As the cultivation of your spiritual imagination will deepen your consciousness and attune your mind to the illumination and inspiration of your soul, it would be well for you to continue to devote some time daily to this means of soul expression. By this time no doubt you have gained the ability to imagine the flowers, the children and their pets, and your loved ones as self-luminous forms.
Each time you sit down for a quiet meditation withdraw your mind from your immediate surroundings, or from the thoughts you want to escape for a while, by beginning to imagine the flowers and children, first in their physical appearance as directed in the last lesson, and then in their more spiritual aspect. By this effort to visualize, you will get your attention and imagination wholly centered in your garden. Make your spiritual garden a most enjoyable place of rest. Develop the feeling of beauty and harmony, of friendship and love, within the sacred retreat, so that you will anticipate with pleasure the moments of meditation, and be drawn easily away from every mortal thought and feeling into the healing spiritual atmosphere which your imagination creates within your garden.
There is deep soul happiness awaiting your retirement into the garden. But it must be created of the spiritual substance of your faith or spiritual imagination, and the image of the flowers, children, and friends must be cultivated until they become very vivid, real, and attractive.
You can make your spiritual garden a place of great healing power by bringing your friends one by one into it, and thinking of them enjoying the flowers and children with you.
To begin with, think of a friend who needs your blessings. Picture her there with you in spirit walking among the flowers and enjoying the garden. Imagine her permeated by the light and warmth of the sun, entirely free from all mental discords, and fully aware of the healing life of the Creator flowing through her being.
It will be much easier for you to sustain the healing, harmonizing thought for your friend by holding her image before you in your spiritual garden, than it would think of her in the mental or physical surroundings which are causing her misery or pain.
After thinking of your friend as she appears in her physical form for a few minutes, spiritualize this mental picture as you did the flowers and children. Think of the soul as a center of radiance in her brain, illuminating her mind and harmonizing and healing her body. Feel the love of your soul going out to her soul.
You love the infant Divinity that is her true Self, and you desire to help it come into expression and give of its perfecting intelligence to her mind and body. You feel the pull of her soul upon your soul, and a beautiful sense of harmony develops through this exchange of love between your souls.
While holding the picture of your friend as a spiritual being, continue to create beautiful feelings of affirmations of truth for her, and recognize that you are actually transmitting to her spirit the force of good feelings which you are creating. This vibration of love is the healing Spirit of the Ever-Present vibrating through your spirit and producing a marvelous healing effect in your nature, as well as in the nature of your friend.
You will be richly repaid for all your effort in this direction. The beautiful thoughts which you create will bloom, fill your spiritual life with fragrance, and bear new seeds of wisdom and love, even as the flowers in your physical garden bloom, fill the atmosphere with their fragrance, and bear new seeds.
After you have blessed one friend in this way for a few minutes think of another you wish to bless, but retain the image of the first friend with you in your garden. In this way you can bless a dozen friends, one after another, and still have them remain in the garden with you, each one acting as a soul-magnet to draw out the beautiful expression of love and harmony from your soul.
After this exercise, imagine that your spiritual vision is becoming clearer and that you are seeing deeper into the spiritual atmosphere and beholding beings that were heretofore hidden to your vision.
You have thought of the flowers, children, and your friends as spiritual forms. Now think of the sun shining there above you as a spiritual world radiant with soul- light. It is the warmth of that soul-light that makes your soul radiant with healing warmth, and all your friends with you in your spiritual garden are being infused with the healing warmth of this soul-light which is shining from that sphere of splendor.
Contemplate this thought for some time because a vivid thought picture like this that exalts your imagination is a form of living faith more powerful to bless and heal than many words or thoughts less vivid with spiritual imagery.
Then, as it were, look deeper into the spiritual radiance and imagine that you see the faces of strong and noblemen, sympathetic and courageous women, the faces of those whose spirits have been exalted above the tribulations of the world, whose minds have been washed clean of all discords and diseases of mortality, and who now shine as suns in the kingdom of the Ever-Present.
Be faithful to this meditation each day and you will note with joy that your spiritual imagination is developing and that you can make spiritual things more vivid and real, and feel there from a great exaltation of spirit which fills your life with inspiration and divine happiness.
Many students have written that they have gained great inspiration from quietly contemplating the description of an angel published in “Healing Currents”. It has helped them to conceive of the perfection hidden within their own spiritual nature, and given them greater faith in the truth that they were formed in the image and likeness of the Creator.
It is a psychological fact that you grow like that which you contemplate. The characteristics which you admire in other personalities are stimulated in your own personality. The beauty that you conceive as having expression through angelic humanity will be quickened within your own nature. The wholesome, healthy spirit of that heaven inhabited by glorified humanity will be aroused, and you will express more of the health and harmony that exists within your angelic nature.
The Pathway of Light
Walter DeVoe
1936