The Canon / Pillars / New Thought
Pillars · 1921
Your Invisible Power
New Thought EraYour Invisible Power is Genevieve Behrend's practical distillation of the mental science she learned as the only formally accepted personal student of Thomas Troward. Its central claim is that a clear, sustained mental image of a desired end can organize outer conditions toward its realization.
Where Troward's lectures were philosophically dense and abstract, Behrend renders his metaphysics into a step-by-step visualization protocol an ordinary reader can perform: form a sharp picture of the completed desire, dwell on it with feeling and gratitude, and act in confident expectation. This procedure converts Troward's "spiritual prototype" theory into a repeatable daily exercise.
The book helped fix "visualization of the end result" as a core operational technique of the reality-creation tradition. By integrating feeling-tone and expectancy as activating components, it prefigures the later "live in the end" current of manifestation practice and stands as a key practicalizing link in the New Thought lineage.
In its words
The power within you which enables you to form a thought picture is the starting point of all there is.
Everything in the whole world has its beginning in mind and comes into existence in exactly the same manner from the hat on your head to the boots on your feet. All are projected thoughts, solidified.
Your mental picture is the force of attraction that evolves and combines the originating substance into specific shape.
Practices it teaches
Behrend's Daily Sitting — the dawn meditation and 'ask believing you have already received'
Behrend doesn't leave the practice to inspiration — she prescribes a regimen. The governing rule is the scriptural formula she treats as a law: "Ask, believing you have already received, and you shall receive." Her…
Behrend's Speaking the Word — releasing the 'power germ' inside a word by repetition
For Behrend, every word carries a "power germ which expands and projects itself in the direction your word indicates, and ultimately develops into physical expression." The practice is to take one word naming the…
Behrend's Faith With Works — act on the 'first sprout of the seed'
Behrend's answer to "what do I actually do?" Picturing and releasing are inner work; this is the outer half. After you have made the picture and let go of the means, you watch for the first small circumstance that…
Behrend's Mental Picture — visualizing the desire as an existing fact
Genevieve Behrend — the only personal pupil of Judge Thomas Troward — built her whole system on one act: making a mental picture of your heart's desire as an existing fact and holding it steady.
Behrend's Written Picture — write it out as already true, then destroy the paper
Behrend makes writing an explicit step inside her visualization sitting, with two distinct uses. (1) Fix the picture: once you have built and felt the mental picture, "write it all down just as you have seen it…
Behrend's Guarding the Picture — keep it secret, keep it single, refuse the contrary thought
Behrend treats the mental picture as something fragile that must be guarded, and she gives three specific guards.
Behrend's Release of the Picture — set the quality, then let details take care of themselves
The second half of Behrend's method, and the half most people skip. Once the mental picture is made, the work is to stop arranging the means.
Lineage
The author
Genevieve BehrendPractical visualization of the end Full voice →Key terms
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