Scripting · “You Assign the Meaning”
Setting the Ideal
To write out your highest spiritual ideal and the mental attitudes and physical actions that flow from it, creating a measuring stick for daily choices.
In 4 lines: Draw three columns — Spiritual Ideal, Mental Attitudes, Physical Activities. Name one spiritual quality you most need now; under it list the attitudes that fit it; under those list concrete actions. Run your real choices against the sheet, and revise it as you grow. “Spirit is the Life; Mind is the Builder; the Physical is the Result.”
What it is
This is the foundational self-practice to come out of the Edgar Cayce material — the exercise his A Search for God study groups were told to do first, before anything else.
Cayce taught that a person drifts unless they consciously choose the standard they are living toward, and that this standard, the “ideal,” should be made explicit and written down. The method organizes that ideal into three linked columns — spiritual, mental, and physical — built on the maxim that recurs throughout the readings: “Spirit is the Life; Mind is the Builder; and the Physical is the Result.” The finished sheet becomes a personal measuring stick: when a choice arises, you weigh it against your written ideal.
It operationalizes the truth that there is a deeper Self worth aligning with (All Is One) and that the standard you hold shapes what you become (The Inner Creates the Outer).
The clairvoyant “readings” are the historical framing of where this came from; the exercise itself stands on its own as a values-clarification practice.
The Method
A faithful rendering of the three-column exercise:
- Draw three columns on a sheet of paper, headed My Spiritual Ideal, My Mental Attitudes, and My Physical Activities.
- Set the spiritual ideal first (Column 1). Choose a single quality or person that conveys the highest sense of purpose and meaning to you right now — for example “love,” “forgiveness,” “kindness,” or a figure who embodies it. Cayce stressed picking something meaningful and reachable, not abstract perfection. This is the source the other two columns flow from.
- List the mental attitudes (Column 2). Ask: what habitual states of mind are consistent with that spiritual ideal? For an ideal of forgiveness you might write “compassion,” “patience,” “openness” — and tie them to specific relationships or situations.
- List the physical activities (Column 3). For each attitude, name a concrete action you can practice until it becomes automatic: stopping negative self-talk, keeping a gratitude list, “gentleness of speech,” a specific kind word or deed.
- Use it as a measuring stick. When a real decision comes up, hold it against the sheet: does this move me toward my ideal, or away from it?
- Revisit and refine. Cayce framed ideals as something to be “challenged, encouraged, even prodded” to keep working on. As attitudes become habitual and actions automatic, deepen the ideal and revise the columns. It is a living document, not a one-time worksheet. (Sourcing note: “Spirit is the Life; Mind is the Builder; and the Physical is the Result” is a recurring phrasing from the readings, attributed; the column structure is faithfully described from A.R.E.’s published guidance, not reproduced verbatim.)
Source & Lineage
The exercise comes directly from Edgar Cayce (1877-1945) and the study-group readings of the early 1930s, in which a group asked how they could become more spiritually attuned; the answers were compiled as A Search for God, Books I and II, the manual of the A.R.E. study groups.
“Setting the ideal” is presented in that material as the first and most important discipline. It sits in a long Christian-devotional and New Thought lineage of examining one’s standard and aligning conduct to it, and runs forward into modern “core values” coaching and personal-constitution exercises.
Common refinements
Starting with the physical column. Cayce was emphatic that the spiritual ideal comes first; actions chosen without a governing ideal become a disconnected to-do list.
- Choosing an unreachable ideal. Pick what you most need now, not a saint’s perfection you will quietly abandon.
- Filing it away. The sheet only works if you actually run decisions through it and revise it over time.
- Refinement: keep it visible and reread it at decision points; let the columns evolve as the attitudes become second nature.