The Ghost in the White House: Some suggestions as to how a hundred million people (who are supposed in a vague, helpless way to haunt the white house) can make themselves felt with a president, how they can back him up, express themselves to him, be expressed by him, and get what they wantLee, Gerald Stanley
Philosophy
The Ghost in the White House: Some suggestions as to how a hundred million people (who are supposed in a vague, helpless way to haunt the white house) can make themselves felt with a president, how they can back him up, express themselves to him, be expressed by him, and get what they want
Lee, Gerald Stanley
Democracy; United States -- Politics and government
A man who does this becomes like any other great force of nature. The
indication seems to be that what the artist in a man or the engineer in
him does with the genius in him namely: the driving down of an artesian
well of consciousness into his subconsciousness, the using of his new
brain tracks and old ones together--is the secret of getting one's way
for all of us, whether with Nature or with one another.
Of course, the hard part of this program to arrange for is the new brain
tracks to put with the old ones both in getting our own way with other
people and with ourselves.
This part of my book deals with what is a very personal problem for most
of us--what new brain tracks are really like, how they work, and what
people can do to get them.
III
WHAT IS CALLED THINKING
The one special trait that stands out in all new brain tracks in common,
is that nobody wants them. The way people really act--even the best of
us, when some one steps up to them with new tracks for their brains, is
as if they had no place to put them.
The plain psychological facts about them when one fronts up with them are
rather appalling. They first appear when one begins to observe closely
what one actually does with one's own personal listening and what other
people, when one checks them up, do with their listening to us.
In making as I have tried to make during the last six months, a few
special studies in not being fooled by myself, studies in changing what I
call my mind, I have come to feel that any man who will try several hours
each day a few harmless experiments on his friends and on himself and his
other enemies, will come to two or three thoughts about Man as a rational
being which would have seemed dreams to him six months ago.
The first fact is this:
Nearly everything that is the matter with the world can be traced back to
the fact that people have, when one studies them closely, two sets of
ears--one set that they look as if they used, put up more or less showily
before everybody on the outside, and another entirely secret or real set
inside, that they seriously connect up with their souls and themselves
and really do their living with.
I first came on them--on these two sets of ears, in my experiences as a
young man in speaking to audiences. In the vague helpless way a young
lecturer has, I studied as well as I could what seemed to me to be
happening to my audiences--what they seemed to be doing to themselves,
but it was a good many years before I really woke up to what they were
doing to me, to the way their two sets of ears made them treat me.
I would watch people sometimes all suddenly in the middle of a sentence
shutting up their real ears or inside ears at me and then holding their
outside ones up at me kindly as if I cared, or as if I doted on them--on
outside ears, on ears of any kind if I could get them and I would feel
hurt but I did not wake up to what it meant.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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