millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth
unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep.
milton.
we must not forget that it is easy to miss the good results of any natural function, and, through misuse, get only poor results. as in the matter of eating, we should get only good from satisfying our hunger, but the acquired habit of eating more than we need or can digest does incalculable harm. in the same way we may misuse sleep, and so lose its best benefits.
“sleep that knits up the raveled sleave of care,” may be made, as shakespeare says, a repairing time as well as a resting time, for as iamblichus, the neo-platonic philosopher saw, “the night-time of the body is the daytime of the soul.” with some insight into the best uses of this natural habit, iamblichus further said that, during sleep, “the nobler part of the soul is united by abstraction to higher natures and becomes a participant in the wisdom and foreknowledge of the gods.” dr. thomas j. hudson’s claim made a very popular appeal, that there is a subjective mind made up of our inner knowledge, our own intuitions and mental processes. he alleged it to be a part of our being that is able, in some instances—as in the case of “lightning calculators,” of mind-readers and of some clairvoyants—to perceive the relations of things without reasoning them out, and to perceive the fixed laws of nature without the aid of the senses.[3] he concluded that this mind or this faculty of mind is an inheritance from experiences and conclusions of the race in its upward growth.
swedenborg also, who was at least a noted scientist, divided the mind into the interior, corresponding to the subjective mind, and the exterior or reasoning memory.[4]
the objective mind, as it may be called, is what we all know as mind or intellect, that part which deals with external objects, getting its impressions and reaching its conclusions from observation. it is differently affected in different individuals by such purely physical things as sight and hearing. for a proof of this, ask any two persons who have seen and heard and been affected by something you have seen and felt, to describe its effect upon them, and the mental picture they have of it. not only will they not agree in detail with each other, but you will find that neither has seen it in the same way that you have.
modern science cannot accept the statement that foreign, mysterious agencies control the mind during sleep; but may not some such experience as that which iamblichus describes, come to us in sleep by the spirit working, not from without, but from within us? our spiritual nature is freed at night from the incessant calls that beset us during the day. in the calm that comes over it in the night-time the doors of the storehouses of memory may stand wide open before it, and it may lead perhaps a broader, fuller life.
professor william james has shown that in our waking hours, each of us is not so much a single self as a cluster of separate selves—a business self, social self, the material self, and so on—all making up the man as his casual acquaintances know him. professor james found that in every individual there is rivalry and sometimes discord among these partial selves. now may it not be that in the silence, these warring factions lose their identity in a state of broader conscious life, and merge themselves into a harmoniously acting “spiritual me”?
from the standpoint of this spiritual self, then, the waking state shows only the objective aspects of the mind. it is that understanding which shows us all men working, whether willingly or unwillingly, for the common good, and each receiving what he needs or has power to use. it is a recognition that all men are comprehended in the spirit’s plan, that nothing can be for the common harm; that even mistakes work out for good, and that life gives to each the experience from which he will get most development and the power which he can best use and relate to his whole life. from the spiritual standpoint the subjective mind is the indwelling life of the soul; and its growth a matter of gradual self-attainment. at its highest stage it is the realization of that which we have in common with everyone—that understanding and that consciousness of the law of harmony which makes us love all mankind, and live in communion with the love that is the substance of all things. the separate self does not appear at all on the horizon of such thought and purpose.
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 sub34conscious, 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 all35 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.
we must learn to connect each experience with what we know of our life up to that point and with what we think it is meant to be. this effort will often show us, or itself prove to be, the key to the “problem.” but it is only the scientific expert, one who has a perfect conception of the workings of all the parts of the frame, who can take one bone and reconstruct from it the entire structure of the extinct animal. that would be impossible for the tyro, and most of us are tyros in the science of living.
