lity.

There are not two I AMS, but one I am. Whatever, therefore, I can
conceive the Great Universal Life Principle to be, that I am. Let us try
fully to realise what this means. Can you conceive the Great Originating
and Sustaining Life Principle of the whole universe as poor, weak,
sordid, miserable, jealous, angry, anxious, uncertain, or in any other
way limited? We know that this is impossible. Then because the I AM is
one it is equally untrue of ourselves. Learn first to distinguish the
true self that you are from the mental and physical processes which it
throws forth as the instruments of its expression, and then learn that
this self controls these instruments, and not vice versa. As we advance
in this knowledge we know ourselves to be unlimited, and that, in the
miniature world, whose centre we are, we ourselves are the very same
overflowing of joyous livingness that the Great Life Spirit is in the
Great All. The I AM is One.

IV

AFFIRMATIVE POWER

Thoroughly to realise the true nature of affirmative power is to possess
the key to the great secret. We feel its presence in all the innumerable
forms of life by which we are surrounded and we feel it as the life in
ourselves; and at last some day the truth bursts upon us like a
revelation that we can wield this power, this life, by the process of
Thought. And as soon as we see this, the importance of regulating our
thinking begins to dawn upon us. We ask ourselves what this thought
process is, and we then find that it is thinking affirmative force into
forms which are the product of our own thought. We mentally conceive the
form and then think life into it.

This must always be the nature of the creative process on whatever
scale, whether on the grand scale of the Universal Cosmic Mind or on the
miniature scale of the individual mind; the difference is only in degree
and not in kind. We may picture the mental machinery by which this is
done in the way that best satisfies our intellect--and the satisfying of
the intellect on this point is a potent factor in giving us that
confidence in our mental action without which we can effect
nothing--but the actual externalisation is the result of something more
powerful than a merely intellectual apprehension. It is the result of
that inner mental state which, for want of a better word, we may call
our emotional conception of ourselves. It is the "self" which we _feel_
ourselves to be which takes forms of our o