THE STANDARD OF PERSONALITY We have now got some general idea as to the place of the personal factor in the Creative Order, and so the next question is, How does this affect ourselves?
The answer is that if we have grasped the fundamental fact that the moving power in the Creative Process is the self-contemplation of Spirit, and if we also see that, because we are miniature reproductions of the Original Spirit, our contemplation of It becomes Its contemplation of Itself from the standpoint of our own individuality--if we have grasped these fundamental conceptions, then it follows that our process for developing power is to contemplate the Originating Spirit as the source of the power we want to develop.

And here we must guard against a mistake which people often make when looking to the Spirit as the source of power.
We are apt to regard it as sometimes giving and sometimes withholding power, and consequently are never sure which way it will act.

But by so doing we make Spirit contemplate itself as having no definite action at all, as a plus and minus which mutually cancel each other, and therefore by the Law of the Creative Process no result is to be expected.

The mistake consists in regarding the power as something separate from the Spirit; whereas by the analysis of the Creative Process which we have now made we see that the Spirit itself _is_ the power, because the power comes into existence only through Spirit's self-contemplation.

Then the logical inference from this is that by contemplating the Spirit _as_ the power, and _vice versa_ by contemplating the power _as_ the Spirit, a similar power is being generated in ourselves.
Again an important conclusion follows from this, which is that to generate any _particular sort_ of power we should contemplate it in the abstract rather than as applied to the particular set of circumstances we have in hand.