Seen and Unseen

by E. Katherine Bates

Now go into the sculptor's studio, having studied well in the great sculpture galleries of the world. You go to the studio, we will suppose, as a pupil. He puts a lump of clay into your hands, and for the first time you are invited to model your own statues and figures, to embody your own ideas in this clay, which corresponds to thought stuff here. You are even made to understand that your houses will only be worthily furnished by the work of your own hands. Here it is the work of your own hearts, of your loving or unloving thoughts.

So the first lesson we learn over here is that THOUGHT is not only Creative Power, as you are often told on earth, but it is also the very stuff out of which the creation must be moulded. It is, in very truth, the clay of the modeller.

Shakespeare said truly enough "We are such stuff as dreams are made of," but he was referring to our embodied selves.

The difference between the two worlds seems to me, so far as I have arrived, as the difference between the pupil in the sculpture gallery and in the experimental studio. The chief part of the earth modelling is ready made—made by the racial thought stuff and the racial manipulation of it.

Here, for the first time, we must turn to and take a hand in the work ourselves. It would not be possible to give such individual power in any lower sphere than this, for it would be misused, and would lead to terrible tragedies.

You see some slight hints of this in what is called Black Magic—the wilful and intentional throwing of evil conditions on other people, making hard and cruel images of them in the mind, and so forth. But all that is as child's play to what would happen if the absolute clay were put into their hands, as it is here.

It is the difference between thinking out an ugly picture; and painting it and hanging it up in a gallery; for we have objectivity here as with you. Naturally what comes into objective existence has more power than what remains latent. The latter can only influence exceptionally sensitive souls, and that to a comparatively small extent, whereas the former, here as with you, has a much farther range of influence.

So this sort of gunpowder is not given to us until we are old enough to know better than to burn our fingers with it, in trying to make fireworks!

At the same time, as all stages of evolution overlap, it is inevitable that some hint of these possibilities should be already in your world. Woe be to those who misuse them!

You have taken enough for this morning. H. D.