Read an Excerpt

PRINCIPLE #1
Mind Is the Builder: What You
Think, You Become
 
While in college Jerry attended a weekend seminar called “Preparing for the Future.” Included in the seminar was a workshop that involved writing down in as much detail as possible just what you would like to be doing in twenty years. Jerry gave this exercise serious attention and did his best to visualize an ideal day twenty years into the future.
 
Participants concluded the exercise by putting the document into a sealed envelope, which would then be stashed away where it wouldn’t be thought about or lost. All this Jerry did, and, as was expected, he forgot all about it. By a curious coincidence he found that envelope almost to the day twenty years later. As he read over the “ancient” document, he was amazed and tickled to discover that he was now actually living his projected scenario with uncanny accuracy.
 
What does this true story tell us—that Jerry was psychic and had successfully predicted the future? Maybe. But, more likely, what happened to Jerry is an illustration of something deeper and more profound, a principle that was articulated over and over in the psychic readings of Edgar Cayce: Mind is the builder. In other words, with the awesome power of your mind you can create your future, your situation in the world, even the very person you are. That power is a very special gift of the Creative Force, or God.
 
What is this gift of the mind, this fundamental aspect of your soul? Is it your ability to analyze and calculate? Is it your ability to visualize and imagine possibilities? Is it the mysterious part of you that concocts dreams every night while you sleep? Actually, it’s all these things. Your mind is versatile and multifaceted, and it’s the bridge between the realm of spirit and the world of physical reality.
 
The phrase Mind is the builder is usually found in the Cayce readings as part of a spiritual law that summarizes the creative process itself. In its entirety, the formula states, “Spirit is the life, mind is the builder, and the physical is the result.” These simple words describe the most basic process of life. Understanding the concept gives you a potent tool in your pursuit of happiness.
 
The formula begins with the source and essence of all life, the spirit—the foundation of all things—the raw power from which everything is born. The Greeks named it pneuma. The Hindus call it shakti; the Sioux Indians, wakonda. In Western religions it is often referred to as the power of God. The Cayce readings label it the Creative Force, but regardless of its name, the spirit is the source of all that is.
 
How does this spiritual force express itself in the three-dimensional world of time, space, and form? Through the activity of mind. It’s probably easier to grasp this formula with an analogy. Think of a slide projector. The light bulb corresponds to the source of life, the screen to the material world. The slide represents the mind! That transparent film takes the source light, shapes it into pattern and color, and projects the image onto the material screen.
 
The mind works in the same way. With a unique mixture of attitudes, emotions, logical analysis, and intuition, it first creates a pattern. Using the pure energy of spirit, the mind shapes a “thought-form,” which is analogous to a single slide. Of course, you have created many different thought-forms, all stored as memory patterns, like the slides in a carousel tray. At any moment of the day one of your slides is chosen from the memory storehouse, is reanimated by the source light, and eventually projects into your three-dimensional world of physical matter. These thought-forms are quite real; although they aren’t a “physical” reality, they shape the physical world according to their patterns. One Cayce reading says simply that thoughts are things and are as real as a pin stuck into your hand.
 
At first it may take a little effort to appreciate the reality of this thought-form world. Where is a thought? What does it look like? How can it be real if you can’t grasp or measure it? Both Cayce and the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung describe the world of thought as the “fourth dimension,” the dimension of ideas. For example, what makes this book you are reading real? Is it the weight of the paper and the color of the ink? That’s a superficial explanation. A more profound answer to this question suggests that the “reality” of thought may be embodied in the ideas that come to life in your mind through the miracle of the written word. Even more fascinating, the same idea can be shared with any number of other people scattered throughout the world and even throughout the generations. An idea isn’t limited to space or time.
 
Dreams often give us a peek into the creative realm of thought-forms. Consider the following story. A woman came to Edgar Cayce and asked for a reading to interpret a strange dream she had had. She had dreamed that she was holding her arms out before her with the palms turned upward. Encircling both forearms was a series of diamond bracelets. It so happened that she and her husband had been trying to conceive a child for several months. The interpretation was that on the night of the dream they had succeeded in their effort. The bracelets in the dream symbolized the joy that the woman would feel cradling the baby in her arms. This much of the story by itself is enough to make one marvel at the subtle faculties of the mind. But even more remarkable is that the woman’s sister, living miles away, had had the same dream the same night! She, too, had dreamed of her sister, her forearms bedecked with diamond bracelets—an illustration of how, through the unlimited nature of the fourth-dimensional world, we can be made sensitive to the thought-forms of others.
 
How Long Does It Take for a Thought to Build into the Physical?
 
If spirit is the life, mind is the builder, and the physical is the result, how long does it take for the mind to project a fourth-dimensional thought-form into the world of concrete physical reality?
 
That’s a good question. Unfortunately, there isn’t a simple answer. The timing depends on many factors. For example, before a house can exist, it must be built, but before it can be built with wood or stone, it needs to be designed. That design starts with an idea in the mind of an architect.
 
Then, once the fourth-dimensional thought-form image has been created, how long does it take for the design to be translated into a physical house? First, how grand or complicated is the design? If it’s a log cabin, it may be built in a few days; if it’s a castle, it will take longer. Second, how much sweat and elbow grease will be applied to the project? If the builder works ten hours a day, the house will materialize twice as fast as it will if the builder works only five hours a day. In essence, the time gap between “mind is the builder” and “the physical is the result” boils down to two factors: the scope of what’s being built and the perseverance of those who are laboring for it.
 
For most people the lack of consistent, persistent effort is the obstacle. Most of us are good at dreaming up grand ideas, but we fail to work at them until they can move from the fourth dimension to the third. For example, a high school student was lying on the living room couch, lamenting to his mother that he had only a few days to complete a term paper. Of course, upon being questioned, he admitted that the assignment had been given several weeks earlier. Then, in the midst of a stretch, he yawned and said, “I guess I was just made to be a procrastinator, and there’s not a thing I can do about it.”
 
When people with a tendency toward procrastination asked Cayce how to succeed with their projects, he usually gave the same terse advice: “Work like thunder!”
 
The Hatching Process
 
The spirit is the life, mind is the builder, the physical is the result—this formula explains the creative process. But if we examine it more carefully, what clues emerge to tell us more about how these steps unfold?
 
First comes conception, also known as inspiration, the awakening of a possibility of something new. Second is incubation, a time of accumulating energies. Think of the idea as an embryo or an egg that needs nourishment and time; through incubation, it accrues the energy needed to penetrate the world of matter. Finally, when the moment is right, the inspiration starts to materialize. That’s birth or, better yet, the hatching of the idea.
 
Many mythologies throughout the world—Greek, Finnish, Hindu, Japanese, and Egyptian, to name a few—use the image of the egg to describe the creation of the universe. In one version of an Egyptian myth, the first act of creation began with the formation of an egg out of the primeval water. From this egg broke forth Ra, the sun god and the immediate cause of all life on earth. The egg motif is still with us today when we speak of hatching a plot or hatching an idea.
 
The world is full of “overnight successes” who in fact spent years honing their craft or deepening their study. One young writer, named Barry Kemp, suddenly moved to Hollywood and seemed to take the town by storm. First he worked as a staff comedy writer for the hit series Taxi; then he went on to create the blockbuster hit comedies Coach and Newhart. To a casual observer he was the classic overnight success—yet for years Barry had crawled out of bed every morning at five o’clock to spend two hours writing television scripts that no one ever read!
 
That’s the incubation period that precedes the hatching. It’s a period not of idleness but of inner work, of preparation for the opportunities that will come as a direct consequence of mental building.