The Mental Highway
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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, heartbeat, 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.