this power. So our first objective is to get acquainted with this power.
For Psychologists and Metaphysicians the world over, are agreed in this — that Mind is all that counts. You can be whatever you make up your mind to be. You need not be sick. You need not be unhappy. You need not be poor. You need not be unsuccessful. You are not a mere clod. You are not a beast of burden, doomed to spend your days in unremitting labor in return for food and housing. You are one of the Lords of the Earth, with unlimited potentialities. Within you is a power, which, properly grasped and directed, can lift you out of the rut of mediocrity and place you among the Elect of the earth — the lawyers, the writers, the statesmen, the big business men — the DOERS and the THINKERS. It rests with you only to learn to use this power, which is yours — this Mind that can do all things.
Your body is for all practical purposes merely a machine, which the mind uses. This mind is usually thought of as consciousness; but the conscious part of your mind is in fact the very smallest part of it. Ninety per cent of your mental life is subconscious, so when you make active use of only the conscious part of your mind you are using but a fraction of your real ability; you are running on low gear. And the reason why more people do not achieve success in life is because so many of them are content to run on low gear all their lives — on SURFACE ENERGY. If these same people would only throw into the fight the resistless force of their subconscious minds they would be amazed at their undreamed of capacity for winning success.
Conscious and subconscious are, of course, integral parts of the one mind. But for convenience sake let us divide your mind into three parts — the conscious mind, the subconscious mind, and the Infinite, Subliminal or Universal Mind.
The Conscious Mind
When you say, “I see — I hear — I smell — I touch,” it is your conscious mind that is saying this, for it is the force governing the five physical senses. It is the phase of mind with which you feel and reason — the phase of mind with which everyone is familiar. It is the mind with which you do business. It controls, to a great extent, all your voluntary muscles. It discriminates between right and wrong, wise and foolish. It is the generalissimo, in charge of all your mental forces. It can plan ahead — and get things done as it plans. Or it can drift along haphazardly, a creature of impulse, at the mercy of events — a mere bit of flotsam in the current of life.
For it is only through your conscious mind that you can reach the subconscious and the Universal Mind. Your conscious mind is the porter at the door, the watchman at the gate. It is to the conscious mind that the subconscious looks for all its impressions. It is on it that the subconscious mind must depend for the teamwork necessary to get successful results. You wouldn’t expect much from an army, no matter how fine its soldiers, whose general never planned ahead, who distrusted his own ability and that of his men, and who spent all his time worrying about the enemy instead of planning how he might conquer them. You wouldn’t look for good scores from a ball team whose pitcher was at odds with the catcher. In the same way, you can’t expect results from the subconscious when your conscious mind is full of fear or worry, or when it does not know what it wants.
The one most important province of your conscious mind is to center your thoughts on the thing you want, and to shut the door on every suggestion of fear or worry or disease.
If you once gain the ability to do that, nothing else is impossible to you.
For the subconscious mind does not reason inductively. It takes the thoughts you send in to it and works them out to their logical conclusion. Send to it thoughts of health and strength, and it will work out health and strength in your body. Let suggestions of disease, fear of sickness or accident, penetrate to it, either through your own thoughts or the talk of those around you, and you are very likely to see the manifestation of disease working out in yourself.
Your mind is master of your body. It directs and controls every function of your body. Your body is in effect a little universe in itself, and mind is its radiating center — the sun that gives light and life to all your system, and around which the whole revolves. And your conscious thought is master of this sun center. As Emile Coue puts it — “The conscious can put the subconscious mind over the hurdles.”
The Subconscious Mind
Can you tell me how much water, how much salt, how much of each different element there should be in your blood to maintain its proper specific gravity if you are leading an ordinary sedentary life? How much and how quickly these proportions must be changed if you play a fast game of tennis, or run for your car, or chop wood, or indulge in any other violent exercise?
Do you know how much water you should drink to neutralize the excess salt in salt fish? How much you lose through perspiration? Do you know how much water, how much salt, how much of each different element in your food should be absorbed into your blood each day to maintain perfect health?
No? Well, it need not worry you. Neither does any one else. Not even the greatest physicists and chemists and mathematicians. But your subconscious mind knows.
And it doesn’t have to stop to figure it out. It does it almost automatically. It is one of those “Lightning Calculators.” And this is but one of thousands of such jobs it performs every hour of the day. The greatest mathematicians in the land, the most renowned chemists, could never do in a year’s time the abstruse problems, which your subconscious mind, solves every minute.
And it doesn’t matter whether you’ve ever studied mathematics or chemistry or any other of the sciences. From the moment of your birth your subconscious mind solves all these problems for you. While you are struggling along with the three R’s, it is doing problems that would leave your teachers aghast. It supervises all the intricate processes of digestion, of assimilation, of elimination, and all the glandular secretions that would tax the knowledge of all the chemists and all the laboratories in the land. It planned and built your body from infancy on up. It repairs it. It operates it. It has almost unlimited power, not merely for putting you and keeping you in perfect health but for acquiring all the good things of life. Ignorance of this power is the sole reason for all the failures in this world. If you would intelligently turn over to this wonderful power all your business and personal affairs in the same way that you turn over to it the mechanism of your body, no goal would be too great for you to strive for.
Dr. Geo. C. Pitzer sums up the power of the subconscious mind very well in the following:
“The subconscious mind is a distinct entity. It occupies the whole human body, and, when not opposed in any way, it has absolute control over all the functions, conditions, and sensations of the body. While the objective (conscious) mind has control over all of our voluntary functions and motions, the subconscious mind controls all of the silent, in-voluntary, and vegetative functions. Nutrition, waste, all secretions and excretions, the action of the heart in the circulation of the blood, the lungs in respiration or breathing, and all cell life, cell changes and development, are positively under the complete control of the subconscious mind.
This was the only mind animal had before the evolution of the brain; and it could not, nor can it yet, reason inductively, but its power of deductive reasoning is perfect. And more, it can see without the use of physical eyes. It perceives by intuition. It has the power to communicate with others without the aid of ordinary physical means. It can read the thoughts of others. It receives intelligence and transmits it to people at a distance. Distance offers no resistance against the successful missions of the subconscious mind. It never dies. We call this the ‘soul mind.’ It is the living soul.”
In “Practical Psychology and Sex Life,” by David Bush, Dr. Winbigler is quoted as going even further. To quote him:
“It is this mind that carries on the work of assimilation
