As you may remember in Lesson 11, Bernard points out that there are two ways you can improve your circumstances by using the power of your mind.
1) think out a detailed plan built on your own interests and capabilities.
2) build a mental “mould” of prosperity in your mind to cultivate abundance consciousness.
As you can see one way is to be very specific and detailed about what you want. The second way is to cultivate a general feeling of abundance (not tied to anything specific), by developing “abundance consciousness” as Bernard called it. Of course, as he points out these two ways fit together very powerfully and he interweaves both of them into this Course.
As you work on your detailed plans – though this type of “work” often feels more like play – you are exploring the specific ways of how your inwardness can be best expressed out in the world. As part of this planning you explore your interests and capabilities. In this way you are discovering more about your inwardness and how it can be expressed in your daily life. You are discovering the untapped resources and capacities which are within you. You are awakening parts of yourself which have been “asleep” by putting your attention on them and giving them a chance to flower and to grow.
If you want, to use a common example, a new car and you use your creative powers to thought brick for that car. You are not only getting a car, you are getting something much more important. You are getting “awakening”. You are awakening to your own capacities and abilities, by having an experience of using them in a practical way to meet the specific needs of your daily life.
As you build a sense, or feeling, of prosperity into yourself, by using the Secret Exercises and the like, you also get “awakening”. You are awakening to your connection to the Source of your capacities and abilities which is the Divine Spirit within you.
When you get detailed and specific about things and thought build for them it is like you are planting flowers in a garden; when you cultivate abundance consciousness it is like you improve the soil in which the plants grow. You make is easier for the specific things you want to occur because you improve the “growing conditions” for those things. Another way to put it is that as you cultivate abundance consciousness you improve the “growing conditions” for the parts of yourself which you are developing as you learn to be able to shape your life the way you want.
As you cultivate a sense of abundance consciousness you feel more connected to the source of all abundance, which is the Divine Father within you. You create a feeling of being part of, and connected to, a benevolent force which shapes the events in your life. This creates a Deep Well of positive feeling within you which flows into the more specific things you do as you daydream and later as you plan your next steps into ever greater abundance.
Therefore as Bernard says “Now, if these two methods are combined in the way I am showing you in this Course nothing can stand in the path of your success.”
William
—ooOoo—