The Ghost in the White House / Some suggestions as to how a hundred million people (who are supposed in a vague, helpless way to haunt the white house) can make themselves felt with a president, how they can back him up, express themselves to him, be expressed by him, and get what they want

by Gerald Stanley Lee

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III

WHAT IS CALLED THINKING

The one special trait that stands out in all new brain tracks in common, is that nobody wants them. The way people really act—even the best of us, when some one steps up to them with new tracks for their brains, is as if they had no place to put them.

The plain psychological facts about them when one fronts up with them are rather appalling. They first appear when one begins to observe closely what one actually does with one's own personal listening and what other people, when one checks them up, do with their listening to us.

In making as I have tried to make during the last six months, a few special studies in not being fooled by myself, studies in changing what I call my mind, I have come to feel that any man who will try several hours each day a few harmless experiments on his friends and on himself and his other enemies, will come to two or three thoughts about Man as a rational being which would have seemed dreams to him six months ago.

The first fact is this:

Nearly everything that is the matter with the world can be traced back to the fact that people have, when one studies them closely, two sets of ears—one set that they look as if they used, put up more or less showily before everybody on the outside, and another entirely secret or real set inside, that they seriously connect up with their souls and themselves and really do their living with.

I first came on them—on these two sets of ears, in my experiences as a young man in speaking to audiences. In the vague helpless way a young lecturer has, I studied as well as I could what seemed to me to be happening to my audiences—what they seemed to be doing to themselves, but it was a good many years before I really woke up to what they were doing to me, to the way their two sets of ears made them treat me.

I would watch people sometimes all suddenly in the middle of a sentence shutting up their real ears or inside ears at me and then holding their outside ones up at me kindly as if I cared, or as if I doted on them—on outside ears, on ears of any kind if I could get them and I would feel hurt but I did not wake up to what it meant.