William Walker Atkinson

The Inner Consciousness William Walker Atkinson

Excerpt: It is now known that "Inner-Conscious" ideas, impressions and thoughts play a most important part in the thought-world of every individual. Beyond every outer-conscious action there may be found a vast inner-conscious background. It is held that of our entire mental processes, less than ten per cent are performed in the field of outer-consciousness. As a well-known writer has so well expressed it: "Our self is greater than we know; it has peaks above and lowlands below the plateau of our conscious experience." Prof. Elmer Gates has forcibly put it; "At least ninety per cent of our mental life is sub-conscious. If you will analyze your mental operations you will find that conscious thinking is never a continuous line of consciousness, but a series of conscious data with great intervals of sub-consciousness. We sit and try to solve a problem and fail. We walk around, try again and fail. Suddenly an idea dawns that leads to a solution of the problem. The sub-conscious processes were at work. We do not volitionally create our own thinking. It takes place in us. We are more or less passive recipients. We cannot change the nature of a thought, or of a truth, but we can, as it were, guide the ship by a moving of the helm." But, perhaps, the most beautiful expression of this underlying truth, is that of Sir Oliver Lodge, who says in his consideration of the subject: "Imagine an iceberg glorying in its crisp solidity, and sparkling pinnacles, resenting attention paid to its submerged self, or supporting region, or to the saline liquid out of which it arose, and into which in due course it will someday return. Or, reversing the metaphor, we may liken our present state to that of the hull of a ship submerged in a dim ocean among strange monsters, propelled in a blind manner through space; proud perhaps of accumulating many barnacles of decoration; only recognizing our destination by bumping against the dock-wall; and with no cognizance of the deck and cabins above us, or the spars and sails-no thought of the sextant, and the compass, and the captain-no perception of the look-out on the mast-of the distant horizon. With no vision of objects far ahead-dangers to be avoided-destinations to be reached-other ships to be spoken to by means other than by bodily contact-a region of sunshine and cloud, of space, or perception, and of intelligence utterly inaccessible below the waterline."