designed to measure cyclic time. Sundials and other such devices, reflected that a cyclic time was intrinsic to nature.”
Johnson identifies a pivotal shift in the perception of time analysis when, “[in] the mid-1600’s, a Dutch scientist Christian Huygens, invented the pendulum clock, providing . . . its own recurring cycles independent of nature. This orientation was embraced by the western world . . . [and] became firmly ingrained in Euro-American culture. Reference to time became more rooted in concepts of hours, minutes, and seconds. . . . Today, it is assumed that time flows rigidly from past, present to future. Languages such as English are designed to describe a linear world . . . the tenses of English verbs indicate a rigid linear worldview. It is thus difficult to express non-linear . . . notions in our everyday language.”
Language, specifically descriptive or discursive language, is linear and consecutive. Descriptive or discursive languages cannot begin to capture or expound the simplest experience without depriving it of the essence that gives it life. Therefore, to try and use such a linear device to understand the All is nothing short of impossible.
Considerations of the Western perception of time as linear reinforce the inadequacy of Eurocentric thought and language to comprehend the cyclic nature of the divine. The cyclic nature of all natural elements on Earth corresponds to the nature of the All and constitutes the very hub of a universal dynamic, which connects the various planes of existence, whether seen or unseen. All things within the natural scheme of life move in cycles or continuous spirals. The double helix of DNA, the molecular basis of heredity in organic life, spirals up and out; blood spirals through living veins. Even the follicles of human hair, especially those of Blacks, spiral up and out of the head, creating the individual spiraling strands of helical, spring-like shafts so characteristic of that race. But the growth pattern of the hair in all human beings is cyclic in that it spirals from the lower top of the crania in a whorl pattern, no matter what the race. Seashells such as the nautilus are composed of a spiraling chain of chambers, the planets spin as they spiral in their orbits around the sun, and tornados and hurricanes also spiral as they move across the landscape.
According to the Law of Correspondence, we may surmise that all of these natural phenomena are the mental creation of the All. In fact, the words spiral and spiritual originate from the Latin spirare, to coil.
I don’t know this to be true, but etymology generally seems flimsy to me. The latin “spira” seems to be the root, “spiral” coming from the Medieval Latin “spiralis” and the Latin “spira,” which means:
A coil or winding
A twist or curl
This, based on a quick lookup via AI.
However, let’s continue
According to ancient belief, the All — living mind or spirit — creates by projecting an incalculable number of mental images that seem very real to us as humans, but are as illusive as the mental images in our own minds. The birth and demise of stellar systems take place within a fraction of a millisecond in the mind of the All, but are eons in time to mortals.
The All creates these images through a process akin to our understanding of meditation. In the beginning of Poimandres (the Vision of Hermes), prior to his contact with the great Dragon, “Hermes, in search for divine truth, found himself seeking solitude. . . . He came to a place of rest and gave himself over to meditation.” Meditation seems to induce the experience of an altered and higher state of consciousness, and through the study and use of it, human beings can create and achieve on a level much closer to that of the divine.
So what can we gather from all of this?
Primarily, beliefs, imagination and thoughts are much more than we have been taught. They are the tools we use to create our life; that life simply being a collection of experiences.
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