Section 9 - Part A: The fountain of wisdom

 The Fountain of Wisdom 

In nearly every physical research laboratory there is a little three-cornered piece of crystal glass called a "prism", which when placed in sunlight splits the rays into the several colours of which it is composed and spreads these colours out like a rainbow on to a screen or background. There is a difference of opinion as to the exact number of colours in the sunlight. It is generally supposed that there are seven: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. There is no dispute that all these seven colours are in the sunlight and that the prism refracts them clearly on to the screen; but it has been suggested by some scientists that the orange is merely the overlapping borders of the red and yellow, and that the green is merely the overlapping of the yellow and blue. These scientists, therefore, claimed that there are only five colours in the sunlight.  

Whatever may be the difference of opinion as to the number of colours in the sunlight, it is universally agreed that light contains every colour the human eye has ever seen. The five or seven colours may be blended into thousands of different combinations so as apparently to produce new colours — such as purple, which is produced by mixing red and blue. But when these apparently new colours are analysed, they are found to be composed merely of combinations of the colours thrown on to the screen by the prism.  

As a matter of fact, no substance has any colour. The different colours in clear light are of different wave-lengths. Some substances absorb all the wave-lengths except red. The red wave-lengths are reflected by these substances and so the substances seem to be red. Other substances absorb all the wave-lengths except blue. They reflect blue and therefore seem to be blue. A red rose has no colour within itself, but it absorbs all the colours in light except red which it reflects and so seems to be red. The purple larkspur or morning-glory reflects both the red and the blue colours in light, and therefore seems to be purple. A substance which absorbs all the colours in light seems to be black, and a substance which reflects all the colours in light seems to be white. Black and white are not included in the list of "colours".  

The prism is also incorporated into a complex combination of prisms which not only splits the sun's light into its primary colours, but also splits up various component parts of those colours for the purpose of finding out the number and kind of substances in the sun. For each substance when heated white-hot gives off its own peculiar combination of colours. By the use of these complex prismatic machines or spectroscopes it has been found that the sun is composed of the same substances as the earth. The same is also true of the other suns in the universe. The spectroscope picks up the light coming from a star so far distant that the light probably started on its journey at a speed of 186,000 miles per second before our earth was torn from its sun. The spectroscope separates and spreads out all the rays in this billions-of years-old beam of light in such a way as to show that the distant sun is composed of the same materials as our own sun and earth. If you have realised that all substances in the universe are produced by mental images in the Universal Mind, you can readily understand that these mental images always produced the same results and created the same kinds of materials throughout the entire universe. Therefore, we would expect the suns and planets to be composed of the same substances.  

There is only One Mind in the Universe  

These references to prisms, colours, and so on, lead me to make another effort to drive home to you the miracle-working thought that there is but one Mind in the universe, and that the one Mind is everywhere in space, creating many phases or variations of itself. If there were no light the prism would refract no colours. If there were no Universal Mind the human brain would reflect no thought.  

Let us for a moment think of the Universal Mind as a universal white light. Let us think of the human brain as a prism which will separate and reflect only three colours. Let us name these three colours "objective", "subjective", and "subconscious". That is what happens in the process of forming - the human mind — the human brain reflects these three phases of the Universal Mind. We are now about to start a detailed discussion of the phase of mind called the Subjective Mind, in which we shall find a vast wealth of knowledge and wisdom. This will be of immeasurable value to you in becoming what you want to be, getting the things you desire, and accomplishing the things you wish to accomplish.  

The Subjective Mind has sometimes been called the "Race Mind" or the "Group Mind". It is not in Man, nor in any animal. It is a part or phase of the Universal Mind, and is merely reflected by the brains of men, just as the prism refracts the red rays in light. It is the remembering phase of mind, and in it are stored the records of all the past experiences and learning of the race. is more, because the race has been experiencing and learning things so long, the Subjective Mind has become a vast storehouse of knowledge. This vast storehouse is far back in the Subjective Mind, behind the storehouse in which are hidden away the memories of your past experiences and learning; but it is there. Its records are written in a part of the mind not used for any other purpose.  

A Vast Store of Knowledge to be Discovered  

In the opinion of the writer the greatest achievement of Psychology is the discovery of this vast store of knowledge, and the demonstration of the fact that it may be contacted and drawn upon by individual human beings for guidance in working out their individual success and happiness. When you contact this deep phase of the Subjective Mind, you seem to know things that you have never learned and to remember experiences that you have never had. Of course, this is not really true, for the real "I" behind each human personality has been here as long as the human race and has learned and experienced everything that any human being has ever learned and experienced. The real "I" is the real Life, the real Soul, the real Spirit, standing behind each human personality, and each human personality is only a part of it. Therefore, it has undergone all human experiences and acquired all human learning; and having experienced and learned, it stores the experiences and knowledge in its own remembering phase.  

I wish to make it clear that our knowledge of the vast storehouse in the Subjective Mind is quite new, and that the ways and means of drawing fully on it have not yet been perfected. We have merely learned that it is there, and that under certain conditions it may be explored and used. This discovery has thrown a flood of light on certain other things.  

It has laid bare the foundations of Spiritualism and Telepathy, and has shown them to be closely alike. It has also given us the key to "Inspiration" - an inspiring or animating action or influence - and we know that the inspired men and women of all ages have merely drawn on the remembering phase of the Universal Mind. This new knowledge does not degrade nor lessen inspiration; it simply lets us know what it is, and promises that inspiration will ultimately be available to everybody who has the courage to know and use the truth.  

How Hypnotism can Open Mental Doors  

The vast storehouse of wisdom in the Subjective Mind was first discovered through Hypnotism — a useful science which has been so mis-taught, misused and misunderstood that most people know little about it and often have an entirely wrong conception of it. This is not the time nor place for a treatise on hypnotism. Those who are interested in the subject may pursue it further in the many books which have been written about the subject. It is sufficient, however, to say that hypnotism is a fixation of the attention of the Objective Mind on a single thought or idea, so providing a gateway to the deeper levels of the Subjective and Subconscious Minds.  

During hypnotic experiments it has been seen that when subjects reach a certain stage in this process their personalities seem to change very markedly. They may suddenly become more educated and refined. Their vocabulary may improve, and they may be able to talk accurately and learnedly about things of which they have no knowledge in their ordinary wakeful consciousness. At first this remarkable phenomenon was explained by two theories: first, that the subjects were merely brought to a knowledge of things which they had heard or learned but which they did not remember when in normal consciousness; and, second, that the minds of the subjects were so tied up with the minds of the hypnotists that the subjects knew for the moment everything that the hypnotists knew. Careful experiments, however, have demonstrated that while both of these theories are correct in part, they fall far short of being the complete answer, for in some cases it was found that the subjects knew and discussed things that neither they nor the hypnotists had ever had the remotest chance of learning. 

Unfortunately, when subjects come out of the hypnotic spell their abnormal knowledge is gone, and they may have no recollection of anything they said while under the spell. While under the spell, people of only mediocre intelligence, and with little education, may fluently discuss art, literature, and science. They may discuss the great poets, compare their works, and recite their poems at length. They may even speak in a language unknown both to themselves and the hypnotists. But when the control is ended and the spell broken, all of this wonderful knowledge and refinement are gone, and they are again the dull, drab, uneducated persons that they were before with no recollection of anything that they knew, or said, or did, while under hypnosis.  

An often-quoted case of recall of subjective memories is that mentioned by Coleridge in his Biographia Literaria. A young woman who could neither read nor write was seized with a fever, during which she was heard talking Latin, Greek and Hebrew. Whole sheets of her ravings were written out, and found to consist of sentences intelligible in themselves, but having little connection with each other. For a long time she was said by priests to be possessed of a devil. Eventually the mystery was solved by a physician, who was determined to trace back the girl's history. He discovered that from the age of nine, the girl had been cared for by an old Protestant pastor, a great Hebrew scholar, in whose house she lived until his death. It turned out that the old man had been in the habit of walking up and down a passage of his house and reading to himself - in a loud voice - passages from his books. The books were searched and in them many of the passages taken down at the young woman's bedside were identified so that there could be no reasonable doubt as to their source.

The Source of Inspiration  

This discussion of the Fountain of Wisdom may make you ask yourself the age-old question as to whether there is anything new under the sun. "Inspired" work, writings and teachings have been common in all ages. Here and there people have stepped out ahead of the rest and "outdone themselves". They have come into a knowledge of things which they did not learn, so allowing them to give the world a new revelation; or they have gone beyond their ability in art, in literature, in invention, in science, in religion, in government. In fact, in nearly all walks in life, this extraordinary ability has been demonstrated. Some who drank deeply of the Fountain of Wisdom have become great teachers and leaders, putting forward advanced truths that have revolutionised the thought of the world.  

Christ told his followers that when the "Comforter" should come to them it would lead them into all knowledge of things (John xiv. 26). On the day of Pentecost, when these same followers were in Jerusalem awaiting the "Comforter", it is recorded that a sudden transformation came over them, so that this little company of simple-minded men rose and addressed the mass of foreign people assembled for the Pentecostal feast in all the different languages of those present, so "that every man heard them speak in his own language" (Acts ii. 1-13).  

There was a Christian sect known as "Holiness", who used to worship in the same "speaking in tongues", commended by the Apostle Paul (l Cor. xii. 10). The speaking in tongues came as the result of a religious frenzy, produced by prayers, exhortations and rhythmical music and singing, which pushed the mental functioning back into the subjective realm. In other words, the methods of worship were such as to produce a state of slight hypnosis, such as many others have produced countless times.  

Into the Realm of Error  

Not all of the members of "Holiness" had the "gift of tongues", as St. Paul called it, though it is greatly coveted and anxiously sought after. More often than not, however, the mental state of the worshippers became so frenzied and self-hypnotising that in the backward moving process of their mental functioning they plunged into the Realm of Error, so that their speaking in tongues became an unintelligible gibberish. Yet here and there some people developed the real "gift of tongues", and so long as they were under the spell of their frenzied hypnosis, they actually preached in a language of which they had no knowledge in their full waking consciousness, but after the spell was over, they had no recollection of what they had said.  

These members of "Holiness" were, of course, totally unaware of the reasons lying behind the "gift of tongues". They knew nothing about the Subjective Mind, and attributed the phenomenon to the action through them of the Holy Ghost. Well, why not? What's in a name, anyway? We are here learning that the Subjective Mind is only one of the phases of the Universal Mind or God-Mind. If anything is holy, the mind of God is holy; and it is certainly ghost-like in that it is invisible and without substance. So why not "Holy Ghost"? 

This "speaking in tongues" gives us another example, as already suggested, of the operation of the Realm of Error; and when people contact that sinister realm their "tongues" are all completely false. Their speech may be only an unintelligible imitation of speech, or it may be actual speech telling lies and delivering false prophecies. In fact, it is usually characteristic of this speech from the Realm of Error that it seems to foretell future events, such as wars, the death of prominent people, earthquakes, revolutions, floods, the end of the world, and so on.

If we realise that this phase of the Subjective Mind is largely animal in its nature, and that its principal functioning is this dealing in false prophecies, we may get a glimpse of the real meaning of guarding against "false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly are ravening wolves" (Matt. vii. 15).  

All hallucinations and delusions have their roots in the same Realm of Error, and from its foul depths bring up their catalogue of falsehood, crime and death. It often happens that those who have made a practice of religious frenzy hear a voice commanding them to go to certain places and to do certain things.  

Speaking of these "voices" that people sometimes hear reminds me of the many sad instances in which men and women have frantically appealed to me to silence those voices. Usually, the voice begins as a feeling of some kind of sweet and beautiful presence, with only a whispered word of love, tenderness and assurance; but if listened to and encouraged it soon begins to speak aloud, becomes taunting, raucous, obscene and blasphemous, multiplies itself into a babel of voices, and produces an intolerable mental condition in which there is neither peace nor real sleep. The medical profession describes this terrible condition with one plain and simple word – Psychosis - when people lose some contact with reality. In legal and in everyday affairs it is called insanity; and perhaps that is as good a word as any. If insanity means that one has fallen into the mental condition in which the false prophet is, then these unfortunate people are insane. 

The Many Forms of Insanity  

There are several forms of "insanity", but they all mean the same thing: that the individual has lost his grip upon the objective phase of mind and has slipped back into the Realm of Error. The poisons of disease may injure the more delicate frontal portions of the brain so severely as to put them out of tune with the objective or reasoning phase of the Universal Mind, so that the only phases they reflect are the subjective and subconscious phases. Some, whose frontal brains are only slightly impaired, may be pushed back only slightly and partially into the higher phases of the Subjective Mind, and because they are brought into contact with the Fountain of Wisdom which exists in these higher phases, they may have an inclination to genius.  

It has long been a common saying that "genius and insanity are closely linked". Or people may be pushed back still farther into that realm of the Subjective Mind where everything is make-believe. Here they live in a beautiful realm of their own mental creation, surrounded in imagination with the things, conditions and people they desire. Their whole mental process is an elaborate mass of hallucinations. Or they may be pushed back only into the edge of the Realm of Error, in which case their hallucinations are of a sinister and disturbing nature - they imagine that people are "against" them, that they are spying on them and prying into their affairs with intent to injure them, and that they are the victims of an elaborate conspiracy of persecution, so making them liable to commit crimes of violence against their imaginary persecutors.  

How to Approach the Fountain of Wisdom  

The only avenue of approach to the Fountain of Wisdom is Memory. No matter how much you have learned or experienced, unless you can remember your - learning - and experience are of no value to you. No matter how rich the experiences of the race may have been, nor how vast a store of knowledge has been piled up in the subjective phase of mind, if you cannot remember these experiences and bring this learning into recollection, you will not profit from them. is the task I am setting for you here - to remember not only your own experiences and the things you have learned, but to remember at least some of the experiences you have had and the things you have learned through other individualised forms of the Universal Mind.

This is a considerable task. So long have men and women been fixed on the thought that they are isolated individual growths or creations that some may be appalled at the thought of one trying to remember the things learned by people who died before they were born. In order that you can get your bearings on this new realm of thought, however, remember that the real "I" behind your body and your personality is none other than the timeless and deathless Universal Mind. 

More than half of the people in the world believe in Reincarnation. They believe that the human soul, or ego, or "I", is born again and again in different forms, and that it is passing through such schooling as will at last bring it to perfection and happiness. In some of the religions of the East there are cults and brotherhoods, usually very exclusive and secret in their nature, which train their students and members to remember their experiences in past incarnations. One religious’ cult which has had a wide following calls the recollections of these past experiences of the race "Akashic Records" and its devotees refer to one's ability to remember these experiences of past incarnations as "ability to read the Akashic Records". So, the idea of remembering the experiences and bringing into recollection the learning of individuals who have lived in the past is not so startlingly new in the world as at first it may seem. The re-incarnationists assume that there are large numbers of souls or egos, and that each one is periodically born into a new body. Actually, there is only one Soul or Ego in the whole universe, and all human souls are the individualised creations of that One. 

The memories of past generations lie behind the memories of your present life. The storehouse of the things experienced and learned in your present individualisation is in the front part of the remembering phase of the mind, and is recorded in the remembering brain cells. The storehouse of the memories and learning of the ages past lies behind this store of present-life memories and experiences, and cannot be entered until the store-room of present-life memories is set in order. In other words, you cannot remember the things experienced by people long since dead until you first set in order the store of memories accumulated during your present life. 

How to Train your Memory  

To begin training your memory for that purpose you should set aside a few minutes each day, even if you have to wait until after you have gone to bed at night. In this quiet period, you should remember some event of long ago in your life, and then mentally ask yourself: "What do I remember next?" The next memory will quickly come, and again you should mentally ask yourself: "What do I remember next?" After a little practice the chains of memories will pass rapidly through your mind, so that in the course of a few minutes you will remember a good many things that you had not thought of for years. Some of these memories will make you smile; others will make you sad. Some will make you ashamed; others will make you angry. You should make no effort to direct your memory, but just let the chains of memories run by as they will.

 

This is the first move to set the memory storehouse in order. Remember that the records of everything ever experienced, heard, seen, felt, tasted or smelled are there in the storehouse of memory, but they are in such a jumbled mass that you have forgotten them. The apparently simple method I have described digs into the jumbled mass of memories so that you can recall them. With practice you should become more rapid and efficient in this digging process, and you should soon find your memories gathering into groups. In other words, if you remember a verse of poetry the next memory may also be of a literary nature. If you remember a chemical experiment you made at school or college, the next memory may possibly also be something of a scientific nature. If the memory is of some love affair, the next memory may also probably be of something connected with love or sex.  

Put your Memories into - "Pigeon-Holes"  

This grouping of the rediscovered memories is equivalent to putting them into pigeon-holes and properly labelling them, so that in the course of time the jumbled mass is removed from the floor of the storeroom and put into such shape that any or all of the memories are immediately available. The accomplishment of even this much will convert you into a walking encyclopaedia of knowledge, will greatly improve your judgment and your ability to appreciate and use opportunities, will broaden and deepen your influence in your community, will bring new and better friends, will result in a greater measure of success, and move you forward into a happier and more abundant life.  

You may never push the process far enough to remember definitely any concrete experience of past "incarnations", but you will begin to find yourself knowing things that you have never learned, and exercising a degree of wisdom and judgment far beyond what your experience and learning should have given you. The treasure from the vast storehouse will begin to come into your possession. Incidentally, your memory will be immeasurably improved, so that you will instantly and accurately recollect anything you may want to remember.  

The Subjective Mind is a vast storehouse of wealth for putting more joy into living, but it should not be confused with the subconscious phase of mind, which is infinitely wiser and more powerful.