A policeman, 49 years old, suffered from intractable insomnia, head pressure, general nervousness and loss of weight. He was not a man to suspect of fear. For many years he had been in active service in one of the worst precincts of Chicago, and on account of his familiarity with criminals was frequently sent after the worst types. He had been in numerous ‘gun’ fights. Once a notorious ‘gunman’ standing beside him fired point blank at his head. All this disturbed his equanimity not a whit.

And yet his illness was the result of fear pure and simple. It came about in this way; a malicious person had preferred against him charges of misconduct, and he was cited to appear before the trial board.

This worried him greatly. Innocent he keenly felt the disgrace of the accusation and feared that he might be suspended or even discharged. He trembled for his well-earned good name and for his home, on which there was a mortgage. Naturally he began to sleep poorly, to have queer feelings in his head, and then to feel uncertain of himself. at this juncture some friends sympathetically told him that one could go insane from worry. These were the steps: Fear of disgrace, fear of financial collapse, fear of insanity. But did the patient know all this? Not he. He knew only that he was nervous, and that he suffered, that he did not feel sure of himself.”

When that was dragged out of his consciousness and shown to him as a root of his trouble, and a physician was able to assure him that fear was all in the world that was the matter with him, he made up his mind that he had better give that up. Then he was healed.

The subconscious mentality is sick in a chronic way; it has been made sick by some kind of mental experience--usually of many years standing--and the sickness is a result of its continuing to cherish that experience and keeping it before itself. This constitutes what is technically called a “running sore” in the subconsciousness--that is, mentally not physically.

A woman had suffered from general debility for a number of years, and had been unable to secure relief; the psychologist began to probe, to see what the trouble was. He began to pronounce words--just anything that came into his thoughts: “desk, book, rug, Chinaman.” When he pronounced the word “Chinaman” the woman appeared startled, and he asked her what the word “Chinaman” suggested to her and why it startled her. The woman said that when she was a little girl, she with a playmate, used to play around a Chinese laundry, that they used to plague the Chinaman by throwing pebbles at him through the open door; that one day the Chinaman chased them with a big knife, and that they were nearly scared to death. “Yes,” said the psychologist, “that is one of the things that I wanted to know.” Then he began to pronounce more words, presently the word “water,” and again the woman was startled. It developed then that one time when she was a very little girl, she and her brother were playing on the wharf and that accidentally she pushed him into the water and he was drowned. She said it was many years ago, when she was a mere child. He said: “Do you think of these things very often?” She said: “No, I do not know that I have thought of them before in fifteen or twenty years.”

“Well,” he said, “I will tell you what I want you to do.” (She was at that time in a sanitarium, under the care of a nurse.) “I want you to tell the nurse every day that experience about the Chinaman and also the experience about your brother, and I want you to keep telling it until you have told it so many times that you do not feel bad about it any more; then, see me again in two or three weeks.” She did as he directed, and at the end of sixty days she was well. The effect of telling it so often was its becoming commonplace to the conscious mentality, without touching the feelings. So the suggestion then went down to the subconsciousness that it did not feel badly about the incident any more, and the conditions of fear which had persisted for twenty or twenty-five years were erased, and the complex in the subconsciousness was no longer in evidence.

The subconscious mind has perfect memory and is fully equipped at birth. Every child inherits certain characteristics from its ancestors. These are carried in the subconscious mind and brought into play when the life or health of the individual requires them.

It is natural to be born without pain, to develop without pain, to live without pain, and to die without pain. This is as natural as it is for a tree to blossom and bear fruit, which at the proper times drops off without distress. The subconscious will take care of every situation; even when it is interfered with it has a remedy available for every situation. Again, you forget something, but the subconscious mind has not forgotten; as soon as the conscious mind dismisses the matter, it comes to us.

Every engineer knows what it is to sleep over a problem; while he is asleep the subconscious is working it out;; or he may lose an article, get excited and anxious about it, and not be able to find it; yet as soon as the conscious mind gives it up and lets go, the sense of where it is comes without effort.

Again there is a difficult situation in your affairs, if you can only persuade your conscious mind to let go, to cease its anxiety, dismiss its fear, give up the tenseness and struggle, the subconscious will ordinarily bring about prosperity. The tendency of the subconscious is always toward health and harmonious conditions. To illustrate, you are in the water over your depth, you cannot swim, you are sinking. If the moment the life guard approaches you, you grab him around the neck and impede the action of his arms and limbs, he may be unable to do anything with you, but if you will simply trust yourself in his hands, he will get you out. And so it is absolutely certain that subconscious will be present in every difficult situation and that it will tend to play life guard in your favor, if you can but persuade your consciousness to cease its anxiety, to dismiss its fears, to give up the tenseness of the struggle.

Suppose the conscious mind suffers itself to become angry over every trifle. Every time it gets angry the impulse is transferred to the subconscious. The impulse is repeated again and again, each time it is stirred up. The second record of anger is added to the first, the third to the second, and the fourth to the third. Soon the subconscious has acquired the habit, and before long it will be difficult to stop. When this situation develops the conscious mind will be subject to the irritating influence from without and the habitual impulse from within. There will be action and reaction. It will be easier to be angry and more difficult to prevent it. Yet every time the conscious mind gets angry an additional impulse will be given to the subconscious, and that impulse will be an additional incentive to get angry again.

Now the, anger is an abnormal condition, and any abnormal condition contains within itself the penalty, ad this penalty will be promptly reflected in that part of the body which has the least resistance. For instance, if the person has a weak stomach, there will be acute attacks of indigestion, and eventually these will become chronic. In other persons, Bright’s Disease may develop; in other, rheumatism; and so on.

It is evident therefore, that these conditions are effects, but if the cause be removed the effect will vanish. If the individual knows that thoughts are causes, and conditions are effects, he will promptly decide to control his thoughts. This will tend to erase anger and other bad mental habits; and as the light of truth gradually becomes clear and perfect, the habit and everything connected with it will be erased, and the accumulated distress destroyed.

What is true of anger, is true of jealousy, of fear, of lust, of greed, of dishonesty, each of these may become subconscious and each of them eventually result in some diseased condition of the body, and the nature of the disease indicates to the trained analyst the nature of the cause which was responsible for the condition.

Frederic Pierce tells us in “Our Unconscious Mind”:

“It is a matter of common observation that everything is in greater or less degree suggestible. The reaction to suggestion may be either positive or negative, either an acceptance or heightened resistance. In this we see a censorship. An epidemic of a certain type of crime shows, on the part of the perpetrators, imitative response to suggestion implanted both by the elaborate descriptive accounts in the newspapers, and by the great amount of discussion of the outrages, heard on all sides.

Primitive effects of great intensity are aroused; they break through the primary cultural censorship (which is weak in the criminally disposed person), accumulate energy be being dwelt on in consciousness, and finally become sufficiently strong to surmount all fear of punishment and to control the conduct.

The remainder of the social group, having a higher cultural censorship, reacts to the same suggestion negatively, and discharges the energy of whatever primitive effects have been aroused, in the form of wrath and the desire for punishment of the criminals.

In this connection, it is interesting to note that one often hears the desire for vengeance expressed in terms of much greater primitive violence than the crime itself actually showed. Psycho-analysts hold that this is a method by which the individual is reinforcing his own none too strong censorship of his Unconscious.

Mind in itself is believe to be a subtle form of static energy, from which rises the activities called “thought,” which is the dynamic phase of mind. Mind is static energy, thought is dynamic energy--the two phases of the same thing.

-Walker.

Tradition whispers that in the sky is a bird, as blue as the sky itself, which brings to its finders happiness. But everyone cannot see it; for mortal eyes are prone to be blinded by the glitter of wealth, fame, and position, and deceived by the mocking Will-o-the-Wisp of empty honors.

But for the fortunate ones who seek with open eyes and hearts, with the artlessness, simplicity and faith, which are richest in childhood, there is an undying promise; and to them the Blue Bird lives and carols, a rejoicing symbol of Happiness and Contentment unto the end.

Psychology



The observation and analysis, knowledge and classification of the activities of the personal consciousness, consisting of the science of psychology, has been studied in colleges and universities for many years, but this personal or conscious, self-conscious mind does not by any means constitute the whole of the mind.

There are some very highly complex, and very orderly activities going on within the body of a baby. The body of the baby, as such, cannot induce or carry on those activities, and the conscious mind of the baby does not know enough to even plan them or be aware of them. Probably also in most cases there is no one around the baby who even remotely understands what is going on in this highly complex process of physical life; and yet all those activities manifest intelligence, and intelligence of a very complex and high order.

From the examination of what goes on in the human body, from all the complex processes, the beating of heart and digestion of the foods, the secretion and excretion of the glands, it is apparent, that there is in control an order of mentality which has a high degree of intelligence, but it is the mentality which is operating in the millions of cells which constitute the body, and so operate below the surface of what we term consciousness. It is therefore, subconscious.

The subconscious mind, again assumes two phases. Connected with each human person there is a subconsciousness which may in some sense be regarded as the subconsciousness of that person, but which merges at a still deeper level into what may be termed Universal subconsciousness, or into cosmic consciousness. That may be illustrated in this way: If you will think of the waves on the surface of Lake Michigan, insofar as they are above the level of the troughs, as standing for so many personal mentalities; and then, if you will think of a small body of water not rising above the surface, but in some degree running along with each wave and merging indistinctly at the bottom into the great unmoved mass below, which may be thought of as the deepest level, then those three levels of the water in the lake may illustrate to you personal consciousness or self-consciousness, personal subconsciousness, and universal subconsciousness or cosmic consciousness. Now, out of cosmic consciousness springs personal subconsciousness, and out of that in turn, or in connection with it, rises personal consciousness.

At the beginning of the experience of the child, its government is almost wholly from subconsciousness, but as it goes on, it becomes aware maybe unconsciously, but still in a degree aware of the presence of laws of consciousness which manifest as justice, truthfulness, honesty, purity, liberty, loving-kindness, and so on, and begins to relate itself to them and to be governed by them more and more.

The first thing to note is that, while this mental action is going on continuously, we are normally quite unconscious of it. For this reason it is known as the subconscious department of the mind to distinguish it from that part which functions through the senses of which we are conscious, and which we call the self-conscious. The existence in the body of two distinct nervous systems, the cerebro-spinal and the sympathetic, each with its own field of operation and its special functions, prepared us for these two mental departments.

The cerebro-spinal system is used by the self-conscious and the sympathetic by the subconscious. And just as we find in the body that, while the functions and activities of the two nervous systems are different, provision has been made for very close inter-action between the two, so we will find that, while the functions and activities of the two mental departments are different, there is a very definite line of activity between them.

The main business of the subconscious mind is to preserve the life and health of the individual. Consequently it supervises all the automatic functions, such as the circulation of the blood, the digestion, all automatic muscular action and so on. It transforms food into suitable material for body building, returning it to conscious man in the form of energy.

Conscious man makes use of this energy in mental and physical work, and in the process uses up what has been provided for him by his subconscious intelligence.

The action of the subconscious is cumulative and may be illustrated in the following manner. Suppose you take a tub of water and begin to stir it with a small piece of wood from right to left, with a circular motion. At first you will start only a ripple around the wood, but if you keep the wood in motion with the circular movement, the water will gradually accumulate the strength which you are putting into the wood, and presently you will have the whole tub of water in a whirl. If you were then to drop the piece of wood, the water would carry along the instrument that originally set it in motion, and if you were suddenly to stop the wood while it is still projecting in the water, there would be a strong tendency to not only carry the wood forward, but to take your hand along with it. Now, suppose that after you have the water whirling, you decide that you do not want it to whirl, or think that you would prefer to have it whirl in the other direction, and so try to set it going the other way, you will find that there is great resistance, and you will find that it will take a long while to bring the water to a standstill, and a still longer time before you get it going the other way.