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.
CHAPTER VIII
WAKEFULNESS
And Sleep will not lie down but walks