Contents
Foreword
Chapter 1. First Steps In Mental Life
Chapter 2. Mind And Body
Chapter 3. Conscious, Subconscious And Superconscious
Chapter 4. Elements Of Consciousness
Chapter 5. Cognition
Chapter 6. Memory
Chapter 7. The Psychology Of Feeling
Chapter 8. Physiology And Biology Of Feeling
Chapter 9. The Will
Chapter 10. The Mind In Action
Chapter 11. Suggestion
Chapter 12. How To Treat By Mental Methods
Chapter 13. The Mechanism Of Thinking
Chapter 14. The Psychology Of Mental Dominion
Chapter 15. Psychoanalysis
Chapter 16. Character Analysis
Chapter 17. Psychology Of Business
Chapter 18. The Psychology Of Efficiency
Chapter 19. The Psychology Of Abundance
Chapter 20. The Psychology Of Health
Chapter 21. Psychology Of Love And Marriage
Chapter 22. The Psychology Of Dreams
Chapter 23. The Psychology Of The Borderland
Foreword
Men and women everywhere show a universal interest in the power of mind to affect the body and material conditions, which is the warrant for this introduction to the study of psychology. Inexperienced adventurers in this new world of mental activities are constantly asking for some safe guidance so that their feet shall tread the highway rather than the byways. We have presented enough of the principles of academic psychology that the student may feel assured that the later studies in applied psychology rest upon a sound basis.
The author presented these lessons as lectures during the period 1902 to 1922. Much of the illustrative material is left out. Occasionally we repeat an idea, but it is necessary in making a full statement of the case for a specific application.
We make no claim to originality for any of the matter here presented. Much has come through reading, more from years of practice, and some from within. We have seen it work often, and it will work for anyone who has the application to learn it and the patience and skill to apply it. This is just a beginning. It points out the Mental Highway. The journey is yours and it is before you. Go forth and find.
Chapter 1
First Steps in Mental Life
Psychology is the science of the mind. It begins with the soul, the ego, and proceeds to distinguish between that which is self and that which is not self. It defines the self as that which thinks, feels and wills. From the beginning, we direct bodily vision outward, and so does the soul move outward, away from itself. We can study mental movements and states by certain records of acts and facts, which the soul leaves.
The body’s eye is set for the vanishing point of vision. The nearer the object of vision, the more pronounced the strain upon the eye. The bodily eye can see itself only by roundabout means, as for instance a mirror. So, too, the mind directs its activities more easily to things away from itself. Mind is concerned with the external objects entering the struggle for existence rather than with studying the method of their perception. We act before we theorize. We adjust the mind to find rest at the farthest distance of thought from itself. Just as mind comes to rest trying to think of space as topless, bottomless and endless, so it finds complete rest in contemplating Infinity.
We take our expressions for mental phenomena from the material world. Thus, we developed language. We represent the inner world of mind by symbols we borrow from the outer world of space. For instance, we call the affectional, emotional side of the mental life the “heart,” and speak of emotion as “feeling.”
We cannot exactly determine just when we begin to distinguish between the self and the not-self. Some think it is before birth, arguing a dim and hazy sense of consciousness.
The new born child’s cry does not clearly have any element of conscious activity, but we regard it as the first step of conscious life. The second step is that the child notices the light, usually on the second day. The light attracts him if it is not too strong, but if too strong, he tries to hide from it. The child can fix his gaze on what attracts him after the third week. Then he begins to notice sounds, and recognizes his mother as the source of nutrition at two or three months. Until he recognizes his mother, we call the steps of his conscious life “sense-perceptions.” Yet that experience brings a series of advanced steps of past sense-perceptions, and this stream of memory-images furnishes material for comparison with the present sense-perception and enables him to recognize them as caused by the same object.
This comparison of his memory-images with sense-perception, leads to a third step of conscious development, for it produces the idea of her as the source of nutrition. From this develops the pleasure in having his stomach filled, and of pain if deprived of her presence too long. As the conscious life develops more rapidly, he discovers that he has hands, and that he can use them to draw things to him or push them away.
Then the personifying faculty becomes active. Often he conceives that his hands or feet are beings apart from him, so that he will offer to share his bread with his foot even after a year. This personifying faculty, coupled with a vivid imagination, makes his world of mental images and ideas a world of reality to him. He lies normally and without moral turpitude. His mind follows his mental images much as a dog chases his tail. For the time being, it is a thing apart from his own personality.
These first steps in the development of conscious life in the child are, in a word, the psychology of humanity. We may sum the life of primitive peoples in the simple elements of the struggle for existence, as eating, drinking, sleeping and reproduction.
Here the personifying faculty is also very active. They dreamed of people, dream-people who were gods of good or evil — mostly the latter, to whom they attributed more strength of character than the dreamers themselves possessed. Darwin records the case of a savage who beheld himself for the first time in a mirror, and remarked: “I see the world’s spirit.” To his simple mental processes, it was not a reflection, but a real spiritual thing.
As the child or the primitive human begins to know himself as a rational being, he recognizes other people like him.
He knows that they have minds, feelings, thoughts, and sensations, by analogy with his own. He can formulate certain laws of the mind, and definite relationships between the mind and the body by comparing their experiences with his own. Later he discovers the difference between the conscious and unconscious activities of the mind, and finally formulates the psychological elements, or Cognition, Feeling, and Will.
The study of the mind is difficult because mental states are so changeable, nor can we reproduce exactly any mental state or experience. Even the same object does not always appear the same on any two days, just as a photographer will not take an identical picture on successive days though he uses the same camera and light.
Our mental outlook is constantly changing, and determining the exact reliability of any individual’s observations is difficult. For instance, one person hears a voice when no objective speaker is near. To him it is a voice from the spirit-world. Another will report the same experience as the voice of his inner self. Either may be correct, but both are unreliable, since conveying just what the phenomenon was is difficult, and because the interpretation of it biases the impression. For these reasons, both objective and subjective experiences are often useless as working material in the study of mental operations.
Using the law of relativity, we test our mental states and experiences by those of others, and so prevent one-sidedness due to personal peculiarity. Our natural temperament, our conditions of life, and our special experiences direct the stream of our conscious life. If our experiences vary radically on some given point, we may need help to compare our ideas and experiences with others’, with our other experiences, and with the facts as they are.
One woman had lived for years with the sense of impending disaster, and had been expecting to die for years. Her recovery began with facing the fact that not one of her forebodings had ever happened, and by showing her that humanity’s organized experience is summed up in the words: “I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God.” Romans 8:38-39.
The study of mental phenomena calls for us to exercise that faculty of the mind by which we consider a proposition from all sides and form an opinion in harmony with all the facts. It uses not only one’s own experiences but the experiences of others and the current working facts in the case and can forecast the outcome of an adventure or the solution of a problem.
Chapter 2
Mind and Body
We draw all of our knowledge of mental and physical states from two distinct sources, mind and body, which seem to overlap each other. Some things are purely material in character, as for instance, the patella reflex, which makes the toe kick upward when the tendon is struck just below the knee. No mental action seems to cause this movement whatever, as no physical action may be involved in the mental process of recalling a past sensation.
Yet we cannot always trust physical action and sensation to report facts as they are, any more than the mind can depend upon its report of facts. For instance, gallstones can cause referred pain below the shoulder blade. Seeing an optical illusion is merely projecting a purely mental state into visual form. We need to closely scrutinize the facts of the mind and the body before we accept and interpret them as realities.
Usually we see the distinction between material and mental things in that all material things appear in space. They have the dimensions of length, breadth and thickness, and we may trace them to a movement in space.
Mental states have no such relationship. We cannot think of a state of consciousness having connection with space, save perhaps in a symbolical way.
Inertia is a basic law of matter in motion, without which natural science would be impossible. We must explain every material movement by another material movement. For instance, a point in space cannot get up and move about of its own accord. Some material movement is in the background to explain every other physical movement.
A second law of matter in motion, called the conservation of energy, says that matter is not destroyed. The form changes but the sum of the material is not lost. The next step is that the energy bound up in or represented by matter is similarly conserved. The fine form of the energy in a steel spring represents the lower form of energy in pig iron, together with heat and hammering.
Every movement upward calls for the outlay of energy, compensated for by the higher form attained. This principle applies in all the physical processes. In the higher and more complex forms of material activity, as when the mental life and its instrument, the nervous system, influences the material energies, we find a gradual emergence into a field where we must keep relative values clearly in mind.
A nervous system in embryonic form exists in plant life, is definite in animal life, and fully developed in human beings. This system is the instrument by which we pass from purely material energy to mental energy.
The lowest form of nervous activity is the reflex, as when an afferent nerve carries a pin prick to a nerve bunch, called a ganglia, from which returns an impulse by a motor nerve, causing the contraction of a muscle and movement of the part. The mind has no part in this action. For that reason, those animals with the least cerebral power are most richly endowed with reflexes.
The smaller the cerebral or thinking power, the greater the reflex activity. The converse is true — the greater the brain power, the less the reflex activity, which marks the measure of a cuttlefish and a human. Likewise the organs of the body, such as the heart and stomach, profusely supplied from the sympathetic nervous system and the least under the control of the conscious mind, are equipped with reflexes, while the organs innervated from the cerebrospinal system have few or none of the reflexes.
The cerebrum elaborates, assorts and determines the values of these reflexes. In other words, the reason, seated in the brain, monitors incoming body sensations, determines their values, controls their reflexes, and decides the values of the impressions and illusions of the mind arising from them.
One can easily inhibit the reflexes of sneezing, blushing, fainting, weeping or laughing, by simply diverting the attention to another idea or sensation. The cure of a facial tic is a process of suppressing the reflex actions of muscles that should move only under motived impulse. The cure of most mental obsessions consists in replacing them with deliberate ideas.
Every reflex must rest periodically. A constantly stimulated reflex will wear out, and not respond. A monotonous physical action or mental process will eventually result in the loss of power to continue that action. Consciousness becomes less active as we hold the mind to one monotonous idea or problem. Just as monotonous sensation or sound tends to put the body to sleep, so monotony of idea tends to put the mind to sleep. All sorts of cranks and partisans are born of such a mental process, to say nothing of the more pronounced abnormal types of mental life.
Variety in food, etc., is essential to the highest physical activity and health. The change of ideas, the recognition of change, and the ability to see the difference between one experience and another, is essential to mental health. Also, we must be able to recall and reproduce yesterday’s experiences so that we may compare them with today’s. Finally we must be able to recognize the unity of our mental life — to know, to know that we know, to know what we know, to know ourselves as knowing beings. A unity in consciousness exists, which must include all life’s experiences if we would remain in both mental and physical health.
We may clearly distinguish between the body and the mind, yet they are so intimately united that we may hypothesize that they are the dual expression of a being in the background. This being partakes of what we call the spiritual nature, which whether it first expresses itself in one, invariably finds expression in other, body or mind. Our mental activities take on corresponding physical form, while the mind reflects our physical conditions.
We may spend our lives curing the mind so that we may in turn cure the body, or doctoring the body to heal the mind. The logical thing is to heal and set in harmony the real spiritual being back of them so that it will express health through them.
Chapter 3
Conscious, Subconscious and Superconscious
The mind in action is conscious, subconscious and superconscious. We are aware of all conscious activity. We are aware of some subconscious activities expressed in our dreams, mingled with our conscious mentation, and in the functional operations of our bodies. The vast part of subconscious activity never rises to the plane of consciousness.
We know superconscious activity as it expresses in our dreams, in a vision, and consciously as a special illumination. The superconscious must express all its operations in symbolism, symbols created by the conscious and subconscious. Apart from these symbols, we cannot intelligibly describe the things known in superconscious.
We may cease to be conscious of the feelings and experiences of life anytime because of the weakness of their individual elements, because the connection between them ceases, or because sleep or some artificial hypnotic inhibits them. They continue unconsciously until the inhibition passes or else the activities of life break down the body because of lack of conscious oversight. A physical stimulus may take effect without any sensation, as when food arrives in the stomach, exciting the flow of gastric juice, starting peristaltic motion, and starting the liver and pancreas. Yet we are aware only of the mechanical part of this process, the chewing and swallowing, and the general feeling of satisfaction that results. We may have ideas and experiences of which we are, at the time, largely unconscious. For instance you may be unconsciously in love. You do not know it. However, everyone else does, and eventually it emerges into your consciousness.
Memory furnishes another field in which to observe the action of the conscious and the subconscious. Memory reproduces mental images of experiences and ideas. These seem to be lost, but we store up their impressions. Often they spring up spontaneously, at other times we recall them by a little conscious effort and association, while very often they refuse to come into consciousness no matter how much we may try to recall them. Then we resort to the time-honored device of turning the attention to other things, and a subconscious trigger causes the memory-image to emerge into mental view.
We often study some problem, gather a mass of facts about it, attempt to set them in order, and the conscious effort ends in confusion and disorder. When we abandon the conscious effort, the subconscious, which has been at work all the time, has a chance to project into consciousness a perfect plan or outline of the subject, which is a logical deduction from the main facts. If we fail to solve a problem, we lie down to sleep, and in the dream state the subconscious can reveal the solution, which it has already grasped.
In the act of hearing, the passing of the vibration through the half dozen steps of transmission to the brain are all unconscious, yet they are an integral part of the process of hearing and classifying of sound, which is a conscious action.
We never really become aware of many subconscious links in all conscious work. A proposition, which we learned to understand by means of proof, remains long after we forget the proof itself. Most of the things we believe are bare outlines, the reasons for which we have forgotten, if we ever knew them.
Many conscious ideas arise from some subconscious decision as, for instance, those qualities classed as instinct, tact, etc. Selfish tendencies often persist after the first causes have passed away. A person begins to drink to drown trouble and continues drinking, unaware that his motive has subconsciously shifted. His only possibility for a cure will be by discovering a motive powerful enough to hold him, and by arousing his will power to carry that motive into effect.
Conscious motives pass, but their effects remain in the subconscious. Instinct acts for ends of which we are not conscious at all. Conscious efforts leave behind them subconscious effects. Four hundred years of the spirit of Egypt had so permeated the subconscious life of Israel that it required generations to eradicate it. It takes more than one generation to erase the effects of slavery from the consciousness so that one will not wince at the crack of the whip.
It is also true that what one does mechanically may eventually gain complete control over the conscious and the subconscious, and he will do the thing wholeheartedly. Take a person whose whole habit of life has been pessimistic and depressed, and who is accustomed consequently to being weak and ill. Let him start in the most mechanical way to affirm the positive side of life (joy, hope, and love), and very soon it will sink into his conscious and subconscious. The new habit will change his whole mental and physical condition.
We may also conceive and carry conscious and subconscious processes simultaneously. We can do any automatic task while carrying on a totally different mental process, and be totally oblivious to what our fingers are doing. Knitting is a good example.
This interplay of conscious and subconscious is ever present in our life of thought, emotion and action. Things that move us profoundly have large elements of subconscious ideation in them. Much of the emotional activities like love, hope, and faith, is subconscious. The subconscious facts and processes lie below all the sharply defined conscious processes, merely waiting some shock or movement to project them into full consciousness.
The study of the dream state, intermediate between the conscious and the subconscious, is instructive. Dreams may reveal the connection between our sleeping and waking states, and the relations of the conscious and subconscious. In all our dreams we may usually discover some relation between the substance of our dream and the facts of the waking state, either recent or remote.
The subconscious is always connected with the conscious world by touch, sound and the other senses. A soldier can sleep in the midst of a battle, yet will awaken at a whispered signal. A mother will sleep soundly, yet will awaken at the first movement of her child. We may set our mind to awaken at a certain hour, and sleep undisturbed until then. These all illustrate the interplay of conscious and subconscious activity in our waking and sleeping states.
Analyzing a person’s dreams will often detect the presence of a hatred for or fear of some person or thing, or the unsuspected influence of some past act, which fills the life with disharmony, bringing ills to both body and mind.
Expecting very much improvement will be useless until they consciously remember these secret states and acts; the very explanation of such conditions will often begin the cure. We need to address any idea that begins to assume prominence in sleeping or waking states, at once.
Chapter 4
Elements of Consciousness
All states of consciousness contain the same elements. The difference in the quality of these states arises from the quantity of one element of consciousness, for instance the elements of thinking occupy a larger place than those of feeling. Knowing the elements and their combinations that make up the various states of consciousness is vital. We may isolate and analyze any single experience to learn just what factors of the mind are most prominent.
The generally accepted classifications are cognition, feeling, and will. Cognition includes sensations, representations, and thoughts. Will includes impulse, purpose, and resolve. The two denote the conscious sides of life, which we turn toward the outer world. Cognition enables us to form an image of the external world and of ourselves as a part of it, while Will enables us to react on that world.
Feeling is the side that faces the inner and unseen factors of experience. It cannot become an element of a percept or image. Feeling may rise to become an inner illumination on the stream of ideas and sensations. The feeling elements, as contrasted with the other conscious elements, act independently. For instance, feeling does not necessarily accompany any definite condition.
In the maturity of a normal life, cognition and will assert themselves to balance feeling, but activity is free from feeling. Neither is cognition separate from will. The rule is that the fewer elements of cognition and will, the more feeling, sensation and passion.
A state of life where the struggle for existence is not immediate is the only condition under which a definite distinction between the various elements of consciousness is possible. The psychological elements are not isolated, since we must react perpetually and instantaneously upon the external world, where our position in the universe determines our life, and where we must bring our surroundings into harmony with ourselves, or ourselves with them. Science and art do not develop, and the shady sides of consciousness, such as depression and sentimentality do not appear. In the “simple life” people are not “nervous.”
A certain mood or feeling always accompanies thought. Activity of thought does not exist apart from feeling.
Knowledge becomes a power in the mind because of this feeling. A form of feeling, beyond the immediate control of cognition and will, is present in the passions associated with self preservation and the propagation of the race. Yet usually all memory and synthesis reveal activity, just as in the use of the eye, we must will to see if we would see aright.
An analysis of the lower life forms shows the primitive consciousness embraces not only feelings of pleasure and pain, but also motor-sensations by which these lead to movement, as in the Monera which expands for food purposes and contracts for defense. Others show the power to apprehend the difference between the stimulus of that which is food and that which is non-food.
A fundamental frame of mind, called the vital feeling, is the result of the general state of the organism as influenced by the normal or abnormal consciousness of the vital processes. It is an obscure mood of whose causes we are not at once conscious, for we are not always able to localize the stimuli that produce the feeling.
In some forms of heart disease and some mental diseases that produce disquiet and melancholy, the sufferer does not discover the causes of these frames of mind. Obscure impulses and vague desires arise at puberty the menopause, yet it is all beyond his comprehension.
We see the close relation between feeling and will in the fact that only a strong and lively feeling serves as a motive to the will. Cognitive elements do not in themselves lead to action. Both feeling and will are necessary.
We may take action with little or no apparent feeling back of the movement itself. So some movements arise out of Feeling, as in the heart, lungs, alimentary tract, and vascular system. Even the muscles and organs, usually under the control of the will, may be set in motion by strong emotion. Some of our involuntary movements, as shrinking from an attack, striking in anger, or reaching out the arms in sympathy, are probably involuntary emotional movements that were once purposive voluntary movements.
The law of the persistence of energy causes the contrast between the elements of consciousness. The more energy an individual spends on one form of reaction the less he can spend on another. He who expresses greatest emotion has least energy for action, since the voluntary control decreases as the involuntary action increases. Instinct is the primitive form of consciousness, and in this, the element of will is evidently the strongest.
Chapter 5
Cognition
The first of the psychological elements is cognition — the power to know, which we may think of as a series of sensations. These sensations are so complex that we can never be sure of a final possible analysis. Their apparent simplicity is really the result of previous combinations below the threshold of consciousness. For instance, the pleasantness of food depends on the delicate skin of the palate and is largely a matter of touch. Smell and sight also play a part, so that taste is a very complex sensation. Analysis of the sensations of hearing and sight reveal the same truth as to their complex nature.
Some mental elements are simpler than those distinctly received through the sensations. So that consciousness is the sum of sensations whose units themselves are not absolutely simple, but have arisen by a synthesis of still simpler elements.
As we consider the relative independence of sensation, we observe a far greater elasticity in some sense organs than others. Touch can distinguish a thousand distinct sensations per minute. We can distinguish thirty-five to forty electric shocks in the same length of time. Sight stands lowest in this respect. A swinging torch loses its identity in a circle of fire. Rapid visual images prevent the optic nerve from adjusting.
So, for a sensation to arise, the sensation must stand out from some background. An interval of time and a contrast between the present and the preceding sensation must exist. If we experience a strong electric shock, we will not notice a weaker one. We do not feel two pains in the same region. Producing temporary sensation in a given region suspends the previous sensation.
In a highly excited state of consciousness, even strong impressions get little hold. The ecstasy of hysteria does also.
The threshold of consciousness is not always at the same level. Contrast with preceding or simultaneous sensations raise it, and custom or accommodation lowers it. As in watching a bird’s flight into the distance, we can discern it long after we look for it for the first time or can possibly see it. That which appears as pleasure today may report as pain tomorrow, and vice versa.
The law of relativity is that a sensation’s relation to other sensations determines the existence and properties of it. Sensation arises from within and from without, as the sensation of effort and muscular sensation such as tension, fatigue and cramp. In all special sensations the movements of the organism play an important part, as in taste in connection with the movements of the tongue. The delicacy of touch in different parts of the body stands in definite relation to the mobility of those parts, being greater in the tongue, lips, and fingers, and least in the chest and back.
Sensation is influenced not only by preceding and simultaneous sensations, but by the idea of a sensation. Conscious life would be impossible without the repetitions of idea sensations. Not that we can exactly recall the sensation, however, we at once fuse the idea with the given sensation, and so it does not stand as a free and independent representation. We involuntarily classify it, and reference the sensation to previous ones of like kind.
In studying the mechanism of thought, sensation and perception appear to be associated with different brain centers. Sensation is possible in an animal deprived of the cerebrum, while perception can take place only when the cerebrum is intact. These centers are always connected. In cases of great mental shock from grief or of long continued mental strain, we see a functional disturbance called dissociation of ideas. The patient loses the power to combine sensations with corresponding reproductions, and in extreme cases produces a condition of dual personality in which the subject sees his friends and surroundings but fails to recognize them as such.
We may lose the power to understand written or spoken words, although the sight and hearing are unimpaired. The path from the concept to the word is open, but the path from the word to the concept is closed. We see the same difficulty occasionally in some diseases as in the after effects of paralysis in which the patient speaks an utterly different word from that which he intended or that which fits the occasion.
Not only can we recall and recognize single sensations, but whole groups of them, causing a complex perception, and most of our perceptions are complex. Thus consciousness has at its disposal a content that makes it independent of the influences of the moment. One may pass a life in memory, a life of thought, not merely a life of sensation and perception. One may perpetuate a state of pleasant melancholia indefinitely without reference to the present realities. We cannot, of course, completely isolate ourselves from the world.
There are two streams in consciousness, one being determined by the sensation present then, the ideas it tends to excite, and the other composed of a series of free ideas which previous sensation has aroused. Between these there is an inverse ratio. They try to suppress each another. They battle for the attention, sensation first having the upper hand, then representation. One moment we are under the control of sensation, reflection and deep thought bury us in the next.
There are three possible fields of conscious living. One is to give up wholly to the play of sensations (musical and artistic natures). Another is to value sensations only as they may be recognized and classified (observers and naturalists). The third is to live mainly in the realm of free ideas, in memory, imagination, and abstract thought.
The distinction between the free flow of ideas and the actual percepts of consciousness is that we come to recognize one as possibility and the other as reality. The distinction is possible because we have the power of becoming conscious that the elements produced were experienced in time past. Every state of consciousness has two poles.
Through one it is associated with preceding, through the other with succeeding elements of consciousness. Memory provides the connection with the past, but hope with the future. Life struggles forever forward and is moved to look backward only by experiencing check.
We gather the unity of conscious life from these facts about cognition. While we may never be fully conscious of ourselves, we may know that we know, what we know, and ourselves as knowing beings. Self is the sum of all consciousness. This synthesis of consciousness is always relative and struggling. If the contrasts in the content of consciousness are too great, the mold breaks.
The disquiet at puberty and the menopause are difficult to formulate into the unity of consciousness, but if we can hold them until they are fully incorporated into the content of conscious unity, we can probably recognize that the transition is continuous and consequent. The failure to synthesize any new or strange element in the content of consciousness marks the beginning of the dissolution of conscious unity.
The process begins with a disturbance of the vital feeling, which the patient cannot understand. The effects of existence are new and interrupted. The fundamental experiences do not repeat themselves. He begins to doubt his own existence and that of others. The things that happen to him are distant and shadowy. He becomes estranged from himself. He refers his experiences to another. Sometimes memory connection is lost and he is in a stage of double consciousness. Two states succeed each other and he appears a different person in each. When he reaches the stage where the different states and periods are lacking in common elements, the conscious life is in dissolution.
An illusion is an inaccurate perception, while an hallucination is an imaginary perception, or a perception without an object. Illusions of any of the senses may occur in normal people, while hallucinations are usually indicative of abnormal conditions. Goethe was able to produce hallucinations at will. When the subject recognizes the hallucination as such there is no serious reaction. For a complete understanding of these phases of consciousness see any standard work on psychiatry, or abnormal psychology.
Chapter 6
Memory
Memory connects every state of consciousness with every previous element of consciousness. It consists in the power to make ideas reappear in consciousness by their connection with other ideas, as well as the recall of an idea by virtue of its own power, as soon as we clear the hindrances out of the way.
Usually, we remember by noting the combination and connection of individual ideas, although some experiences impress themselves so strongly upon our attention that they arise apparently spontaneously. However, real memory images always arise from some experiences, while hallucinations emerge into consciousness without external conscious association. So much is this true that distinguishing them from actual percepts is often difficult. Usually the subject of hallucinations will stoutly maintain their reality, although occasionally ‘he can discern their unreality. They seem to arise from the same psychological basis as the dream image, namely, the action of the altered condition of the blood on the sensory brain centers. We may produce hallucinations voluntarily.
General conditions for clearness of memory images are as follows: First, they are clearer when the general vital process is fresh and energetic. Fatigue and exhaustion inhibit clearness of the impression of the image and of its recall. Second, time and repetitions of the thing to be recalled are factors in clear memory images. Third, we member ideas better if we put them into words, either written or spoken. Fourth, the simpler the ideas and experiences are, the more easily we recall them. Fifth, attention is the greatest factor in memory, for by it the mental images are so deeply impressed that they may be recalled at will.
The first general rule of memory is the association of ideas by similarity. Similarity means that there is a point of attachment in consciousness so that we instinctively recognize and recall by the similarity in sound, form or substance. We form associations by the more remote similarity expressed in analogies, parallels, metaphors, and allegories. We associate ideas by the relation between the whole and a part. We may call up an entire group of related ideas by the similarity of a present percept to one of the group, as a figure of a globe may call up the planetary system, and that in turn brings the law of gravitation into mind. Similarly, the end may call up the means, or the idea of a kitchen may call up that of a dwelling.
We also associate ideas by external connection, and in a sense we associate everything by external connection. We recall by similarity and by contrasts of the idea with us and the idea apart from us. Some sensations always rise together, as color, smell, touch and taste ideas, as for instance an apple leads to the idea of smoothness, of taste and smell, plus color. Or the idea of a friend brings up her house, her friends, etc. The idea of a wreck arouses the idea of a coast. A natural connection exists between an event, and the time and place of its occurrence.
An important instance of association is by outward connection with a thing and the sign of the thing. We naturally associate an emotion and its outward expression in idea. The sound of weeping, the shriek of terror are difficult to counterfeit, and we cannot misunderstand them. Sounds, articulate or otherwise, are the universal sign of all sensations and feelings because they command the greatest wealth of shades to express feeling. Its symbol, its word recalls an idea, or in a child, its signs. With many people, real thought is a sort of inner speech that will make them hoarse.
One person, in listening to a speaker and following closely his thought, would often have a spasm of the throat muscles followed by coughing. It is the instinctive impulse to put the idea in the universal sign of sound, for all ideas to be recalled readily ought to be written or spoken to form a symbol. This also fixes the attention upon it critically, and attention is the secret of memory.
Briefly the following memory rules will, if practiced, give one a perfect working memory: Repetition: Say it repeatedly again. Write it. Form a distinct mental picture of it. Contiguity: Relate the matter to be remembered to other things occurring simultaneously. Correlation: Attempt to link each thing to be remembered with an old idea of a similar nature. Bind new facts to old facts by relations of similarity, cause and effect, by whole and part, and other forms of association. Comparison: Note how the facts to be remembered compare with other facts on similar subjects already stored in the memory.
The law of recall: Simply say to yourself, “I want that name” or fact of any sort. Command it. If it does not come up into memory at once, turn the mind away from it and let the command work in your subconscious; often it will flash up in a few moments.
The alphabet: If you remember the first letter, start as if to speak words beginning with that letter, taking up the vowel sounds in turn and then combining them. As you use any of these rules, your memory will steadily develop until you will see what you wish to see, and hear what you wish to hear, and can recall their impressions with ease.
The art of forgetting is as great as that of remembering, and here the attention is the chief agent, just as it is in remembering. We forget by abstracting the attention away from the strong or obsessing idea to another. You must replace the troublesome idea by another of greater power; you must fill your mind with greater ideas of a different sort. If you have a vicious circle of ideas, then you must fill your mind with a circle of good ideas. Many afflicted people would be well and happy if someone could divert their attention from themselves for a short time. We may not easily obey the injunction to “forget it,” but we can bring our will into action, direct our attention to other things and our troubles cease at once. This is the secret of the cure for many.
Logically following memory as a factor in cognition, the method of apprehending time and space arises. Mental phenomena make their appearance in the form of time, while physical phenomena appear in the form of space. That which is constant gives the sensation of time while that which is variable gives the idea of time. The idea of time involves the consciousness of change, and the repetition of certain states that we recognize. If we concentrate the attention and so prevent the notice of a succession of experiences, we will shorten both the time of the experience and the memory of it, as with Jacob to whom seven years seemed as no time because he so perfectly loved Rachel.
We apprehend space by three dimensions, length, breadth and thickness. We may reduce these to two or increase them to a fourth possible one. Sight and touch are the two senses with which the form of space plays an important part. We take the true measure of an object by touch, but estimate by sight.
As the final study in cognition, we come to the apprehension of things as real. How can we distinguish between mental health and mental disease, between hallucinations and reality? No single perception can decide it, nor can many percepts and their associated memories in the same individual determine it. Consciousness recognizes a reality independent of itself. All the sensations are those of resistance, and resistance brings the not-self in view. We must test a present perception by our other perceptions and those of others under similar conditions. We can apprehend the real only in this way. We cannot correct our illusions if we depend on ourselves alone, for there is no absolute continuity in experience, nor absolute repetition. We cannot exactly recall or completely explain any single phenomena.
The law of relativity applies here, for we determine every experience by another experience. Comparison is the fundamental form of cognitive activity at all stages of development. All proof is from several given premises. Little can be inferred from a single experience or premise. Time and space are always relative. Every experience that is on one side, as effect, is on the other side, as cause. All knowledge rests on the relation between the knowing subject and the object known.
The criterion of proving truth by the agreement of reality with knowledge seems impossible, and so we have to seek it in the world of consciousness and not outside. The criterion of reality is nothing else than the inner harmony and consistency of all thoughts and experiences. Therefore, the idea or experience that will not harmonize and be consistent with the trend of all one’s thoughts and experiences, must be set down as an illusion. If it shall usurp the place of and practically dispossess the usual ideas and experiences, it becomes marked as an hallucination. An illusion may not be serious in its effects, if we recognize and treat it as such, and do not take it seriously.
Chapter 7
The Psychology of Feeling
The second psychological element is feeling, which we shall study under the divisions of feeling and sensation and ideation. We have to distinguish between the two, for while the elements of feeling always predominate in the primitive stage, the cognitive elements are also present.
Strong contrast between pleasure and pain marks every feeling, and such a contrast would not be possible without some memory of a pleasant or unpleasant sensation. Contrast or associations in memory produce the very intensity of pleasure and of pain. Real feeling is mental.
Even physical pain is possible only after some form of mental activity. A pin prick is a sensation carried to the brain and associated with present or past experiences of similar kind to detect whether it is pleasant or otherwise. An elemental form of pain, like the toothache, as compared with the pain that arises out of sorrow, has this distinction: Sorrow involves memories and association with the past in the sense of something lost that cannot be returned, and from which there is no reaction. We react from the toothache, and no particular central process or thought is passing through the brain.
Central processes in the brain itself generally play a large part with sorrow and trouble. Sensation itself may be perfectly simple, but the feeling that arises from it may be complex and be produced later. For example a person puts his hand suddenly into hot or cold water.
First is the sensation of touch, sensation then recedes, and the feeling of heat or cold arises. The element of time must separate sensation and feeling, or else what we call feeling would probably not exist. It follows that we could feel no pain without memory. No sensation would be reported as pain unless it is associated with the same sort of memory. Pain, to be noticed as such, must spread and it must have duration. The previous illustration of the hand in hot or cold water includes all these conditions.
We have studied the psychology of pain more than we have the psychology of pleasure. Few people become introspective concerning their pleasures, while the vast majority become introspective concerning their troubles and pains. Exuberance marks the experience of joy or pleasure, but pain or trouble causes us to dig into it to find the cause. We often become morbid and say, “If I had only done it this other way.”
The absence of any individual local sensations marks general sensations of comfort or discomfort, and we call the result the vital feeling. Hope and fear is bound up in the vital feeling. If the general vital feeling is comfort, attended by the mental feeling of ease and pleasure, then hope is in the forefront. If the general vital feeling is of discomfort, then a sense of being ill at ease comes, bringing fear, despondency and despair.
General sensations develop into specific ones. The general sensation of hunger at first is not localized, but later a sensation of oppression arises, then the stomach growls, the mouth dries, we distinctly sense the need of food and water. We thus pass from general to particular sensation and have localized pain and discomfort. Our self-preservation instinct is aroused, prompting us to secure relief.
Similarly, the general sensations of touch and movement may easily become particular distinct sensations of comfort or discomfort. Touching soft velvet produces a sense of smoothness, while the other gives the sense of roughness. In either case, the sensation is carried out of its original class.
Other sensations, such as taste and smell, pass easily from the character of general to particular sensations, and by so doing they preserve the individual welfare. For instance, we may eat without any particular sensation, delight or otherwise, until we taste something bitter or unusual, then self preservation immediately calls the taste sense into its service. Smell is also a general sensation that protects and preserves the welfare of the body.
Sight and hearing serve the purpose of self preservation, too. Yet since the things we see or hear may also introduce either pleasurable or unpleasant elements, we class them in a higher order of sensations than smell and taste, etc. The special forms of sound, silence, light and darkness exercise a finer play of feelings than just the preservation of life. We relate them to the vital feelings, as we see in the pleasure we experience in the light, the play of colors, etc.
The effect of light is to increase activity. The impulse to act is a first form of the impulses of life. Plants in a room turn toward the side that provides the strongest light. Mental and physical activities are more pronounced in the light than in the darkness. Light stimulates the activity of the body and mind, while darkness lowers their activity. Too much light during sleeping time is not good. Some people would sleep better if they wore a mask over the eyes.
This leads to the psychology of color. Reds, purples, orange and yellows are all stimulating colors, while blue is cooler and subduing. Yellow and dark blue are the two opposite poles in the psychology of color. Green produces the impression of great repose without the cold of blue or the excitement of red. (“He makes me to lie down in green pastures.”) Violet has more soberness and depression than the blues, and more liveliness than the reds. We distinguish red in its greater restlessness and force in its influence on the feelings. One “red room” may be permissible in a home, but only the phlegmatic should frequent it. A general red scheme of color will affect a family as a red rag does a bull! The color irritates the path through the nerves of the eye, thence to the feelings and emotions, people “see red,” and go on the rampage.
Sound affords pleasure because it stimulates activity. Nothing is more depressing than a soundproof place, for mentation comes to a standstill, and sensation eventually ceases. Sounds are pleasant or unpleasant, as they combine in one way or another. Coming from silence, any sort of noise is a relief, but soon one develops a desire for more harmony and less noise. We can stand total silence less than anything else. Heaven itself could stand only half an hour of it.
From this analysis, we may conclude that activity in the sensations is bound to cause a corresponding rise in the feelings. So we may trace a gradual rise of the general sensations into the particular, and in harmony with it, a series of stages of the vital feeling, up to the finer shades of feelings in the higher senses. The rule is that the higher the feeling element becomes, the more the sensation and cognitive elements disappear. What the sensation loses in strength, it gains in richness of feeling.
Feeling and Ideation: Sensations, and ideas develop feelings. Without ideas, feeling has no direction, that is, it is not about some particular thing. Pain becomes, for instance, aversion when associated with its cause. The next step in the development of feeling after aversion is anger, then hatred. A child cries at the sight of a cup from which he has tasted nasty medicine. That is a form of sorrow, determined by the idea of cause, and the contemplation of its possible repetition.
The psychology of love is the development of a general feeling of pleasure. It is inseparable from impulse or desire. Desire is impulse directed by ideas. We first find pleasure in the presence of another. We probably cannot define it, but we find an egotistic desire to continue that pleasure. The next step is to possess the cause of the pleasure to prolong that pleasure. The sense of a proprietorship arises, then responsibility and protection, as the process grows into what we know as love. Anyone who “falls in love at first sight” passes through these same steps quickly, although most of them are intuitive.
Feelings arise more slowly than ideas. Having the feeling of sorrow is much easier than it is to conjure up what the feeling of sorrow is like. You can recall the fact of sorrow a great deal easier than you can recall the exact feeling.
We develop hope and fear in the same way. Hope is based on certain expectations from which basis it reaches a certainty of things that are not yet in sight. Fear grows from the idea that we will be unable to meet certain contingencies, then resignation and despair follow.
Sometimes, when hope and fear alternate, they produce a mental state called melancholy. It may have a very pleasing side to it, so that arousing the person is often difficult. The delight is not in the fact that they are miserable and making all around them miserable, but in the contemplation of the character and good points of the person or thing lost, and the hope of possessing, of being with him again.
We come to the egoistic or personal and sympathetic. Pleasure and pain depend very much on whether the experience favors our self-preservation or not. That seems to make life a quite selfish thing, but we cannot eliminate it from the equation. The sense of personal power is essentially the sense of self-assertion, the conscious ability to achieve. That is the egoistic feeling, which enters all life. It furnishes the measure of love for our neighbor, and is to some a sufficient motive for enduring a cross.
Sympathy is a feeling based on memories of experiences, good or bad, which comes up when we find another having a parallel experience. We commiserate with them. Empathy is a sort of transition by which we place ourselves in the other person’s condition. From this arises one of the higher feelings, classed as altruistic, such as compassion. An effort to understand another’s trouble may lead to sympathy, and empathy arises from that. Sympathy leads to idealistic love, from which all the social instincts grow, the impulse to feel, and suffer, and rejoice with our kind. Those who give feel sympathy much more quickly than those who receive benefits. A nurse usually has more sympathy for a patient than a doctor, because she gives more.
Sharing sorrow is a more primitive form of sympathy than sharing joy. Sympathy is idealized in social, family, and patriotic directions, its one impulse being to embrace the object and protect it from further trouble, or to serve in official capacity, or to fight for the benefit of the State.
Sympathy delights in dwelling on adversity with all it causes. Empathy is exactly the reverse, for it objectifies any fact, good or bad, looks it over, and determines whether it has a right to call upon our higher feelings or not. While we cannot safely feel sympathy, anger, or love without in some sense expressing it, hating or loving without any thought of reward or return is possible.
This brings us to what we call ethical feeling, which consists in considering what is the effect of sympathy. How does sympathy advance the public welfare, justice, righteousness and the comfort of the few or many? Conscience, which we call the ethical memory, is the next step in this development. It weighs facts solely concerning their worth from the highest standpoint. From this ethical feeling grows the religious feeling and the religious feeling primarily produces fear. Fear created the first wrong notions of God. The Bible begins with a question of fear, “Where art thou?” This fear takes on the form of reverence when we discover that God is interested in our welfare and is working with us. Finally we reach the conception that God is Love. The first question of the New Testament is, “Where is he?”
All of the forms of feeling are traceable to the sense of self preservation, which is served when the general vital feeling is normal.
Abnormal feelings and mental states are merely the misguided efforts of the sense of self preservation to right that which is wrong, while all normal development of feeling psychologically tends toward the personal knowledge of the God of Love.
Chapter 8
Physiology and Biology of Feeling
The psychological elements, which we separate for the purposes of study, are in fact inseparable both in psychology and physiology. They are not centered in different parts of the body. Plato placed thought in the head, feelings like honor and courage in the breast, and the sensations, impulses, and passions in the lower part of the body. Aristotle attributed all sensation to the heart, while pure reason was not united in the corporeal functions at all. Descartes placed the phenomena of consciousness in the brain. Bell and Gall were the first psychologists of the 19th Century who placed all consciousness, whether it is cognition, feeling, or will, in the brain. Apart from the fact that certain sections of the brain influence certain parts of the body, very little basis seems to exist for the claims of phrenology, which determines one’s various tendencies and dispositions by the shape of the head.
Feeling, which is represented by greater extension of the nerve processes in the brain substance, seems to rise more slowly than cognition. However certain elementary feelings like fear and pain may arise without cerebral action. A rat, having the higher parts of his brain removed, will display signs of fear at the cry of a cat, showing that while no apparent connection with the brain exists, the vegetative organs, the viscera, still exercise a very important influence on the feelings. Doubtless the observation of these influences led to the idea of a conflict between feelings and cognition, between the heart and the brain, and placed humanity in warfare between the “law of his mind and the law of his members.”
Feeling makes a greater demand on the nerve centers than does cognition. Cognition concentrates the energy in the brain, while feeling distributes its energy to every part of the body, especially the visceral tract. The sympathetic system furnishes their energy, and through its action sudden violent emotions, like sorrow or joy, may react on the heart and cause death. It may seem strange that two opposite feelings should produce the same result, but the strongest element in the feeling takes effect, not the nature of the feeling itself.
These effects are due to the influence of feeling on the vasomotor nerves, which close the arteries under the influence of sudden emotion, and drive the blood to the heart or brain with fatal results. The face turns pale under fright because the blood is driven to the heart. In blushing produces the opposite movement. A similar movement is apparent in sorrow, which produces tears. It is a question whether we weep because we are sorry, or are sorry because we weep.
The effect of fear on the bowels and kidneys shows that the emotions do affect the organs. Anger contracts the liver, and one gasps for breath when terribly startled. Thus it appears that the emotions decidedly influence the bodily functions, but it is not pronounced enough to claim a correspondence between every ill in the various parts of the body and some specific emotion. When the feelings are pleasurable, our muscles are firm and vigorous, our bearing is upright, our glance is frank, and our face is open. On the other hand, if the feelings are unpleasant, the muscles loosen, bearing shrinks, the step shuffles, we look downhearted, and downcast.
The vasomotor nerves arise in the sympathetic system, and in the cerebrum, which explains the tremendous influence of the emotions. The vasomotor nerves furnish nerve impulses to the blood vessels’ walls, causing them to contract and expand, and are in direct contact with both the cerebral and sympathetic systems. Thus, it becomes clear why every emotion like hope or joy or love makes for health while fear, anger, and hatred make for disease. If the emotions’ effect on the sympathetic system can stimulate the circulation and produce a sensation of health or disease, then the organ may get out of order, and affect the emotions adversely. If mental strain, and depression can produce constipation, then constipation arising from other causes may and does produce mental depression and nervousness. In fact, such a vicious circle as this is present in most nervous disorders. [In physiology, this is called a positive feedback loop.]
As a rule, things that we understand to contribute to our general well being are pleasurable. Sugar is a large nutritional factor, and its pleasurable sweet taste is based upon that instinctive feeling that it contributes to the general vital feeling of welfare. Some things that are pleasant momentarily are harmful, while substances bitter to the taste are helpful. We must judge by the outcome, not by the momentary impression. Pleasure evokes cognition, from which springs the desire to secure that which gives pleasure. This calls forth the will to make the object a permanent possession. Pain follows the same method. We recognize by a mental process that a certain thing is harmful and call the will into action to push it away. Pleasure and pain are educative. The first appearance of pain warns us that the body is on the retrograde, while the feeling of pleasure tells us that things are moving along favorably.
The law of relativity for the feelings states that the value of a thing is determined by its relation to the individual’s interest. A fortune left to a person with millions already will not be as valued as a $5000 bequest would to a person who has lived in the clutches of debt. As we distinguish between the various shades of a color, so we can take pleasure and pain, which are fixed forms of feeling, and determine them by their contrasts, one with the other. By contrasting the various shades, we may see a person’s disposition, his attitude toward the various shades of pleasure and pain, which is a sort of regulator. If we drop below the usual level of feeling, our disposition tends to rise again, while if our pleasure rises above a certain level, our regulator will soon bring us to the normal.
Heredity, experiences of life, and the circumstances under which we live determine our disposition. If the shift between pleasure and pain is great enough to break the unity of conscious experience, and reaches beyond what seems normal for the disposition to grasp, we lose our regulator and have a divided personality. Many such cases occur from shock or grief, and unless they can reassociate the personality, and weld the stream into one again, the consciousness is in danger of ruin.
We express feeling fully only when we contrast it with another feeling. Feeling general moves from one strong feeling to its opposite. “If you laugh before you eat, you will cry before you sleep.” Often, peace of mind comes to a person only when they have expended tremendous passions or emotions. Many people cannot overcome temptation at first, but only when it reaches great heights. Conscience awakens in some criminals only after they have committed a heinous crime. Religious conversion often occurs after working conscience-stricken feeling up to exhaustion, followed with emotionally setting the ideas of peace and forgiveness. The swing of the feelings gives that spectacular exhibition its emotional fervor.
Underlying all such experiences is the fact that continued action tends to exhaust any sort of feeling. A person may suffer until he loses the power to suffer. Then he may rest and gather himself up for more suffering. Our capacity for constant suffering or pain is therefore limited. Happiness, through its very excess, may lead to unhappiness, while pain may exhaust itself and end in pleasure.
The ancients considered wonder to be the beginning of wisdom because it set new currents of feeling in motion, keeping life fresh and pleasure unalloyed. The person who knew how to find new inspiration for his wonder would come to know the secret of all living experiences. The constant repetition of any act or feeling weakens the freshness of its experience unless enough time elapses to let wonder enter again. By adding wonder, each repetition enlarges the capacity for enjoyment.
Emotion is a sudden burst of feeling, a storm of feeling, while passion is a continual steady stream of feeling. Feeling begins in emotion, and if sufficiently fed, ends in passion. Anger and sorrow are emotions that develop into the passions of revenge and depression. The law of relativity applies here: Repeating an emotion weakens it, while repeating a passion steadily strengthens it. Some formerly thought that reason and passion were in conflict, but they are not. Reason cannot and need not try to suppress any sort of passion. Reason can affect passion only by producing another passion and holding it before the mind as a substitute for the original.
The criterion of feeling well or ill is the vital feeling. If the vital feeling is lowered, then physical and mental depression is apt to be present. If the vital feeling is raised, then mental and physical exhilaration results. Pleasure, to grow, does not need pain in the background.
The greatest pleasures often have their source another pleasure that is relatively of the same class, though weaker in feeling. All pleasure is a positive state. It does not matter whether a sensuous joy is based on fact, illusion, or chimera. It is joy for all that, and a real thing. Likewise the hallucination of pain is just as real as if it were based on a physical lesion. The hypochondriac does feel real physical discomfort, and we cannot argue him out of the experience. His experiences are as real as if they had physical foundation.
We can draw a median line between the strongest pain and highest pleasure. Approached as pain, it becomes pleasure, while approached as pleasure, it becomes pain. So that the fact and the degree of pleasure or pain are determined quite largely by the mental approach to the experience. We find pleasure in many things because we expect to find it, while we experience pain very often because we expect it to hurt.
Chapter 9
The Will
Will power or the action of the will is a conscious choice between two or more alternatives. A choice implies that a content may be chosen, and this content must acquire a value in consciousness. Volitional choice is a result of certain developments of cognitive feeling and does not exist in the lower stages of consciousness.
The simplest organisms have the power to set up movement independent of an external stimulus. Internal changes in the organism, in which potential energy is set free, cause this automatic movement. We see an example in the function of nourishment, which is a fundamental organic process. The range of automatic movement is limited, for life depends upon a definite relation of reciprocity between the organism and its environment. To live entirely separate from environment would involve absolute spontaneity, acting without any outer influence or impulse whatever, and the effect would be similar to that of an animal living on its own fat. They soon exhaust the supply.
Automatic ideas may also arise from chemical changes in the blood, in which carbonic acid and other poisons directly affect the higher nerve centers, causing what we know as automatic ideas such as dreams, images, hallucinations and other mental movements. Movement precedes or acts before sensuous perceptions and is at first independent of all outer stimuli. Fichte said that “the most natural thing in us is the impulse to action.” The impulse to action arises before consciousness of the actual world and is not derived from it. However, the independence of sense perceptions indicated by these spontaneous movements cannot be absolute.
We class the next step in movement as reflex. It is the effort to adapt the organism to the external conditions and to decide its activity by the nature of its surroundings. We see an illustration in the action of the foetus: In responding to pressure from outside, it does not show conscious deliberation, but a reflex or mechanical movement, which is an advance from the automatic-toward-actual volition and the motived action growing out of it.
When the cerebrum shares in determining movement by elaborating the impulse, we have a higher spontaneity called instinctive movement. Instinct requires a stimulus to set it to work, but the motor tendencies implanted in the individual determine the resultant action far more than the nature of the impulse itself. We might expect a certain stimulus to lead a person to do a certain thing, but his constitutional temperament may give the movement an entirely different direction. In other words, a sort of hereditary tendency seems to move in a certain direction upon the action of a certain stimulus. Science is still debating whether instinct is really linked to and located in the cerebrum, but it is a fact that in some animals, the removal of the cerebrum or parts of it, will destroy the feeding and sexual instincts, which seem to be centered there.
Having discussed the field of automatic, reflex and instinctive movements, we question what the exercise of the will really is. Science links volition to the cerebrum. The ideas of the end of the action, the means of its realization, and a vivid feeling of the worth of that end when we attain it characterize volition, so that actual volition comprehends cognition and feeling and its own action. The movement from automatic to volitional is parallel to the development from unconscious to conscious activities. Volition occurs when we are conscious of activity and are not entirely receptive. We would have no volition if we were absolutely receptive and passive, since cognition and feeling are synthetically bound up in the activity of the will, so that we base the existence of consciousness upon volition.
We know because we will to know, feel because we will to feel, and see because we will to see. The stronger the individual sensations and ideas are, the more volitional activity falls into the background. That means that more of the automatic and reflex are action involved in it. Automatic movements resulting from exclusive and repeated sensations all tend to produce hypnotic states.
Steadily stroking the fingers from the center of the forehead down to the bridge of the nose (in fact on any part of the body), constantly repeating a monotonous sound, or insistently repeating a single idea, all tend to inhibit volitional activity and produce hypnotic states.
Any single sensation of unvarying intensity, sustained for any length of time, tends to suspend the will and objective consciousness.
Our attention to any stimulus or excitation may be voluntary or involuntary. The stimulus itself causes the powers of the mind to turn in a certain direction in involuntary attention, while in voluntary attention the powers of the mind have already turned before the stimulus has reached us. Choice ranges from purely instinctive up to rational motived action of the volitional powers.
We see what we will to see, and usually only what we will to see. The inspiration of the prophet, and of genius overall, arises because the volition commands inner illumination. Daniel saw his great visions, after a few days’ fast. He knew that he could exercise vision power by means of fasting. That he was sick certain days afterward was a necessary reaction. This very same fact explains some farfetched forms of philosophy and mysticism.
The will actively retains the connection between ideas in all our thinking. An inner action precedes all outer action, the end of the action draws our attention, the means of securing it, and the value of it when realized. Cognition begins with excitation. Will power ends with the starting of the motor impulse. The moment that I will for my finger to move, the will power ends in the physiological process called the transmission of impulse, which causes muscular action.
Many of our actions are instinctive and involuntary because we act from a memory of movement under similar impulse without distinct volition. We really will movements when we make then with a distinct intention directed to a certain end. This is not so much a memory of our actions, but a racial memory, which is what instinct really is. We may distinguish impulse and desire from instinct: Impulse and desire always possess an idea of the end, while instinct leads to means applied to an unconscious end.
The pleasure we anticipate at the end of the action supplies the motive for that action, although the end is not always satisfactory. For instance, an alcoholic’s desire for a drink is motivated by the sensations he anticipates, which are greater that the sensations that actually result. As we study the motives to determine the true self, we find the criterion to be those facts and feelings which in the course of our life have taken the deepest root in us. Our ruling passion is not determined by a single action, but by that which expresses itself out of the main channels of our consciousness.
Resolution is the highest form of the will’s action, and is the result of thought and feeling, which forms the single motive. The will is not creative, but modifying and selective. It further influences our ideas by isolation and combination. Sequence of thought and firmness of character are closely related because they imply the steady pressure of the will toward a chosen end. The will reacts upon feeling by preventing it from spreading, by arguing with it, and by inhibiting the organic movements that would result otherwise. Self-control consists in developing the power to limit and inhibit the play of the feelings. It is not well to try entirely to suppress the feelings, and many neurotic conditions arise in the suppression of feeling. A better way to control the feelings with the will is to change the external conditions with the purpose of changing internal movements. This will often greatly alter the state of feeling.
We may easily eradicate a headache or mental depression, by the diversion of a walk outside, filling the lungs with fresh air, and diverting our attention to other things. Gaining a clear insight into the cause of feeling will often react upon and modify the feeling.
Often we can greatly modify sorrow by resolutely facing its cause as an inevitable thing, and reach a state of resignation, and of trust.
The will reacts upon itself. Our ideas and feelings furnish the motives of the will, but we may turn them around to become the objects of will. In other words we may will to will. We may will to have a strong will and actually produce it, just as we may will to have a strong memory and get it by following the laws of memory.
Our will is limited to a single thing as its object. To change this object tends to weaken it. The will is strongest when we fix it upon the ultimate thing. “If any man wills to do his will, he shall know of the doctrine” is another way of saying that if we would seek and find the largest happiness, let us not make happiness itself the end, but something else, external to happiness, by the carrying out of which we attain to happiness.
All real conscious life is individual. The form the personality takes depends on what elements predominate. If cognition predominates, we have the critical tendency of mind, if feeling predominates we have the emotional tendency, and if will predominates we have the dogmatic, and stubborn tendencies. These come under the heading of temperament, and the organic constitution, genetic stock determines that.
Physical, mental, social, and hereditary tendencies supply the elements that create personal character. Everything in human life is relative. Nothing is absolute. Nothing has an absolute beginning or ending. That which is perfectly unexplainable in the individual is explainable in the species. We may explain the world through humanity and we may explain humanity through the world. We can go no further back than the necessities of thought require, but we must go that far.
The psychological method is to find an understanding of purely mental processes by their relation to the physical, and finding an explanation of the physical by its relation and interaction with the mental. The relative and human life understand the Absolute Life and its activities, while the Absolute, of which the human life is a partaker, explains humanity’s activities.
Chapter 10
The Mind in Action
The elements of consciousness are themselves compounded of other elements. Other elements of intellection make up cognition. Various other sensations make up sensation. Feeling of any specific kind is a combination of simple elements that have developed a sort of unity. So likewise various elements make up will power, or volition. So back of all conscious knowing, feeling, and willing, we find simple elements, the beginnings of which we know nothing.
Having any conscious conception or perception that is not itself admixed with unconscious influences is impossible for us, so that all conscious processes lead back into the unconscious, and we cannot fix any limit at which they stop. The mind is therefore conscious and unconscious, outer and inner, objective and subjective, in its action.
We must conceive of the mind as a unity, facing in two directions. We must not think of a dividing line in consciousness, above which we notice all things and below which we do not consciously know them. For what we call the plane of consciousness rises and falls. We can follow a bird in flight long after we are unable to locate it. One may follow a sound and can distinguish it when another will be unable to do so. Similarly, we may follow our thought processes to the borderland of sleep, stop at the threshold of consciousness and be able consciously to follow the unconscious processes. Likewise, we who exercise regularly in prayer will find ourselves in touch with a Spiritual Intelligence that will bring to us the comfort, peace and health that we ask and expect. By this method, we bring our own superconscious or divine self, in which is all power for all purposes of our life, into action for a specific purpose.
The two sides of mental activity mingle, conscious and unconscious. For instance, sometimes while within a dream we remember a previous dream, and contract the substance of the present dream with it. This act of comparison introduces a definite conscious activity into what is otherwise unconscious.
While we may think of purely psychological processes, we seldom actually localize them. Even the highest forms of thinking and spiritual activities are accompanied by purely physical activities — the blood flow to the brain, the blood purification in breathing, and the general chemical actions attending our thought processes, which influence all the body’s secretions. No activities of body and mind are absolutely separate, nor are any thought processes purely conscious or unconscious. However, for purposes of study, we think of the consciousness as an entity apart from the body, which we divide into conscious and subconscious, and superconscious, each of which takes on certain characteristics by which we know them when we pass from one to the other.
The conscious mind can reason in several different ways. It may reason by induction in which it takes many facts and out of them formulates a certain law or underlying principle. This is the commonest method of scientific research. It may reason by deduction, which is practically a reversal of the above method, consisting in taking a general truth and drawing from it every logical sequence. The third common method is analysis, in which we separate a proposition into its component elements. Another method is that of comparison, which takes a known and accepted truth and a proposed one and, by contrasting the two, arrives at the probable value of the latter. Synthesis is the method by which we group many related facts or ideas or sensations together in a harmonious whole, as for instance, taste is a synthetic blending of touch, smell and sight.
Prophets have hinted that the Almighty has other methods of thinking: He has “ways that are not our ways and thoughts that are not our thoughts.” Also, “He knows the end from the beginning.” These suggest that God, in whose image we are made and of whose nature we are partakers, is in possession of a method of thinking that is beyond us — an activity of consciousness, whose laws we have not discovered and mastered. The only way to explain it satisfactorily is that time and place do not exist in the Absolute Being. “I am” is the Divine Being’s method of consciousness. The sense of time and place belong only to the limited finite mind. If we can consciously contact Absolute Being, then the past and the future are present to Him. This is the psychology of the prophet’s superconscious inspiration.
When we come to the subconscious, we find a curious limitation — it is able to think only by deduction. It can be perfectly logical in drawing out every possible sequence, although it cannot discern the truth of the statements. The subconscious cannot hold two contrasting ideas and therefore cannot test new statements by those known and proven. It cannot tell whether a statement is true or false, and is not at all concerned about it.
We may make certain deductions from these facts. First, the subconscious is perfect for a world that has only one class of facts, having a common basic truth underlying them. Its processes are not suited for a world of change and conflict, in which every step requires testing by comparison and constant readjustment to new experiences. Second, the subconscious is specially equipped to manage all the physical processes (digestion, heart beat, circulation, etc.), which seem automatic but are really governed by the subconscious. Thus, the subconscious is (1) best suited to manage functional processes in an orderly and determined method, (2) it tenaciously holds to a given norm or type until a new one is thrust on it, (3) it is unable to originate anything new, and (4) it is absolutely amenable to suggestion. These attributes all equip it for its role as the builder for the body and emotional responses.
If we hold the pattern or mental image of the thing we desire to be before subconscious mind, it at once adjusts its building processes to the new architectural plan for the body or for the disposition. Just as a stronger sensation in the body displaces a weaker one, as a stronger mental idea replaces a weaker one, as a negative always gives way to a positive idea, so does a mental habit of fear give way to the habit of love. Despondency gives way to hopefulness, and pessimism melts before the rising sun of optimism. Disease and pain and languor vanish before the mental habit of “I am filled with comfort and health and vigor.”
Regarding prenatal psychological development, all sensations and movement by the unborn child are apparently instinctive and reflex, if not entirely in the realm of the unconscious. From the conception of fetal life, some unconscious but unerring intelligence builds the body, repeating the memory pattern of all its past existences, and following a certain norm or type that is ineradicably fixed within it, leaving some traces of its past forms in the finished product, and finally producing a physical body after the human image of the divine.
After birth the subconscious must adjust to outer conditions in other ways than automatic and reflex. The need for conscious choice arises from the demand to be acted upon by the world and to react upon it. It still manages all the functioning processes of the body unconsciously, but the first signs of volition begin to develop, such as attention to the light, sound, recognition of the mother, etc., which soon unfolds into a new world of conscious activity.
Corresponding to this conscious activity, the cerebrum, which was previously merely the nucleus of the brain that is to be, becomes the organ of the new mental activity, and grows remarkably. Conscious mental activity apparently is a development by which we adapt ourselves to the new conditions of life, and is a function growing from the relations between the subconscious and the organism in which it dwells, and by which we maintain that condition of existence that we call human life.
Remember that the conscious mind directly controls that part of the body made up of voluntary muscular tissue, which it controls through the cerebrospinal nervous system, while the sympathetic nervous system, which the unconscious mind controls, furnishes nerve supply to the involuntary muscles of the vegetative organs. With this brief statement of the mechanism of mental adjustment, we are ready to take up the laws of suggestion.
Chapter 11
Suggestion
As we have studied the various ways in which the subconscious processes pass upward into the conscious, we now study the methods by which knowledge, feeling and volition of the conscious life are carried down into the subconscious and incorporated into its activities. A vast realm in cognition, feeling and will overlaps the subconscious. We become conscious of many subconscious processes only incidentally, which leads us to infer that a great world of subconscious activities exists, of which we never become aware, activities that relate to our physical, mental and spiritual welfare. To reach this subconscious side of the mind with its depths and capacities, and to impress its processes with new facts, ideas, feelings, volitions, new ideals and plans of work, is the test of a workable psychology.
The one term, suggestion, embraces the whole list of methods, which we class as direct and indirect, positive and negative, autosuggestion and hetero-suggestion, and post-hypnotic suggestion. All sorts of people use these methods under all sorts of circumstances and for all manners of purposes. The physician uses the air of absolute self-assurance to quiet his patient’s nerves and mental apprehension, the overwrought sympathetic friends, to enable him to discern the real cause of the trouble and to prescribe for its treatment sensibly. Likewise, he uses suggestion when he writes prescriptions.
The fervid evangelist uses suggestion when he dwells on that hoary fiction, “original sin,” which so works in human nature as to make people feel only evil. After his listeners’ self-condemnation has reached a proper stage he teaches them that repentance and faith in the good of someone else will, in some way, undo the effect of this original sin, and their actual sins, and give them peace.
Suggestion reaches its place of supreme efficacy in any system that teaches that the One Absolute Life heals. The patient understands that Truth, Principle, God heals him. The contrast between the limited, finite healer and the unlimited and Infinite Mind measures the power and use of suggestion.
We use suggestion by indirect methods when we turn the patient’s attention to the one Divine Mind, or Principle, which is universal. Because of its abstract conception, this leads the mind into the abstract state so that we turn his attention from self with its ills. We work on the psychological principle that the greater the sensation produced, the stronger is the consequent movement, whether reflex or voluntary. The greatest idea that can influence cognition and feeling is the idea of the Infinite God. So we make the basis of our procedure the thought of the One Absolute Mind, of whom we are an essential part as really as our finger is a part of our hand, an at-oneness with God, which is inherent and eternal, by virtue of which we are partakers of the divine nature, and therefore of all that belongs to the divine nature, whether it is health, peace, or prosperity. These are not things bestowed upon us, but dwell in us.
We do not deny sickness because to do so is a psychological error. Instead, we seek to displace the evidence of the senses in consciousness by emphasizing the greater realities. We emphasize the positive of health rather than the negative of pain, we urge the right and power of Love to rule the life rather than Fear. So, in all suggestion, we lay the emphasis upon the positive constructive powers rather than denying the negative and destructive ones. Yet we clearly bring out the principle of suggestion here, in that it is God who heals always, although, from our standpoint, He can use either mental, material or spiritual agencies.
The power of suggestion depends largely upon the patient’s idea of its nature and source, what it can do, and the power that lies back of it. If he recognizes suggestion as coming from someone vested with a remarkable personality, a great reputation, or someone of mystic power, it is much more effective than coming from someone whom they know thoroughly. Likewise, the scope of the truth presented determines the effectiveness of suggestion, the truth of universal application being vastly more influential than that of limited application.
We also see this in such experiences as hypnotizing a person. He can be hypnotized largely because he thinks he is going to be, he goes to sleep because he expects to, and his expectation depends largely upon the power of the operator to make him believe he can do it. The operator leads him through a series of steps, each of which tends to some more advanced condition. He commences, with relaxation, then suggestion that his eyelids are getting heavy, they are going closed, he is getting drowsy and sleepy, and he is going to sleep.
The operator uses mechanical means such as holding a coin before his eye and moving it in a circle some six inches in front of his eyes, above eye level. You are taking advantage of certain physiological facts, the first of which is that focusing the eye at six inches produces a little strain that very quickly leads to a sense of tiredness. The uplifted glance also produces the physiological attitude of the eye in sleep, and moving the coin in a circle starts the eye on that “rhythmic roll,” which we note in people who are asleep. All this leads to the autosuggestion that these are all conditions belonging to sleep. We can produce every step of the process of hypnotism because the patient believes that he is going to be, and the conditions that he recognizes as belonging to sleep back up his belief.
Hypnotism is merely one of many effects produced by suggestion. Suggestion has many degrees of effectiveness. For instance, the person sits in a chair or lies on a couch, becomes perfectly passive and receptive, closes his eyes (or sits with them open for that matter), and listens in a receptive, passive state. Suggestions given to him in that condition will be just as effective, or more so, than when given in an actual hypnotic state. The first step in suggestion is soothing, quieting and relaxing the patient so that he becomes receptive and passive. All people who treat and various schools of healing, follow that method.
Suggestion works, not only through this means, but also through the eye itself. You remember Peter and John at the Beautiful Gate. A man asked alms. They fastened their eyes upon him and said to him, “Look on us. Silver and gold I have none. Such as I have, I give to thee. In the name of Jesus Christ, rise up and walk.” The simple, yet supreme truth in the suggestion was the fact of the almightiness of the Christ to make him walk. Yet the effectiveness of the method is that while that lame man looked in Peter’s eyes and let Peter do the talking, he could not think of anything else in the world but what Peter was saying. The result was that what Peter said held perfect sway over his mind and he could literally do nothing else but to arise and walk.
Every achiever who rises in business, professional or social life, knows that at the critical moment, either consciously or unconsciously, he fastens his eye upon the person whom he wishes to persuade. People have used that method to heal the sick, teach the Gospel, “lock the gates of glory till you accept our ideas,” sell real estate, gold bricks, bogus bonds, and worked good and evil in every occupation.
In using suggestion, remember that the mind is both conscious and subconscious/unconscious in its action. The conscious mind, controls the voluntary muscles through the cerebrospinal nervous system, while the subconscious controls the involuntary muscular tissues through the sympathetic nervous system. The subconscious mind controls the vegetative processes, repairs the body and keeps it in health and vigor. This subconscious self dominates health, disposition and our general mental states. The subconscious is the builder of the body, while the function of the conscious mind to be the architect, the planner of health and character. The conscious mind acts as a temporary agent to enable the subconscious self to act upon the material world and to be reacted upon by it.
The subconscious mind is unable to reason by any method but deduction, and it is consequently a creature of suggestion. The law of suggestion of the subconscious mind is that it accepts the strongest idea presented to it, and we may replace any negative may with its positive, just as light dispels darkness. The strongest idea in a sentence is the one upon which the subconscious mind fastens itself. For that reason it is wrong to say “I will not have a headache, I will not be afraid, I will not suffer,” or to be constantly afraid of any particular thing or experience. If you want health, do not expect to find it psychologically by denying sickness, but by affirming health. If you want strength, find it by affirming strength. If you want to get rid of fear, affirm love as an indwelling fact.
The most effective method of using suggestion as self-help is just before going to sleep at night. You must first be thoroughly sure about what you wish to be. Make it a practice before sleep to repeat to yourself, “I will be that which I wish to be” ( stating specifically what it is) at least one dozen times. The subconscious mind will work on the problem while the conscious mind is asleep, and will produce effects in proportion to the suggestion’s strength. Thus, you can change weakness of body into strength, health and vigor, worry, anxiety and nervousness into perfect calm, peace and self control. Saying, “I am tired and good natured,” is just as easy as saying, “I am tired and irritable,” and the results are infinitely more satisfactory. This is merely applying the principles of post-hypnotic suggestion to give the suggestion to the unconscious mind, sleep over it, and on the morrow it may come to pass.
The book, “The Finger of God,” outlines the correct forms of giving suggestions so that one may use them and get results even if he does not know anything about suggestion. This is correct psychological procedure, for most of our mental and physical processes are carried on without giving much attention to how they are done, or the laws that govern them. If we act according to the law we get results although we do not know the law by which it is done.
Chapter 12
How to Treat by Mental Methods
The first essential thing in giving a mental treatment to yourself, or to others, is to relax. Relax the muscles, let the mind become quiet, receptive and passive as possible. Shake yourself out, physically and mentally, see that you are thoroughly relaxed. Talk to yourself and say “Now relax. Let those muscles down. Let your mind be quiet.” Keep up this suggestion until it works. The best method is to draw the attention to something that is so big that it is unthinkable. For instance, try to think of space that has neither length, nor breadth, nor height, nor depth, and so the mind will come to rest when it is trying to contemplate the infinite and absolute.
Having secured this state of relaxation, the next step is to reach either by direct affirmation or by indirect implication, the thing that you desire. In direct affirmation the patient says to himself, “I have a strong will. My body is filled with comfort. All my bodily functions are working normally. My stomach is perfectly normal and will digest its food properly. My circulation is perfect.” These are all affirmations that we may carry into the physical, mental or spiritual realms, for ourselves or others.
Many people can give these direct suggestions to themselves or to others with equal ease and success. We realize when we first begin to make such affirmations that they are not actually, literally true. Yet if we will continue to affirm them, we begin to think of ourselves according to the affirmations. We will find that we have passed from the affirmation to the mental atmosphere of attainment. Similarly, our affirmations will work out in results in our physical body.
The indirect form of suggestion presents the result desired as a mere implication of what we will be, by creating a mental ideal, which it is our privilege, and everyone’s privilege to be, by developing the thought of the unity of our life with the Life of God. All material things are simply the organisms through which that Life expresses itself, and we are an integral part of the organism of the universe, and of the life of the universe, which we call God. This divine or Universal Life, called God, knows no such thing as sickness, weakness, or any such thing. Such things as pain are possible only in human consciousness, resulting from material incarnation. Therefore, our suggestion develops in us the consciousness of oneness with the Absolute Life, and to insist upon it so that it displaces the human consciousness and its pains and ills.
Our inherent oneness with this Absolute Life, which apart from all human and material ingredients, is at once perfect health, of which we are partakers, and perfect love, which dwells in us. It is our privilege so to express this love, to be entirely freed from all fears and worries and anxieties, and to be freed physically from all disease and pain. We must see that while pains and ills come, they are merely aids to developing the divine consciousness, to be freed from them, and they disappear when we reach this freedom. We must not dwell upon them, nor recall them, nor fill the mind with images of them in any way. Whatever the expressions of life are, we must discard them when they have served their purpose.
Another thing to remember in treating yourself or another by suggestion, is that the stronger of any two physical sensations is the one reported to the brain and to the consciousness. You cannot feel two pains in the same region simultaneously. If we experience two stimuli that would ordinarily produce pain, only the stronger one is reported, so if we have a headache we create a stronger sensation elsewhere on the skull, we cannot feel or report the first pain.
The same principle in applies in psychology. Two ideas without any contrast between them and any difference in time, leave practically no effect upon the attention and no conscious action or volition follows. It is only the contrast in strength, quality, or time that makes possible the choice between the two, and the stronger sensation or idea is always expressed at the expense of the weaker one. For instance, we hear a very loud noise for a short time and so become incapable of noticing a smaller or weaker sound because we adjust our hearing to the stronger one. So in all sensation and in material processes, we adjust so that the stronger sensation or the greater truth excludes the weaker one.
In treating ourselves or others, some vital truth must penetrate into the mind and displace whatever negative condition exists. The cure for any physical or mental ill is to find the opposite of the particular ailment and present it to the foreground of attention. For instance, to eliminate fear with all its forms that assail and torment people, we must fill the mind with its opposite, which is love. “Perfect love casts out fear” is both a philosophical and spiritual statement. We never fear the people or things we love. Such things are not compatible. Therefore, when people fear insanity, poverty, or sickness, we begin by creating in their minds an understanding of those things upon which the Love of God is based — the infinite wisdom, the infinite care and goodness, God’s presence everywhere, His power under all circumstances, His interest and concern about our welfare, for each of us with is an individual expression of Him. In other words, we must lead them to identify their lives with the Life and Love of God.
This is the first step in casting out fear by an intellectual love. As we realize that God is so identified with our lives and is bringing us continue benefits and so enables us to reach His life for comfort and health, the emotional side of Love arises, born of comfort and care and similar qualities. This furnishes us with the thought of a complete truth. We cast out fear by embracing and dwelling upon the boundless Love of God that dwells in us, which is an intellectual conception and an emotional impulse. We can apply this method no matter whether the agent of fear is a person, thing, or some indeterminate and imaginary object. We simply teach ourselves and others to love that which we fear, and the fear passes away.
Hope and the great spiritual powers and qualities allied to it are the remedies for worry, hurry, and other mental attitudes that wear the nerves to a frazzle. If one is obsessed with the idea of poverty, begin to dwell on the opposite, upon the fact that abundance and plenty are the inherent right of everyone, a part of every life. Of course, life does not consist of the abundance of things that we possess, but consists in our contentment and satisfaction in the things that we have. Yet that very state of mind, of diligence and contentment, tends to increase material conditions because it attracts them to the worker. This is perfectly good psychology. Most new businesses fail. Yet when we work with the idea of satisfaction and contentment, we psychologically prepare the way for the material possessions he would like to have. Happiness does not come by making happiness our primary objective, but we incidentally get what we desire when we serve to bring happiness to others. In other words, for material or spiritual transformation, we must mentally focus on the positive spiritual form and fact of things, rather than on their secondary and material expression.
Make suggestions for the present — the results are taking place now. The work is going on while you are talking to yourself or to others because you speak the truth and it is working its transforming processes now. This work is steadily increasing in its volume of expression. Do not to study symptoms too closely, or emphasize the abnormal conditions that may arise either in sensation or in mental imagery.
Others, by autosuggestion, often unconsciously counter the suggestions you give them. Some people find it difficult if not impossible to relax, simply because you are telling them to relax, so suggest to them just to imagine themselves as relaxing, now being perfectly quiet, receptive and passive.
No two people are equally receptivity to a mental treatment. Some can probably take a simple statement from you that their pain will cease from this hour, and it actually will. Ask tense persons to sit or lie down. Stroke their forehead to relax the vasomotor nerves and explain that you are doing this to help their nervous tension and to treat their heart, liver and stomach. This will quiet them and they will take the suggestion. In other words, you have to rub the suggestion in.
To get the best results, your statements should be perfectly reasonable to them, for their common sense will act against any suggestion that is based on a palpable falsehood. Although you know their pain is illusionary and has no foundation in fact, it is just as real to them as though it were a real pain. Treat them by diverting their mind with some suggestion stronger than the one their mind now holds. Ease is always a greater sensation than pain, pleasure is always greater than discomfort, light more powerful than darkness, goodness is always infinitely more satisfactory in its results than badness. We never analyze these positives, but we do analyze the negatives.
One great drawback in giving suggestions is the subjects’ lack of imagination. Instruct them that they must know that the suggestions are coming to pass. If they have formed some wrong habit of thinking, they must replace it with a right habit. Since repeating a mental or physical act or state causes wrong mental and physical habits, we replace them by repeating a right mental or physical act.
Some people hold deep-seated prejudice against mental healing, or against some material agents, such as medicines. Others have serious doubts about the spiritual life, which will stand as mental barriers to suggestion until you have discussed it. So the personal factor enters, at least in showing your patient how to get the divine healing agencies within himself into operation.
The ideal healing method is to teach any individual that God dwells in us, and is absolutely sufficient for health and strength and peace without relying upon any human agencies or practitioner. In other words, its supreme ideal is that of self-mastery for the whole person, physically, mentally and spiritually.
Chapter 13
The Mechanism of Thinking
The worker, his tools and materials, must enter the success or failure of every effort to achieve. Aims and ends, with the plans for their achievement, are all present in the worker. They may be original or borrowed, but unless they are present, be no permanent building can result. No one today questions the truth of the statement that “to think is to create.” The material universe moves from the unseen into the apparent because of an intelligent plan. Our work of achievement is simply the result of our thinking, plus action. Whether we will or not, our thought moves into objective form. Our body, our feelings, and our surroundings are the result of our thinking. This is equivalent to saying that we are one thing, but our body and conditions are something else. A speaker does not see the people whom he addresses. He sees a concrete form that tells him that his hearers are present. His hearer is one thing, but the forms before him are the means of communication.
We can show that mind may communicate with mind directly without using any of the five senses, but the experience is unusual and not susceptible of material proof. We are accustomed to communicating with our friends in a certain way, and it is a slow process to become accustomed to a new way of doing it. Besides the still uncharted fields of mental action make it difficult to systematize the countless instances in which one person has clearly caught the exact thought of another. Mental wireless is still an infant.
For the present, we must consider the thinker and his instrument. The body is a complex mechanism that we may understand and use for unlimited service. Skin, skeleton, muscular system, nervous system, arterial system, venous system, and lymphatic system reach every cell in the body, yet they all dwell in a body, which each system perfectly fills. When we are in health, they all get along together in such harmony as to prove that the kingdom of harmony is within us. The thinking, feeling, willing self dwells within this body, and we dwell in every cell of it. Every cell and group of cells is intelligent, but a central point of control and direction causes all these intelligences to work in cooperation, and coordinate all activities of the body.
The nervous system is the point of contact for communication between the mind and its instrument, the body. This is really two systems, the cerebrospinal and the sympathetic. The cerebrospinal system is composed of the brain and the spinal cord. The upper and larger brain is the cerebrum, and the lower is the cerebellum. The upper brain is divided into two lobes that are bound together by a strong cortical tie. These two lobes are made up largely of white matter that consists of nerve fibers. These are covered with a thin layer of gray matter that is also a mass of very fine nerve fibers. The brain answers the analogy of a wireless plant. One side acts as a sending, and the other as a receiving instrument. It is supposed that the side of the brain most highly convoluted is the receiving part of the nervous mechanism. The cerebrospinal system is the instrument of all conscious thinking, and of all volitional action.
The sympathetic system is made up of a series of nerve ganglia, connecting with the lower brain and centering in large groups of ganglia, called plexuses. The solar plexus is the principal one, often called the “abdominal brain.” All the involuntary muscles of the body, such as the stomach, receive their nerve supply from the sympathetic. It is wholly the instrument of feeling and of the reflex movements of the body. This marvelous mechanism furnishes the connection between thought, which is the beginning, and expression, which is the ending of all things.
For instance, the thinking self holds the thought of motion, say, in the finger. This thought is a vibration in the ether of the spiritual self, which the brain’s antennae, or little fine fibers of the gray matter catch. From there it passes to the white fibers, whose centers classify and shift it to a motor nerve center. From there it passes as a motor impulse down a nerve to the finger where it distributes the vibration to many divisions of the nerve, which ramify the muscle and reach every cell. The impulse reaches these cells with something of the effect of an electric shock, causing the muscle to contract, and that which started as a purely mental conception, ends in its material expression.
Suppose the self holds the thought of warmth for the finger. The vibrations of thoughts of warmth pass through the same processes, first of the gray matter, then the white, then to the various centers for classification, from which they automatically switch it to the vasomotor nerves for the arm. These are motor nerves threaded into the walls of the blood vessels. As the impulse travels down, these nerves with a motor stimulus, the blood vessels dilate, it increases the flow of the warm blood, and in a short time the thought of warmth in the mind is expressed in the sensation of warmth in the finger. That which began as a purely mental concept has been translated into the terms of material energy. By this same mechanism we may substitute the thought of ease for pain. We can substitute strength for weakness, efficiency for failure, courage for cowardice, love and confidence for fear, abundance for poverty.
These illustrations of the mechanism of thought show the seeker after self-mastery the method by which we may hold any mental conception in the mind, and unerringly transmit it to any part of the body, to express in material form. It hints at the creative power and method of the mind in changing and constructing the body, or in regulating any of its functional activities. Moreover, it shows one way in which conscious thinking may pass downward into subconscious activity, affecting not only the welfare of the body, but directly affecting the elements of thought, feeling and will, which form characters. It points a way by which we may change the whole morale of life from bad to good and vice versa.
It further shows that while the thoughts act directly upon the body and its surroundings, they also react upon the mind itself. The constant action of the will strengthens the will itself. The affirmation of having a strong will adds to the power of the will to resolve and move to action. The constant thought of a perfect memory reacts in increased power to recall any recorded event in consciousness. In a word, it furnishes the mechanism by which we may change every faculty of the mind and element of character for better or worse as we choose to think.
This also opens a vista of mental action from sources outside the self. The exact mechanism of thought transference or telepathy is an open question. It remains a fact that seers and prophets in every age have caught and recorded ideas that we could not fairly say arose from any human mind by any process of thought formation that we know. Countless numbers of people in every occupation have received indubitable messages from other intelligences without any apparent means of communication. From these observed experiences, such proverbs as “Talk about the angels,” have arisen.
The body is the accepted externalization of mental thoughts and states, influenced by the action of both inner and outer stimuli. For instance, the eye waters under the stimulus of a cinder or dust. Looking steadily at an object for some time will cause a similar flow of tears, but grief, or another emotion, will open the fountain of tears more effectively than any material stimulus. Certain medicines may quicken or slow the heart’s action. Percussing the seventh cervical vertebra slows it, while percussing the first and second dorsals quickens it. However, the most effective stimulus for the heart arises in the emotions, as anyone knows who has experienced great love or fear. A great joy or grief has often so aroused the emotional reflexes, that the organ could not respond, and the subject died of a “broken heart.” The same parallel of action is found in the stomach, the liver, the kidneys and all the organs of the body, and in the changes in blood pressure. These facts support the claim that the most potent powers for influencing the body for good or ill, are the mental and emotional states that we allow ourselves to indulge. We are equipped with the mechanism by which mental scientists are justified in their enthusiastic claims of achievement over the body and its conditions.
Having now a clear idea of the instrument, let us turn to the builder, and his materials. We may use the terms “mind, consciousness, self,” or any term, so that we understand that we are referring to the knowing, feeling, willing self. Nothing is clearer to us than the proposition that there is a Universal Intelligence exists, from which all individual intelligences have sprung. All minds are individual points of the One Mind. Whenever we think, this Universal Mind is thinking in us and through us. So that we may clearly understand this fact, let us study some terms to describe a human. Humanity is spoken of as Spirit, Soul, Mind, and other terms. A careful analysis of these will prevent confusion.
Spirit is the original life principle in the first living cell, out of which have evolved all the countless individual expressions of life. It is the basic principle in the first cell from which any individual being is developed. It is the fundamental entity of consciousness, whether it is a one-celled creature, or the perfectly coordinated group of cells called the human body. It came out of the Universal Life and Mind. It brought the qualities and characteristics of its Source into this incarnation. It is the basis of consciousness upon which all variant forms of consciousness are constructed. It corresponds to the term superconsciousness in psychology.
The law of cell growth makes every cell to be a partaker of the nature of its parent cell. When the life of a cell is extended to its child, it carries all the qualities of its parent with it. As the life principle is thus carried forward through countless experiences of cell life, it begins to be clothed with experiences, impressions and memories of its successive incarnations, until it is surrounded by a “mist of matter.” It begins to act otherwise than as pure Spirit or superconsciousness. Its surroundings and experiences influence its activities, so that a new form of consciousness arises, called subconsciousness.
Soul is, therefore, the original Spirit, plus the accretions and attritions of all past incarnations that endow it with instinct, intuition, desires, impulses and various forms of activity unknown to its basic principle. As these accumulated, there arose the necessity for classification of experiences, the power to adjust to material conditions, and a new instrument of mental activity, called the cerebrum came into expression, with a new functional activity, called mind, or objective [egoic] consciousness.
Mind is, therefore, the soul plus the developed power to act consciously in the classification of experiences, to analyze and compare experiences and form judgments and act upon them intelligently. It has the power to scrutinize the reports of superconscious activity, to pass upon all the stored up memories of subconsciousness, to form judgments based upon its own memories and experiences, and to handle all the reports arriving every moment through the medium of the five senses. We call the result of these activities personality.
Personality is the mind conscious, subconscious and superconscious, with all its powers of reasoning and knowing, in the threefold action called cognition, feeling and will, which in their ceaseless interplay upon each other, and their action upon the material world, with the resultant reaction, produces the stable qualities of being called character.
Character is, therefore, the highest attainable climax for the individual expression of mind. It is the objective demonstration of the possession of qualities that the mind knew that it had before it left its source in Universal Mind. These it can never forget, and must forever seek to express. Its relation with Universal Mind is inherent and intimate, as the relation of the finger to the hand. In this unity it exercises practical freedom of choice and independence of action. It was before the body, is superior to the body, and has the power of life independent of the body. The body is its instrument of separate expression.
The five senses are so many channels through which the perceiving power of the self moves out to act upon material objects. In turn the perceptions, which move inward over the visual, auditory and other sense pathways, act upon it. A sixth sense, called the sense of balance, with its organ is found in the ear. All these senses are the development and extension of the original sense of touch. These six do not limit the perceiving self, for some in every age have so developed and extended the perceptions as to be able to transcend the range of the sense perceptions, and to perceive things that were around a material corner.
Understanding is the power of the mind that enables it to classify and formulate, into an orderly method, not only the reports of the six senses, but the memories of all experiences, and those higher perceptions that come in moments of vision and revelation from the realm of Universal Mind. Thus understanding enables the mind to act instinctively toward ends that it does not objectively know, intuitively from grounds of whose nature and reason it is not aware, and rationally by careful analysis of all known and classified facts.
Thought is an inner, unconscious perception of a truth or fact upon which the mind acts and brings to objective form through speech or other material action. Thought may arise from (1) some stimulus coming to the mind through the six channels of sense perception, (2) some stimulus arising from the vast storehouse of memories of the past, upon which there are ceaseless subconscious action and combination, or (3) from truth present to the mind by virtue of its direct relationship to the Universal Mind.
Mind functions as conscious, subconscious and superconscious, each of which is adapted to the particular realm in which it acts. The activities often overlap, but we may detect their elements at once because the characteristic action of each is definite. Any idea bearing the stamp of analysis, comparison, induction, synthesis or conscious deduction, is conscious in its origin. Ideas bearing the stamp of deduction from the known experiences of human life are subconscious. The presence of spontaneous ideas bearing the stamp of absolute truth, yet having none of these marks, is superconscious. It has come into consciousness from the Universal Mind.
A classification of the activities will warrant these distinctions of the three phases of consciousness. Conscious mind reasons in five ways, namely, comparison, analysis, synthesis, induction and deduction. Subconscious reasons by one way alone, that of deduction. Superconscious does not reason at all; it knows and announces the truth in its absolute form, therefore no reasoning is necessary.
Comparison is the simplest form of reasoning. It consists in taking a known fact and contrasting with it a proposed one, and by comparison of points of likeness determines its truth or falsity. Analysis takes the proposition to pieces and applies the method of comparison to each factor, and determines the truth of the whole. Synthesis gathers many known and accepted truths into a harmonious working whole. Induction takes many similar facts and leads them into a common working principle. Deduction takes a principle and draws out from it every logical sequence.
Conscious mind uses all these methods, which enable it to find its way through the maze of experiences that are present in consciousness. It can pass upon the ideas and impulses that rise up from the depths of the subconscious storehouse. It gives us certainty and direction amid the conflicting reports of the objective world. By it we can pass our own thoughts and experiences and those of others. It enables us to adapt the truth that comes to us from the realm of superconscious, and apply it wisely to the conditions of our life. It varies with consciousness for this life and of this life. It could have no place in a monistic world where only truth exists. Nevertheless, it alone enables us to meet the countless problems in a world of dual expression.
The subconscious activity is purely deductive. It cannot reason in any other way. It has no power to compare two ideas because it cannot hold two ideas simultaneously. It, therefore, cannot determine the truth or falsity of any proposition presented to it, but accepts the idea offered and continues to work it out. It is not concerned with the question of the right or wrong of any idea. It does not question why. It takes and moves into formal expression any idea offered it.
The subconscious is the body builder, maintaining all the processes of the metabolism by which it renews the body. It carries these processes forward according to the ideals furnished it by the conscious mind. It does not originate anything. Its creations, such as we see in dreams, are made up of ideas and combinations of ideas received through the channels of conscious activity. Its dreams may be perfectly logical or ridiculous, yet it sets them forth so that they seem to be perfectly natural when they are taking place. It is only when the dream images begin to rise to the plane of conscious action that we are struck with the bizarre elements in them or the dream as a whole.
The subconscious is preeminently the creature of suggestion. It receives, attends to and records every idea held in conscious mind. The subconscious immediately accepts everything we think of, read, hear, or in any way consciously experience, and enters it as a factor in its processes. The strength of the impression measures the power of influence on the subconscious. We may so strongly hold an idea in conscious action that its effects in subconscious will be indelibly fixed. We may repeat a milder idea often enough to produce the same ineradicable impression. Because of its one way of reasoning, it is the side of consciousness given up to habit. Having started to do a thing in a certain way, only profound impression of an opposite idea can change its action. This element, combined with the fact that the subconscious memory is perfect, explains its marvelous tenacity in reproducing things in body, mind and disposition for which we no longer have any need. We see this in the more than forty vestigial remains of an animal ancestry in the body, of more than thirty animal impulses as seen in the emotions and disposition, and in its reproduction of hereditary marks of all sorts in body, mind and character.
It is the body builder, and maintains its conditions. It keeps the whole body conformed to a general family and racial type. It takes care of all the functional activities of the body. It feeds and renews the seventeen thousand trillion cells of the body. It carries on chemical process in the body that would baffle the most expert chemist, and it does these things in accord with what it has learned in the past, or what we teach it in the present. Once given an idea of doing anything, it never deviates from it unless a new idea replaces the old one. Its relation, therefore, to the conscious mind is that of the builder to the architect. It cannot originate, but it can carry out perfectly.
Conscious mind must devise the plan upon which subconscious will act to give it external form. The general idea of health and vigor, of body will inevitably result in such conditions. Constant dwelling on happiness, prosperity or any other desired condition will furnish the subconscious builder with the plan by which it will cause such conditions. Of course, every negative idea held will work on the same principle and the subconscious will reproduce it in the body and conditions. So, we must not give place to a negative thought or word, for the builder will at once accept it and work it out in the outer.
The power of mimicry is a subconscious endowment, and it is universal in all forms of life. It appears in all the lower types of life, in animals and in humanity. One sees mimicry everywhere in nature, where the small insects, animals and birds take on the form and color of their surroundings. It appears in the larger animal forms, such as the polar bear, whose color conforms to his surroundings. It reaches its greatest activity in humanity, where it operates both unconsciously and by intention, We become like those with whom we associate, imitating their appearance, form, color, actions, tones of voice, and even taking on physical characteristics.
The power of good example and right associations rests upon mimicry. It imitates bad examples as faithfully as it does good. It stimulates the forms and expressions of sickness as fully as it reproduces those of health. It clothes the body with the images of power and energy or with weakness and failure, with equal facility. It builds after the images of love and confidence or fear and doubt, without power to change either. Holding the thought, “I am a weak worm of the dust,” will create the impulse to crawl, while the thought “I am the son/daughter of the Most High” will make us rise to the mastery of all material and other conditions.
The subconscious accepts the strongest idea. If it is a negative, it will work out its negative results. If positive, it will produce positive effects. “I won’t have a headache today” will almost surely result in a headache, for “headache” is the strongest idea in the sentence. We should never affirm or deny a negative. Affirm the positive. If we deny a negative, we should follow it at once with the most positive, constructive statement.
This is an outline of the mechanism of thinking. Study it until you understand it. Use it faithfully and you can produce any condition you desire. If you want health, and will keep clear of all thoughts of sickness, filling the subconscious with the images of virile, abounding health, it will be yours. If you want happiness, and will fill your mind with the images of happiness, it will come into realization. If you want prosperity, and will hold the idea of what you want steadily before the subconscious, it will set in motion the dynamic energies that produce abundance. You can do anything you want to do, be anything you want to be, if you will use this little key to personal power.
The superconscious mind is that phase of the mind that is divine. It does not reason at all; it knows, and announces that which it knows. Others may say “this is the truth,” but it says, “I am the Truth.” It sees Truth, Life and Being as they are, and announces them. It sees the Truth in which there is no error. It sees the Absolute in which there is no duality of expression. It furnishes the ideal for thought and action, which the other sides of the mind may act upon and determine whether they will follow or modify them to suit material conditions. The high visioning power of the seers of all ages is found in the superconscious. It announces in the terms of mysticism, “Matter is not, sickness is not, poverty is not, sin is not, death is not. There is only life and Truth.” It is the function of objective consciousness to pass upon these statements, to classify and adapt them to the conditions of material life, and then to give the subconscious builder his plans for embodying them in life and character.
Chapter 14
The Psychology of Mental Dominion
I wish that you would hold these sayings of the Master in your mind: “I appoint unto you a kingdom.” Jesus said, “is it not written in your law, I said ye are gods; now if the law said they were gods to whom the word of God came, and the scriptures cannot be broken, why call ye me a blasphemer because I said I am the son of God.” These and many other declarations of a high visioning point out the fulfilment of the age long promise of dominion over all things. We find this note of mastership over the fish of the sea, fowls of the air, beasts of the field, over mental, material and spiritual power from the first to the last chapter of the Bible.
When the Master appointed them to a kingdom, they looked about but saw nothing that looked like a kingdom, neither army, navy, commissary, treasury nor cabinet. They knew that it must be a kingdom that comes not with observation — a thought kingdom. His disciples studied him, heard his words of matchless grace, saw his wonderful works, caught something of his spirit, and they knew that it was a kingdom of spiritual reality. They thought and spoke, lived and wrought and the kingdom came. They had dominion over sickness, sin, disease, sorrow, poverty, fear, death and every material thing. They had reached that sovereignty given to every soul that rises into conscious realization of God.
They found that in this kingdom that is God’s real world and in its external expression, law and order govern everything. The seen comes from the unseen, the temporal from the eternal. The unseen reality exists before the seen unreality appears. A spiritual universe must exist before a material one can. Every material expression arises from unseen reality, and everything in manifestation moves forward to its origin in Spirit.
They learned the method of the kingdom of Spirit. The scripture opens with the statement, “In the beginning God created.” There was nothing else but God, Eternal Spirit, Being Love, Truth, Life, Power, etc. This clearly gives the order of all material becoming. God thought and called by name that which He thought, and became that which He thought, and it was good. It is the nature of the Divine Being to become that which He thinks and calls by name.
Humanity was a thought before we became thinkers. We are a compound idea of God, many ideas of God synthesized and correlated into one. God has made us in His image of and we are partakers of the divine nature. We are the embodiments of the Principles of the Universal Being. Whatever there is in God is potentially in us. Whatever is in the divine original is in the divine image. Our thought processes show the same divine order. We think and call by name that which we think. The creative powers of the universe move out to become that which we think and call by name. If we think the thoughts of God, we set all the creative powers of God in motion to become that which we think. If we think the thoughts of God, then we do the works of God.
What are God’s thoughts? It feels almost like blasphemy when it first occurs that we could think the thoughts of God, but when we read in the first chapter of Habakkuk that the eye of God is purer than to behold evil, we know that God thinks only Good. He thinks only truth, love, health, abundance, etc. Thinking these things, only good, truth, love and abundance arise into external expression. No bad thing existed when God finished the Creation. Now all creation arises in thought and since (1) God thinks only good, and (2) we are the only other creative thinking beings we know of, and since (3) we do think both good and evil thoughts, (4) finding the source of evil is not difficult. Just as every good comes into expression by right thinking so does every evil thing come into his experience by wrong thinking. “As a man thinks in his heart so is he.” So we act, so we look, so we become.
If we will think God’s thoughts, our whole life will vibrate with Divine Life and Power. If we will fill our mind with the thoughts of God’s good, then we will find that the things over which we have been stumbling and worrying, vanish. Instead of seeing the mote in our brother’s eye, we will see the goodness and beauty in him. When we call it by name and magnify it, our brother arises to become goodness and beauty. If we will fix our thought on Eternal Health, health will fill us. If we fill our mind with abundance, then abundance will fill us. This is the law of creative thinking.
However, let us think human thoughts of duality and limitation, and our thoughts become the channel through which the creative powers move into external expression. Job said, “The thing I greatly feared is come upon me.” Fear sees a clear form through which the creative power moves into materialization. If we think disease thoughts, disease will fill us. If we think poverty thoughts, poverty will fill us. If we think worry thoughts, we will be worn to a frazzle. Worry, like a rocking chair, gives a vast amount of agitation but no progress. No matter what we think we will get it. This is not guess work, but it is law. Every sick person in the world owes their sickness to wrong thinking. Our friends will hardly let us be well. David said, “The days of our years are threescore years, yet is their strength but labor and sorrow etc.” That statement has shortened more lives than the world war. These are a few of the many ways in which we malpractice upon our friends.
A law of becoming also definitely exists. We think, and call by name that which we think, and our thought goes out into the great Mind of the Universe. By dynamic power it gathers and correlates to itself its own kind and it materializes in our body, mind and character. This is not a thing of speculation, but it is a matter for expression. It is not so much a matter of belief but of knowledge. Just go out and put it to the test and you will know that it is true. You can believe anything, although it is a lie, but you can know only the truth. The only way to know the truth is to prove it by experience. It is a matter of your own consciousness of the truth. Just think and call your thought by name, and it will come to pass. The power to do this is within you. An absentee God does not do it, but the God who works in you, both to will and to do. God is evenly present, centering in you. Likewise every power and possibility for the Infinite centers within you. Send forth your thought into this mind soil of the universe and it will leap back into your arms, a harvest. When you sow a live seed in the ground you do not sit up and worry whether the earth will work, or the atmosphere or the moisture, or the sun, or the life in the seed. Neither need you be anxious whether this thought seed will work. Thought goes forth into the world of God’s Creative Powers and comes back thirty, sixty, and a hundredfold. This is not a cunningly devised fable, but an absolute truth that you can prove for yourself.
We think in three ways: (1) by the objective conscious mind, such as we use while listening or reading and compare it with what we have previously thought and known, by induction, deduction, comparison, analysis and synthesis. (2) Subconscious thinking includes that part of our mental activities that deals with the dream life, the functioning of our bodies, and the instinctive and intuitive processes. It thinks in one way only, by deduction. (3) The superconscious side of thinking does not reason at all. It simply knows and is the Divine Mind in humanity. It is the Christ in you, the anointing that abides, by which you know all things, and that you need no one to teach you. This a tremendous truth, which we need to know.
Our real mind is God’s Mind, by which we know everything instantly, but we do not know that we know it. We are so busy thinking objectively that we do not give the Divine Mind in us a chance to thrust its perfect knowledge into consciousness. The soul within us never reasons, never argues, never needs to, because it is at once in touch with all truth. In this higher realm of divine consciousness, Jesus thought, and from it he taught. There is not an earthly logical formula in all his teaching. He announced the most tremendous truths without the slightest trace of intellectual heat. It is the simple statement of the truth as he knew it, and as he was it in consciousness.
Every word that he spoke has stood through the ages because it was the Word of Truth from God. Thinking in this higher realm of consciousness raised the vibration of his personality to that level that gave him immunity from contagions, infections, and from the power of any material thing. He touched leprosy and every form of disease, not only with immunity, but with power to heal.
The rate of material vibration determines many things. The same rate of vibration that produces heat will not produce light. We must raise the rate of vibration to produce light. Thinking on the lower or material plane produces disease and makes one open to all contagion and infection. While thinking on the higher or divine side of consciousness raises the rate of vibration to immunity from all disease, pain and weakness and puts the thinker in the place of triumph and power. It raises us to that plane of thought and life where we can say, “All power in heaven and earth,” that is, mind and matter, is given us. That is our right. Jesus vibrated in that higher level and he calls upon us to do the same. If we think and work in the lower vibrations, the reports of pains and ills and things of matter fill us. If we think and live on the plane of divine consciousness, health, abundance and power fill our life.
Can you be well? You can if you will change your thinking. Can you be happy? You can if you will change your thinking. Can you be prosperous? Yes, if you will change your thinking.
A man was recently charging $15 for five lessons in How to Make the Other Fellow Do What You Want Him to Do. I would not give fifteen cents for all that sort of thing ever written. However, I would mortgage the eternal future to find the secret to make myself do what I know I could do and ought to do, the secret of how to get out of us what we know is in us, how to find the way to connect with the powerhouse, to employ the truth that God is right here and right now.
It ought to be the high ambition of everyone to know the secret in the life of Jesus, the lost word of power for healing. One person one gets healing immediately, but nine others must try repeatedly for the same result. The one thing to covet above all else is the secret of Jesus to say to these people, “Rise up and walk” and have ten out of ten do so. The answer is not so distant if we can just once forget the limitations of matter. He said, “Father, I pray that they may behold my glory.” They saw it, and an answering glory within them rose and he healed every one of them. The secret is very near that fact. Jesus never saw a paralyzed arm — he saw an arm stretched forth and whole. He did not see a woman bent double, but one every whit whole. He saw not a man eaten with leprosy, but one in absolute health. Unless the healer can see beyond the twisted limbs and distorted bodies, the blind eyes, deaf ears and dumb tongues, and behold a divine soul there, made in the image of God, in whom is nothing but what is in God, and can command that divine soul, which was never sick, never sinned, to come forth into manifestation, he has not found the secret of Jesus. However, when he can speak the word of authority and have it come to pass, He shall heal every one of them.
The world is waiting for the spiritual Newton to come forth and write the Spiritual Principia by which the principles, laws and methods of the spiritual life shall be gathered and formulated so that the spoken word shall have the same miracle working power that it had when it fell from the matchless lips of Jesus of Nazareth. I believe the person is now born who shall give the world this superlative service. It is our privilege to seek that word, for we shall surely find it.
The next step is Speaking the Word. In the beginning was the Word, the Logos. The same was in the beginning with God. We were there when that word was spoken. That is why we are here today. The spoken thought comes into externalization. Thus, “the word is nigh thee, in thy mouth and in thy heart,” and we have only to know the divine law of thinking and speaking and we can speak and have it done, command and have it stand fast. All religion can be stated in one sentence that has two halves. The first half of all religion is, “Thus saith the Lord, ‘it shall come to pass,’ ” and the second half of all religion is, “and it came to pass.” This is a concrete statement of the power of the spoken word.
God called Jacob a new name, Israel, a Prince with God, when he had just finished cheating Laban out of his cattle. They would have imprisoned him today for what he did. Yet that spoken word worked in him, and forever afterward he was a prince with God. He made David His anointed, and it took a long time for the idea to work out. David did things that would today have sent him to prison, but one day David said in startled wonder, “Thy gentleness hath made me great.” Jesus called Peter a rock at a time when he was more like a jelly fish, but the spoken word worked and Peter became a rock of integrity.
Thought is simply unuttered speech. It must be spoken to have power. It can only become definite and clear by expression. The thought we speak becomes our own. The truth we think or hear, yet leave unspoken becomes like the talent hidden in a napkin, we lose it. Tell it and it is ours forever. The only way to give the truth power is to speak it. The only way to keep the truth is to give it away. One element of power in the life of Jesus was, that he spoke as no one had ever spoken. Learn to speak and have it done, to command and have it stand fast.
The third step is to enter the kingdom. God promised humanity dominion over all things. He put all things under our feet. In the vision of the winged creatures, Ezekiel saw the personified powers of the Universe offering themselves for service. When the prophet was down on his face talking to the Lord, the Lord said unto him, “Son of Man, stand up on thy feet and I will speak to thee.” It has taken God a long time to get us off our face, knees, and other attitudes of fear, to stand and look upward and talk with Him. When Isaiah had exhausted language and imagery to make us feel our “littleness compared to Him that sits on the circle of the earth,” he said, “Concerning My sons and concerning the works of My hands, command ye Me” Isaiah 45:11.
The best revelation of God was in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, who said, “I am among you as one who serves.” That is the secret formula of genius, the revelation of God as He is, the Universal Servitor. Every creative power of God waits the word of those who have the faith to see it and the courage to command it. Faith is that perception of spiritual reality that makes us know that the spirit of a thing is the reality, the thing hoped for is now reality, waiting to be perceived and called into material form.
Jesus commanded the Vital Abundance and multiplied the loaves and fishes. He touched with the finger of God, and the blind eyes saw. He commanded the powers of God and devils went out. He spoke to the regions of perfect health, and leprosy ceased. He spoke to the unseen Realm of Reality and Lazarus came back to live in his body. A certain Centurion came to him for his servant and said, “I am not worthy that thou shouldst come under my roof, just speak the word and my servant shall be healed, for I also am a man under authority. I say to one man come, and he comes, to another go, and he goes,” etc. Jesus said that he had not seen so great faith in all Israel. The Centurion knew that when he spoke every Roman legionary stood back of the command and he saw that when the Master spoke, every power of God stood back of his word to make it good.
Elijah rose to the heights of divine command and the barrel of meal wasted not, neither did the cruse of oil fail. Daniel commanded the invisible and the lions’ mouths were shut. Peter commanded the infinite deliverance and prison doors were opened. Paul and Silas called upon the Infinite and the doors of that Philippian jail shook from their hinges. When are we going to learn to command the invisible powers to make this world what it should be? We should just as easily speak the word to a thousand at once and have the works of God manifest in them all. This is the promised kingdom.
Mimicry is a principle by which all this comes to pass. We have all seen insects, birds and animals that have become so like the leaves and grass and bark about them that we mistook them for a part of the growing things. This is unconscious mimicry. The polar bear is like the snow amid which he lives, but others change with the seasons. When we come to human life, we find mimicry used both consciously and unconsciously. We have a proverb about children, “Monkey see, monkey do.” We are all mimics. We take on the physical, mental and spiritual likeness of those about us. Two people in constant association become like each other in appearance, in voice, in mannerisms, in methods of thought. The principle operates in its greatest power in the realm of character building.
No better illustration exists than that of Jesus and the twelve. They were uneducated, uncultured, spiritually dense. Their roughness and spiritual blindness grieved him often. Yet they walked with him across fields, they heard his matchless words, they saw his wonderful works, they drank in his spirit of love, gentleness and compassion. Their dark unlikeness to him began to drop away, and at the end of three years they had become so like him that they were ready for him to entrust them with carrying forward his kingdom. We are all ready to admit this fact.
He had passed from their sight. They no longer had him to point out as the exemplar of what they taught. No longer could they say “Here is the Master, hear and see him.” All they could do was to draw mental pictures of him. Peter made one of these mental snapshots, “He went about doing good.” So they pictured the life of Jesus with all the richness of imagery that their experiences with him had inspired, and we have the result. One day they found some of these same people who had heard and received the truth standing boldly up for the cause of Christ. “They took knowledge that they had been with Jesus and had learned of him.” They had not seen him but they had held this mental image of him, and the creative mimicry within had made them like him. It works. If it worked there, it is a principle upon which we can formulate a science.
“For we all with unveiled face beholding as in a mirror, the glory of the Lord, are changed after His image from glory to glory by the Spirit of the Lord.” Fill your mind with a clear mental ideal of the Master as the Son of God. As you study that ideal, the fact that you are as the Son of God will rise unto your consciousness, a being made in His image, with every thing in the image that is in the divine original.
Go forth then to take your kingdom. Picture prosperity and make it a kingdom of abundance. Dwell on good alone and make it a kingdom of good. Picture the infinite harmony and make it a kingdom of harmony. See your neighbor as a divine being who was never sick, nor sinned, nor was unhappy. Your kingdom will come and you will reign with him whose name is forever enthroned in earth and in heaven — Jesus the Christ.
Chapter 15
Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis is a consideration of the hidden hindrances to efficiency and success as they report in health, happiness, business or usefulness in any form. It deals with finding the hidden impressions and interests that lie uncharted and forgotten in the soul, which under certain conditions, rise to produce terrors for the mind, hallucinations of the senses, and the appearance of disease in the body, acting as an effective bar to progress.
The name “psycho” is a Greek derivative, meaning “soul.” The Greeks had a fine shade of distinction in words, and while we use mind and soul interchangeably, in the Greek there was a definite distinction. The soul is nothing more nor less than what we term the subjective or subconscious side of the mind. This subconsciousness of ours has a way of its own in functioning. It has its channels of contact with the body, just as has the objective conscious mind. The objective functions through the cerebrospinal nervous system and governs the voluntary movements of the body. The subconscious functions through the sympathetic nervous system and controls all of the involuntary motions of the body, such as the action of the organ systems, and all the metabolic processes by which it renews the trillions of cells. It does tjis through involuntary reflex action, directly under control of subconscious mental activity.
Whenever anything happens in our conscious life, whether it comes from physical experience, mental activity, or the impact of the thoughts of others, whether good or bad, it affects the subconsciousness, and through it on all of our functional activity. Likewise, whatever happens in the superconscious, or divine side of the mind affects the soul side of life, giving it a tremendous uplift and inspiration. The superconscious influences the soul on every side, catches everything and forgets nothing. Thus we have within ourselves a net into which every thought and every vibration of the universe falls, and nothing slips through or is forgotten. We may not be conscious of it, but we are subconscious of it. So, all functional diseases and disorders of various kinds rise through the action of this subconscious self.
Certain experiences directly impress the subconsciousness: Wrong mental acts and habits, such as shock, long continued strain, steady attention to a given thing without proper diversion, depression, caused by grief or loss, prenatal influences, such as fear, timidity and solicitude of various kinds, hereditary influences, and the influences of stored up experiences from other lives. These all act on the subconscious mind very definitely, and can form scars and complexes, producing the vast variety of abnormal ideas and experiences of nervous people. These impressions lie hidden in the subconscious, and we forget them as the years pass. Under the strain of nervous energies, a hidden scar suddenly projects itself into the conscious mind, filling the vision and senses with hallucinations, sense images, mental ideas and obsessions, filling one with the sensations of disease and delusions of mind. Sometimes the original scar associates itself with other and later impressions, which are also hidden and forgotten, and it rises in experience as a psychological complex.
The secret of the power of such a complex lies in the mystery in which its origin is shrouded. The very fact that its origin is hidden multiplies its terror a thousandfold. If we can only trace its cause, most of its power is at once annulled, which leads us to the law of dissolving these complexes and giving relief to the patient. The law is, that the moment we discover some stored and forgotten experience, which is the cause of the trouble, we sweep the mystery away, the mind immediately begins to readjust itself to facts as they are, rids itself of its hallucinations, and recovers normality. The patient can rarely make this analysis for himself. In fact, only the most skillful work by the practitioner is at times able to find the hidden cause, for the subconsciousness hides its secret as cunningly as a burglar hides his loot.
A thousand forms of functional diseases arise in that way. We are not speaking of organic diseases, although doubtless they arise in the same way. Many physicians who have been cancer specialists and have given their lives to the study of this disease, to find its cause and cure, have developed the disease and died of it, although no known infection or contagion exists. The only explanation of this is the metaphysical one: The influence of constantly imaging the ravages of the disease so impresses the subconscious side of their life that finally it produces those mental images in external form. It is worthy of note that organic conditions are often cured while the symptoms remain, and likewise, the symptoms of disease are sometimes removed while the organic conditions remain unchanged. Assuming functional diseases can pass into organic is reasonable, therefore.
We have seen many cases of paralysis, which would defy anyone to detect that they were not the real thing, having all the signs and symptoms, such as lack of sensation, loss of control, inability to move limbs and parts, yet the paralysis was purely functional. No destruction of any motor nerve or destruction of any brain substance had occurred, in fact, nothing but the inhibition of nerve action.
We have seen many cases of blindness, some partial, some total, some of many years standing, in which the sight returned instantly after finding the hidden cause in some past shock. We may relieve this by placing fingers on the eyes and by prayer, turning the mind to an entirely new thought, arousing in them the tremendous uplift of faith, filling the released nerve with the normal thrill of life and action. Sometimes, the returned vision is gradual, but in all such cases it is necessarily a process of psychological cause and effect.
The most difficult condition to relieve is inhibition of the auditory nerve, possibly because it is so close to the brain center, but more probably because people use the sense so constantly that they fill consciousness with its shortcoming. These complexes inhibit the auditory nerve just as they do other nerves of sensation. We make no reference here, of course, to those organic causes for deafness, which are many, whose distinguishing features are well known. We speak of functional deafness caused by these psychic impressions.
People suffer from “hot spots,” “cold spots,” tumors, false growths, numbness, dizziness, muscular and nerve weaknesses, trembling and a host of other sensations all arising from psychic impressions. Such conditions disappear when we discover their point of origin in forgotten experiences. Often instead of a physical expression, but frequently with it, the effects produced are mental or psychic in character. People have all sorts of delusions and fixed ideas, one of the commonest being that the Almighty is punishing them, or that they have sinned against the Holy Ghost, or that an evil spirit has possessed them. Some, who believed they were possessed of a devil, certainly acted like it. Under hallucinations of the senses they see all sorts of things and hear, touch, taste and smell them. The great family of phobias, which these complexes create, include the fear of dying, the fear of going crazy, and kindred ideas. It does not matter that we have proven these fears false a thousand times. The next time that they arise actively, the patient is overwhelmed with the terror of them.
Psychoanalysis is a process by which we search for the cause, and show the patient that cause. We show him the rational process of cause and effect: A process of development, which works with unfailing certainty and regularity, produces these false ideas and experiences. If we can discover the cause and bring it to the light, it strips away the mystery, and therefore, of breaking the power of the obsession. We must show them that the idea has no power unless they give it power by their thinking. The rule is that upon the revelation of this cause process and effect, the mind reacts upon itself, the inhibitions are freed, the nervous system returns to its normal functioning, the mind is cleared of its hallucinations, and the trouble stops, usually promptly.
We emphasize the necessity of stripping away the mystery of origin because the experiences of most psychoanalysts show that the doctor’s uncertainty delights the patient, who soon develops a love for the mystery of it. Woe to the analyst if he hesitates, for the case is lost. If we act in an orderly and systematic way, with the air of confidence, we beget confidence in the patient, and enable him to answer questions and to recall experiences, which he could not do of his own unaided effort. Anyone can bring up experiences and memories under the stimulus of a skillful questioner, which he could never have recalled of his own accord.
Psychoanalysis grew from the practice of medical science in investigating the states of a person’s soul. It consisted of analyzing the effects of the repression of the various impulses that we have, which otherwise would arise into normal expression. Researchers found that when we repress any strong impulse of life, it forms a scar. Repression causes an atrophy of the powers of normal expression of that impulse, causing it to combine with other scars. When it takes some mysterious slant, it suddenly projects itself into the mental horizon, filling the mind with grotesque visions, inhibiting the nerves, and deranging the functions of the body. When we repress an experience, it often lies hidden and forgotten for months and years until some stimulus (long continued attention or effort or the effects of shock and strains) upsets the nervous system. Then this hidden impression arises, often associated with other impressions or scars, forming a complex, which is often mysterious to most trained observing.
According to some teachers, we can refer all impulses to action back to the fundamental, or Creative Impulse, whose primary expression is sex, and they claim that every repression, in some sense, is sex repression. Furthermore, they claim that every impulse of expression in any direction is a primary, secondary or tertiary expression of this primal impulse, sublimated in some new form. While it seems to have a good deal of scientific basis, it remains a fact that many of our impulses for expression are so far removed from the sex impulse that it requires a good stretch of the imagination to relate them.
Our power to achieve is nothing more nor less than the sublimation of the Creative Impulse in us. Every great book that any author ever wrote, every picture painted, every oratorio composed, every song written, every sculpture carved, every sermon preached, or play produced, every life or character devoted to a high purpose, found its explanation in the sublimation of this Creative Impulse, which is fundamental in every one of us. The psychoanalyst cannot dismiss the question by any arbitrary inclusion or exclusion. Our mind must be open to the right answer.
Many cases are clearly rooted in repression of the sex impulse, yet many other cases do not seem to be connected with the Creative Impulse. Undoubtedly, many people suffer most of the ills of the flesh simply because they do not know this law of sublimation, or change in the direction of the Creative Impulse. Yet the world also has many extremists, who have sought to carry the sublimation process to the Nth degree, and who suffer from an inverted sex repression. We say this in the interest of sanity and common sense in all things. Recognizing that the primary law of expression has been inhibited may relieve many cases of a nervous breakdown. When people deny normal expressions of the Creative Impulse (usually through enforced celibacy), they fall out of harmony with life, family and friends. Unless they find the normal expression of the Creative Impulse, or can wisely direct the impulse in some secondary way, it inevitably brings trouble.
The process of a psychoanalysis, while apparently intricate, is simple enough. It is carried out on the principle of the confessional. It requires the digging up of the last hidden thought and impulse, and enters every area of the subject’s life. Having the confidence of the person to be analyzed is necessary; second, you must be alone. He will never tell you the truth about his morals or religion when his wife is present, and vice versa. The most vital and delicate questions have to be asked, because the solution of the problem often hinges directly upon some fact of sex consciousness. Keeping his mind on the simple facts is necessary.
Just as certain symptoms guide the physician in making the diagnosis of a case, so do the subject’s answers guide the mental practitioner, and the subject’s mental operations in answering. This method of questioning is effective and is based upon sound principles. The method is for the subject and the analyst to sit facing each other, the analyst to pronounce, one by one a list of words, definite, pointed, clearly spoken, beginning with those of the simplest significance, and moving into those of extensive influence. The subject is asked to pronounce instantly, in one word, whatever idea arose in his mind when a word is spoken to him. We call this the mental reaction, and the time between the speaking of the word and the reaction determined the quickness of a subject’s thought processes. Those words carrying ideas that have no effect upon the subject’s emotional life, usually elicit an immediate reaction, while those words whose significance influences the subject’s emotional life require time for reference to all the nerve centers involved, so that sometimes the reaction would not come until 3 or 5 or even 10 seconds had passed. If a subject is unable to react in 10 seconds, he is considered to have received a solar plexus mental blow, upon the theory that the idea and its experiences had not only registered in his brain, but also in his solar plexus, the center of the sympathetic nervous system. In this way, by pronouncing a list of 25 or 50 words, it is possible to bring to light the various things that had played havoc with the subject’s emotional nature, and of whose effects he is totally unconscious. A list of 50 such words, carried out in this way will give a fairly correct hint of the things that have profoundly affected the individual.
The best method is to have the subject give a full statement of his case, including its reports in body and mind. Then we review his life, looking for shocks or traumas (accidents, for sudden situations that have thrown terror into his life, or moments of great danger, either personally or someone near to him) that have caused the block. Study his life for repressions, the things he desired to do and was unable to do. Learn when the unnatural circumstances, or any tendency toward them first began to develop, tracing carefully back to childhood, looking minutely into the circumstances under which he was raised, about whether he had a normal childhood. If you do not found the cause, look to prenatal conditions. The parents’ age when he was born, their ages relative to each other, and general characteristics of each parent, the number of children, and the nearness of his birth to the child preceding him. Pay particular attention to his mother’s prenatal states, as to material surroundings and comfort, as to her disappointments and fears. The common difficulty of stammering is prenatal in its origin, and is essentially a defect of the personality, which can be cured by practice of those mental and emotional qualities which make for self-confidence and self control. Follow this by finding the family characteristics, not only of the parents, but previous generations.
This is the briefest possible outline of a practical working method of psychoanalysis. The analyst must see with the mind and with the eye, and to hear with mental ears. A trained intuition will often lead to the discovery of the hidden cause, when well-formulated rules fail. The general principles of psychoanalysis are the same every time, and every case is a thing of itself, required to be treated individually and not as a class.
As illustrations of the results of psychoanalysis, Dr. Jung, a student of Freud, told of a man who had been blind for 14 years: The analysis of his dreams revealed that he was dreaming of fighting all the time while he slept, he had never quarreled nor fought with anyone. He never quarreled with his wife, because she was his wife, and because she was a woman, but that he had been angry with her often. The repression of his anger had brought the inhibition of the optic nerve, which was released at once by finding the cause, and by the declaration that its power was ended.
One young woman was unable to ride in an automobile when it started up or downhill. The cause was a state of fear by her mother in the patient’s prenatal state. Her mother was filled with fears from having to go up and down steep, icy steps at the back of the house. The finding of this cause, and the declaration that the idea no longer had power, released her from the trouble.
A correct psychoanalysis may be made in five minutes, or it may much longer, but when once the correct explanation for any given trouble is found, the patient is released from its power, and gets well.
Chapter 16
Character Analysis
“Know thyself” is the first step to knowing the other fellow. You may have birth, environment, education, brains and opportunity, and utterly fail because you cannot get along with other people. That inability arises from the fact that you never understood yourself, and therefore, did not understand the people about you. You can change this failure to success by training your powers of observation, and then using your common sense. This will enable you to know them, encourage them to like you, and inspire and motivate them.
We are all character readers in a crude way. We instinctively form impressions about people when we first meet them. Many of us trust our first impressions, but there is a surer way. The body becomes an external expression of our emotions and other mental acts and states. It follows that we may not only gather a good idea of the character of another’s thinking by the way the body reports in health or sickness, but we may know the general elements of character itself by their outstanding physical characteristics.
Character analysts differ as to the relative importance of the various indications of character, such as form, bulk, color, facial and cranial characteristics. Since the first contact with the individual challenges the attention to his bulk, we make that the first element in character analysis. In biological evolution, the first system developed was the digestive tract, next the lungs and heart or the thoracic tract. Third, the muscular, fourth, the bony framework, and fifth, the mental system. Each individual is the expression of one of these types, or of the combination of two or three. Your first step in character analysis, therefore, is to determine whether your subject of study is an alimentative, thoracic, muscular, osseous or mental. We cannot be mistaken as to the type, the general characteristics of which are set forth as follows:
- The Alimentative Type consists of those individuals in which the entire digestive and nutritive systems are more highly developed than any other system in the body. Your first impression is that this person is overweight. It is a physiological fact that the obese person has from six to twenty feet more intestines than the other types. The keynote of the alimentative type is enjoyment. They enjoy most “the good things of life”: Plenty of rich food, a good car, a warm room, good cigars, good clothes, the best of everything, and they worship food. The strongest point of the alimentative type is their good nature, and their disinclination to cause trouble. They mix well, and mold themselves to fit the company they keep. Their weakest point is self indulgence.
Occupation: They hate both physical and mental work, and are inclined to find occupations in which they will direct the work of others. They have splendid facility in capitalizing the brain and muscles of other people and letting them work for him. When they have little brain power, they get a job by flattery, usually as an administrator of some sort. The alimentatives of the lower mentality make good butchers, restaurant-keepers, bartenders, saloon keepers, night club owners, bakers, chefs, grocers, or commission merchants. Since this type likes good things to eat, expensive clothes and all the luxuries of life, they are interested in them in all their forms and phases, and make good merchants, for they can interest others in them. They will sell and buy these goods. Because of their ability to get along with others, they make successful politicians and bosses. When endowed with good brain capacity, they become corporate types. Many rich people of all countries are of this type.
- The Thoracic Type includes those individuals in whom the lungs, heart and blood vessels are highly developed. The first impression is that they are very florid (red-faced), have a high chest development, and are long-waisted. They give you the impression of being “chesty.” The keynote of the thoracic type is their affectability. They are always a bit excited, and are intensely responsive to all stimuli. They are people of changeable moods, and are inclined to be flighty. The strongest point of the thoracic type is their capacity for getting their second wind, and their quickness in responding to orders. They get the point at once, and are off like a shot to do the necessary thing. Besides these qualities, they possesses a large share of what we know as personality. Their weakest point is their changeability and flightiness.
Occupation: The pure thoracic must choose work that gives freedom of movement, is full of rapid changes, and gives much variety. Their nature demands ceaseless change. They like to meet people, especially new ones, and are popular and entertaining. They are fitted for work which calls for these outstanding qualities. They excel in advertising, salesmanship, publicity work, reception experts in large businesses where a special person meets the public. They are interested in anything that promises increased efficiency.
- The Muscular Type is that group of individuals in whom the muscles are more highly developed than any other system. They may not be large, but their muscles are well defined. Your first impression is that they are solid, well knit. The keynote of the muscular type is physical activity. They enjoy physical exercise, particularly if strenuous, love the open air, and are adapted to open-air work. They love motion, speed, activity, physical contests and movement of every sort. They are apt to have deep emotion, and great enthusiasm. They work all the time. The strongest point with the muscular type is their vigor and enthusiasm, ability to accomplish, and capacity to help others. They do not express as much sympathy as the thoracic, but do things to relieve suffering. Their weakest point is their tendency to anger; pugnacity goes with muscularity, just as amiability goes with alimentativeness. They may have a chip on their shoulder, frequently get angry or start something.
Occupation: Musculars should choose vocations which give freedom of movement, plenty of it, and fairly rapid movement. They handle all sorts of machinery, especially large and powerful machinery, more expertly than any other type. They make the best chauffeurs, engineers, motormen, miners, lumbermen, foresters and orators, for possessing much emotion themselves, they are able to arouse it in others. They are the most hard working of all types. As employees, they act efficiently, and as employers, they demand efficiency. The muscular is interested in any machine, method or proposition which increases the volume and efficiency of work.
- Osseous Type. This is the fourth stage in human evolution, and these individuals have a pronounced bony framework, whose function is to hold the body upright. Your first impression of the osseous type is that they are raw-boned. Abraham Lincoln was a striking figure of this type. Immovability is the keynote of the osseous type. This gives them stability, unchangingness, hard-headedness, and all the ramifications of stubbornness. Their strongest point is their reliability and determination, their absolute fidelity to an ideal when once it is formed. Their weakest point is obstinacy, and they lose many of the good things they could otherwise get out of life.
Occupation. The osseous type succeeds better in farming, stock-raising, and other pioneer vocations. They do not get on well with people. They cannot dictate to others, nor be dictated to by them. When the osseous is combined with the mental, it makes a powerful boss; otherwise they are drivers, incurring the hostility of subordinates.
- Cerebral or Mental Type. The fifth, latest and last stage in human evolution was the development of the brain and nervous system. We know these individuals in whom the brain and nervous system are more highly developed as the mental type. The first impression is that they are frail and delicate. Their features are more refined, more sensitive, than those of other types. Sensitivity is the keynote of the mental type, and the instinct to think characterizes them. Their aim in life is to be let alone to think, imagine, dream, plan and read. Their strongest point is that they think where the other types feel. They keep abreast of their time, and are usually ahead. They lead in the world of ideas, and create the world’s ideals. Their weakest point is their impracticality.
Occupation: This type must follow mental work. They cannot be successful in any other kind. Children of the mental type should be given a good education, for only failure awaits the mental who is without it. To them physical labor is drudgery, and the touch of material things fills them with shrinking and repugnance. Teaching, library work, research work of all kinds, translating, and proofreading are the lines that this type should follow.
Coloring is the second class of physical characteristics. The two general types are fair-haired and dark-haired. The fair-haired are the path-finders. The dark-haired are the road-makers. The fair-haired have given the world leadership in exploration, discovery, invention, material progress and government. The dark-haired have led in language, arts, music, literature, philosophy and religion. One appeals to the fair-haired through love of publicity, display, material advantages, and progress. One appeals to the dark-haired through sentiment, love of comfort, leisure and family.
The characteristics of the fair-haired type are energy, daring, courage, alertness, hustling, ambition. They are dynamic, fond of physical and mental activity, of games of conquest. They love variety, like change in interests, and in their activities. They like new problems, to see new places, make new acquaintances, and to do original, creative work. They hate confinement and restraint, have little patience for detail, and do not like monotony and routine. They tend to action. All of their bodily processes tend to be positive, active and vigorous. The intellect is naturally creative, resourceful, inventive and original. They are optimistic, hopeful, eager and fearless, speculative, impatient, restless, very fond of change and variety. They love to rule, to handle and manage affairs, to meet life at as many points as possible. They like excitement, crowds and gaiety, and are usually good mixers. They push into the limelight, engage in politics, promote and build up great enterprises, and are particularly adapted to selling, advertising, organizing, colonizing, invention, creation. They are liable to tax themselves physically too far. They are often too changeable, scattering and irresponsible, therefore not always dependable. The fair-haired may be merciless drivers of others. They are liable to extremes of dissipation. Excess of sunlight first stimulates, then irritates, then exhausts, and finally kills fair-haired people.
Occupation. The fair-haired type loves distribution, advertising, selling, inventing, creating new plans, new markets, new products. They love athletics rather than profound study, and do not specialize well. They prefer authorship, construction and engineering, exploration, fishing, hunting, forestry, invention, public work, journalism, law, politics, the stage, and being executives in places free from routine.
The dark-haired type is enduring, intense, imitative, fond of detail, spiritual, meditative, persistent, patient, dependable, slow to anger, constant, conservative. They are inclined to adapt, improve upon and apply already existing ideas, rather than strictly original work. They tend to thought and philosophy, also pessimism. They are not as active, positive, rapid and vigorous physically as the fair-haired, but have greater physical endurance. They are more conservative and more constant, are inclined to concentrate, to specialize, to persevere, to attend to details with painstaking care. They prefer a few friends, a quiet home, affection and the beauties of nature. They tend to introspection, to the development of philosophy, religion, mystery, metaphysical and spiritual activity. They are less aggressive, but more inclined to revenge. They are imitative, and excel in all those situations calling for endurance, sympathy, painstaking and plodding.
Occupation: The dark-haired type prefers business building, calling on same customers, selling same goods, cementing friendships, establishing trade, agriculture, involving patience, specialization, study, isolation, and love for plants and animals. They do well in service rendering jobs, such as art, authorship, medicine, the ministry, music, personal service, research, social service statistics, theology, endurance. Also those kinds of athletics calling for endurance, such as long races, prize fighting, auto racing, art, journalism, law, manufacture, merchandising, administration, detail work.
When some features are fair-haired, and others are dark-haired, the individual has some of both sets of qualities. A medium or combination of the two types modifies the variety loving, impatient and original impulses of the distinct fair-haired, also altering the patient, careful, conserving, constant and meditative marks of the distinct dark-haired.
The next class of character signs is found in the study of profiles. There are three main types: concave, convex and plane, with two combinations, convex upper-concave lower, and concave upper-convex lower.
The marks of the convex are the forehead prominent at the brows, sloping back as it rises. Eyes full and prominent. Nose long, high in the bridge, and curving outward from root to tip. Mouth prominent, lips pushed outward, the chin receding, or sloping backward toward the throat. Convex traits: Quickness of thought and action, practical, keen observer, interested in facts, ready in speech. Energy is the keynote, impatient, impulsive, short endurance. This is the keen, quick, practical, impulsive person, the worker.
The concave marks are, the forehead prominent above and flat at the brows. Chin prominent at the point, sloping inward towards the lips. The eyes are deep-set, hose short, low in the bridge, curving inward from root to tip. The mouth recedes. Concave traits: Slowness of action and thought and speech, great endurance. Interested in theories, meditative, absent minded, philosophizes about everything, mild, moderate energy, patient, determined, impractical, staunch, dependable. They are the calm, deliberate, good natured, theoretical types, the thinkers.
Marks of the plane profile are, the forehead equally prominent at brows and top. Eyes are neither protruding nor deep set. Nose moderate in length, and straight. Mouth neither in nor out, but straight up and down in the profile. Chin neither, protruding nor receding, but in profile shows a vertical line. Plane Traits: Balanced in action, thought and speech. Good judgment, great capacity for both thought and action.
Marks of the convex upper-concave lower. Prominent brows, sloping backward as it rises; eyes full and prominent; nose long, high in bridge, curving outward, concave mouth and concave chin. This is the person who thinks before he acts. Traits of the convex upper-concave lower: Quickness of thought, keen observation, practicality, command of language, abundant energy, patience, good nature, deliberate, determined, with good physical equipment. This type is found everywhere among leaders, executives, rulers, in business, professional, political, artistic and practical lines.
Concave upper-convex lower is just the reverse of the preceding type. The traits are slowness of thought, impracticality, quickness of speech, excitability, good intellect, moderate energy, impulsive, skillful and rapid in carrying out a plan, physically frail.
These are the five great types of character as judged by the profile: First, the quick-thinking, quick-acting type. Second, the slow-thinking, slow-acting type. Third, the moderate, balanced type in thought and action. Fourth, the quick-thinking, slow-acting type.Fifth, the slow-thinking, quick-acting type.
We see the next class of character signs in a study of the proportions of the face, from the full front view. The three divisions are the forehead, eyes and nose, and base of the nose to the chin. The more the forehead slopes back, the more practical it is. The broader the forehead, the greater the power of imagination, and constructive ability. The corners on forehead show good nature. Slants in these places show lack of humor. A rounding of the forehead shows optimism.
This first may be called the Intellectual Section, and in it are found the marks of the thinker. The head is somewhat large for the size of the body, the forehead is high and wide, jaw, chin and lower part of the head usually small, giving the face a triangular shape, broad above and tapering to a point below. The body is usually frail, bones small, muscles slight, shoulders narrow, sloping, features finely chiseled, hands and feet usually small, hair also fine.
The second section, including the eyes and nose, marks the Motive type. These people have square jaws, high cheek bones, the whole face has rather a square appearance. This type is the doer. They are square built, and are persons of achievement.
The next type as indicated by the face is the Mental-Motive type, having the wide, high forehead, square jaw, large nose, and high cheek bones. This is a combination of the two, and is the doer with a brain.
The next is the Mental-Vital, which is marked by great breadth in the second section, eyes and nose. The mark of the type is the width of the head between the ears. This is the organizer, the financier, the judge and the leader.
The next type is the Vital-Motive type, who looks very much like the typical obese person, but is marked by squareness of the jaw, squareness of the shoulders and large bones in the wrists and ankles, high cheekbones, and a large, high-bridged nose.
The final type is the Balanced type, combining them all, mental, motive and vital. This is the all-round person, whose head is big and well developed in all directions, square jaw, high cheekbones, full cheeks and fullness of the neck. They are found everywhere among the leaders. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was an excellent illustration of this type.
Eyes. Other signs of the face are seen in the eyes themselves. If the eyes are too close together, they show shrewdness. If the eyes are small, they may go to the point of cunning. Eyes far apart show that one is gullible. Wide-open eyes indicate innocence. The eyes are the indication of the soul. Wrinkles at the side of the eyes are laughing wrinkles. In a catty person the eyelids almost come together. People with nothing to conceal keep the eyes wide open.
Noses. A person with a long nose is more likely to be dependable than one with a short nose. A high bridge indicates strength of character.
Lips. If the lips are thick, it shows sensuality. If thin, coldness; close together, persistent; turned up at the corners, optimistic, turned down, pessimism. If lips are very thick and full, the person is sensual; if too thin, cruelty. An upper lip that curves inward shows severity. A short upper lip, which rolls upward when smiling, indicates a love of praise.
Chin. A person with a weak, receding chin is not a fighter. A very pointed and receding chin shows that others easily influence them.This type does well in work that does not call for courage or pugnacity. A pointed chin shows adaptability and tactfulness. Squareness of chin, breadth, shows endurance, persistence, stubbornness, and fighting characteristics.
No one can tell a lie without twitching the lips at the corners. The voice tends to be a trifle raised in telling a lie. The individual who, constantly repeats explanations is probably not telling the truth. A person who sits still, without movement, is unsympathetic. If a person seems conscious of looking you square in the eye, look out.
We have covered, thus far, in the briefest outline the working points for reading character. Notice the general correspondence between certain types in the different classes of signs. Keep in mind the fact that coloring simply accentuates the qualities in these various types, or modifies them.
The best way to apply this lesson is to practice on yourself, then on the people whom you know the best. Reading character isn’t magic. It consists in knowing what the signs of character are, in observing them, and working out their various combinations. With the simple outline given here, anyone, by steady attention, can learn to read character unerringly.
Chapter 17
Psychology of Business
You are in business to succeed, and success is spelled m-o-n-e-y. It does not matter whether you are selling the products of your own hands and brain or those of others, or whether you are selling qualities of mind and efficiency. Your business must eventually be an expression of you, for really you are selling yourself when you are selling your goods. In the second place, you must believe in your business as you believe in yourself.
One of the most effective salesmen I have ever known would ring the door bell and greet the owner of the house with these words: “We are the Bartell Music Company. We have learned through a friend of yours that you have a child the right age for taking music lessons.” That first statement was an appeal to his prospective purchaser’s vanity. If he had said, “I am Jones, Agent for the Bartell Music Company,” it would not have carried any weight, but the fact that the Bartell Music Company stood on the front porch waiting to ascertain her wants, with the readiness to satisfy them, was the opening wedge. This man eventually became the sole owner and proprietor of that business. He was saying it for ten years before he became it.
Your business is subject to certain changeless laws, the most important of which is the law of supply and demand. A million dollars invested in VCRs would today be a white elephant as a business proposition, while a million dollars’ worth of DVD players would be an absolutely certain success. Test your own business by this.
If you prepare the way daily for your business’ general outcome and the day’s contacts, your consciousness of what your business is and what it will do, goes before you. Telepathy is a demonstrable fact. You transmit what you really think about yourself and your goods to the other fellow. Your general idea of whether the day is going to be successful or not profoundly affects its success or failure. The people in authority will catch your desire for promotion when your own consciousness of your value is clear and definite.
Your success in business depends upon your knowledge of the people who are helping you to sell as well as the people who come to buy. If you have to guess how each person will act under a given condition, success may be an uncertain thing. If you know to what type a person belongs, and know that in a majority of cases that type will be interested in a certain class of values, and will be appealed to by a given method of presentation and will decide and act in a certain way, then you are effectively using psychology in your business.
Study carefully the chapter on Character Analysis. Humanity is a piano. No matter what make of case, the internal mechanism is about the same. You appeal to and reach most people by means of certain dominant interests. Finally, your success depends upon you, and not upon any single quality that you have, but upon the weakest and the strongest. They all have to work if you are going to get the best results, so you must bring your every faculty up to the highest possible efficiency.
The Working Plan: Your business will flow through certain channels. It will follow the plan you have laid out, much as a house follows its foundation and plan. Having made your plan, you now turn to the materials, and all the materials in the psychology of business are within yourself. Success, when you achieve it, is your own. Success means position, honor, power, happiness, money, and these ought to spell satisfaction. The goal of your business is that you want money enough to enable you to achieve contentment. Having your plan, turn to methods, no matter your profession. You must go into Executive Session with the Ways and Means Committee at once.
To succeed, you must be able to inspire others to help you by cooperating with you and by purchasing from you. In its final analysis, all success comes to us through others. This is the key. People band together, not only for protection, but for cooperation. You must realize that they must be motivated and inspired in their desires to cooperate with you and further your success. Humanity is the universal channel for money, friends, happiness, and every other factor of success, and all depends upon your ability to inspire them toward you. If you study all the great successful leaders, you will find that this great law measures their success. Politicians, employers, executives, the leaders of any class, each in his or her own way, has climbed up by this power to inspire others to work with them. This underlying principle governs all achievement. All success must come to you through humanity. Therefore, the degree of your ability to inspire others will surely measure your returns from life. We have the standards of highest value within us.
The true way to success is through personal charisma or “presence.” It isn’t magic, just recognition of the law and wise use of it. It doesn’t require grind, rush and struggle, but poise, calm and certainty, advancing easily and smoothly, with the utmost freedom. Keep in mind, then, that others are the doors through which you must pass to your domain. Then you are ready to take the next step to deal with the ways of utilizing this channel.
Inspiration has certain basic elements. Begin your business by having the largest possible vision of its outcome. Why settle for some small success, when big things are constituted of little things? This same principle applies with reference to your staff. To use this great channel of success, you must know how to inspire people in the direction you desire.
The mind is like an ocean, unstable, changeable, ceaseless in motion, subject to eddies, calms and storms, but for all that it can be mastered. Our first discovery of the law of displacement enabled us to build ships of wood, and to acquire partial mastery over the ocean. Further knowledge of the laws of displacement gave us the ocean liner and practical mastery. Most people sail the ocean of mind in a windjammer, in the blind, primitive fashion of ten centuries ago, while they might just as well learn to sail it safely and surely. The vast masses are still helpless, adrift on the ocean of mind, subject to every change and whim. Now the ocean of mind is composed of individual minds plus. You must build your own ocean of mind, by motivating and inspiring them one at a time to your vision.
Humanity stands at your door, clamoring to do you favors and aid your progress. While “it is more blessed to give than to receive,” it is a curious fact that you always feel more kindly toward the person for whom you do something than for the one who does something for you. The whole world is the same. The greatest favor you can do for people is to let them help you gain your goal. Those who have risen to prominence, power and success have done so through the help of those whom they could inspire.
In studying your abilities to motivate and inspire others, the first question is, what do the people you have met think of you? Do you know what they think, or how far you could motivate or inspire them? If you have the key, you know what they think. When you hold this key to progress, you do not “occasionally exert” yourself, you use it as naturally as breathing or walking, without exertion. It becomes a part of you, and you can open the book of life to the pages you want. Realizing that your course to the goal lies through others, and that you must inspire and motivate them, you naturally turn to the method of doing it.
All the people you meet will fall into two groups: First, those who are in a position personally to further your ends if you can inspire them to do so, and second, those who can never help you directly or through their own efforts, and they are much the larger number. You must learn to motivate the first group, but you must not overlook the second. They can be your direct means of getting in touch with those who can help you. It is well constantly to build up this great class, for the best advertisement you can have is another who thinks well of you and expresses his good opinion to someone who never heard of you. When another adds his paean of praise to that, they herald your coming, and your task is easier. When these people have reported you to those who can help you, you must be able to make a good first impression, then to live up to it. You must favorably impress people with your ability and personality, and you must repeat it so that their good impression of you grows stronger the longer they know you.
The two steps are, a favorable first impression, and a ripening respect and admiration after successive meetings. You must meet people, many people, classify them, choose them, and you must give as well as receive. Five minutes of exerting personal charm will produce an impression or cement a friendship, such as a haphazard way could not do in months or years. The people in both these classes are very much alike. Their differences are largely external. They show their points of likeness and unlikeness outwardly. Learn to know the signs. The moment we consciously exercise the essential factors of success, so that we strongly and evenly develop our mind, we can motivate and inspire others. Order a mind of this type from the only person who can build it, yourself.
The three great groups of mental qualities are: The hidden qualities are will power, concentration, and time efficiency. The conscious qualities are judgment, practical memory, effective speech, and motivating people. The action qualities are ambition and initiative.
Study yourself. First, what are your mental wares? What is the demand now existing for your ability, and what price ought it to command? Second, what is the exact quality of what you have to offer? Third, what steps are you taking to develop your wares, to make them more valuable and insure your progress?
Will power: Every business has a head. Every nation has a ruler, and you have an executive — your will. There are two kinds of will, the winning will and the losing will. The winning will holds ever to the goal, advances and recedes when necessary, but never losing sight of the outcome. The losing will has no such adjustment, and develops into obstinacy. Every person has a fundamental distaste for effort, continued, concerted effort, but yielding to such weakness never succeeded. All worthwhile things require continued and intelligent effort to accomplish. You have the qualities and the resources, but your will is the leader. The moment the mind points out the wise course, consciously exercise your will to that end. Strong people become stronger by exercising the will in small things. They meet every necessity with the mental attitude, I can and I will. I will to will, therefore, I can. The only limitation on your achievement is your will.
Test your will, therefore, with these tests. Do you choose what is easiest or best? Having decided, do you carry out to the utmost? Do you permit obstacles to swerve you and change your mind? Do you recognize the difference between will power and stubbornness? Are you easily turned aside? Do you worry? Can you banish fear and worry at will? If you cannot, learn to do it now, for in these are the root of all our ills. Use your will to banish them. Do not permit your imagination to anticipate or create the possible misfortunes of the future. Calmly use your will to kill the germ of worry and fear at first. Use your will to create a prevailing mental attitude of the right kind. Refuse to imagine misfortune, and fill your mind with bright and hopeful anticipation. If you will, you can. If you will not, you cannot.
Concentration: The next of your strong elements, concentration, is the power to fill the thought idea with one idea, and to shut out all else. Use it for every task and for every problem. Fill the mind with the subject in hand, so that the whole brain power is actively bringing all its powers into action. When the concentration has served its purpose, relax, wipe the slate, and you are ready for another task of concentration. Ask yourself these questions: Can you consciously induce sleep in five minutes anytime, day or night? Can you concentrate on the work in hand when it is uninteresting, freeing your mind of everything else? Can you concentrate on any subject at will, in noisy places, and bring all your abilities to bear on the task in hand? If so, you have learned to concentrate.
The next one of the hidden qualities is time efficiency. There is a legal phrase, “time is of the essence of this contract,” and time efficiency calls for the use of time to leave an investment after it is gone. Recreation and exercise are an investment in health insurance. Study gives knowledge that abides long after the time of study has departed. Knowledge has a money value. Money buys things for contentment. These are time investments. We attend most of our work with too much lost motion, too much wasted time. You must learn a skillful use of your time, the effective disposition of it. Use a “What are you doing?” card, and answer such questions as this: How much time of your working hours do you spend without getting returns? Do you feel that you are getting the utmost out of your working hours? How effective are you compared with possible results? Have you ever studied cashing in your time at full value, or have you ever tried to practice it?
The first of your conscious qualities is judgment, which is the power for looking ahead and forecasting the outcome of your business, or any problem of your life, or others’ lives. You use it best when you work on your problem as if it were another’s problem, that is, make it impersonal. Just get down to cold, bare facts. A well-balanced judgment is based on your own experiences, on current working facts, and on the experiences of others. You use all the senses, all the stored up memories, and all the known current working facts, and avail yourself of all the experiences of others in forming a wise judgment. Test it by these questions: In daily life do you attempt to forecast the outcome of matters arising in your daily life both of a business and social nature? In what percentage of cases is your judgment correct? By your experience, do you rate your judgment as sound concerning men and events?
Practical memory: The subtlest form of flattery is to be able to remember a face, and to recall the name that goes with it. “I remember you” is the big asset that you can cash in. If you add the facility to recall the person’s personal affairs and peculiarities, it is still more valuable. In fact, anyone can remember by following certain simple rules. Plenty of people cannot recall your name, but can tell you the name and batting average of every player in the major league. Three or four reasons for it. The first law of memory is repetition. A second reading of a book makes its contents much more clear. The baseball expert does it by repeating often in his mind, and with his mouth the facts. If you concentrate on remembering a person’s name, repeat it mentally and verbally, and use it often in speaking to them, it will fasten it in the memory. Practice reviewing the events of the day, the people, their names and incidents concerning them. Get the utmost detail. Nothing is too trivial.
The second law is that of the intensity of impression. Heed, listen, look. You will get the name the first time if you give attention. Get a clear-cut mental picture of names and faces. You will remember the things that interest you. Then pay attention; concentrate; use your eyes and ears. Another law is that of association of ideas. It consists in tying up “I might forget” with “I’m likely to remember.” The fourth is ingenuity, which is a form of association. Practice the first two, repetition of the facts to be remembered and intensity of impression, and ask yourself these questions: Can you say to most people whom you have met once or twice, “I remember you. I met you, Mr. Smith, at a banquet in Los Angeles.” Can you recall, without hesitation, facts or principles that relate to the business you are conducting? Do the things that you want to remember arise spontaneously at your call? If so, you have a practical working memory.
Effective speech: Speech is the one great method of conveying your ideas to others. It is the means of persuading them to see your viewpoint. It requires two things: First, the retention of well-organized ideas, or knowing what you are going to say. Second is technical control of voice, which includes the tone of voice, inflection, emphasis and delivery. One person interests us because their delivery is interesting. In controlling the voice, the first essential is deep breathing, second is clear enunciation, and third is modulation, or change in tone, volume and rapidity. Believe what you are saying, practice reading and telling a story to an imaginary audience until it sounds convincing, then tell it to a real audience. Answer these questions: Can you voice your thoughts clearly? Do you speak effectively? Do your words sound convincing and interesting?
Motivation is based on a knowledge of human nature. All people are alike physically in a general way. They differ in manner, physical effect, aspect and look differently. All people are alike mentally, and yet they differ in minor points. We ordinarily mask and conceal certain underlying things. An age-old instinct tells us that if we show our inmost emotions and feelings, we lay ourselves open to the manipulation of others. Certain motives govern us all, but we mask and conceal them. We are afraid of the other fellow, and forget that he is as much afraid of us as we are of him. This will help you to overcome your timidity. Develop your confidence, and forget your fears.
Human nature has two major controlling motives. Curiosity and self-interest/selfishness are the two universal doors of human nature through which you can pass to success. Curiosity is the introductory motive. Self-interest is the motive that causes it to act. Self-interest has produced more good than any other one factor in the history of humanity. You use curiosity to open the door, and self-interest to land the sale. Self-interest is of two forms, selfishness, the destructive kind that reduces wages to keep down expenses, and constructive self-interest which makes better conditions to get more effective service. You cannot injure others without hurting yourself, and you cannot help others without bettering yourself. Life is service. You get back what you give out.
The psychological moment is the time when conditions are favorable to secure action on your proposition. Learn to recognize it. Learn to create it by appealing to curiosity and self-interest when you need it, and you can turn it into gold. You have to learn how to persuade. The hardest thing for anyone to do is to say “yes” to a proposition. People usually say “no” verbally when they are ready to say “yes” mentally. When the psychological moment comes, act. Just take it for granted that they will agree, and start settling the details that make favorable action easy. The average person will usually allow you to persuade him, and will feel relieved when you do. It requires skill and diplomacy. Do not ask for a decision, but take a favorable decision for granted. The moment you have a favorable decision taken for granted, introduce some subject of discussion that would naturally rise at that point. If a crisis arises, bring up some factor of the case for discussion that does not cloud the main issue. They term this the cross fire, and it is wonderfully effective. Answer these questions: What do you know about human nature? Do you study it? Do you apply its findings? What two big factors in human nature play an important part in influencing others? Can you create the psychological moment? How do you do it? Can you persuade the other fellow?
Ambition is the first of the great action qualities. It begins as desire, grows into a gnawing hunger and ends in ambition, which means you seek methods of satisfying its demands. Ambition pushes a person to seek the means of getting the things he sees to be desirable in life. All achievement lines up as follows: (1) desire, (2) ambition, (3) will power, and (4) initiative. Select the big things so that when you have achieved them, you will be content. Answer these questions: Are you ambitious? Do you just wish, or do you act on your desires? What is your goal in life, and what means are you planning to achieve it?
The last one great element of business psychology is initiative, the power that makes opportunity to order. Initiative is the entering wedge. It finds something to do, finds a way to do it, and discovers a value in doing it. You must always keep initiative working. It looks for signs of an opening as a hunter looks for signs of game. A person with initiative does not wait for opportunity, but finds and opens a door. If nothing is inside, knock on another until you find the right door. You make your own opportunity by using your initiative. Opportunity is a favorable occasion, and opportunity comes through the channel of others. Look over your list. Choose the people who can help you make the opportunity. Set about persuading them to help, and do not be bound and trammeled by conventions. First, decide what you want, second, decide who can give it to you, third, formulate a plan and exercise your initiative, and you will find that you can make an opportunity every day. Answer these questions: What moves for self-betterment have you actually made in past years? What opportunities have you found because of your own search? Are you ready to act when you see a chance? Do you so act? Do you feel that you possess initiative?
You can work two ways at the art of getting there. One is to depend upon your own knowledge and experience alone, the other is to add others’ knowledge and experience. Having decided on this latter way, get your working plan in order. Utilize the findings from successful people’s experiences. Apply these principles to your own needs. These are only theories until you put them into operation for yourself. Set a value on yourself, and constantly add to that value. It does not take any more breath to say a million dollars than it does to say ten cents. Others measure you at the value you set, and your facial expression is your price tag. This is the psychology of business. Keep these facts in mind, then dig.
Chapter 18
The Psychology of Efficiency
You achieve efficiency in your highest expression of you. How well you express your latent qualities sets your degree of efficiency. We each have in ourselves the potential elements of genius. Our business is to find out how to set them free and get them into effective operation. We may have particular characteristics, and do particular things that will make failure certain. These faults self-advertise and sell the idea of our disqualification. Such, for instance, is the panhandler, who is a walking advertisement of inefficiency. We may have certain characteristics and do certain things that will make success certain. The good natured, intelligent, reliable person exhibits his or her qualities so that they self-advertise and sell right ideas of those qualifications and guarantee success.
The Parable of the Talents illustrates the duty of success to the utmost individual capacity. A one-talent person working at his highest efficiency is worth a hundred undeveloped ten-talent people. While we differ in the degree and variety of natural endowments, everyone has the potential elements of success. Success consists in realizing that you have it in you, that you are worthy to succeed, then carrying your qualities to market. For no matter how high the quality of your faculties and abilities may be, they do not spell success until you market them.
You do not actually sell your qualities. You merely sell ideas of them. Success consists in selling your ideas of them rather than selling some one’s else’s ideas of them. A salesperson does not sell so many barrels of oil, but certain ideas of them. The “goods” are delivered afterward. A real estate agent does not sell a house, but an idea of a house. When you sell your services to a purchaser, you merely sell an idea of what your services will be worth to the firm. You deliver the “goods” afterward.
The psychology of efficiency hinges on a right idea of your goods and how to get that right idea across to a prospective buyer’s mind. This resolves itself into the following formula: How to sell the true idea of your best capabilities in the right field or market. This operates in the following order: (1) Develop your best capabilities to the highest possible degree. (2) Learn to describe them truly so that you can present them and sell them, so that the prospective buyer will get a correct idea of what you can do. (3) Identify your market. Find the right field for your goods or services. (4) All that is left to do is to deliver the goods, to make the prospective purchaser know that you are the person for the place, or that your goods will better fill his needs than any others.
Your success depends on your skill in discovering the open way of access to the prospect’s mind, then finding his particular point of interest in your proposition. In what way it can serve him and forward his interests? Having discovered this point, the next move is to illustrate your ability to help him achieve that point of interest until you can close the deal.
Suggestion is the supreme agent in these steps. It is present in your idea, your presentation, your words, your tones, your eye, your gesture, your pose of body, your muscular tension, for these are all ways of expressing yourself — and it is ideas of yourself that you are selling. Avoid antagonism, criticism and comparison when using suggestion. Commending a person’s effort to be up to date is far better than intimating that his methods are behind the time.
Make your suggestion tend to produce direct results in action. Suggesting to an employer that he needs and wants your services is far better than asking for a position. It is good suggestion to show similarity of ideas, also to manifest the probability of growth. Propose the idea that one strong point of your qualifications is just one point in your all-round fitness. Picturing yourself in active service is good autosuggestion. Find out what the prospect wants, and avoid showing that you want something very much. Instead, hold to the idea that you can supply what he lacks. This sort of suggestion leads to action.
The psychology of efficiency resolves itself into a problem of skill and availability. An analysis of your present equipment will be helpful, because you need to know your faults with the idea of correcting them. Maybe your chief fault is poor fuel. You haven’t good “gas.” Your mind isn’t filled with right ideas and in such order that you can handle them. Maybe the piston rod rings leak, and you do not get the high compression of determination and persistence. Maybe it is a faulty carburetor. You are not a good “mixer.” Maybe the spark plugs are misfiring, and the fire of enthusiasm is lacking. Success means firing on every cylinder, whether you are a two- or a twelve-cylinder machine. Maybe your cooling system doesn’t work and you get “hot” from lack of self-control. Maybe it is a cracked cylinder — broken health.
A car kept in repair is renewed in every part in seven years. Your body renews and replaces every cell every nine months. Go to the repair shop of that supreme fixer, your subconscious mind. Tell it what you want, and revisit the repair shop until the rebuilding process is complete. Success depends primarily on physical capacity. Heart power and stomach power can put anything over. You must have health, energy, virility and endurance to be physically able to do your work.
Mental capacities. You must bring your mental qualities up to their highest effectiveness. You can train every mental power by clearly perceiving what they mean and how they work and then going into action. Chief among them are perception, alertness, accuracy, punctuality, memory, imagination, concentration, adaptability, self-control, determination, tact, diplomacy, and good judgment.
Perception is looking at things with your mind as well as with your eyes — a stick stuck into the water reports crooked to the eye, but straight to the mind.
Alertness is mentally sharp ears. “Yes” pronounced crisply means one thing, pronounced with a falling inflection, it means another. Yes, with a rising inflection, means something else.
Accuracy is the result of taking pains to do, think and say things correctly.
Punctuality is a mental habit most people haven’t acquired. People who would spurn a dishonest action pilfer all sorts of time by being a few minutes behind time. If you have “a little behind hand,” amputate it.
Memory grows stronger by every effort to remember. It grows each time you affirm, “I have a perfect memory.” It gets clearer as you repeat a thing to be remembered and holds strongly to the object of your attention. It recalls the apt-to-be-forgotten when tied up with the sure-to-be-remembered.
Imagination grows by use. Use it daily to picture out the success of your undertaking, and never let it run undirected.
Concentration directs the attention of the mind to one thing and keeps it away from everything else. Practice looking so intently as to shut out sound, listening so intently as to shut out reports of the eyes, or thinking so intently as to practically inhibit all the senses.
Adaptability is a wonderful attainment, to be able to adjust to new and unexpected conditions. It is the ability to “back up” gracefully when you realize that for each backward step you take, eventually you will take two forward. It is the temper of the Damascus blade, which can bend double and not break.
Stability is the power to “stay put.” It grows every time you stick to a purpose. Stability is the habit of “being there” when the occasion calls you.
Determination is that resolute state of mind that holds to its objective no matter what diversions arise. It is the “center” of your whole army of qualities, and unless it holds, you will lose the battle.
Tact is the skill to find a way of easing the pressure, relieving the tension, smoothing ruffled feelings, turning away wrath and impatience, and disarming injustice. Often tact alone will open the way to achievement.
Diplomacy is mental maneuvering for an advantageous position. It is finding the way out of an impossible situation. A young sales agent went to a house all primed with his story, but was completely baffled when the door opened an inch and a cold eye demanded what he wanted. He hesitated and then good naturedly remarked, “Madam, I believe I have forgotten the password.” The door opened and he had a chance to present his case.
Good judgment is a wise forecasting the outcome of any project. It is a faculty that all people pride themselves as possessing. Its motto is “I told you so.” Really good judgment is based upon your own experiences, upon others’ experiences under similar circumstances, and upon the current working facts in the case.
Heart Qualities are certain emotional qualities necessary to any large success. They are ambition, hopefulness. Optimism, enthusiasm, cheerfulness, self-confidence, courage, persistence, patience, earnestness, sympathy, frankness, expressiveness, humor, loyalty, love of others. You possess these to some degree, but you must develop them to their highest expression to give you a perfect emotional equipment.
Ambition furnishes you with motive power to continue to perfect success.
Hopefulness is a mental anchor out to the future success, which sees the invisible and holds to it as a reality until it comes into expression.
Optimism sees the bright side of things. Business is always good. The weather is fine. All things work together for good to him that thinks good.
Enthusiasm kindles all the fires of energy, keeps all the powers at flood-tide, and carries a difficult position by storm. It grows from your sense of your real worth and the value of your goods or services.
Cheerfulness keeps smiling, lives on the sunny side of the street, says the helpful word, is glad to be alive, and is busy every moment in the “cheering up” business.
Self-confidence rests upon your realization of your ability. Claim for yourself every quality and power you see in others. Concede to others every excellence you discover in yourself.
Courage grows out of optimism and self-confidence. No matter what it is, it can be done, and you can do it, and will do it.
Persistence keeps steadily at the task, whether you work or play, you keep your objective clearly in sight.
Patience teaches you how to play the waiting game. Waiting for mental processes to be completed in others, for gathering of material-factors that will build your temple of success.
Earnestness keeps you from lagging in the race, and inspires others with the idea that you believe in yourself and your proposition.
Sympathy helps you to put yourself in the other fellow’s place, think with him, and know how he feels.
Frankness brings you out into the open, puts all the cards on the table, and takes away from others the idea that you have any ulterior motive.
Expressiveness gives music to your voice, a light to your eye, a charm to your personality.
Humor saves many a bad situation with a good story or bright saying. Keep the fun stop in your organ well tuned, but do not use it too much or others may deem you a “comedian.”
Loyalty to the best in yourself, to others, and to your undertaking is the main element in the stuff called integrity.
Love of others is the oil that makes all the wheels go. It gives all confidence, for you cannot fear that which you love. It reacts on you, and you cannot help others without helping yourself. Go over these one by one to see how fully you have developed them, then begin to build them up.
Certain Ethical Qualities are essential to success. The ethical principle is that your business is equally helpful to others as to you. To this end, your intentions are right. You mean to be honest and truthful. You are of good moral character and reliable, dependable. You love your chosen work because it enables you to serve others and yourself. Certain Spiritual Qualities are essential.
Idealism enables you to see the higher purposes of life, and to cherish the unselfish desires. It is the imaging power by which you construct the ideal of a finished and glorious, success.
Vision enables you to see the large outcome of your work. It keeps you from looking at life narrowly.
Faith is confidence in the reality of your ideals and vision. It holds to this reality until you have turned it into external form.
Desire to serve — The secret formula of genius is “I am among you as one who serves.” Every quality in you is embedded in the obligation to serve.
Ability to understand others — Success depends upon your ability to know the other’s need and to supply that need. Approach others through their curiosity about your proposition, and their self-interest about what degree it can be of use to them. This is the key to human nature.
This is an outline of every essential element of success, from an attractive physical appearance to the highest qualities of character, and you can safely neglect none of them. You need to cultivate their use, increase the degree of their activity, and steadily improve their quality.
Chapter 19
The Psychology of Abundance
The key to abundance lies in your consciousness. The laws of prosperity and economic freedom are specific and we may know and apply them. The same laws, by which inner states come into outer expression, generally apply here. If your consciousness is rich in realization of the spiritual abundance of the universe, you will find that richness moving into abundance of material things.
Probably the crudest thing you can hear a person say is, “I own this.” In the literal, absolute sense we cannot own anything. God is the only owner or proprietor. We should never forget that. We are only stewards and custodians of material things.
The impulse toward abundance is perfectly natural. You have seen a dog carrying bones away, a squirrel collecting his supply, or even a bird laying by store, conserving against the future. The desire to be prosperous is a perfectly natural thing.
The desire for abundance is also intelligent, for it provides opportunity to exploit life in its higher phases. If the questions “what shall we eat, drink, and wear” compel any state of civilization to react immediately, it has no time nor inspiration for advance. Yet when they lay up a reserve, and the necessity for reaction is not present, they have time to develop the arts, sciences and philosophies that have made for the world’s advance.
Desire for abundance is a perfectly moral desire, for the principle of justice is universal. The right to secure abundance and provide for the future is not for a favored few, but for the labor force, the lowest and the highest. The only just, economic freedom is that abundance should come to everybody, just as it now comes to comparatively few. The desire is ethical, for no high state of civilization has ever been or will ever be possible apart from some form of individual ownership. For therein lies the incentive to progress, and unless we have that, no progress is permanent.
While individual ownership stimulates competition, and promotes one individual to prominence over others, no one can safely reach a great height who does so at the expense of others. The loneliness of the very rich is an irony of life. When they acquire these riches at the expense of others, immutable law has ordained that moth and rust shall corrupt, thieves break in and steal, and profligate sons squander until the level is reached again. Whenever a family begins to accrue vast wealth, the great leveling process begins to work, balancing up and balancing down. Ancient Egypt towered above all nations in literary, scientific and other achievements, and became a heap of sand.
This observation highlights the fundamental law of economic progress, that cooperation is the only safe principle upon which economic freedom can safely depend. Some of our great industrialists are applying this law in the spirit of cooperation and practical copartnership with their employees. The spirit of universal fellowship forbids that one should want while another revels and squanders.
Economic freedom rests upon two presumptions, the power to produce, and the right to consume. We have hardly begun to realize the full producing capacity of the sum of human life, yet we are face to face with the fact that millions are in want. The explanation is that we have not solved the problem of equitable distribution of the earth’s abundance, and that is a fundamental factor in economic progress.
Those who raise crops, cut timber or mine for ore are producers. Other producers manufacture them into higher products or usefulness. Still other producers furnish means of transportation and distribution to the needs of millions. The teacher who calls the latent mental powers in the child’s mind into action, and teaches the child how to use them, is a producer of efficient personality. The teacher of religion who calls out the higher and better impulses, furnishing ideals and incentives for better living, is also a producer of the highest quality. All classes and conditions of humanity fall into line with the first law of economic abundance.
The right to consume is based on the fact that we have produced something of equivalent value. Paul said, “He that will not work, neither shall he eat.” Every time we give a panhandler a handout, we contribute to his poverty. Every time a person shortchanges another, he cheats himself out of dollars. Bargain hunters steadily impoverish themselves, while those who seek to get something for nothing, will soon have nothing to get nothing with.
This is all based upon the great law of compensation. No one has a right to render a service for which there is no compensation, nor to receive compensation for that which he did not do. To be sure, the compensation may not be of the same kind, but we must never forget the obligation of the law. If you receive a lift on the road by some passing driver, remember that you owe the debt to the next person you find in need of help. Only in this way can you maintain economic self respect.
An eminent lecturer used to say that if you want a million dollars, and know how to use your subconsciousness, you can have it in four years. This statement is generally true, but it needs modification by two principles. The first is that you must have an idea or possession that is worth a million dollars to the world before you can go out and collect its equivalent justly. The second is that you cannot have a million dollars from the world, which the justice of the Eternal Right governs, unless in getting that million you obey the law of compensation, giving value for everything received.
Abundance rests upon the principle of trust. A person who has possessions is the custodian of public resources. Moreover, he may lay aside not only for himself, but he must also lay aside for altruism, to promote the other fellow’s prosperity.
If any of us rest under the illusion that anything is actually our own, please remember that the municipal tax collector has a claim. The county tax collector forces his claim. We cannot forego the State’s demand. The Federal Government claims its right to our possessions in many ways, especially income tax. Nor is the claim on our possessions limited to these. Our own economic safety depends upon making other nations financially safe. When we have done this, a call comes to feed and clothe poor children, or flood, fire and earthquake sufferers. Our prosperity is intimately bound up in the welfare of others.
The secret of abundance lies in one’s consciousness. Jesus said, “A man’s life consists not in the abundance of the things he possesses, but in the consciousness of that which he is.” When we reach that realization of abundance within, then obeying the law of all becoming, our inner state moves into outer expression.
The scripture gives the law of prosperity, “Be diligent in business, fervent in spirit, serving the Lord.” Here are two counts on the spiritual side to one count on the material side, but the spiritual comes first. It means to hustle, and while hustling, remember that “The earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof, the round world and they that dwell therein.” In this way you establish a conscious oneness with the source of all abundance, and your thought becomes a channel of inspiration and action for its outward expression. The consciousness of abundance is the secret of abundance. Most poverty of the world arises from poverty of consciousness. It is born of that ancient heresy that there is not enough to go round, and that because the almighty abundance is a little short, some of us should go with less than we need — and this in the face of the fact that when the Infinite Abundance had finished creation, it did not contain a poor house.
Revise your ideas of lack, and fill your mind with the limitless riches of the Infinite. Develop your realization of oneness with the all-life. Realize that you are the open channel through which His life expresses, in which His health glows, where His love manifests, and His abundance rises into unlimited supply.
People are poor because they think poor thoughts, and some become rich when they think rich thoughts — not thoughts about riches, but thoughts of rich, spiritual value. As your consciousness that God is abundance rises, your poverty will cease, just as the realization that He is health will cause your sickness to cease.
Money draws money. Most people think in terms of pennies and nickels, some in terms of dimes, a few in terms of quarters, and occasionally some have enlargement of the heart and think in terms of dollars. If you think of material prosperity as nickels and dimes, you have a nickel and dime consciousness. If you are consciousness of God’s abundance in terms of thousands and millions, it will draw returns in harmony with that consciousness. Enlarge your inner consciousness of prosperity and abundance, and you will get the thing for which it stands.
A person, who gave his last dollar in an offering, received $10 from an almost unheard of source the next day. He gave the $10, expecting another tenfold return, but received one dollar back. He asked why. When he put the one dollar in, he put in $10 worth of riches of thought and consciousness, but when he put the $10 in, he only put in one dollar in faith. Experiences of this kind demonstrate that the law will work.
These experiences are not unique. They merely show that the law still stands. God is the Infinite Abundance, and every idea of His incorporated into material form is for our use, and that Love is the great power that causes us to pass on God’s ideas. He governs by law and order, and all His ideas move with unfailing certainty and regularity. The consciousness of these facts will cure poverty, and bring abundance to everyone.
Chapter 20
The Psychology of Health
We hear of mortal mind and Divine Mind, conscious, subconscious and superconscious, until we are apt to think that there are many minds, when in fact, there is but One Mind, which functions in different ways. Subconscious mind is that vast, uncharted realm of mental activity that plays so great a part in our material, mental and spiritual well being. It is forever busy in the functional operation of our bodies. Countless subconscious mental processes precede one conscious mental operation. It likewise plays a large part in what we term the spiritual activities of our being.
The subconscious was originally part of the undivided Mind of the Universe, that is, before Mind or Being created any individual expressions. When, in the creative process, Life or Mind took individual form of expression, it brought into this limited form all the qualities of the Absolute. It arose by an evolutionary process until life reached the human form, but all the memories and impressions and experiences of all our past had clothed it. These constitute the “mist” through which Mind functions as subconscious, which is referred to in Genesis: “there went up a mist over the whole earth!” An individual subconscious mind, functioning through this mist, does not see clearly, but “sees through a glass darkly,” as Paul says. The basic principle of mind as manifested in the subconscious is divine in origin.
Subconscious powers: We read that “man was made in the image of God,” and since an image contains all the elements of its original within itself, it follows that humanity is the embodiment of all the principles of Universal Being. Whatever there is in Absolute Mind is potentially present in His human image. Since the Absolute is apart from all spatial and time relationships, we shall expect to find some reflection of that fact in humanity. In the subconscious we find a sense of absolute time, space, mathematics, harmony, etc.
The subconscious always knows the exact time. We can charge the subconscious to awaken at a given time and soon find the power to do so. We can practice imaging the face of a clock with the idea of seeing where the hands stand, and in a short time can look within and know the exact time. If we try to calculate the passage of time by conscious mental methods, it becomes a species of guessing, but when we acquire skill in letting the subconscious register, we have an absolute timepiece within.
This is essentially a reflection or image of the power of Divine Mind with which “a thousand years are as a day, etc.” Absolute Mind is an eternal now. There is no yesterday nor tomorrow in the Absolute Mind. Occasionally some seer or prophet will clear away the mists of matter, the Divine Mind within will function on its superconscious or divine plane, and he will see things as present in Absolute Mind that are a thousand years in the future as measured by human experience.
The subconscious holds a sense of absolute space. In Absolute Mind there is only here. Clairvoyants, in their moments of deepest and clearest perception frequently exclaim, “Everywhere is here,” meaning that no space exists in mind. When thinking of a friend, you do not need to project your thought across space. You merely call your friend’s name and he is present. This reveals the kinship in all mind, for in Absolute Mind there is no up nor down, in nor out, here or there, only here and now in space and time.
Mathematical prodigies attain a perfect and instantaneous mastery of all mathematical problems without any objective knowledge of the principles of mathematics. Many people have wrestled with a problem in mathematics, and given it up only to have it projected into conscious attention as a dream. They knew the solution instantly in the subconscious, but it could not register what it knew until sleep inhibited the objective activities.
The subconscious has a sense of the absolute science of chemistry. It knows exactly every chemical action and reaction. It carries on the most elaborate chemical processes in the digestive processes daily, and the functional activities of the kidneys, liver and other organs of the body without making a single mistake. In fact, the subconscious holds a perfect knowledge of every principle of being as it applies to human life. This is why Paul said, that we are to “work out our welfare, because it is God that works in us both to will and to do.”
Subconscious mind’s work: When mind functions as subconscious, its characteristic task is that of the builder. It has built every body in which life has been incarnated. When it started with single cell life it had within it the idea of the human form divine, and it continued through all the ages to move upward to at last perfect our complex organism. It never lets any variation of expression turn it from the final completed work.
Through all those ages it preserved the memories of all the structures it had built and repeated them in its successive buildings. Some forty-three vestigial remains of our animal ancestry remain in the human body, such as the tip of the ear and the fan-shaped muscles on the side of the head, none of which have any functional capacity. The Bible recalls to us that we have more than thirty mental characteristics that are purely animal in their origin. Moreover, in the first six weeks of the fetal life of the child, it repeats the six great stages of material creation, and only in the sixth week does it take on the human form divine. We give these facts to show the marvelous fidelity of the subconscious to a plan or an idea.
Therefore, we get the next characteristic of the subconscious. It builds according to plan. It never forgets and changes only when we substitute another plan. It follows a given idea without fail unless we substitute another idea to replace the one with which it is working. It has no power to originate, substitute or change ideas or plans, because it has no power to reason by comparison, and, therefore, it does not question the good, bad, right or wrong of anything it may be doing. It is a builder only.
The conscious functioning of our mind is how we may plan our contacts with the material world. It is the architect that plans our body, health, strength, material conditions, moral character, or whatever else is to enter our experiences. We do this with our thought and speech. Our subconscious accepts whatever we think and speak as the plan for the immediate future, and it goes to work to externalize it in our body and circumstances.
The subconscious always accepts the strongest idea in a sentence, and if that idea is a negative, it works out a negative result. If the conscious thought is about weakness, the great builder will reproduce weakness. If the mind dwells upon pain, pain will increase. If we think of poverty and lack, the builder will see to it that we count pennies instead of dollars, while we keep up the wrong thinking. If we fill the mind with ideas of health, the great builder will marshal all its abilities to bring it into expression. If we think abundance, it will draw like a magnet upon undreamed of resources, and abundance will fill us. If we think health, love, harmony and happiness, we will discover a builder within us who never fails to carry out the idea we submit to it.
These are the general psychological facts that underlie all the health giving processes. The following suggestions will give an idea of how we may employ them to alter every wrong condition of life and bring about ideal conditions for anyone who will intelligently and persistently use them.
Suggestion is an act or process by which we make an idea to penetrate the subconscious to hold its attention to the exclusion of other ideas. A simple direct statement may do it, such as “you are going to sleep.” The influence of circumstances may do it, such as when we enter the bedroom, we put on pajamas or nightgown. We take the position of sleep, we relax our muscles, the room is dark, and thoughts of sleep fill our mind. We may do it by steady affirmation of the various steps in going to seep, such as, “you are relaxed, eyes are heavy, mind is quiet, getting drowsy and sleepy, going to sleep.” Whatever the method may be, whenever we cause the idea of sleep to penetrate and hold the subconscious attention, sleep follows. We use sleep as an illustration of the principle, but no matter what the idea may be when we cause it to enter and hold the subconscious attention, it at once becomes the dominant thought, and directs the action and operation of the subconscious.
If we hold to the idea of ease instead of pain, until it is the dominant thought, then subconscious action will produce ease. If health is the dominant thought, the subconscious will cease to build sickness in the body and will clothe it with health. If we clearly hold the idea of oneness with the Divine Mind, a sense of power within arises, which excludes all the wrong effects of thinking that we are a broken-off fragment of life, dependent on favor and circumstance, and enables us to manifest the works of God, which are always good.
No matter what the school of teaching, nor what its special methods may be, a strong underlying framework of psychological procedure lies at the base of all its efforts to heal and help. No amount of denial can alter the scientific fact, although it may camouflage it for a time. No dogmatic claim can long stand in the face of investigation by scientific method, for denial of matter and denial of the use of suggestion are forms of suggestion. The recognition of these laws of the mind and the fact that there is a scientific procedure in their use is desirable, instead of the implication that one is “following a cunningly devised fable.”
Subconscious action goes on whether you wake or sleep. It keeps the heart beating, the blood circulating, equalizes the temperature of the body, carries on an elaborate chemical process, takes care of the body’s trillions of cells, and completely rebuilds every cell every nine months. Imagine how inconvenient watching your heart all day would be, or to see that it did not stop beating while you sleep.
The subconscious registers and records every conscious thought. It sets every wrong idea, of sickness, failure or poverty, which you permit yourself to think, to work to express in your body or circumstances. Likewise, it at once sets to work every good thought of health, harmony, happiness and prosperity and success. If you do half an hour of right thinking during the day and fifteen and a half hours of wrong thinking, you can see the proportion of results you may surely expect. A single thought may enter the mind with such illumination that we will shed the ills of the body in a moment. Surrendering to the withering effects of a few minutes of the wrong thinking, anger and passion can undo the result of years of right thinking. Right thinking all the time is the only way. Get the habit.
The process of thinking for results is very simple. First determine what you want done. Hold strongly to the fact that the power to do it is within you, and that it will do, just what you direct it to do. Then hold a clear mental image of the completed work before your mind. Know that the idea that you hold is reality.
Your subconscious is a master builder, but it must have an architect’s plan, and your perfected idea is that plan. It is a construction engineer, and that perfect idea is the blueprint by which it carries out the work. The method is as certain as mathematic principles, or those of logic. Two plus two never equal anything but four, and the whole of anything is equal to the sum of all its parts — nothing less and nothing more. You are working now in an exact science. Stick to the known principles and you will get results.
You can rebuild your body into the image of perfect health, abounding energy and radiant beauty, by following this simple but scientific method. You can brighten and strengthen any faculty of mind. A weakening of its functional power will surely follow “I am losing my memory,” while a renewed grip of memory power always follows “I have perfect memory, I remember everything that I want to remember.” Slow mental processes will quicken under the suggestion of “Cold, keen-edged with wisdom.” An imperfect judgment will get in line when you tell it, “I look all the facts squarely in the face,” or “I see clearly the outcome in the light of all the facts.” A wavering will responds to the idea, “I hold unwaveringly to my purpose. My will has the grip of a bulldog’s jaw.”
The exercise of the higher spiritual powers, such as faith, hope and love respond perfectly to these right suggestions. Your affairs, your business, your social, domestic and other relationships gather strength and effectiveness through the power of right suggestion, “Everything is coming my way” will cure the mental habit of “losing” things. “Everybody thinks well of me” will have a strong tendency to cause you to do those things that will bring a fulfillment of the statement.
The only way that you can know these statements to be true is to try them. They are only beliefs if you accept them but do not put them into operation. You can believe anything, even a lie, but you cannot know a lie. You can know only the truth, and the only way you can know the truth is by doing the truth until you have become it. Then it is your very own. You do not need to make a lot of affirmations, or use formulas. You simply know the truth and it makes you free. Affirmations and suggestions are useful in arriving at a knowledge of a given truth, but when it becomes one’s habits of mind to think in a certain way, it has become a matter of his permanent conscious state. He has only to turn his attention to the fact in consciousness and act at once upon it. It ceases to be a series of affirmations and becomes a state of realization.
This lesson is to show you the way to establish a conscious state of health, prosperity, happiness, rightness of thinking and living, so that it becomes the normal thing for you to display these, so that you make no calculation of anything else arising in your life. The power is in you to do this very thing. It does not require any special talents or gifts. Just take the natural endowments you have, whether they are many or few, and work with them in the light of the creative power within you — you can bring them up to the Nth power of expression. You will discover that latent powers, of which you knew nothing, will arise and go into action as you begin to declare for more power to carry out your life purposes.
Chapter 21
Psychology of Love and Marriage
The most vital application of psychology is in the study of the supreme passion of life called Love, because it takes hold essentially of the feeling element of consciousness. Nothing so tones up the body, illuminates the mind and glorifies every object about one as the influence of love. Nothing can so undermine physical vigor, depress the mental processes, drape the soul in gloom and annul all the processes of action as much as a love disappointment. This is true not only because of the beneficent effect of love as an emotion, but because love is the movement to fruition of the fundamental Creative Impulse.
We have not worked out the psychology of love as has been that of the more somber experiences of life. When we feel good, we surrender ourselves to enjoying it, without analyzing the causes, but when our general vital feeling is that of illness or discomfort, we study all the minutiae of cause and effect, self-pity and self-blame. Very few people ever stop to analyze their love emotions.
Love is often an unconscious affair in its beginnings. You are unconsciously in love. You know that something out of the ordinary is the matter with you, but do not know what it is, although everybody else does. Love is the carrying out of a general feeling of pleasure into something specific. It is inseparable from desire. Desire is impulse directed by ideas. We trace the psychology of love in this way: First we find pleasure in the presence of another, followed by the egoistic desire to continue or increase that pleasure. The desire follows to hold or possess the person exclusively, which in turn is followed by a solicitude for the person’s welfare, the feeling of responsibility, and the extending of protection. Then follow exclusive possession and ownership, and then love comes to the full bloom of the Creative Impulse from which it started, or dies of suffocation.
We may call one phase of love “intellectual love,” which is another word for idealistic sympathy. It loves for love’s own sake, and has no ulterior motive, beyond the delight of mental association.
Going into speculative psychology, love arises in the Universal Mind. It is the birthright whose image and superscription are upon every individual born. Each comes into the world with an unconscious ideal of our mental counterpart or other half, our partner to be. With that mental picture or ideal, which is purely spiritual, we are always in love unconsciously. One day our senses report the image of someone who resembles this mental picture with a physical form. The more perfectly they look like the picture, the more positively and consciously are we in love. Sometimes the discovery is gradual, as in those cases in which friendship ripens into love. Often the eyes are blind to all defects. The object seems to step in and fill perfectly the picture, and we are in love at first sight.
The truth is, we are never in love with a man or woman. We love a perfect ideal, and someone who more or less fills that ideal steps into the picture, and furnishes an objective upon which love may express itself. Such an objective may move into the picture anytime, and he or she may move out anytime because they no longer fill the picture, and another who more perfectly fills the ideal takes the place.
This may seem to make love a fickle and undependable thing. However, its fickleness is not in love, nor in the lover, but in the objective that has failed to fill the ideal, which has failed to grow and more perfectly express the perfect spiritual reality in objective form. The glamour of love is likely to be dimmed the moment that the humdrum of life renders the relationship commonplace. A common idea after the marriage ceremony is “Now I have my mate, I don’t need to work at making myself agreeable.” That thought is the death knell of love, and the first step toward the divorce court. Yet if we will learn of the ancients we may learn the secret of holding the object of love. The mystery of charm is this saying, “Wonder is the beginning of wisdom.” If we can, out of our own inner self discover some new excitations to the wonder and admiration of our mate, we can constantly grow into the picture, and nothing can oust us.
People marry for many reasons. Very few marry to please their parents. The two supreme motive qualities for action are curiosity and selfishness, even in love and marriage. The moment we think that we have exhausted the possibilities of a partner, have discovered all the charms of mind and heart, and have surveyed all the possible excellencies, and nothing remains to excite our further wonder or curiosity, we are open to the challenge of the next candidate to fill the picture. Only the most staunch fidelity to the memory of what has been, will keep love from seeking a new image to express its spiritual counterpart.
Among the motives for which people marry, some desire to avoid being alone, others marry for social position, or simply because they want a change. People marry for physical beauty, fascination with a keen mentality, pity or sympathy for their partner’s loneliness and helplessness. Others marry because the partner is good, pure or innocent. Some marry for companionship, or they want children to perpetuate the family name, to help them in their old age, and apart from the deeper motive of answering the Creative Impulse within. Some men marry for a home, a cook and housekeeper. They want somebody to mother them. Some women marry from pride in landing a husband. Still people marry for spite, others for money, and finally, some marry for excitement, and they usually find it.
The ideal marriage is based primarily upon spiritual affinity, the fact that two people perfectly fill each other’s spiritual ideals. Marriage requires harmony of mental qualities, companionship of ideas, and finally physical harmony. All these elements must be present. Many people have wrecked their marriages because they do not suit each other physically, others because they had no harmony of ideas. The truth is that most people need special instruction as to the physical, mental and spiritual elements entering the marriage contract and relationship. The glamour of love so blinds most people that they do not see the seriousness of the undertaking. They need to go to a school of matrimony, where the commonsense facts are presented to them so that they can undertake this great adventure with at least a reasonable chance for success.
People have so debased some of the greatest words spoken that we need to send them to the laundry. Among these are love, marriage and affinity. The world has lost their deep spiritual significance and a very material notion has taken its place. People talk of love as if it were a sort of material reality, something that begins in, belongs to, and ends in them. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Love is a cosmic phenomenon — a Universal Power whose mystical and spiritual significance we have lost or forgotten save in those rare moments of emotion when we catch the thread of its real meaning and feel the wondrous thrill. However, these are rare moments, which the grind of life quickly submerges. The moment we try to harness it to work for us, and to serve us, its glory departs. Only when we let it work in and through us with perfect freedom will it abide.
Love is grounded in our ultimate possible idea of God. We read, “In the beginning God,” never thinking that it points to that era before time and space, or any of the relations of material things because no material things existed. There was just God, Life, Mind — Infinite Life, undivided and unexpressed, Infinite Love with no object upon which to lavish it, none to reciprocate, Infinite Power and Wisdom, and no one to understand and cooperate with it. So, the motive of the creative process is expression.
The “Logos (or idea) which was in the beginning with God” was a process, which would culminate in beings made in the image of God, reflecting or expressing His Intelligence, Love, Wisdom, Power and other qualities. The process involved Life coming from the universal into the relative, which is the real “fall of man.” It also involves the truth that since the Life of God took on the human form divine, every step has been toward a recovery of all those activities and privileges that were ours in the Consciousness of God.
Of all the activities in which we can engage our consciousness, love stands first in its range, power and achievement. The emphasis of Christ-centered truth is love’s spiritual reality rather than its human shadow. “God is love” describes this divine quality in love and introduces the element of the wondrous in love. Every new incitement to wonder adds to the glamour of love. The great classic on love, in the 13th chapter of 1st Corinthians, describes the developmental steps of love to the state of perfection where it never fails, and is the greatest of all spiritual qualities.
Since the primal impulse of Being is to create, and since that Creator is Love, it follows that Love is the great Creative Power. Creation is essentially the birth of ideas. It is the fire that furnishes all energy. It stimulates the imagination to construct all ideals, the skill to formulate all symbols, and furnishes the power to build all forms. Love purifies all human imagery and evolves all the forms of human genius. It holds the prophecy of setting humanity free from all the chains of matter.
The primary expression of the creative power is reproduction in every species of its kind. We see this in every form of life from the lowest to the highest. Yet reproduction does not use up all the creative powers set free by love. In spring, the bird clothes itself in gorgeous plumage and sings its sweetest songs to find its mate, but it continues to wear its plumage and to sing after the mate is found. The creative power is busy building and preparing for the offspring when it arrives. So that both the primary and secondary expressions of the creative power seem to center in and revolve around love, at least in bird life.
Most people see these secondary and greater expressions of love as a creative power only hazily, and think them associated with the sex life. Yet the highest ideals that we express in thought, literature, song, service and other symbols that we see in the arts, sciences and philosophy, arise from love. The charm and inspiration of the opposite sex awaken and arouse us to attain and continue at our highest note of service. Love is the anterior power in all advance. Life’s secret of all abundance is Love. It comes from the one Absolute Source, and to give it the right of way in our heart is to fulfill all law, human and divine.
Perfect love always seeks another’s good. Selfishness seeks its own good. Two people love perfectly only in forgetfulness of self, “Love seeks not her own,” yet the reciprocal operations are such that love never fails to draw its own. The law of affinity, the irresistible attraction of likes, guarantees that “None shall lack her mate,” and that every individual goes to his own place in the scale of character.
The affections and emotions are grounded in the Divine Love, which is universal and perfect. Love instinctively clothes its objective with a perfect ideal. To the lover, love is supreme, and all things are lovely and lovable, just as “to the pure all things are pure.” Often we find that the one we love does not fulfill the ideal. It is this eternal struggle between the ideally perfect and the realistically faulty objective that tries so many couples to the breaking point. Only a course in the University of Hard Knocks can help students to a wise adjustment of their perfect ideal to their imperfect human mate.
Love is the legitimate basis of all ties, especially those of the family. Marriage can arise only in the outgoings of this Divine Love ideal, which finds its own, and they two are one. Marriage can begin, continue and end aright only in this Divine Harmony of two ideal lovers. This alone constitutes marriage, and because of this perfect harmony, we say that marriages are made in heaven. Legal and ecclesiastical sanctions alone cannot make “Holy Matrimony.” Love alone is the divine warrant. The other sanctions are provisions for the protection of the social order. The love that endures is so akin to God that it takes the form of worship toward God and His human image. Love is, therefore, a divine prerogative whose volume is measured to the individual according to his intelligence and uprightness. Love fills its possessor with a general altruistic inclination that expresses itself in kindness to every living thing. This is the key to every permanent success.
Divine Love, with its gentleness, cannot exist apart from a forgiving attitude toward all others and toward ourselves. Love endows the soul with redeeming purpose and power. Love stimulates the incentive to achievement, industry, presentable personality and self-esteem. Love imparts its divine quality to everything, and transforms its surroundings into a paradise. Love reclaims when all else fails. “Thy gentleness hath made me great,” was the testimony of the inspired one of old, and it is the secret of all preferment. Love alone with its kindness and gentleness can inspire to greatness of achievement. Love promotes to honor and shapes destiny.
Love may lose its objective because love was not pure, unselfish and exalted, because the objective was not worthy, but love can never lose itself or the fruit of its service. “I am persuaded that nothing can separate us from the love of God.” Love is the highest form of Divine Harmony, making its human medium a harp of a thousand strings, from which vibrates its soothing, healing and ennobling power. Love profoundly impresses the physical body, filling it with contagious health and boundless energy. Our body systems appropriate our feelings, and every cell in the body shouts for the joy of living when the divine stimulus of true love reaches them. Love absolves from all wrong and consumes all iniquities, for “we are without blame before Him in love.”
Love inducts us into the thought atmosphere of the Eternal, for “He who dwells in Love dwells in God, and He in him.” It lifts us out of the idea and sense of time into the method of the Divine Existence. The idea of time is lost to lovers. Jacob’s seven years of service “seemed but a few days, for the love he had for her.” Love is the all-compelling power, for “all things work together for good to them that love God.” Logically this is true of love, whatever its object. Therefore, the greatest thing in the world is love, for love is the highest characteristic of the Divine Nature and noblest expression of a Divine Character.
Chapter 22
The Psychology of Dreams
The dreamer is (1) pure Spirit, as it came from God in the first forms of material incarnation, and functioning in humanity as the superconsciousness. (2) Soul, which is the pure Spirit plus the accretions and attritions of countless incarnations in the life stream, clothing it with innumerable experiences and memories and functioning as unconscious or subconscious. (3) Mind, which is pure Spirit plus the elements that make up soul, plus a new power of functioning objectively, called conscious mind.
The conscious mind reasons in at least five ways, induction, deduction, comparison, analysis, synthesis. The subconscious reasons in one way — deduction. The superconscious reasons not at all — it knows. We may inhibit conscious action and the self functions as subconscious, with all the play of deduction, mimicry, simulation and fantasy. In the world of dreams, both conscious and subconscious may be inhibited, then consciousness functions as Spirit knowing everything instantly that it ought to know or wants to know. In this activity we “come to visions and revelations of the Lord.” We see an illustration of these various activities in the writing of Paul, who wrote some things by direct inspiration, others in which he was not sure that it was the Mind of the Lord, and still others when he spoke not by revelation but by permission. The consciousness may function in any of these ways as a major element while traces of the others are present.
The dreamer is the conscious mind, functioning through the subconscious, after sleep has inhibited the conscious mind. If the dream contains factors that belong to conscious activity, such as comparison with a former dream, then the inhibition is not perfect and the conscious and subconscious overlap. If the dream contains a vision, a content with some definite meaning and value, the superconscious is overlapping, and the dreamer is drawing on material and information from the purely spiritual realm of being. The act of awaking is merely the self returning to conscious active functioning.
We may know that we are dreaming, but if the conscious is perfectly inhibited, we suspend the faculty of comparison and we have no means of knowing that we were awake a while before. If the inhibition is perfect, we will not remember that we were dreaming when we were asleep. If our level of consciousness rises, so that our subconscious activities overlap consciousness, then some point of association will enable our memory of the waking state to recall the memory of the sleeping state. Complete inhibition of the conscious by hypnotic methods will reveal many dreams, which we never consciously know. A clairvoyant may also know this.
The personality of the self in its superconscious activity is the perfect spiritual character acting in its relation to absolute truth and being. In the subconscious or dream state, the personality is functioning through all the memories and experiences of all past personal experiences, in other words, the “mist of matter.” It takes on much of the character of the temporal and the untrue. In the conscious personality, we function by direct action and reaction upon the objective world and exhibiting a side of personality that is of the waking world and for it, which ceases with it. The only real and abiding personality is the spiritual or superconscious soul.
The dream world and its images are not external to the dreamer, but are made up of memories of subconscious activities in the past, and from the impressions received from the conscious mind during waking states and stored up in subconscious memory. We cannot distinguish our dream world because we have no available faculty of comparison. A real, unseen, spiritual world exists, of which the waking world is a material expression or reflection. The dream world is a shadow of one or both, and exists only while the conscious mind is functioning through the subconscious. To the conscious mind, the material or waking world exists only while it functions through the conscious faculties. The spiritual and real world always exists and in it the soul functions continuously. The soul being the real entity, independent of the material, it follows that the conscious mind can and does function in that world despite material things.
Communication from one world to another is possible and is always taking place. In the waking state, we can communicate with the dreamer by becoming very quiet objectively, and becoming subjective. Our subconscious carries the message to that of the dreamer. Conversely, if we go to sleep with the desire or purpose to communicate with someone in the waking world, our message may arise into his consciousness, or come forth when he is in the dream state. By the same law, we can reach the superconscious state and communicate with other superconscious or spiritual beings in the flesh or out of it, and can receive communication from them.
The spiritual world is the only real world. The waking world is the material and imperfect expression of it, while the dream world is but a shadow of this material expression. The waking world is therefore more “real” than the dream world. The existence of either is a matter of conscious experience. To one who never dreamed, the dream world does not exist. Spirit is the highest conceivable ultimate state of being, which is changeless, which we know without reasoning, because it is our basic nature. It is perfectly conceivable that each stage of experience in the infinite possibilities of unfoldment may appear as a world in itself, which in turn becomes only a memory in the Light of a new world of experience and development.
We may remain aware of the fact that we are dreaming because it is possible for the conscious and subconscious to overlap. Sometimes this happens without any intent by the dreamer. The nature of the dream may do it and we will remember it when we awaken. We may do it by watching our progress from the waking to the sleeping state with the effort to stop on the borderland between the two. This takes time to develop, but when once acquired, can give the dream consciousness full sway and can analyze all the elements of the dream state.
By steady training we can consciously be aware of the dream’s nature during the dream state. At first, too much attention to analysis will make the dream fade, or too much attention to the dream will suspend the conscious action and one is sound asleep. Only by extended effort can we reach the borderland and maintain it at will, reveling in all the imagery of the dream world and comparing it with the known facts of the waking world. Following these methods, we can direct our dream toward any end which we may desire, and concerning anything lying within the range of subconscious knowledge.
In the dreamless stages of sleep the only subconscious activity is that which maintains the body’s various routines, so that it does not form any mental images. The conscious element can conceivably enter and be aware of the facts of metabolism, etc., and to direct them; however, it does not take on the nature of a dream.
The creatures inhabiting a dream are a part of the dreamer and have no existence apart from him. The created beings of the waking world are dual, having a real and spiritual identity, which is inseparable from the infinite, and a material form through which it functions. The body acts and reacts upon its material surroundings by the material laws of its existence. It knows and can know nothing. The soul knows its source and, functioning through its superconscious power, communes with its Creator of whose Universal Principles it is the embodiment.
There is an Ultimate Reality, self-determining Being, Omnipresent in every phase of expression, Omnipotent, Omniscient. Everything that appears in any world, whether waking or dreaming, is the result of His action. The means of realization should be acceptable to all religions, creeds, climes and peoples — namely, God is and there is none else. Everything comes from the action of God.
God rules and governs by law and order. The order of God’s creative work is (1) God thought, (2) He called by name that which He thought, (3) He became that which He thought and called by name, and it was good. It is the nature of God to become that which He thinks and calls by name. Everything that appears is the representation of a world of ideas in the Mind of God.
Humanity was a thought before we became thinkers. Humanity is the compound idea of God, the true idea of Life, Love, Truth, Mind, Soul, Spirit, Substance, Intelligence, Principle, and in a word, the embodiment of the principles of Universal Being. Whatever is in God is potentially in us. God has made us in His image and we are partakers of the Divine Nature. If we think God’s thoughts, we set in motion and direct all God’s creative powers to produce in ourselves ir in our surroundings all those things we have thought and called by name. If we have the faith to perceive, and the courage to command the available powers, then we fulfill dominion over all things as promised.
The Magna Charta of our mastery is found in Isaiah 45:11, “Concerning My sons and concerning the works of My hands, command ye Me.” The secret formula of genius is found in the words of the Christ, “I am among you as one who serves.” The epitome of all existence is, “All things are yours, and ye are Christ’s and Christ is God’s.”
Chapter 23
The Psychology of the Borderland
Mind, its nature, its methods, its states, its powers, and its relationships, enters any study of psychology. All movement of mind is from within outward. The solution of all mental phenomena must turn upon a study of the mind itself. The origin of all experiences must be in the mind.
We think, feel and know, and communicate these results called ideas as thoughts and words. Likewise we receive such communications from others. These are everyday experiences, so common that we lose sight of the fact that we are exchanging ideas by means of symbols. The mind in one is communicating with the mind of another using conscious mental forms and mental symbols. In all ages, people have spoken into the unseen, directed their thoughts to the Infinite, and have received some reaction — often so definite as to preclude any other idea than that they have prayed to a Spiritual Being who has heard and answered their prayer.
Many students of psychology have experimented in sending mental messages without the use of any material medium, with results so specific that they do not doubt that they have communicated with their friends by purely mental agencies. What they call telepathy or thought transference is largely a theory to one who never made it work. However, it is an established fact to the patient investigator, who has both sent and received specific messages without the chance of collusion, coincidence or fraud.
These accepted experiences of mind warrant presuming a mechanism in us by which these and all other possible mental phenomena occur. If one mind dwelling in the flesh can communicate with another dwelling in the flesh through material media, if two such can communicate without any such material means, if we in the flesh can communicate with God who is pure Spirit, and if He, being pure Spirit, can reach from the realm of Spirit and make known to us truth, then it is possible for an intelligence dwelling in the flesh to communicate with one not in the flesh.
In every age prophets and seers have received vibrations from the realm of the unseen, and have translated them into statements of greater or less value. When certain elements of truth are apparent in them, we compile them into a book and call them a revelation. Many others have received what purported to be messages from other intelligences in the unseen world, some of them having general application, but mostly having a personal reference, sometimes valuable, often whimsical and often downright ridiculous. It matters not as to the element of value in the communication. Psychology is not so much interested in the value of it as in the fact of it.
Whatever happens in the realm of mind, does so because mind operates by definite methods called laws. Whatever happens is caused by some power operating through the laws of mind. If a thing happens once then it can happen again, if the power acts within the law. However, if it does not happen again, then we have not found the law of its happening, or it never occurred in the first place.
A common mental law evidently underlies the lowest form of mental phenomena, from the Ouija board, table tipping, automatic writing, clairvoyance, clairaudience, trances, materialization, levitation, and all such experiences up to the most ecstatic vision of the inspired prophet. The student of these messages is struck with the many purely human material and extraneous elements in most of them. They bear the marks of subconscious stuff arising from the medium’s own subconsciousness, or unconsciously drawn from the subconsciousness of the sitter or circle through telepathic means. Many investigators at first thought that they could account all phenomena of that kind in that way. Nevertheless, many now conclude that powers and materials in the subconscious do not account for certain phenomena.
Apparently people who have such experiences have a strongly developed subconscious, while many of them have comparatively developed few of the objective conscious mental powers. They have always had the power to “know” things without study. The vast majority of sensitives have not developed that culture of mind resulting from systematic study of the arts and sciences and philosophies. Thus, an accounting for the character of much of the material that comes through these crude mediums is not difficult. It is further conceivable that if these sensitives could have adequate objective mental training, their messages might rise to the superconscious dignity and beauty of an Isaiah or a Paul.
We find the source of sensitivity to these subconscious and spiritual activities in the psychological level — a borderland between the realms of superconscious, conscious and subconscious functioning. In one person this level is low so that he has no such experiences, rarely has even a “hunch,” and is seldom conscious of having dreamed. Another, in whom the level is normally high, is a great dreamer, has daydreams as well, and can report activities in both the subconscious and superconscious realms of mind.
We have observed that this psychological level is variable, so that one day a sensitive can report vibrations from some high realm of mental life, while the next day he or she will be unable to do so at all. Correspondingly, we find that prophets did not exercise the prophetic function steadily but as occasion required, when the prophet was “in the Spirit.” So it should not surprise us that so many sensitives should have the same variableness in their power to register and reproduce reports of other-world activities.
Conceivably we could acquire the ability to balance our activities at this borderland so that we could not only see and hear of things in the unseen realm but could classify and judge their meaning and value. We cannot do this by the ordinary mind in a time or two of practice, for it often requires months of steady effort to be able to arrive and stop at the border. After we do that, we face a still more delicate task, acquiring the habit of “listening in” superconsciously and thinking about what we hear consciously. For the vision fades under too much objective attention, while too much surrender to the sweep of the vision shuts out the conscious attention and we wake in the morning.
Night is the best time for such practice, when we are through with the day’s work, and the mind is composed for sleep. Suggest to yourself that you will consciously track your journey to the land of sleep. Then follow each stage as you sink to sleep, with the purpose that you will stop when you come to the borderland. At first you will get about so far, and will wake up in the morning. Yet if you persist, you will succeed. Usually the first experiences are fragmentary because maintaining your ground of balance is difficult. As time and effort have their effect, you will acquire facility and ability to hear very clearly while thinking consciously about what you hear and see.
This sort of development will lead to another form of experience. You will be able mentally to reach this borderland anytime or place during your waking hours for light on matters known to your superconscious or subconscious, but not reporting in consciousness. In this way we solve problems and find lost things. We merely give the superconscious or subconscious a chance to register their information. Inspirational speaking and writing consist in being able to maintain a mental state near the borderland so that all the wealth of the superconscious arises into view and passes through the analyzing classifying powers of the conscious which arranges and clothes it with words.
Other factors enter this study of the borderland. Many of the body’s activities are purely automatic. They arise from inner and unconscious stimuli, and set up activities that have no conscious nor volitional element. We see examples of these automatic actions in such experiences as when we are asleep or in a perfectly quiet state, and “jerk” so hard that we shake the bed or chair.
The personal interest of the one who engages in these experiments is still another factor. People usually undertake these unusual experiments because they desire light or comfort. They are so interested that they are unable to exercise judgment regarding the value or genuineness of what they receive. We see or hear what we can see or hear, and what we really desire to see and hear. So clear and insistent is this demand that people may not note any discrepancy between the reported message and the common experiences of humanity, so they greatly impair their judgment. The materials for practically every message received are already in their own subconsciousness or that of others with whom they in touch. Their own subconscious mind will project images from that material, and messages of whose source they are not consciously aware. We can see the material parallel to this mental phenomenon by looking for a moment at an electric light, then turning away or closing the eyes, we can see the image of the light. Perception is purely a mental power, as unlimited as mind itself. Yet in human life it functions through the eyes, ears and other senses. The instrument that it uses limits it. The circle of vision range can report an image in only an arc. In other words the rays of light from behind or at the side do not fall upon the organ of vision.
We may extend each sense to such a degree that we may, for instance, see beyond the ordinary range of vision. When we watch a bird in flight, we can continue to see it when another person would be unable to site it. We may inhibit the senses by turning the whole attention to seeing so that our ears do not report any sound, or pay attention to hearing so that our eyes do not report any image of what passes before them. We may abstract the attention to some thought or idea so that none of the senses report.
The Bible records many incidents of this supernormal seeing and hearing. Elisha saw the unseen at Dothan, the chariots of fire ringing the Assyrian hosts at the siege of Samaria. Jesus saw Nathaniel around a material corner. Stephen saw the risen Lord standing to watch his own martyrdom. These and many other cases show that normal people occasionally found themselves able to exercise a power of perception entirely beyond the reach of the physical senses.
It is more than probable that God has constituted the human brain as a sending and receiving instrument of thought vibrations. Thought is a vibration in mind itself. It rises into conscious form and classification and expression through the instrumentality of the brain. Our brain may catch and formulate his thought and radiate it throughout the body and through space, and may receive the reports of action and reaction in the body and classify them. It is reasonable that the same instrument is available to catch the vibration of other minds, either in the flesh or out of it.
It is a reasonable presumption that mind can communicate with mind without any material instrument whatever. In those recorded cases of the perception of truth and thought, which lie entirely outside the range of material limitation, it may be true that a human mind may communicate with other human minds, in direct mental contact. Also we may communicate with mind in any realm or under any condition in which mind is in active possession of knowledge.
Psychology is not so much concerned with the question of such communication, as it is with whether the mind has capacities, powers and functions for such communication. These statements of psychological truth do not exhaust the possible treatment of the subject, but show the method of its study, and how to guard the mind against deception, prejudice and bigotry. We suggest a purely psychological method here, by which anyone can patiently and sanely settle the whole question.
Chapter 24
The Psychology of Religion
Any study of applied psychology would be incomplete without discussing its relation to religion. When Spinoza invented the phase, “the intellectual love of God,” he paid tribute to those higher reaches of mind in which we find satisfaction in the idea of a Mind beyond which we cannot go and do not need to go. This is of course but one phase of the idea of God, for God is more than is at once apparent in the idea of mind. Purely mental activity is but one element of psychology evident in our ideas of God.
Experience and philosophy present to us the emotional Love of God in just as convincing a way as they do the intellectual element. In fact in the scriptures, while they nowhere state that God is mind, it does specifically say that “God is love.” Emotions more often sway humanity than do purely intellectual processes. Their minds direct a few, but many are moved to action by their emotions.
The evident wisdom in the arrangements of the universe, and the orderly methods of procedure, all show the presence of purpose and the operation of Will so that we are ready to accept the statement that “He governs all things by the counsel of His own Will. “True, all things move according to well-established laws, but these are merely the channels through which His Power flows to the fulfilling of His wise purposes.
These are the elements of personality, so clearly present in any well balanced psychological study of God that even those who deny personality are constantly using the terms and implications of personality. Personality does not involve any idea of form or parts, although human personality does include this factor in personality. But to think and feel and will produce results in their interaction, which we call character. The seers of the ages have realized that God is “wise and just and good.” That revelation of God, which has resulted in the highest type of character, always refers to God in the terms of personality, and never in impersonal terms.
It is also true that personality is the one and only channel through which truth has been given to the world. Every great idea which has furnished inspiration and motive to men has been multiplied and projected through personality. In every spoken and printed word the impress of personality is always evident.
Philosophy meets the apparent difficulties involved in personality, and reasonably interprets them in the third great category of mind called Quantity. This includes the truth of Unity, Plurality and Totality. In other words, there is One Being, One Mind, One Consciousness. There are many individual expressions of that One Mind, and the all-inclusive Mind holds these expressions. Theologically, the possibilities of personality are set forth in the doctrine of the Trinity, which represents God as expressing in three forms of personality, but His Unity is undisturbed. If God can express Himself in three forms of personality and His Being remains undivided, then logically He may express Himself in the countless forms of human personality and His Being remains undivided.
The strongest or greatest idea presented to the subconscious holds it. The greatest idea that the human mind can grasp in any psychological process looking toward health, peace, prosperity, or any other form of human welfare is the idea of God.
All possible powers are raised into actual operation when we are in conscious union with the One Mind. We can discount the limiting idea of the independent human mind having all power to do things in favor of oneness in actuality with the Absolute, by which “All power in heaven and earth (mind and body) is given into the hands of men, so that they shall speak and have it done, command and have it stand fast.” This constantly reinforces our minds with the idea that while we “work out our welfare, it is God that works in us both to will and to do.”
As the idea unfolds in our mind that God has made us in His image, which holds potentially all the powers of the Original, the consciousness arises of being the instrument of divine powers, the channel of divine intelligence and love, and the voice of the divine harmonies. Paul stated the result of this: “Of my own self I can do nothing, but I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.”
The purely psychological value of the idea of religion is thus made clear: We conceive of the presence of unlimited skill backing us, and working with us to produce health. We can handle business projects, or achieve happiness through a harmonious adjustment with our fellows and our surroundings. When we are at the ends of our resources, we instinctively call for help to a power above ourselves. We may immeasurably heighten the effect of this calling by realizing that the God we call on is the Universal Servitor, who is not waiting to be prayed to, but to be worked with, who presents His powers to us in the words, “Concerning My sons and concerning the works of My hands, command ye Me” (Isaiah 45:11).
The sacred records of religion are nothing more nor less than the history of the unfoldment of human consciousness in the knowledge of God. All other matters are incidental. Whatever their value or authority, the psychological element is one infallible element in the Bible. It never trips, from first describing our conception of God as a being of fear, to at last beholding Him as a Being of Love. History bears out the fact that humanity’s progress has been graduated according as our ideas have held God as an object of fear, of reverence, or of love.
The value of these recorded experiences is that they are not just the single experiences of individuals, but the organized experiences of humanity. The Psalmist’s experience, “I will say of the Lord, He is my strength,” is the identical experience of countless people. These people having the same experiences and the same results under similar conditions have established a psychological criterion.
All psychological movement is from within outward. Jesus, the Master psychologist of all time, strictly followed this principle. “The kingdom of heaven is within you” sounds the true note of all his teaching. All our acts arise from inner impulses. All our conditions proceed from states of consciousness. The source of power is in our inner states of mind and feeling. When these are right, “out of his heart flow rivers of living water.” We are to be born from above, out of animal and material and limited consciousness into divine, spiritual and absolute consciousness. The secret of the Master’s power lay in his consciousness of oneness with God. From that truth he drew all his wondrous authority over material things. He said that when the same truth made flesh and blood in him was also made flesh and blood in us, that the same life with its limitless power would begin to express in us.
He refused to be bound by time, and said, “before Abraham was I am.” “The glory that I had with thee before the world was.” He refused to be limited by spatial relations, and speaking of himself, said, “the Son of Man which is in heaven.” He refused to be limited by custom. “The Son of Man is lord also of the Sabbath.” He refused to be bound by the conventional idea of death, “the Son of Man hath life in himself,” “power to lay down his life and take it up again,” and because he could do this, all might also do it. This is the full psychological significance of his work. Whatever he claimed and achieved for himself, he claimed and declared is possible of achievement for all his disciples.
When his disciples found themselves unable to cast out a devil, which he went on to do, they said, “why couldn’t we cast him out?” He told them they couldn’t because they didn’t believe that they could. He gave them a formula by which they could attain that full confidence in the power potentially within them. The psychological worth of the incident is invaluable. It clarifies why we do not succeed at any task, because we do not clearly understand our inner resources and therefore do not believe that we can. Few people have done what they didn’t believe could be done, and few have failed when they really believed, with a belief based upon a full consciousness of their powers, that they could and would do it.
Paul used the same exact psychological procedure. “Forgetting the things that are behind, I press toward the mark of my high calling, etc.” Here is the method by which we can avoid the certain failure that results when we fix our attention on effects rather than on causes. The only true psychology is to forget successes and failures alike. No success is anything more than partial, no failure can be more than temporary. Keep your vision set on the goal. That is the only reality. The moment we begin rejoicing over our successes, or lamenting over our apparent failures, we are like the disciples who “rejoiced that the devils were subject to them rather than that their names were written in heaven.”
Paul spoke of the method by which men become fully conscious of the inherent powers and direct them to full maturity of growth and expression: “The mystery which has been hidden for ages is now revealed to us by the apostles and prophets, Christ in you, the hope of glory.” This is clearly a state of consciousness, by which we turn our attention from human powers to godlike powers, and he describes it in the terms of growth. It is a state of consciousness that in its beginning answers to birth, then babes, then children, then adults, in the full stature of maturity, finally as a state of consciousness in which “Christ lives in me.”
Paul sets forth the psychological value of this idea in the great formula, “For we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a minor, the glory of the Lord are changed from glory to glory, after his image, by the Spirit of the Lord.” This declares that realizing that the potential powers of God are within us, we have but to hold clearly before our minds the image of a life that fully expresses these powers and some inner creative process will steadily build us into the same perfect expression. This is the same principle that operates whether the image we hold is that of success, or harmony, or happiness, or health, or any other condition that we wish to express.
The same power that produces one of these effects will produce all of them. It is a quality resident in all life and is therefore divine. It is unconscious in all forms including humanity, and in us is also conscious. We call it the power of mimicry, by which we hold the subconscious focused, to produce in us an imitation of the mental idea that we hold. It never fails.
Religion emphasizes the gifts or graces God bestowed upon us because of our right relationship with Him. Some people believe that His government of the world is similar to a Christmas tree: God bestows these gifts and benefits upon us like ornaments, as a reward for right attitude, because of our prayer or importunity. One has but to view the matter in the light of psychological principles the Master taught to see that the peach tree plan suggests the real principle. The fruits and gifts are the results of the processes of the tree life itself. All our adversities are the result of wrong inward states, and all our blessings accrue as the result of right mental states.
Prayer, in the light of psychological principles, consists in thinking the thoughts of God. His thoughts are only good, health, love, peace, abundance and every right thought. We do not have to inform the One Mind of our needs, since the same high authority teaches us that “He knows what things we need before we ask Him.” Nor is praying with the idea of changing His mind necessary, or to get something that we would not otherwise have gotten. The same authority assures us that “He has freely given us all things.” Prayer is simply reaching that inner state of mind where we receive that which is already ours. In other words, prayer is a process of becoming conscious of that which is.
Religious worship consists of using certain forms and symbols of truth. This results in order and dignity in a public gathering of people but we lose its value if the symbol replaces the idea for which the symbol stands. Bowing at the cross becomes a species of fetishism if the worshiper sees only the cross and does not discern the spirit of service for which it stands. Repeating prayers and creeds, and singing songs becomes a “tinkling symbol” unless one discerns and reaches the idea for which they stand.
Religion, being the exercise of the higher spiritual side of the mind called the superconscious, we must state its supreme truths in such forms and symbols as the conscious mind can understand. Jesus highlights this fact in his statement that if he had told them the inner truths about earthly things and they were not able to receive them, expecting that they could receive what he might tell them of heavenly things was hopeless. Paul, caught up to the “third heaven” of spiritual illumination, found it impossible to express, even in symbols, the truths of being and activity as he beheld them in spiritual reality.
These only confirm the method of prophets and seers, who use figures and symbols to convey the results of their high visioning. No other method is possible. The conscious mind can grasp the idea of Infinite Mind, or eternity, no better than it can grasp the more material idea of boundless space. At best it can faintly glimpse the reality for which the symbol stands. Psychology reveals the existence of a side to consciousness that is able fully to grasp absolute truth, to think the thoughts of God, and to engage in the highest spiritual activities without the use of symbolism, but when it would bring these ideas and experiences into conscious form, it must resort to symbols.
Psychologically speaking, we can at any moment, for any purpose of good, call into use a power in us that is direct its operation and infallibly certain. The dominion promised us in the beginning is still potentially ours. We were to have “dominion over the fowls of the air, the fish of the sea, the beasts of the field and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” We have already achieved that, and have moved up to dominion over the material forces of creation, the earth, the air and the sea. These are only the first lessons in learning the mastery of the real powers of Mind and of Spirit. When we have conquered this lesson, we find that in mastering these higher and real powers, all else is ours. The mastery of material forces is like learning the addition and multiplication tables, which leads to understanding the changeless principles of mathematics. The science of Being is the goal. We may know it, and it is therefore a science. We may understand it, and it is therefore a science and a philosophy. We may practice it, and it is therefore and art, and the highest art of living.
Originally published in San Francisco, California, 1922
The End