Thoughts are Angels
by Harry Palmer



From Volume 2, Issue 3 - May / June 1996

The following is taken from a lecture given by Harry Palmer on January 25, 1985. It is reprinted here by popular demand.

I was thinking about thoughts. Well, actually I was just watching them go by. It occurs to me that there is some hierarchy of thought. Kinds of thought - maybe like the different kinds of
clouds. There could be cirrus thoughts, nimbus thoughts, cumulus thoughts or just plain foggy thinking. Totally fogged-in thoughts - zero visibility. Maybe that's the condition of being unable to see beyond your own conclusions.

Anyway, certain thoughts are a lot better - or at least they make you feel better - than other thoughts. The thought "I was right" feels better than "maybe I was wrong." It's also more effective to think "I can do it" than it is to think "I tried and it can't be done."

Some thoughts we create, and some thoughts just seem to come in because someone left the door open. It's as though we each live in a boardinghouse mind, and thoughts are the roomers (play on words) coming in and out of our boardinghouse minds. Some are uninvited guests, and some are more welcome than others. Some of them just stand in the hall and repeat the same line from a song over and over. Do you wonder why you entertain them all? And when one moves in and takes up permanent residence, you have an opinion!

One of the definitions of the word "angel" is a messenger or thought from God. In place of thinking of thoughts as intruding guests, we could think of them as angels. We wouldn't be the first to think that way. Instead of saying, "I had an idea," we could say, "An angel appeared to me." Instead of sharing our thoughts with someone, we could share a chorus of angels with them. And rather than saying that the world began as a thought, we could say that the angels built it.

Did you know there is a hierarchy of angels that is analogous to the hierarchy of thoughts - ranks of angels corresponding to kinds of thinking.

Let's see if I remember: an archangel is just above an angel, and the next one higher is a principality - a prince of angels. Then there are powers, virtues and dominions. I think that's the right order. And the top three are thrones, cherubim or cherubs and seraphim or seraphs.

Cherubim and seraphim are very powerful and guard the throne of the creator. As long as they are on duty, nothing gets by them. Cherubs are often depicted as winged faces, sometimes carrying a flaming sword. Seraphs are described as pure white-burning love lights that cannot be contained.

And whose throne it is that that they guard? Who is the ruler of your thoughts? Have you abdicated your throne? And when you rule from your throne, what thoughts protect you and keep you strong? They are your cherubim and seraphim.

Angel-ranking began in the fifth or sixth century, and most church scholars think it began with a writer calling himself Dionysius the Areopagite. There are many Biblical references to angels, particularly in Isaiah, and even winged messengers in hieroglyphs. But it was apparently the
Areopagite who cataloged them into nine ranks with each rank responsible for part of creation. I suspect that Dionysius the Areopagite was relying on allegory to avoid offending anyone, and only a select few ever understood or even suspected the psychological counterparts to his
angel ranks.

I guess we can imagine the kind of thinking that Lucifer, the fallen angel, represents. Have you ever felt that your own thoughts were rebelling against you? And are addictions, desires and cravings anything other than a descent into the lower regions of self-deceptive thought? Lucifer's, right?

I guess if we consider that fallen angels correspond to self-deceptive thinking, we'll get some idea of the direction in which that leads. But before we hit bottom, the best thing we can do to save ourselves is to call forth our cherubim and seraphim. Remember, they guard our thrones.

So what I was getting at is that there are different kinds of thoughts and different kinds of thinking. You can create a thought. You can just sit there and totally bloom a thought, and it's not necessarily motivated by anything outside of you. It's a thought-angel that you send forth. It's not a thought that is dependent on, or a reflection of, the world around you. It's a
thought-angel that you originate.

You can create a thought for no reason (a thought-angel), and you can create a reason for having created that thought. The second thought is inspired by the first thought - that's your seraph. It was not a response to anything else. It was not a comment or an opinion about reality. It was a thought-angel that created a reality.

Now this idea comes as quite a surprise to some people. They start wondering if their stimulus-response model - where the world is stimulus and thought is response - might have some holes in it. I'd say it does. For one thing, they're going to have a devil of a time explaining where the world that causes them to think came from. They're going to have to
create reality - oh, that's a pretty neat trick - and then say he did it! Let's not go down that path this time. Let's just sit on our thrones and send out our cherubim and seraphim to create the world the way we want it. The world begins with thought-angels - your thought-angels. That's where reality comes from.

Create the thought, "I am." Now that's a seraph thought. You just create it. You don't have to consult reality to see if it's true. Why? Because it's true because you say it's true!

Now create the thought, "I create." That's a cherub thought. You created it. You could also create, "I can't create." Either way, the truth of the thought is the thought - not dependent on the world.

When you cause you to think, you're God of your universe. You send forth angels. When the world causes you to think - you have fallen into self- deceptive thought. Response thought. Look at the difference. Response thought assumes a reality has already been created. By whom? Don't know. But there it is. A created thought (an angel) creates a reality, but a
response thought creates a lie. What is the lie? What is the Lucifer thought that causes you to abdicate your throne?

It's simply, "I didn't do it!"

Well, you might be able to pull that on your mother, but you're wasting your time trying to convince me.

When you are God of your own universe and you decide something, your angels make it happen. But you have to be God of your universe. Unfortunately, some people try to make something happen with a response thought (a lie) rather than a created thought (an angel). It's the
difference between a falsehood and a thought that creates reality. One of them remains forever a lie; the other becomes a fact. A thought-angel becomes a fact.

So here is a person on an airplane, and he looks out the window and the engine is on fire. Boy, does this cause some response thinking to occur! "I'm going to crash!" Fortunately, that is a response thought, otherwise he wouldn't have a chance. If it had been a thought-angel, he would have created the fact of the crash.

The way to handle that one is to hurry back to your throne and take charge of the angels that have already been created. Something like this: "I am. I am on an airplane with the engine on fire. I am frightened. So be it." Now for some new angels.) "I am going to make it! I am safe! The airplane is safe!"

It's important and it's simple. You have to be a creator to create something. People who attempt to create "because of..." don't create very much. Mostly they create worries. They worry themselves and they try to worry others. They will try to convince you that some idea or some reality is more powerful than you are. It's nonsense. It's a lie. They've simply lost all their angels and haven't yet realized they can create more.

There is a funny little game that goes on all the time. Someone creates a thought. The thought creates a reality. The reality causes people to think. Of course, if the reality is getting them to think, they are not the creator of their thoughts about reality - not unless they create that they created the other person to create that reality. It's a funny little game, don't you agree?
Funny because you lose only as long as you won't take responsibility for creating the other guy. It's just like life.

While I was talking, I thought of another definition of power. This one sums them all up: the ability to originate thought-angels. Okay?

Enjoy your heavenly hosts.