 You may have heard it said that there are many minds, but such a statement is merely an idiom. There is nothing in science or reality to support such a predicate. There is but one mind, as there is but one electricity, one air or atmosphere. The many minds referred to are but a multiplicity of expressions of the one. We use mind as we use air or electricity – as our individual needs require. I will now ask that you bear with me for a time while I make use of a contradiction in order that I may simplify the next subject. It becomes necessary for me to refer to three minds, or, properly speaking, three phases of mind. You are apparently made up of three minds. The one which controls the functioning of the body and which, for want of a better word, I will call the Deeper mind. This mind we are not particularly concerned with, and properly should not be. It knows its duties better than we do. We can cooperate with this mind to our great profit in both health and strength by keeping our thoughts off the body. By forgetting that we have a body and thereby refraining from interfering with the proper functioning of this Deeper mind, we will find that it will get along very nicely. The other two minds in which we are greatly interested and with which we must deal from this time forth, are what I might name the Inner and Outer minds. Those two minds you will readily recognize from the fact that when you take sides within yourself upon a subject and find yourself carrying on a spirited controversy with yourself, you are engaging these two minds. The proper office of the Outer mind, which is in touch with external things through the medium of the five senses, is to transmit its desires to the Inner mind, which is the seat of power within you and which, by its very nature, has no consciousness of duality, since it has no faculty of discrimination. It knows no impossible, no failure, no obstacle, or limit or lack. It depends upon the guidance of the Outer mind and throws its great, unlimited force into anything that the Outer mind may direct. I can better illustrate the character of the Inner mind by again comparing it with electricity. As electricity is the greatest power in the world, so is the Inner mind the greatest power in your being. Of themselves, neither operates independently, but depends upon a separate agency to incite them to action, and both bring helpful or harmful results according to the wisdom or ignorance with which they are directed. This being true, how important, then, for the Outer to unite with the Inner and cooperate with it, and if this were the condition in human affairs, man would be master of his environment instead of being the slave of circumstance. Why are all not super-men instead of merely men? For this reason: The Outer mind forms a desire which is automatically taken up by the Inner mind and, in turn, it immediately proceeds to function toward bringing it forth. It scarcely has time to turn its great force in that direction before the Outer has found a new fancy or has conjured up illusionary obstacles, and the Inner, not being on the surface, not in contact with outer things and consequently dependent upon the Outer for guidance, is forced to again divert its power. And thus it goes, on and on, like leaks in a steam pipe, scattering its wonderful power everywhere but getting nowhere. Why is the Inner mind thus thwarted in every move it makes toward accomplishment? Why? Because the Outer judges everything by what the eye and ear reports and transmit that message to the Inner. What do we find humanity doing? We find them taking pictures of what they experience daily in the outer world, developing the sensitized film, then printing those pictures upon themselves within. The procedure should be just the reverse. I know whereof I speak when I say that we have been endowed with the capacity and the power to create desirable pictures within and to find them automatically printed in the outer world of our environment. And it is a simple process, as you will see later. When we can do this, we have mastery. And not before. Well, then, you would say, the need must be to discipline the Outer mind, since it seems to be the offender. Just so. But since it meets up with thousands of experiences almost daily, ordinary methods of training might require years to accomplish results. Or, at best, such training would be a long-drawn-out process. There is a quicker and better way. A method which, when put into operation, employs the usefulness of the Outer mind without taking into account its vacillating willfulness. |
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