We Can Recreate Our Minds

Looking down onto Exeter from the Tree


In Defense of Sensuality
John Cowper Powys
Victor Gollancz Ltd 1930

Page 199

What we have to do is to realise that we can re-create our minds, our whole intellectual and aesthetic powers, at our free will. To do this we must have faith. It is absurd to leave such a miraculous power as faith to all manner of mountebanks, charlatans, and quacks. We must have faith in the experiments of our own inmost will. Not a biological change, not an evolutionary change has ever occurred that has not been the creation of a particular organic will. And we must will not only the hardening and tightening of our “ego” but also its loosening, its relaxing, its liquefaction, its becoming nothing… we must become nothing in order to become everything! We must be as weak and ubiquitous and yielding as air and water, in order to be as formidable as space and time…

…what the individual person must do who has discovered the magical secrets of loneliness is to value nothing, hold nothing of importance, except the actual experiences of his own soul. In place of regarding his day-dreams as a weakness, he will regard them as the only reality.