We have all had a consciousness of this love at some time in our lives,
no matter how the cares of the world may have choked it out. It was
this consciousness that made a little boy say, in a burst of happiness,
“I love everything, and everything loves me.” When we “become like a
little child” in this sense, we, too, recognize the love that binds all
life in one.
When we can harmonize these two—the subconscious, that knows no
separate self, with the objective, that can see all men as one because
it sees all men as working for the same end—we shall have rest and
harmony instead of worry, the insanity of the spiritual mind.
The objective mind which is active during waking hours, apparently
rests during sleep; the subconscious mind is ever busy. Like the heart
or the digestive organs, the subconscious mind carries on its work
during that break in our usual consciousness which we call sleep. How
this is done we do not know, any more than we know how the physical
organs carry on their work while we are wrapped in slumber and
unconscious of all about us. There are very few, though, who have not
had some proof of the activity of the latent mind during sleep. That
somehow this under-mind does work in an “uncanny” way—that is to say,
in an unknown way—is shown by the fact that most persons can wake up at
any hour that they fix in their minds without being called and without
the abominable alarm clock.
It is a common enough thing to hear people say, “I do not know how I
knew that; I never remember hearing it; it just came to me.” Or, “I
tried and tried to think of that yesterday, and could not, but, when
I woke this morning, it was the first thing that came to my mind.”
Such incidents show that some process of which we are not objectively
conscious is going on all the time; that no mental experience is
destroyed or wholly dissipated. The common wish is “to sleep over”
any perplexing matter. After a good sleep our ideas are often better
arranged than when we fell asleep.
I have a friend who drops all her problems into her subconscious
thought, refuses to be “exercised in her mind” about them, and leaves
them for the latent mind to answer. So long as she views them from the
objective, conscious point of view only, she finds herself worrying
and losing sleep. The sleep-won mind, the “all-knowing Self,” as it
were, is not touched by worry, perhaps because, in communion with
the substance of all experience, it perceives that there are few
“problems” in life, when she does not persist in regarding as a
“problem” each separate experience.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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