The Creative Process in the Individual | Page 6

must eliminate the
ideas of time and space from our conception of Spirit's initial
Self-contemplation.
This being so, Spirit's primary contemplation of itself as simply Being
necessarily makes its presence universal and eternal, and consequently,
paradoxical as it may seem, its independence of Time and Space makes
it present throughout all Time and Space. It is the old esoteric maxim
that the point expands to infinitude and that infinitude is concentrated
in the point. We start, then, with Spirit contemplating itself simply as
Being. But to realize your being you must have consciousness, and
consciousness can only come by the recognition of your relation to
something else. The something else may be an external fact or a mental
image; but even in the latter case to conceive the image at all you must
mentally stand back from it and look at it--something like the man who
was run in by the police at Gravesend for walking behind himself to see
how his new coat fitted. It stands thus: if you are not conscious of
something you are conscious of nothing, and if you are conscious of
nothing, then you are unconscious, so that to be conscious at all you
must have something to be conscious of.
This may seem like an extract from "Paddy's Philosophy," but it makes
it clear that consciousness can only be attained by the recognition of
something which is not the recognizing ego itself--in other words
consciousness is the realization of some particular sort of relation
between the cognizing subject and the cognized object; but I want to
get away from academical terms into the speech of human beings, so let
us take the illustration of a broom and its handle--the two together
make a broom; that is one sort of relation; but take the same stick and
put a rake-iron at the end of it and you have an altogether different
implement. The stick remains the same, but the difference of what is
put at the end of it makes the whole thing a broom or a rake. Now the
thinking and feeling power is the stick, and the conception which it

forms is the thing at the end of the stick, so that the quality of its
consciousness will be determined by the ideas which it projects; but to
be conscious at all it must project ideas of some sort.
Now of one thing we may be quite sure, that the Spirit of Life must feel
alive. Then to feel alive it must be conscious, and to be conscious it
must have something to be conscious of; therefore the contemplation of
itself as standing related to something which is not its own originating
self in propria persona is a necessity of the case; and consequently the
Self-contemplation of Spirit can only proceed by its viewing itself as
related to something standing out from itself, just as we must stand at a
proper distance to see a picture--in fact the very word "existence"
means "standing out." Thus things are called into existence or
"outstandingness" by a power which itself does not stand out, and
whose presence is therefore indicated by the word "subsistence."
The next thing is that since in the beginning there is nothing except
Spirit, its primary feeling of aliveness must be that of being alive all
over; and to establish such a consciousness of its own universal
livingness there must be the recognition of a corresponding relation
equally extensive in character; and the only possible correspondence to
fulfil this condition is therefore that of a universally distributed and
plastic medium whose particles are all in perfect equilibrium, which is
exactly the description of the Primary Substance or ether. We are thus
philosophically led to the conclusion that Universal Substance must be
projected by Universal Spirit as a necessary consequence of Spirit's
own inherent feeling of Aliveness; and in this way we find that the
great Primary Polarity of Being becomes established.
From this point onward we shall find the principle of Polarity in
universal activity. It is that relation between opposites without which
no external Motion would be possible, because there would be nowhere
to move from, and nowhere to move to; and without which external
Form would be impossible because there would be nothing to limit the
diffusion of substance and bring it into shape. Polarity, or the
interaction of Active and Passive, is therefore the basis of all Evolution.
This is a great fundamental truth when we get it in its right order; but

all through the ages it has been a prolific source of error by getting it in
its wrong order. And the wrong order consists in making Polarity the
originating point of the Creative Process. What this misconception
leads to we shall see later on; but since it is