THE DUPLEX MIND
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.
[3] “Law of Psychic Phenomena,” chap. vi.
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]
[4] Arcana Coelestia, § 1772.
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 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.
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.