What is Creative Process?

The one way Spirit creates, in the cosmos and in us: its Self-contemplation sets up a polarity that works out in form. In The Creative Process in the Individual, Troward traces it from Spirit's first movement upon itself, which projects the Universal Substance, through the forming of the worlds and the mineral, vegetable, animal and human kingdoms, each stage the platform for the next. The order matters: Self-contemplation comes first, and polarity follows, not creative but only distributive, localizing the energy that proceeds from the one Power. At the human level the process passes to the individual. When we recognize our life as one with the Spirit's, our contemplation of the Spirit becomes its contemplation of itself from our own center, and it works outward through secondary causes into the conditions of our life. We do not create the power; we distribute and specialize it.

Troward builds The Creative Process in the Individual on this one idea. He starts from facts of physical science, the ether present throughout space and the condensation of the primary nebula into a solar system, and reasons back to their only possible cause, the movement of Spirit within itself. The process has one way of working, the Law of Reciprocity, which he calls "the fundamental law of the Creative Process": Spirit's Self-contemplation produces a Reciprocal corresponding to the idea contemplated, the re-action being "always equivalent and correspondent to the action which generated it." From that root the process runs as a progressive series with no final term, because at every stage the creating power is the Spirit's self-consciousness reaching forward for a fuller enjoyment of life. Four kingdoms are already manifest. The fifth, the Kingdom of Individuality, cannot be produced by the generic working of cosmic law, since it depends on the powers of initiative and selection that make a person a person, so each of us enters it by recognizing the same process at work in ourselves.

Two safeguards run through the teaching. The power is one, so it cannot be set against itself from different centers, and whoever uses it in its true nature works in harmony with everyone else who does. Its pattern is the Normal Standard of Personality, the Life, Love, Light, Power, Peace, Beauty and Joy that the Spirit is. Within these the field is open, for "Principle is not bound by Precedent." Troward follows the process to its end: the body itself included in the conscious life of the Spirit, and the individual receiving, through Christ, power to become a son of God, "which is the dénouement of the Creative Process in the Individual."

The term "creative" derives from the Latin "creare," meaning "to make, bring forth, produce, beget." "Process" originates from the Latin "procedere," meaning "to move forward, advance." Thus, "Creative Process" literally translates to "the act of moving forward in bringing something forth." In Troward the word "process" is exact: creation proceeds stage by stage, each stage a preparation for the one that follows, and the progression has no final term.

Troward's practice begins where the cosmic process began, with Spirit, now found within ourselves. Instead of contemplating existing conditions, we contemplate the Divine Ideal, and the Spirit as the very power we want to develop, dwelling on that power in itself rather than on the circumstances that seem to oppose it. Then we contemplate ourselves surrounded by the conditions we desire, without laying down a fixed pattern of details or straining to make the Power conform to it, and we trust it to give those conditions their form.

We test our desires by the Spirit's own nature, Truth, Life and Beauty, and present ourselves to it free of inversion. We leave the channel open, since means come through recognizable channels, and when the materials and opportunities arrive we work on them with diligence and common sense. Growth may be slow at first, so we hold the thought patiently, knowing that the corresponding growth is taking place.

It is not a three-step technique of picturing, willing and acting. Troward's Creative Process is the Self-contemplation of Spirit, and he warns against laying down a hard and fast pattern and trying to compel the Power to fit it. Nor does it bypass ordinary means: the individual sets up polarities that start secondary causation, and results come through recognizable channels. "Do you expect God to put cash into your desk by a conjuring trick?" he asks. And the individual is not the source of the power: we cannot generate what generates us. Supposing ourselves the ultimate source of Personality, instead of its distributors and specializers, is the error Troward finds in much present-day teaching on thought-power.