a perfect body, left it in man's keeping to do with as he willed. At first, man was ignorant of this, thinking that the body was self-operating; but as soon as he discovered that such was not the case he began to formulate certain new theories about himself. He discovered that while he could consciously think and decide, something happened to his thoughts after he had thought them. They went somewhere; for soon they would come back as remembrance. Man had now discovered that he could consciously think and that his thought would come back to him again. This led to the conclusion that memory is an active thing, an inner mental action. He said, "Memory is the storehouse of all my conscious thoughts and it is active. My body is not conscious of life, but my thought is conscious of my body; my body is operated upon by my thought; and it must also be operated upon by my memory, since memory is active. But, since memory is only the result of conscious thought, memory, of itself, is an unconscious operation of what was once a conscious thought."

THE CONSCIOUS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS THOUGHT

Since man always has had the habit of naming things, he named his memory his "unconscious thought," and his conscious thought he called his "objective mind." He now came to the conclusion that he had two minds, one conscious and one unconscious, or sub-conscious. The conscious mind being the one that he used all of the time in his self-conscious state and the sub-conscious mind being the storehouse of all his conscious thoughts, as well as the seat of his memory. It follows, that as conscious thought acts, unconscious thought must also operate. This conclusion led to the discovery that the sub-conscious mind is the builder of the body; not that it really made the body in the first place, for Instinctive Man did that; but that the sub-conscious mind keeps the body going and is always acting on the thoughts of the conscious mind. After carefully watching this process, man discovered that he could consciously think and, by so doing, make such an impression on his unconscious thought that it would do what he directed. From these observations he deduced the law of suggestion to

32

PREVIOUS PAGE - NEXT PAGE