In this process, two distinct aspects are evident: there is you, functioning as a thinker, and there is the concept, or what you are thinking about. Should you decide to think about something else, whether it is a gnat or a nebula, a microbe or a mountain, the concept of your choice will replace that of the chair. You are unchanged as the thinker, though what you think may change at your whim. The question then arises: Where do these thoughts come from? Do you create them?
An answer to that inquiry may be illustrated by supposing that you were determined to write an original number, one so large, so enormously greater than any number which might ever in the history of the world have appeared in any conceivable mathematical circumstance, that you could say it was a totally unique number. Let us say you filled a hundred large notebooks with handwritten figures, until you had a number two million digits long, making it so uncomfortably large that it surely had never been written before. Then just for fun, to put it out of reach, you might terminate your adventure by writing impetuously at the end, “times two.”
Now the problem is: in recording this stupendous and original number, did you create it? Almost instantly, the answer is evident: no. The system of numbers is infinite in scope and that huge number you transcribed, despite its manifest uniqueness, already existed potentially somewhere in the system. What you did was to reveal it, to point it out, to decide upon it. But you did not create it.
Thus it is with ideas. If an infinite Source underlies existence, then It must contain all potential ideas, just as the number-system contains all potential numbers. So when you decide to think of an idea, you select it from the unlimited supply of available concepts.
This indicates something of the extraordinary capabilities of consciousness, for the inscrutable “I am” of your mind is able freely to roam the corridors of infinity, surveying in an instant the endless array of potential ideas, all of which exist simultaneously at the exact point of your awareness. In the sanctity of your own mind, freely and without effort, you may contemplate and embrace any concept in the whole unbounded spectrum of creation
