M2220
The Power of Thought
by Martinus
1. Thought is the connecting link between the I and life
Earthly human beings usually hold the view that they live and experience life in a physical world, due to the fact that they identify themselves with the physical organism and believe that what they experience is also something physical. This, however, is a great mistake. From a cosmic point of view, it is quite out of the question for us to experience anything on the physical plane. The entire physical world is merely a combination of different kinds of movements, which we experience as what we call "Heaven", "Earth", "a tree", "a star" etc. Our experience consists entirely of "pictures" that the special energy combinations in the outer world project through our physical senses into our consciousness or inner world. Our experience is a world of pictures; thought pictures, it is a spiritual world, and the earthly human being is a spiritual being, even though he perhaps at the moment believes that he is only physical.
We cannot live a single moment without this spiritual reality; we are enveloped in spiritual matter, in thought matter, which is a connecting link between the I and life. All experience is a manifestation of thought; the six basic energies, which form an essential part of my analyses of the universe and the living being, are six different forms of thought, and they are connected to the being's desire and will. One cannot think a single thing without there being a form of desire behind it. Thought is that part of the living being that, when it has a physical organism, it experiences as an inner world; if this world did not exist it would be quite impossible to experience an "outer" world.
2. We are a "Godhead" in our own thought world
By virtue of our consciousness and thought world we are all a part of a spiritual world, which is something primary, just as we, by virtue of our physical organism and its sensory tools, are a part of a physical world, which in relation to the spiritual world is something secondary. We decide, in our inner or spiritual world how we are going to react to the physical world. In our thought world we work constantly with everything we see, absolutely everything that we experience; every day we receive a great amount of impressions, and we make decisions about these impressions; we are, in fact, very busy in our spiritual world. The thoughts function because we have to use them in our reactions to the outer world. Inside our inner world we have a kind of "physical world" made up of the "thought pictures", we have made for ourselves of the world "outside". This is what we call personal experiences and conceptions; all evolution consists of a widening of these personal experiences and conceptions. The interaction of energy, which takes place between the energy combinations of the outer world and the energies of our inner thought world, is that play which is our own I's experience of life. In the inner world we are ourselves a Godhead, ruling in a universe, our own thought world. In this universe there live millions of micro-beings, with which we build up our thought matter, just as we build up our physical organism with physical micro-beings. Those micro-individuals, which our thoughts are made up of, have been attracted by us, because they fit our evolutionary step. There are micro-individuals on all evolutionary steps in underlying spiral cycles and we attract and use those which find themselves on more or less the same step in their evolutionary spiral as we, their macro-being, find ourselves on in our own spiral. So our evolution and the regeneration of our life is naturally tied up with gradually attracting micro-individuals of a higher type, so that they can "live, move and have their being" in the spiritual world for which we are a Godhead.
3. Thought and action
Everything that we think, is an expression of desire. It can be either selfish or unselfish. We experience this desire as what we call will, and will in turn is an expression of power, for the power we have inside us. For this power to be manifested and find expression, two of the six basic energies play an absolutely essential role: the energy of gravity and the energy of feeling. All power depends on a tension between these two energies, which are contrasts to each other, because they constitute the heat and the coldness of the universe. The energy of gravity is fire or heat, the expanding force, and the energy of feeling is the coldness, the contracting force. It is this state of tension that has to be overcome. In this way it becomes possible to make one's thought accessible to one's surroundings. From being a wish, the thought becomes a releasing of the forces we have around us. We make our thoughts visible only by acting. The action would not be able to occur, without a wish, an act of will, taking place in the person's inner world. We set in motion a force, an overcoming of a state of tension, when we wish, think and act. We cannot open and close our hands, without us having to use a force. It is the same with all our movements. But it is not everything that we wish and desire that we are able to realise in action. Take for example the sentences "He gave the word, and so it came about", "He gave the command, and there it was". This does not apply to the earthly human being; it is not everything that we wish for, that we can also have fulfilled. If we for example want to change the position of the sun or move the universe, this is an expression of abnormality. There are limits to the fulfilment of our wishes. We can, of course, through our faulty desiring and wishing, go against that system of laws which governs Nature, but we will also experience life becoming difficult, and our longings and desires will turn again in the direction of following the laws. So this means that our thought world is also enriched by mistakes. It is a question of getting to know the laws of thinking, and Nature is our greatest teacher.
4. The development of thought
But how does our thought come about? The first primitive form of thinking - the ability to sense vaguely - arose as early as the first zones of the spiral cycle. This form of thinking is a function of the subconsciousness. The life of plants consists of thinking in the form of sensing vaguely pleasantness and unpleasantness. The plant begins to use this ability to sense more and more strongly, and it has, in its eternal cosmic structure, talent kernels, which some day will bring it forward to the same stage, that we ourselves are on. Wind, storms, rain, coldness, warmth, everything that plants sense vaguely of Nature's various forms of energy display, develops within them a desire to be totally conscious in these experiences. And as desire and will - if they follow the laws - are the beginning of all evolution and creation, the plant little by little begins to be able to create something on the physical plane totally according to its will. What it creates is a more sensitive and mobile organism, through which is possible a greater wealth of experience and an increased ability to create its own experience. The instinct for self-preservation is the first form of developed thinking, and this force drives the being through the transitional stages between the plant kingdom and animal kingdom. Little by little the plant has grown into an animal. For the animal by now it has become a vital necessity to kill in order to live, the animals' world is a world of killing, and in the animal kingdom, to which the earthly humans still belong, they experience the peak of the unfolding of the killing principle, in the form of war, violence, terror and physical and spiritual crises and sufferings which we call illnesses. The outer world is characterised by the inner world. People cannot manoeuvre correctly in the physical world before they have learnt to direct their inner world, their thought world. It is necessary to learn that one should wish for and so also how one should think. We can wish for many things, but these things can be for or against the laws of life. Through our wishes we can arrange the forces in various combinations. If the tension is too weak the person cannot manifest himself powerfully enough. If it is too strong one becomes too aggressive, hot-tempered and irascible, governed by the killing principle. Perhaps one commits murder, perhaps one causes explosions that destroy the natural expression of life and joy of life of one's surroundings, making them miserable; this can also be seen as a kind of "murder". Earthly humankind finds itself at a new transition stage in evolution, namely that from animal to human, and this is the reason that it now has to learn to think and have wishes along human lines.
5. High-intellectual thinking
Modern science and technology, among other things, are expressions of the fact that earthly human beings have to a certain extent learnt to think logically i.e. in harmony with the laws of life. But the whole world situation tells us that the forms of thinking that lie behind the scientific and technological manifestations are still not human or humane enough. World wars and world crises are the result. Because of this the wishes and desires of millions of earthly human beings are now directed towards the Opposite of this condition of war and crisis, towards a world of peace and neighbourly love. To this aim they do not have to give up intellectual thinking, on the contrary, they have to learn how to raise it up onto a higher level. With the longing for peace and active neighbourly love, earthly humans are on the point of being on the same wavelength as true human thinking, which is not just intellectual but also ethical and moral, which means that they are on the point of coming into contact with divine thinking itself. It is this form of thinking which fulfils all the laws, this is high-intellectuality. The energy of intuition plays a very large part in this thought combination. Intuition is that force by which the world is carried forward to knowledge. If this were not the case, my cosmic analyses and symbols would never have come into existence. First of all one gets the "solutions" themselves, but one is not able to make an analyses of them; the physical brain of the earthly human is not yet designed for this.
Christ came bringing the great solutions to earthly humankind and for a long time people were content with the dogma that "the ways of the Lord are beyond understanding", but that isn't the case anymore. Not because Christ brought untrue solutions, they are true and perfect, experienced as they are through his intuition, but because more and more earthly peoples' intellect is now developed so much, that belief and the ability to sense vaguely has been superseded in so many areas by knowledge and understanding. This is the reason why people now also want to know something about the highest things. I would never have been able to have created a perfectly mathematical world picture, if I hadn't previously had the solutions, but at the same time my cosmic analyses and symbols are an expression of how people with the help of intellectual and ethical thinking can work their way through the calculations to the solution.
6. Cosmic consciousness
I live in another world than the one which is visible. I see with cosmic sight. This is not a clairvoyant sight, but an open seeing with which I see the whole world. By receiving solutions through the intuition and working on them with the intelligence, one arrives at perfect thinking. One needs to practice to be able to think in contact with the universe.
In modern technical establishments and large factories, there is an instrument panel, from which more or less the whole establishment is controlled. The human brain can be likened to such an instrument panel, through which the I can regulate its consciousness. In order for a large establishment to run without difficulties, short circuits, mishaps etc., one has to think about what will benefit the whole, which means, what will benefit every single one of the factors, which go to make up the whole. That it perhaps isn't already like this in our factories, is because of the fact that people have still not learnt how to think correctly, i.e. with a moral orientation, without thought of making profit at other peoples' expense. Earthly human beings have to learn to use their own instrument panel, the brain, like this, because only through humaneness and love can the real, the high intellectual, thinking come about. Love is the way that the open cosmic consciousness manifests itself.
When I say that I developed my ability to think so that it has come into contact with the laws of life, perhaps it might seem as if I want to boast about this ability. But it isn't boasting. I do know that it does not constitute a special favour or favouritism on the part of the Godhead, it is what everyone who has lived before me has experienced, and what everyone after me will experience. Every single earthly human being will at some point experience it. It is a natural development. Through the development of this form of thinking and morality people come to be able to see just as vividly into the spiritual world as into the physical world. With me it has become C-knowledge (See Martinus' book "Logic" Chapter 94 for an explanation of A-, B- and C- knowledge) to be in contact with the laws of life, and I have the ability to be so. After intuition has streamed through my consciousness, it takes me a long time to symbolise and work out into text, what I have experienced in a single fraction of a second. The intuitive experience does not offer calculations but solutions; I have to use my intelligence to elucidate them in detail. To get the intuition under the control of their will is the goal, earthly humans must reach, in order to become one with the Godhead. It is still an energy which most people are seldom in contact with, merely in glimpses, when they are in an especially happy state, but a time will come when it will be permanent and will help people raise themselves up out of a primitive existence.
7. The reason why we find ourselves in the earth's organism
There is absolutely nothing at all in Nature and the world around us, which is not in one way or another an expression of thought. When one looks cosmically and lives with one's awake day-consciousness in the spiritual world, it becomes clear that everything that surrounds us constitutes the various thought-formations of a great being. What we experience is the will and thought-formations of the planet earth being. The force of gravity, which prevents things and bodies from falling out into the universe and pulls them in towards the earth, is an expression of the earth's will power, which holds everything together. The same principle applies to ourselves. If we did not have will power, our micro-individuals would be able to jump out of our body. They cannot do this because our concentrated will power holds together the universe, which, from a cosmic point of view, our organism is. That this will to hold our organism together is an automatic function, so that we don't have to consciously concentrate on it all the time, is another matter. It is also a wish and a desire in us, that our body should be healthy, normal and natural, but usually we don't go round wishing for this, it also has become C-knowledge or an automatic function in us. We don't wish for it consciously every day, but when we become ill, we do wish for it strongly.
The universe is permeated by forms of will and thinking, and it is these forms of will and thought that determine that the universe is held together in milky way systems, solar systems, planets, human, animal and plant organisms; and in the microcosmos in organs, cells and molecular and atomic systems etc., which means that all together it is living beings that form or make up universes and matter for each other, which also means that they live within each other's thought world or spiritual worlds. All living beings live, move and have their being in the eternal Godhead's thought world, where they experience the contrast principle in eternal spiral cycles and thereby have renewed their own consciousness and thought world. Earthly human beings find themselves at a stage in one of these spiral cycles, where they have had enough of reaping the effects of selfishness and egoism, which they have sown over the centuries and thereby set in motion as causes. This is the reason that they have "ended up as", that is to say been attracted as, micro-individuals in the earth's organism, because the planet earth being is a macro-being whose thought activity and will are tuned into the same wavelength as a longing for peace, harmony and love.
8. Cooperation with the will of the planet earth and the will of the Godhead
The planet earth being will in its present incarnation experience cosmic consciousness, which means that this being harbours in its consciousness and organism, a concentrated longing for harmony. It has put all of its conscious will power into this. For the "brain cells" of the planet earth, which are the earthly human beings, this will mean that "peace on earth and goodwill to all men" will really come about, as promised in the Christmas gospel. This is the same thing as the development of the true human kingdom on earth. But the development will take place organically, which, even though it only takes a short time seen from the time-perspective of the planet earth being, will, from the earthly humans time-perspective, takes about 3000 years. In this period of time peoples' thought world will be changed from egoism, destructive and negative ways of thinking, to positive, loving and logical thoughts, which will unite earthly humankind in a cooperation between the states, so that they form into one kingdom or the united states of the world, which already does exist as a wish and a longing in the thought world of thousands of people. So every single one of us is in cooperation with the will of the earth and the will of the Godhead, which of course is behind it, when we focus our own will power and thought world on neighbourly love, humanity and logical thinking.
Something that is not logical cannot be loving or useful, and to the degree that it is not logical it will cause a breaking down or destruction. Whatever is built up in accordance with that way of building that rules in the universe is logical. Humanity is an expression of the highest logic because it is an expression of high-intellectuality, which is the same as the Godhead's way of thinking. The Godhead thinks in contact with the same energies as we do, the six basic energies, but we have to learn to mix them in a divine way; that is what I call becoming a "cosmic chemist". At the moment most earthly humans mix these energies in such a way that the result is what I call "devil consciousness", which is the same thing as the transition stage between the animal and the true human. In the jungle it is useless to command lions and tigers not to break the fifth commandment, as it is an absolute necessity for them to kill in order to live. But for the earthly human it is no longer necessary, and not only is it not necessary, but gradually, as earthly humans' longing and wishing begins to focus itself on a more human world, it is directly destructive for its organism and its consciousness to contain and work with negative and killing kinds of thought, which can contribute to causing both psychological and physical illnesses.
9. Cosmic chemistry
It is my task to instruct people about the laws of cosmic chemistry, and to show that logic and love are one and the same thing. Christ gave the great solutions and through his conduct, was a model of what it means to be a human being in God's image after his likeness. And he is still to this day an example for people. My task is to show the calculations that lead to the solutions that Christ has given, among others to show that the principle of reincarnation and the law of karma are natural consequences of the cosmic principle of cycles and have to form a natural link in Christianity. However, Christianity should of course be an everyday way of thinking and acting, not a dogmatic religion. The power of thought, and the action that follows from it, fills up our daily life, and through it we can contribute to changing the whole course of the world, by thinking and acting along more humane and loving lines. Has not Christ said that one should forgive not seven times, but seventy times seven times a day, which means always? To say "Father forgive them for they know not what they do", means that one should no longer choose the way of revenge, hatred and anger, but the way of love.
I know that there are beings who wish to live in a better and better world, and who are miserable because they do not do what is good and everything seems hopeless to them. But everyone can gradually learn to do what is good, if they really want to. It is my task to describe how one can be saved. As long as there is something that you don't like, as long as you are not saved in that particular field, you will be unable to get your "instrument panel" to function correctly. When you get to the point when you can understand that no person at this moment can be otherwise than they are, then you will have peace in your mind and be able to forgive. And when you, as well as that, can learn to understand that the person who is unpleasant towards you is releasing that karma, of which yourself are the cause, it is easier to forgive; he really does not know what he is doing. Peace has to be created from within in each individual person's thought world, and sown as action, so that it will also be reaped as peace and harmony at some time in the future. One should get used to looking on people as one looks on plants, here we have a rose, here we have a thistle, and none of them can be different than they are. Each one stands at the peak of its development and its ability to create its own experience, and each one will be quite different in the future. One should get used to being in contact with the moment, with the present, because any experience whatsoever is at its most perfect at this moment, seen in relation to the past and with a view to the future. One can only abolish war by abolishing it in the way that one wills things and in one's thought world, creating peace there. Therefore it cannot be stressed enough that it is love, humanity, intellectuality, logic and harmony that is needed from now on and into the future. With the help of my analyses and symbols, I will show that it is logical to be loving. In order to make your way forward to the divine world, you have to learn to follow the laws of love and logic in everything that you do, so that you cannot help but gain inner peace and so that your inner world becomes lit up.
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Original Danish title: Tankens magt. From a lecture on Glahns Allé in Frederiksberg, Copenhagen on Thursday 6th July 1941. Edited by Mogens Møller and approved by Martinus. First published in the Danish edition of Kosmos no. 9, 1975. Translated by Andrew Brown, 1994.
Article ID: M2220
Published in the English edition of Kosmos no. 6, 1994
© Martinus Institut 1981, www.martinus.dk
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