The Road to Paradise
Chapter 7
Why our experience of life constitutes the feeling of an "inner" world and an "outer" one
We have thus seen from the above that the entire physical plane of existence is a world of thought, since all its details constitute thoughts that are manifested in physical matter. It is therefore not difficult, on the strength of this analysis, to reach an understanding of what is known in everyday speech as the "spiritual world", it constituting neither more nor less than the part of our life experience during which we are conscious of our thoughts before they become manifested in physical matter. Because we have a physical organism by virtue of which we can transfer our thought so as to be manifested in physical matter, our sphere of life experience will appear in two distinct sections, namely the section in which we create and experience our thought in so-called "spiritual matter", and the section in which we create and experience our thought in physical matter. In reality our creation in physical matter is a copying of thoughts we have already created in spiritual matter in our world of thought or consciousness. These thus constitute the models for our creation in physical matter. By virtue of our physical organism we can thus copy our thoughts in physical matter, just as we can also, by virtue of the same organism or combination of sensory faculties, transfer the copies of the thoughts thus made in physical matter to the spiritual sphere of our mental manifestations or our consciousness. It is by virtue of this that we feel or experience that we have an inner world.