[179] About a dozen years ago,
before I had heard of Mental Science
in any of its branches--when I was
simply an overworked journalist,
forced to pump brains for a
living--there would often be times
when my thoughts would give out
entirely. At such times I could not
write a sentence. I would then leave
the desk and go off somewhere, alone,
where I would be apt to fall into a
sort of introspective reverie. I
would seem to sink deeper and deeper
down into myself, until presently
strange and brilliant thoughts would
occur to me. These thoughts were
always in line with the ideas I had
been writing about. I would never
wait for more than one or two of them
before becoming excited and anxious
to put them down on paper. Oh, what
impetus this accession of inner truth
would give me! It seemed as if all I
had needed was a simple peep into
this storehouse of native thought;
for I would take just what I had
received and put it down, when other
thoughts would flow forth in an
unbroken stream until my day’s
work was done. I thought very little
about the matter at that time, though
I knew I had a sure dependence in
this hidden mine on which I could
draw in every case of emergency.
At this time I was writing for
reform papers, and the ideas that I
drew from the well of intuition were
on reform subjects. Many a time when
I would awake in the morning with a
feeling of weariness in my work, and
dread the day with its dearth of
ideas in a field that had been
gleaned to utmost barrenness by me, I
would--with a feeling of intense
relief--recall the fact that I could
go down into “the quiet of my
own mind” and bring up what I
wanted. Now, remember, I not only
brought up some great thought that
served me most abundantly as a text,
but I brought with it a strange
self-dependence that made me realize
my ability to handle my subject as I
pleased; so that it became mere
child’s play to work out the
editorial in all its details with the
utmost precision and clearness.
But these fragmentary interviews
with this inner me soon took me
beyond the thoughts in demand by the
average reform papers. Snatches of
greater truth began to come. I had a
paper of my own by this time, but
could not hold it level with itself,
in fact; for every paper was a shade
bolder and more advanced in thought
than the previous one. For all the
time newer thoughts were coming up to
me when I would seek them by silent
communion with my intuitional
faculty.
But were these thoughts always to
be depended upon as absolutely true?
No, not always. They were more or
less mixed with preconceived,
erroneous opinions; but they were
nearer the truth than I could find
elsewhere, in books or out of books,
and as I cultivated them more and
more they became more true and
reliable--less mixed with error.
I know--from my experience in this
matter--we can go on drinking at this
[180] inner fountain of communication
with some unseen body of great
intelligence until we have conquered
our preconceived beliefs and are
filled full of new and vital truth. I
feel that it is in my power to reach
this place.
Let the student close his eyes and
abstract his thoughts from all his
outside surroundings, turning his
eyes, as it were, down within
himself. Let him think of the subject
upon which he wishes to be
enlightened; or let him ask a
question about it. Then wait
patiently for a few minutes, or
longer, and the answer will come, and
it will be more or less unmixed with
his preconceived beliefs, in
proportion as he had power to
abstract his thoughts from his
surroundings.
Now, whether the answer he
receives comes from this inner
source, or whether it is simply a
tremendous influx of vitality that
flows in to meet the demands of the
brain, thus enabling the brain to
answer its own questions, I cannot
tell. But this I do know, that no
matter what troubles or perplexities
may come to you, if you will go alone
for a few minutes and draw all your
thoughts home, and let them sink down
and down within you, they will be met
by an uprising force from some hidden
laboratory of love, and from out of
this soft and genial and luminous
wave words of courage and comfort
will be spoken to you.
Now, this intelligent glow that
comes up to us when we seek it is a
manifestation of the Law of Growth
within us. Growth is vital life, and
all vital life proceeds from the
great Life fountain; and it proceeds
from this fountain incessantly, but
never becomes apparent to us, or
accessible to us except we recognize
it. To recognize this growth
principle in ever flowing vitality is
to appropriate it hourly to our own
needs. In proportion as I recognize
this growth principle within myself,
as it is manifested to me through
intuition, I have health and strength
and a constantly increasing and
brightening and widening and
deepening intelligence.
The organ of intuition, then, is
that organ through which the eternal
vitality, the spirit of growth, flows
into us forever, and by the
recognition of which, or the
intelligent understanding of which,
we can co-operate with it to the
complete regeneration of every part
of ourselves--external as well as
internal.
To heal ourselves of any ailment
whatever, it is only necessary to
know that we are joined to this
strange fountain of natural or
intuitional knowing, and that it is
Life, or vital force, in its most
intense character; and that it will
flow into our external intelligences
if we will look for it.
But our external intelligences are
closed against it, and are thus cut
off from the great life-saving supply
of that strange substance which knows
no disease, no sin, no poverty, no
anything but opulence and health and
strength and unbroken and
unconquerable vitality.
Just what this strange power that
lies out of sight behind the external
intelligence is, no one knows. All
metaphysicians recognize it, but none
can describe it with absolute
positiveness. It seems to be a hidden
mind of immense capability. Some
writers on the subject believe man to
be possessed of two distinct minds,
and they call this hidden mind--the
unconscious knowing--the subjective
mind, in distinction from our
external intelligence, which they
call the objective mind.
Now, I am sure man has not two
minds. His mind is one. It is whole.
Like everything else, it has two
poles, positive and negative. These
two poles may very rationally be
called the subjective and objective
mind.
The whole effort of Mental Science
is to show the student what a
powerful creature a man is. It wants
to show him how great a reservoir of
undiscovered possibilities he is, so
that he will know that he need not
succumb to such negatives as disease,
old age and death. In order to do
this, it will be necessary to try to
find out all he can [181] about this
part of himself that lies back of his
objective mind, and that manifests
such mysterious power. First let us
see some of the power it manifests
when we render the external mind so
negative that we can catch a glimpse
of its subjective half.
When little Jessamine Powers was
two years old she sang at least
twenty songs in a rich baby voice, in
perfect melody and time. I began to
call people’s attention to her
singing, and in doing this I seemed
to call her own attention to it, and
she lost the power entirely. The
objective mind knew nothing about
music. It could not sing. As soon as
it took cognizance of the singing and
tried to do it, there was a failure.
The child sang no more for years.
When she sang again she sang from the
objective mind, as the objective mind
learned it on the objective
plane.
In California a camp of Chinese
miners lived near our place for a few
months. They came to our well for
water, and my little Jennie--four
years old--talked to them in their
own language. I heard her, and heard
them replying, but thought she was
only imitating the sound of their
talk, until the thing had continued a
month or more. The Chinese assured me
that she was speaking their language
in absolute perfection. I was
astounded, and made much of it to my
neighbors. The mining camp was
removed to another place, but was
brought back the following year. Many
of the same Chinamen were in it. They
were wild to see little Jennie; but
imagine their disappointment when
they found that she could not speak a
word of their beloved language. The
objective mind had closed the door
into the subjective reservoir of
knowledge, and she--no more than
we--knew how to open it.
Look at “Blind Tom”:
An idiot, whose objective mind is too
feeble to offer a resistance to the
action of his subjective mind, which
brings its stored musical wonders to
the surface to astonish a wondering
world with.
Look at Zerah Colburn: A child
who, under eight years of age, would
instantly, and without the use of
figures, solve the most tremendous
mathematical problems. On one
occasion he took the number 8 and
raised it up progressively to the
sixteenth power. In naming the last
result, which contains 15
figures--namely,
281,474,976,710,656--he was right in
every figure. Asked the square root
of a number consisting of six
figures, he would give it instantly.
He would give the cube root of a
number in the hundreds of millions as
soon as it was proposed. Hundreds of
questions of a similar nature
respecting the roots and powers of
enormously high numbers were proposed
to him by various mathematicians, and
his answer was never delayed a
moment, and never incorrect. Asked to
name the factors which produced
certain numbers, he would give them
without an error. Asked how many
minutes were in forty-eight years, he
replied 25,228,800; and immediately
added that the number of seconds were
1,513,728,000. These are only a few
of the marvels performed by this
child. A lot of learned professors
resolved to make the boy still more
wonderful by educating him, but the
attempt simply closed the door of his
inner reservoir of stored knowledge
and left him a very ordinary
child.
I have no space in a lesson like
this to recount one-tenth of the
wonders connected with this unseen
and unacknowledged storehouse of
intelligence as they occur to my mind
at this time, but I will refer to one
other case. I am acquainted with a
spiritualist who is an inspirational
lecturer. A few years ago he believed
that some spirits of the dead
influenced him in speaking. He now
says that he speaks from this inner
reservoir of stored knowledge and
does not believe the spirits
influence him at all. He has the
power to relax the tension of his
objective or external mind and let
the stored knowledge flow through.
But still he holds (and so do I) that
the external mind is master, [182]
and keeps watch of the fountain of
internal intelligence, and has the
power to hem it in to certain lines
of thought.
Now, in saying this I am not
trying to disprove the fundamental
belief of modern
spiritualism--namely, the existence
of spirits after death, and their
power to communicate with their
living friends--for I must confess
that I am not at all prepared to
dispose of their claims, nor have I
any prejudice against their belief.
And I should accept their belief
because of the undeniable phenomena
that sustains it, but for the fact
that I begin to see such unlimited
and strange powers in the human mind
that I think it possible for all
these spiritualistic manifestations
to be explained without calling on
the spirits of the dead to do it. Not
that I have any objection to
communicating with them. I should
only be too glad to do it, but I want
to know the truth. I am simply
seeking the truth in this matter and
do not care where it leads.
And now to return to this strange
storehouse of intelligence lying back
of our external perceptions. What is
it, and how did it come there?
I do not know what it is, but can
form some idea of it from its
characteristics. In the first place,
it seems to be the receptacle of
hundreds of things we have once known
and forgotten. “Where is the
hammer?” asks the man of the
house. “I do not know,”
answers every member of the family.
Presently, when thinking of something
else, or oftener in that negative
mood when the bottom seems to have
dropped out of our thought and we are
not conscious of thinking anything,
we will suddenly recall having seen
the hammer lying somewhere, and on
going to the place, there it is. The
remembrance of where it was had been
recorded on this subterranean mental
tablet, and as soon as the external
mind forgot itself it became visible.
Experience has long taught me the
folly of cudgeling my brains for a
forgotten name, or anything else that
I seem to have forgotten. I know that
I will get what I want by ceasing to
strive for it; so I will make myself
passive and quit thinking of it. In a
few minutes it comes.
Now, if this subjective mind lying
back behind the objective mind is
nothing else, one thing is certain,
it is a record of every past
experience of our whole lives, and as
a record it contains infinitely more
than would appear in a superficial
glance at the matter. For it is not
only a record of the few years of
experience embraced in the lives we
had lived since birth, but it reaches
clear back to the time when, as
primordial seed germs, we began our
individual growth under and by the
Law of Attraction.
Remember this. We have actually
lived every step of the way from our
small and far-away beginning up to
the present hour. Having lived it
all, we are the condensed essence of
it all. We are the whole earth in
miniature form, with its lumbering
grossness eliminated through
desire--our power to choose that
which we wanted--and we carry the
knowledge of it all in the layers of
our organizations.
And is this knowledge nothing?
It is volumes of natural
intelligence; volumes of mother
nature’s own teachings; and oh,
what a wonderful teacher she is! Do
you know that our little brothers and
sisters, the bugs and worms, are, in
their sphere, each one the embodiment
of some peculiar phase of wisdom? If
you do not know this, you have much
to learn from the study of natural
history. Take, for instance, this
fact, as illustrative of the
intelligence which their desire for
life induces them to manifest in
their bodies. It will prove what I
have stated in former lessons, that
desire is the soul of things, and the
basic principle of growth; also that
the recognition of desire unclouded
by doubt makes the desire manifest in
bodily form.
There are a good many bugs and
worms that the birds do not
like--they have an unpleasant taste.
These bugs [183] and worms become
known to the birds by their peculiar
markings, and are therefore left
unmolested. Other bugs and worms that
are good to eat, and the birds are
fond of, know this fact, and their
desire to prolong their lives causes
them to acquire the same markings and
colors that their distasteful
neighbors have; and so their own
little lives are perpetuated. It is
this desire for life that causes so
many little lives to be shaped like
leaves and twigs. Indeed, there is a
regular process of deception carried
on by little weaklings in order to
preserve their own lives, and an
infinite amount of strange
intelligence manifested.
And still lower in the scale of
being, there is a glowing ideal
burning in the heart of the popply
seed, and a spontaneous and native
wisdom there which unfolds it. Why,
its life is a dream and a poem, and
it acts upon the human organism that
is negative to it as the promoter of
dreams and the suggester of poems. Do
you imagine that this little poppy
does not think? It does think, and it
possesses a wisdom unknown to us, or
at least unknown to our objective
minds, though no doubt a part of our
subjective intelligences.
When, after a walk in the woods,
you stop to pick the burrs off your
clothes, do you know what you have
done? You have been serving in the
capacity of coach-and-four to a lot
of passengers who were hunting a new
location in which to preempt claims,
stake out home sections and rear
their families. These little
“stickers” were
manifestations or visible expressions
of their innate desires pointing to
the very thing you have helped them
to do. “Oh,” you say,
“that was nature. It was not
they. They did not know anything
about it.”
Why, they themselves were
nature’s own knowing! They were
so much natural intelligence in
visible manifestation.
Millions of these little creatures
have become extinct. They have merged
the pattern of themselves in higher
organizations. And all the knowing
which made them what they were went
to swell the knowledge of this
submerged mind, this gulf of
inestimable intelligence that lies
back of our external perceptions. And
not of these little creatures only,
but creatures whose lives took a
wider range and embodied greater
intelligence and infinitely
diversified experiences, all of which
are recorded in the stupendous memory
of which we catch glimpses when the
outer mind is off guard for a
moment.
And it may be that this is not
all, nor even a fraction of the
knowing pent up within us. Suppose
that reincarnation is true. Suppose
that it is a fixed law that man must
return again and again to this earth
life until his experience embraces
every atom of knowledge necessary to
his final conquest of matter
(negative mind), and to his ascension
to the realm of a consciously
recognized and vital condition of
pure mentality, wherein he sees that
he is no longer mortal and
perishable.
Suppose this to be true, and then
picture to yourself, if you can, his
gradual ascension by conquest of his
own ignorance from the time he met
the enemies of the forest
single-handed and naked, up through
the dawning ingenuity that taught him
to make a knife of flint, clear on
through a hundred ages of growing
constructiveness, until an Edison or
a Keely were revealed.
And think of the thousands and
thousands of experiences he passed
through on his long journey;
experiences that taught him every
secret of his mother, nature; that
made him master of every one of her
forces. And all of this mastery he
appears to have forgotten. It finds
no place in his objective mind. His
mind is as unconscious of it as if it
had but awakened from the dead
yesterday.
And yet each experience is inlaid
in the unrecognized layers of his
being. They are like the growths of a
tree. [184] They are all there, from
the first central line, ranging in
many rings clear out to the bark that
covers and conceals them. Not an atom
of his immense knowledge has ever
been lost on man’s long journey
from the far beginning. And that
beginning dates back to the fire mist
out of whose unformed and widespread
vapor our earth was condensed; and
who knows how much farther back
still?
Nature wastes nothing. Not even
her crudest material is ever lost.
How much less then her precious
organizations that are growing and
refining with every change, and that
promise such miracles of beauty and
goodness when the whole world shall
have contributed of its fullness to
feed and develop them into a splendor
of blossoming and fruitage that we
can only now--at this late date, and
after this immense journey--begin to
be faintly conscious of.
No wonder that hypnotists declare
that they find in the mind of man
everything that they have the ability
to search for. They put the surface
mind asleep and reveal at once what
seems to be a shoreless and soundless
abyss of natural knowing. They stand
aghast before this “sunless
sea” of which philosophers and
sages have been so silent.
And yet they have not been silent.
Although no description of it has
been given, yet many a soul has
caught glimpses of it, and hundreds
have drawn the cool water from its
depths with which to refresh a
thirsty world. In art and in poetry
the existence of the subjective mind
reveals itself in those
“touches of nature that make
the world akin.” And now, what
is the thing to do in order to
develop this subjective mind and make
it more apparent? Shall we set aside
the objective mind, put it asleep as
in hypnotism, or make it negative by
withdrawing our confidence in it and
our respect for it?
Fortunately for us, it is not
necessary that we should make this
experiment. It has been often made,
and the result is most disastrous. Go
to an insane asylum and find how
utterly unbalanced this mighty
storehouse of memories is, when freed
from its jailer--the objective, or
externally perceptive part of itself.
Here, at once, if never before, we
have evidence that man does not
possess two separate minds, as some
authors assert, but simply two poles
of his one mind. One of these
poles--the subjective, or the
negative one--reaches back to
man’s individual beginning, and
is the infallible record of every
experience he has had in every form
he has ever inhabited, and in his
spiritual transpositions from one
form to another. This subjective mind
is the complete and perfect knowing
of his own history without a missing
link.
His objective mind, which is the
positive pole of the same mind, is to
the subjective mind what the bark is
to the tree; what the skin is to the
peach. It is the visible containment
of the internal wealth. It is an
expression of recognition of that
which lies behind it. But how
inadequate this expression is! It
expresses simply as much of that
internal reservoir as it recognizes,
but it recognizes so little of it in
comparison with what it might
recognize. This external or objective
mind is created by the reasoning
powers. The reasoning powers make the
boundary line--on the external
plane--of this wonderful mind which a
man is. In other words, the
subjective mind, with its almost
infinite knowing, can come no farther
forward into visible existence than
the external reasoning powers (the
objective mind) will allow it to
come. Not that the objective mind
holds the manifestation of the
subjective mind back by will power,
for as yet it does not do this, but
it holds it back by reason of being
unconscious of its existence; and
nothing makes it manifest externally
but recognition. The objective mind
has got to recognize the presence and
the potency of the subjective mind
before [185] the stored memories--the
stored knowledge of facts--which
constitute the subjective mind can
come to the surface and be recognized
and understood in our every-day life
here in the world.
In other words, man, taken as a
whole, is a bundle of stored facts,
comprising every experience he has
ever passed through; every knowledge
he ever gained. But he does not know
this, and therefore he does not know
himself and his opinion of himself
misrepresents him. As his body is the
record of his opinion, or his
beliefs, it therefore happens that
his body is a weaker thing in all
respects than it really ought to
be.
Now, remember that all through
life, from the very beginning, man
has been a selecting factor. The soul
of his existence was desire. In the
earlier or animal stages of his
growth his desire was unclouded by
doubt, and it was therefore an almost
omnipotent power. He did not attract
to himself what he did not want; this
would have been impossible under the
Law. He attracted to himself those
things which were related to him
through desire--the things, or
conditions, he wanted. Many a little
bug, for instance, took on a soft
brown coat and created yellow bands
around its body in order to resemble
the bee. Why? Because the birds were
afraid of the bee on account of its
sting. These little creatures were
defenseless, having no stings. Why
did they not create stings for
themselves?
The question is apt, and the
answer sustains my claims of the
power vested in individualization.
Students of natural history waive the
mighty power of individualization,
with its moving soul of intelligent
desire, and say, “Oh, it is
nature that does all these wonderful
things!” and here they drop the
matter. Well, it is nature; but
nature expresses herself in the
myriad personalities of which all
these little creatures are a part.
Now, these little creatures do their
own thinking in their own way. The
instinctive desire for life has
provided them with instinctive
methods of self-preservation. They
know that the bee is rejected as
food, while they are accepted. That
part of the bee which appeals to
their perceptions is his yellow bands
on his brown coat. Desire, prompted
by the instinct of self-preservation,
gives them the yellow bands and brown
coat. They know more of the colors of
the bee than of his sting.
But is it really true that the
defenseless creatures imitate those
which are well defended? Naturalists
tell us that it is true. They have
experimented with them in various
ways, and they say that an insect
which changes his coat when exposed
to the attacks of his enemies will
resume his native colors if placed in
a protected situation. It often
happens that he himself will not
resume his original colors, but his
immediate descendants will.
All of this is a part of
nature’s wonderful knowing,
individualized in her children. It is
as I have said over and over in these
lessons, all is mind, or
intelligence; and every object in all
the world is some expression of a
mentality; some external evidence of
a certain amount of knowing.
But to go back to the main thread
running through this lesson. I have
been trying to prove that man is a
selecting factor. Among his
multitudinous experiences he only
retains as part of himself those that
were desired by him. Under the Law of
Attraction this could not have been
otherwise. That to which he was not
attracted, that which seemed to be
not good, not desirable, did not
adhere to his experience; did not
become incorporated in his
organization as part of his true
self. Therefore, as a living mind I
have never died at all. Death never
was desired by me, and never became
incorporated in my experiences. Being
built through desire, under the Law
of Attraction, I have no recollection
of death. Such a recollection could
not possibly belong to my experience,
and [186] my experience is myself. If
my experience held a recollection of
death it would have ceased in that
very moment, and I should have had no
more experiences. As it was, I, the
true self, the record of all my
experiences, simply burst my
inelastic environment and went on to
other experiences in a new
incarnation; each of which was
effected by my insatiable desire for
expression--which is manifestation in
the visible world of uses.
And so I, the desire which is the
drawing power of my body, the real
me, have never died and never will
die. Furthermore, I have never been
sick, nor weak, nor diseased. The
soul of me, dating so far back, has
always reached forward in
anticipation of the time of a fuller
outward expression in the world of
uses. This soul of me enjoys
perpetual being. But it is the nature
of perpetual being to be expressed in
perpetual doing. Hence the constant
effort of irrepressible desire to
become established or fixed in the
world of uses; to operate on the
external plane. The subjective mind,
reaching far back through an
infinitude of experiences on the
subjective plane, desires to make
those experiences practical in uses
on the objective plane. So everything
clings to life on the objective
plane. The tendency of all thought is
toward what we call
“material” manifestation.
The earth is man’s workshop. We
want to do, as well as to be. Indeed,
being is worthless unless it finds an
outlet in doing. This is why we cling
to external life, and why we are
trying to conquer that disappearance
from external perception called
death.
The belief that spirits are better
off after death than before it is all
nonsense to me. And I know the
assertion cannot be proved. Life on
the visible plane is expression on
the visible plane. And this is the
expression that every desire in the
universe points to, from the desire
in the smallest insect up to
man’s desire. In the death of
the so-called physical body, the
desire has been thwarted for the time
being. It has not conquered its
environment, but has been pressed
back out of the world of uses into
the subjective world. It becomes
merely a subjective mind, having no
objective outlet in our life which is
the true life and the life to be
desired above all things.
To be sure, this life on the
objective plane is full of
disagreeable conditions; but what of
that? Do we not find our greatest
happiness in conquest? Imagine
yourself spending a whole day without
having conquered anything. What a
dreary day it has been! What a wasted
day! Infinitely better has been Aunt
Sally’s employment, whereby
certain graceless scraps of calico
have been shaped to her will and made
to assume symmetrical proportions in
her quilt. And with what sturdy
enjoyment Uncle Lige snowballs the
pigs out of the wheat pasture, and
almost hopes they will get in again,
so that he can have another chance at
them. Oh, the blessed privilege of
doing!
We want to do things. We are
creative. To create is to make
visible in this world of uses. We are
constructive. We want to consolidate
our ideas into the objective. If I
attempt to carry the idea of an
improved sewing machine in my head
for even three days it dissolves and
fades away from me; but if I go to
work with regular tools and bring out
my idea in wood and iron, I have
fixed it among the permanent uses of
life; and I am happy because I have
found expression. My idea did not die
stillborn, but was brought forth into
existence to become one of my
cherished children. I am fond of it
and proud of it. To be fond of things
and proud of them are among the
chiefest pleasures of life. And the
gossamer illusions with which you
picture a life in the spirit world
are nothing in comparison with these
substantial creations.
[187] The entire drift of this
lesson is to prove, first, our
ability to do, and second, that our
happiness consists in doing. I have
made it plain that we are very great
creatures--possessing wonderful
knowledge lying back out of sight of
our objective minds; all of which
knowledge may be made available in
the objective world in proportion as
we recognize it and bring it forth. I
have shown that the mind lying back
out of sight carries within its
minute and wonderful record not a
single thought of sickness or death;
that it is a compact, unbroken whole;
that as such it knocks constantly
upon the portals of the objective
mind for recognition of its wholeness
and perfectness. And now I ask the
student to make an effort to
recognize this indestructible spirit
of himself. I ask him to adjust his
outer consciousness in a way to
harmonize with his marvelous interior
experiences, and then claim that he
is one with the diseaseless and
deathless spirit that has infused him
from the dawn of his individual
being. I do not ask him to lay aside
his objective, for this is travelling
on the back track; but I ask him to
believe in the knowledge of his
subjective mind; to seek them out by
calm, introspective thought, and to
make them apparent and useful on the
objective plane of life.
