The Hidden Power

A handshake is two hands moving up and down. A wedding ring is a loop of metal. Nobody who has shaken a hand at a funeral believes that is all they are. The outward thing carries something that is not visible in it.

Troward opens his last book with exactly this, and then widens it to everything. There is an inner side to things, he says, and "until this inner side is known, the things themselves are not known."

The mistake he cares about is not believing in the wrong symbol. It is the flatter assumption that the symbol has nothing behind it, and resting content with the outside. Like the folds of a cloth that hint at a figure underneath, the outside is real and even truthful. It just is not the whole of what you are looking at.

Here is the part that makes it personal. The shape of a life, Troward argues, follows what a person actually believes about the power at the centre of things. Not the creed he recites on Sundays, but the stage his mind has really reached.

If he thinks nothing can be known about it, his inner world is chaos: all the elements are there, cancelling each other out. If he senses there is a ruling power but has no idea of its nature, it becomes something to fear. In Troward's words, "the unknown stands to him for the terrific," and he spends his strength trying to appease it.

What that second man never suspects is that the power he keeps placating is not his opponent at all. It is the very centre of his own life.

According to Troward, what sets the character of a person's life?

• The number of good deeds he performs daily
• What his mind has actually grasped about the centre✓Correct answer
• The outward circumstances he was born into
• The creed he formally professes and defends

Troward separates the formal statement of belief from the stage a mind has actually reached; only the second shapes a life. A person can recite the right words and still live as if the power at the centre were a stranger to be feared.

So what is at the centre? Troward's answer is one word: Life. But not life as you meet it in a dog, a tree or yourself. He means life before it has become anything in particular, all powers, none of them yet.

He calls it "unknowable", and then explains carefully what he means: not unthinkable, only unanalysable. You cannot take it apart, because it is not made of parts.

His comparison is the physicist. Break matter down far enough and you reach energy that cannot be broken down further. The scientist does not give up at that point. He builds all of physics on it. Troward asks for the same move with spirit: follow the analysis to the thing that cannot be divided, then treat it as the foundation, not as a void.

The centre is alive, and Troward insists it is also intelligent. His evidence is the order of nature itself. Our best science, he says, is only the translation into words and numbers of an order that was already there before anyone noticed it. Whatever produced that order cannot be less intelligent than the minds straining to follow it.

Then he adds a law you will need later. Atoms gather into molecules, molecules into tissues, tissues into organs, organs into a person. At each step the whole is more than its parts: a new, higher intelligence belongs to the organism as a whole, not to any piece of it.

Your body is not a committee of cells voting. It is a single living thing with a mind the cells do not have.

From that law comes the claim the whole book rests on: the power at the centre is responsive.

Troward's reasoning runs like this. Spirit knows, and since spirit is ultimately all there is, what it knows is itself. So its lower degrees recognise its higher degrees and respond to them, the way parts answer to the whole they belong to. In a human being the gathering-up has gone far enough to become personality.

That is why he can say the less organised life around you responds to your thought. It is not obeying a stranger. It is answering a more complete degree of itself. And because a personal being cannot come out of something impersonal, he concludes the centre must be personal in its nature too. You cannot get more out of a bag than it contains.