Your Invisible Power summary

The picture you think, feel, and see is reflected into the Universal Mind and returns to you in spiritual or physical form. This is the law of reciprocal action, and the Law of Visualization rests on it. Behrend offers these pages as a key to the attainment of desire. Fear must be banished, and the deepest need in all effort to possess is to consistently "Be" your best self. She tells of a man in New York with half his money in his hand. She taught him that substance fills all space and cannot come too late, and within months he was prospering in New Orleans. Possessions give cause for happiness, but the Joy of Living comes from within. Effort in study means steady persistence without strain, and visualizing never breaks the continuity of cause and effect. All of it holds true only for one who knows that the power to make an abiding mental picture comes from the All-Originating Universal Spirit, and who stands toward that Spirit as a son through whom the parent mind acts.

Visualization is the faculty that sets the mind in order, and an ordered mind draws to itself, through the law of attraction, everything needed to fulfil its picture. Everyone visualizes, knowingly or not. Used on purpose, the faculty ends mental hurry, which is fear, and brings desires into material form one after another. Behrend tells of a woman who pictured the sale of her property and was led to a dealer who sold it in three days, and of another, out of work, who found exactly the position she wanted on the afternoon her desire was pictured for her. Alongside these cases she sets the history of flight, from Cavendish's hydrogen to the Wright Brothers, who kept seeing themselves riding in their machine. With Troward she calls this the triumph of principle over precedent. The laws of Nature never change. Visualizing does not alter them but fulfils them, starting the plastic substance of the Universe flowing into the moulds of thought.

The power to form a thought-picture is the starting point of all creation. Your mental picture is the model into which the formless substance of life takes shape. Behrend compares the imaging faculty to a magic lantern. The picture is the slide, the will is the light, and the physical world is the screen. Once the light of a steady will shines behind it, the picture is projected exactly. Behrend tells of a deserted wife who lost her mental grip several times while her husband divorced her and remarried. Each time she held her picture again, and in the end he returned to her. She also tells of a business man who doubled his orders in six months by picturing his work enlarged each morning. Visualizing is Universal Mind exercising its powers of initiative and selection through you, so no one can work against your picture, because the law of harmony prevents it. It is the nature of Originating Substance to solidify and of Spirit to complete its work. Only you, who gave the picture birth, can prevent it from taking concrete form.

Matter is not an illusion and nothing to be ashamed of in visualizing. It is the necessary channel through which Spirit differentiates itself and comes to know itself from the individual standpoint. Behrend answers those who think visualizing for things is too material by showing that Spirit and matter are polar opposites, and that together they make one harmonious whole. Drawing on Troward, she points to the heavens: raw material is spread evenly through all space, yet cosmic activity begins in some places and not in others. Particles held in equilibrium cannot start motion themselves, so the first movement must be Spirit working through substance. The same power that brought universal substance into being brings your mental picture into physical form. It differs only in degree, working from the Universal to the particular, from its specific center in your mind.

Each individual mind is a branch of the Universal Mind, as a branch exchange is joined to its head central in a telephone system, and every need is rightly carried back to that source. The world was projected by the self-contemplation of Universal Mind, and the same creative action works in man: the mental picture is the force of attraction that gives the Originating Substance specific shape. Behrend traces the stages of creation through Troward, from awareness of being to the desire for freedom to the clear mental picture. She illustrates the law with a mortgaged Southern home saved, a New Jersey hardware business restored, a music student's piano, and a doorman's five dollars delivered by an escaped parrot. She explains why pictures fail. Few people study the law. Some speak their desire and scatter its power, some change their pictures as though exposing one photographic plate twice, and some tie fulfillment to particular persons or channels. The Originating Principle is the universal here and everlasting now, and it creates its own vehicles.

Everyone carries the means of liberation within, and visualizing is how it is used. A desire held as a steady mental picture and strengthened by faith comes into material form, often by ways the one who pictures it cannot foresee. Behrend gathers cases from beginners and from public life. General Foch pictured himself leading a French army to victory. An actress reshaped her figure by seeing it constantly as she wished it to be. A poor girl from New York's East Side held her picture of marrying a physician until it came true, and then pictured a fruit farm in the South with her husband until they owned one. An old woman brought to court for stealing milk had long pictured five hundred dollars, and the judge turned out to be the executor holding her legacy. James J. Hill travelled his railway in his mind before a single rail was laid. Behrend closes by saying the method is simple and enjoyable once its principle is understood well enough to be believed, and that the first need is to know exactly what you want.

Every visible thing begins as a desire, and the desire takes form first as a picture. A chair started as someone's wish to be at ease, and the same principle stands behind the hat and the clothes you wear. Behrend turns this law into a daily practice. Once you have decided for good what you want, set aside unhurried time before breakfast and again before sleep. Go to a quiet room and meditate on how the things around you first came into being until you know the principle as your own experience. Then breathe deeply at an open window inside an imagined circle of light, drawing its rays into the solar plexus and spraying the whole body with light. Seated upright, affirm that there is one Life, one Substance, finding pleasure in recognizing itself in you, and keep affirming until you feel the words are true. Only then do you begin the picture. Behrend's example is a house: walk through it, note the rooms and windows, move the furniture, see yourself healthy and happy in its mirrors, go over the picture until it feels real, and write it down with the knowing that the best there is belongs to you. A picture made this way is as certain to come true as the sun is to shine.

Every physical thing was a sustained thought before it became a thing, and the thoughts you dwell upon become the things you possess or lack. Behrend gathers the practice of visualizing into seven points to remember. Know exactly what you wish to produce and weigh where it will lead. Hold your mental picture without strain and in a cheerful frame of mind, for strenuous effort calls up the sense of an adverse force and builds conditions against your picture. Your picture gives quality to the undifferentiated Creative Energy, while the Creative Power builds its own channels of manifestation, so the details may be left to it and the work kept to yourself. Behrend reminds you that Nature is one vast storehouse of good devoted to your use, and that conscious Oneness with the Whole is the secret of success. She closes with the case of a young man who believed he could not afford to marry, saw himself in the home he and his beloved wanted, and soon returned to her study a married and happy man.

The individual mind is a center of Divine operation, and because the Divine always moves toward expansion and fuller expression, it brings something new into each life, growing out of past experience in orderly sequence rather than erasing it. Behrend gives her own testimony as the ground of her teaching, since a messenger of these truths convinces only by what has been tested in personal experience. Widowed, well provided for and surrounded by friends, she still felt deeply alone, and she searched country after country for a peace that could only be found within. Christian Science gave her no solace. Abdul Baha told her she would travel the world seeking truth and then speak it, and this turned her search inward. She then found Troward's Edinburgh Lectures and Dore Lectures, which had to be studied rather than read. She memorized one paragraph from the Dore Lectures and kept entering into its spirit. Its promise that the Divine in her must work as it works on the Universal plane lifted her from despondency and set her resolve to study with Troward himself.

Supply begins in mind. The Idea holds within itself the one primary substance, and that substance takes the form of money as readily as anything else. Behrend tells how she first put this to the test. She needed twenty thousand dollars to go to England and study with Troward. Each night and morning she pictured the sum as twenty thousand-dollar bills, wrote out the whole journey, and held Troward's statement "My mind is a center of Divine operation" without asking how the money could come. On a walk one day she realized "I Am all the substance there is." The strain left her, a great joy took its place, and after that her picturing took no effort. Soon a possible avenue opened. She treated it calmly as the first sprout of the seed sown in the Absolute and followed it step by step, and her hardest work was staying free of excitement. Behrend then gives Troward's own instructions from the Edinburgh Lectures. They teach co-operation with the greater Intelligence, calm expectation, and attention to the direction of each small circumstance rather than its size. Within six weeks the full sum was in her bank.

A desire held as already received carries a person through every refusal, and the Truth it leads to is simple, the same from whichever side you come to it. Behrend tells how Troward turned away all her letters and requests to become his pupil. She kept her courage by living over again her illumination, "I Am all the Substance there is," and travelled to his remote house in Cornwall, where he still declined. From Paris she kept writing until he set her a test: the meaning of the foursquare city in Revelation 21:16. Answers from scholars all over the world felt wrong to her. Then intuition led her to a great astrologer, whose cat jumped into her lap and won his interest, and he gave the answer at once: the city is the truth, and the truth is non-invertible. Troward accepted it. Behrend closes with his letter on her course of study. He sets aside all occult systems and so-called initiation, puts the Bible and Christ at the center, and hopes to make faith, prayer and worship present living facts. Behrend calls that letter the greatest thing she can give you.

Every word holds a power germ that expands and projects itself in the direction the word indicates, and in time it takes physical expression. Behrend takes joy as the example. Repeated secretly, persistently and emphatically, the word sets up a vibration that fills the whole being with joy, because joy is a state of consciousness and comes only from within. Quoting Troward, she teaches that the mental faculties can be stirred from within as surely as from without, so any desired state can be brought into consciousness, and once it feels normal it belongs to you by the law of growth and attraction. Words embody thought, and thought is simply creative. For this reason Faith builds up and Fear destroys. Simple Faith in your best self makes you master of every adverse condition, and your health, peace and finances come to reproduce your most habitual thought.

Nobody is without faith. Every living thing has faith in something or somebody. Faith is the quality of Power that gives the Creative Energy its vitality, and that vitality in the word you speak makes the word take physical form. Fear is faith too. You fear illness, poverty and loneliness because you believe they could happen to you. Behrend holds that the Faith which understands that every creation is born in the womb of thought-words gives you dominion over all things, your lesser self included, and that this faith grows as you watch what it does. Her method is to recall the times you really did rise into a better frame of mind or get what you needed. Live those moments over in your mind until you feel in touch with the self which knows and does.

Faith that has grown into the faith of the Universe, which knows no failure, shows you that you are part of the universe and not its victim. Within you is that which makes conscious contact with Universal Law, and through it you can press the particular laws of Nature, seen and unseen, into the service of your desire, so that you stand as master of any situation. Behrend draws on Troward: this mastery comes through knowing the personal element in universal spirit, for your words and your sense of self are reproductions in miniature of God, and every thought-word was a God word-form before it was yours. Words are the channels through which creative energy takes form, and the sensitive Creative Power can only reproduce the shape of the instrument it passes through, as water takes the shape of its pipe. Failure comes from thinking one thing and expecting another. When your thought-word corresponds with the constructive, forward movement of Universal Law, your mind becomes the mirror in which the Infinite sees itself, and your life moves in harmony.

An Intelligence and Power fills all Nature and all space. It is always creative and infinitely responsive, and its responsiveness works two ways: it creates, and it takes suggestion. Behrend teaches that once you see your own mind as a center of Divine operation, you see how simply the law of life meets your every demand. Your part is to know that your mind holds within itself the power that accepts suggestion, and to expect all life to answer your call. Then suggestions that serve your desire come to you, from other people and also from the flowers, the grass, the trees and the rocks. Behrend closes by turning to the old scripture that faith without works is dead: these suggestions bear fruit only when you act on them with confidence on the physical plane, and Faith with Works sets you free.

An idea held steadily in mind draws kindred ideas to itself until the desire takes physical form, because the Creative Power that fills all space answers suggestion and is not bound by precedent. Behrend illustrates this with Tyson, the Australian millionaire. While working as a bushman for three shillings a day, he took his inspiration from a woodland violet and kept his thought fixed on flowers and grass growing in the desert. He put aside every question of ways and means. His ideas found sympathetic ideas in the financial world, and the doors of finance opened long before his savings could have done the work. Behrend extends the principle to charity and to personal finances, where holding to the affirmation that the best is yours and shutting out doubt lets 'I can' and 'I will' ideas gather and grow. She then sets out Troward's three facts: all space is filled with a Creative Power, this Power is amenable to suggestion, and it works only by deductive methods. The Power therefore takes its direction from the word you give it. Behrend closes on the law that as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he. This law reaches to your innermost, secret thought, which the Father hears in secret and rewards openly in body and affairs.

Prayer that is answered is not supplication but a steady, habitual affirming of what is already yours in thought. Because everything has its origin in mind and no one can think a thought in the future, the thought form of a thing belongs to you the moment you think it, and your steady recognition of that possession causes it to condense and take physical form. Behrend begins with a discipline of early retiring and five o'clock meditation on the Intelligent, Undifferentiated Substance that fills all space. She then sets out the principles beneath scientific prayer: it is never hypnotism, never self-deception, and it rests on the laws "As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he" and "As you sow, so shall you reap." The acorn yields the oak, and so you reap whatever you habitually affirm and expect. Behrend gives a formula for treatment of yourself or another. You speak the person's name and dismiss the personality, cleanse your consciousness of fear and malice through the thought of God's love, deny what is unlike the desired manifestation, and overlay the denial with the affirmation that the desire is already fulfilled in its original thought-form. You close in praise, knowing that the Creator and His creation are one. The chapter ends with timed exercises: fifteen minutes of practice for every five of study, a written record of the vividness of your mental images, and a daily noon search for new sources of wealth.

All things are possible to you. Jesus, the greatest Mental Scientist, does not claim to be more divine than any other child of God, and the power he shows is open to everyone who believes in the Divine life within. Behrend gathers the book's teaching into short maxims to keep in mind. God gives the idea and man works it out through physical action. Contentment comes only from self-command, and because soul and body are one, contentment of mind becomes health of body. You watch your thoughts about everything and everybody, keep them in line with your desire through the will, and act outwardly in accordance with them. You believe in yourself as the instrument through which God operates. Each day you ask what the Power that placed you here intends, and each hour you work to fulfill it. Excess in eating, drinking, or blaming circumstances gives way to the inward conviction that all power is yours. Behrend closes by explaining why beginners often succeed most: their joy in first finding the Power within runs ahead of their understanding. As understanding grows, joy and enthusiasm grow with it, and results follow.