Chapter   8     

The Human Mind

To paraphrase Sobieski¹-

"You have paid for this lecture, so you may go to sleep if you choose; but we have just one rule we must observe, that is, you must not snore. For the other fellow has paid for his seat, and likewise may want to sleep as well and we must protect him in his rights."

First, the principles and definitions of our topic: In the discussion of this evening we take "mind" to mean all those activities of soul called physical, and all the constituent elements of soul life realized in thought, feeling, and volition: voluntary and involuntary.

Too long man has sought to find out and reach final knowledge about God, truth and self by studying the objective. The Egyptians, Chaldeans, Phoenicians and Greeks, our intellectual ancestors, knew more about astronomy and the things furthest from them than about self or consciousness. They discovered a mathematical order in the starry heavens perfect in time and space before they came conscious of mathematical self-hood. They knew more about things farthest from them than they did about things nearest to them.

The human mind was one in our parents; and in the first human parents. Will it ever be one again depends on our birthright as promised by the last and complete human, Christ.

Our collective human mind has been differentiated and divided into millions of units until its forms are now racial, national, tribal and individual. The Scotch mind and the French mind bear recognizable national forms. Waldie: "I belong to that people of whom it is said that they pray: 'Lord help us to be sure we are right, for you know, Lord, when we make up our minds up, we are very determined.'" This could never be said of the French in the same sense, as their form of mind, viewed nationally, is impulsive and changeable, and fractured into 40 political parties. The Hebrew mind said "We will show your one fact by our beliefs prove them by our activity in their defense." The Greek mind developed to the place where it said through Socrates, Plato, and Pythagoras: "Prove your beliefs by facts". The mind of the middle ages said, when the church had stolen man's right to think, "It is so because we believe it", and it meant death to think disbelief out loud.

All these forms of mental activity are alive among the peoples of today. But there never was a time in human history when we can in every field of mental activity answer the challenge: "Prove your beliefs" "Give us the facts." But only to the mind unmortgaged by prejudice and open to life, liberty and progress can the facts be given and received.

"Twice two are four" to every mind, though some minds predisposed to money have made it mean five to them. But it does not invalidate the axiom. And there are other fundamentals of thought just as rock bottomed and abiding as the rule stated. The starry heavens we look upon tonight are as different to astronomical heavens as seen by the mind, as the picture of your sweetheart is to the real thing (the one is for the eye, the other is for the whole man -- we do not marry pictures), or as different as the physical eyes of Copernicus to his reason.

The human mind contains the history and civilization of the world. He who would read history aright must be able to read the mind of history from which the acts that we call historic, have emanated: For every act of history a form of living and acting was once possessed by the mind of the nation, tribe or clan giving the expression. The mind acted that way because it thought and felt that way. The ideas of Christendom, in Charles Martel, and the ideas of Mohammed in Abdul Rahmen met in the battle of Tours 732, representing two sets of ideas on which they had projected their lives and through whom form and content were given to the civilizations of Europe and America.

History is an account of the rise and development of institutions that represent ideas and feelings possessed by the mind of the humanity. Civilization is the sum total of these ideas and institutions existing at any one time in any given place on the earth. Blot them out and the mind will reproduce them.

Our children go to school to take into each young mind the form and meaning (content) of our civilization. They come to the task with a larger content of mind than their ancestors brought; Content, inherited or acquired, colors what is offered in the school and tints their visions of enlarging concepts. The tree of our civilization produces more luxuriant foliage with larger and more richly colored leaves, with flowers of bud and beauty of blossom foretelling a larger fruitage in the seasoned maturity of life.

The American mind holds in it American civilization, and the Chinese mind holds the form and gives the meaning to Chinese civilization. We could not produce theirs, and they could not produce ours. We talk about "American institutions" and say that the "Declaration of Independence and the Constitution" are photographs of the American mind and please note that it is a photograph of what the budding national mind both thought and felt.

We refer to the law as an institution; but the law lives, and only lives in the minds that recognize the equality of men and feel the true sense of justice in their relations. We see a man studying the law. He is seeking to rethink the thoughts of other men and the precedents of their activities as they expressed the idea of law, the law as an institution being subject to its enlarging interpretation.

Science says matter is eternal because of the infinity of its divisibility and the law of the conservation of energy. Take a book, any piece of matter, a cut of meat, and illustrate the division of matter. Suppose I get a pound of round steak and cut it in two parts. What will I have? Two half pounds. There is always the other half or remainder to be divided. Cut it again, what will I have? Four quarters. Cut it again? Eight eighths. Again? Sixty-fourths. Again? One hundred and twenty-eighths. The answer comes more slowly. Again? A boy in the back of the room: "Please, sir. It would be hash!" And so with matter. Matter is infinitely divisible only in theory; in fact it is not.

Note that the mind may seek to endow matter with its own nature, yet matter is not eternal in its current form. Matter gets its general and specific names from mind. But before it is named, it is something undifferentiated in the whole for the mind to name and to utilize.

On the other hand, we say mind or soul is eternal because of its indivisibility and indestructability. We divide the soul into a triad of feeling, volition and intellect for the sake of study but there is no such division in fact. We cannot take one away and have the others left; nor can we separate our activities and say this is of feeling and that of will and another of intellect. Each act is an act of the whole man.

But there are innate qualities, principles and ideas of soul that we cannot get away from; constituent facts and qualities of being in us, which for man to deny is to renounce his humanity.

Let us study together for a little while the constituent elements of every man's mental make up and without which experience would be impossible and he would be a non-entity. I mean the elemental qualities of time, space and causality. I know there are those here who have studied psychology, but a review of these principles will refresh your minds and open the way for me to make some enlarged notions of Causality.

We are born into our infancy as imbeciles. As the brain and body grows, so does the mind and its grasp of how the world operates. We learn that there is space: We can reach our little hands into it, and touch people and objects that are separate from ourselves. We learn that the world continues to exist when we cover our eyes; and that objects and persons continue to exist when they are in another room, another space. And we learn of time, that there will be a tomorrow, it will be similar to today and yesterday, but different, and there's no going backward. And we learn that objects broken will not become whole again. We learn that beings die and then are seen no more. We learn that actions have consequences.

Time is a quality of our soul's life and enters into all our mental activity. It is part of the soul's endowment and makes your own life and nature intelligent. Without this quality of soul, sundials, clocks and watches would never had been.

I hold in my hand a watch, a beautiful piece of mechanism. It did not grow up in nature. It came into being and gets all form and meaning from mind itself. Without the element of soul and mind manifested in this mechanism and mathematical contrivances, it would be impossible for you to think of a past and future, or a present as you know it now. What meaning would "present" have without past and future?

You say, "Where were you last night, Sam?" a question that implies both time and space. But without the time quality there would be no "last night", and Sam would be a different fellow to what you know him now.

Is that fellow here that says: "Can God make a two year old calf in a day?" Yes, brother, by subtracting the quality of time in your mind, you could not see a two year old calf or any year old thing, or the measure of a day. The time is with you not the calf. The element of the passage of time is manifest in our dreams as well as space. In a realm where there is no physical world and all is a projection of mind; a time and a space, however imaginary, form the background and foundation of visions and dramas.

We cannot conceive of a time before which there was no time, or a time after which there will be no time. Space is of a like nature of time. Man cannot think or imagine or dream anything outside of space.

Take a cake, here it is with six sides; top, bottom, and four sides. Can you take it in your thoughts and push it far over beyond the farthest star of your imagination until you can say there is space on five sides, but on the other side there is nothing? Then space informs your thought in respect to things.

Mind is a camera to take the picture of what God has wrought, and work out its meaning. I hold in my hand a piece of wood, a ruler. On one side are marks from the figures 1 to 12 = a foot rule; these again are divided into 96 eighths. On the other edge is another system than ours = 30 centimeters marked off into 300 centimeters. On the other side is a semi circle with its radiating lines of degrees. So that this piece of wood marked with the symbols of space is one of the elements that reveals the fact that man has taken this world into his thought and flung his thought out where? Into space, to do his geometrical and mathematical will. With an instrument called a sextant, with the sun at noon, he is able to define the longitude and latitude of his position on the earth! That man finds nature of time and space responsive to an order of thinking is that which gives him dominion.

Causality is a sublime form in the life of the mind and thereby the soul. By this, humanity takes possession of the soul's deeds and thus responsibility for the consequences of one's actions. By this, humanity also realizes there must have been efficient knowledge, force and initiative behind a thing to produce it. To rational humans, every physical effect must have had an adequate cause to produce it. No amount of argument can make us believe that a child conceived the plan of this building, and that children brought the plan to perfection. Nor can we believe that a plank has only one end!

The house, the piece of statuary, the painting or the ideas on a written page must have had a mind capable of thinking and presenting such conceptions on the stone, canvas or book. This is the basic element of man's thought, and self-separation is the fundamental idea of causality.

It is this quality of mind and soul that gives humanity initiative and makes us reasoned investigators, to seek out the beginning and finality of things, and to seek by the initiation of change to alter the world for our own purposes.

Some men claim to be infidel and atheistic in their thought and say that the world happened thus and so, as accident upon accident compounded over the eons. Consider a parable.

Come with me, my unbelieving brother, and let us drive out where the habitations of man are few and far between. "Out there in the land of sage brush, in the brown horned toad's domain, Where the clouds float round moth eaten in the land of stingy rain: Where the birds are only sage hens, where the gray coyote slinks: Where each little drop of water is a shining pearl that stinks: Where the trail-less, silent desert like a winding sheet has grown-alkali made even whiter; red hot sunshine crumble bone!" ²

A man drives with me out in this waterless desert land, we discuss God and nature and he says, "This is the country God forgot." Ironically, since he holds to Atheism.

Toward evening we become anxious, realizing that we have lost our way! Later we sight a shack of a building. He sees it first and say: "Perhaps there is someone here!"

"Why, because you see a shed?"

"Yes, but what has that got to do with it?"

"Well, somebody built it didn't he?"

If I asked you would you say, "Oh, I don't know, it may have just happened there?"

He see the point; and I say "If one infers that a person with mind and thought and will was necessary to nail those few boards and shingles together; what shall we infer from the Earthly house in which we live; with its carpet of beauty and flowers of delight and heavens of glory with its sun and this vast starry canopy of undying light?"

He infers that intelligence and personality were behind the existence a shack and but denies the inference of a mighty intelligence and personality back of and keeping alive all of nature!

Why? Because he fails to recognize the deity's moral code that resides in himself: Conscience. The voice of conscience in us indicts our willful waywardness. Implanted within each of us is an eternal moral compass, the knowledge of right and wrong. How did it get there? An accident?

And go further with me in this interpretation of human consciousness and return to our parable. We drive on into the desert, as we find no one in the ramshackle sanctuary and no water for which we thirst. We drive on, the hot night is darkening, and as our thirst grows more intense, and our tongues begin to swell, death is staring us in the face! Say what you please, speculate all possible, but my infidel friend will pray! Also implanted within us is a feeling of dependence on the infinite, and he will call upon it now. Each of us has an inner voice that speaks to the higher love, out there in the quiet judgment, in moments of despair. How did it get there? Or did it just happen?

Note the fact of 100 persons in the prison of San Francisco at the time of the earthquake: When the building shook, with terrified puny hands they tried to break the iron bars of their cells and then as the warden reported: "As one person they fell to their knees in prayer and cries for deliverance!" What does this mean but that the soul has a feeling of dependence upon the infinite and an instinctive realization that he will hear us despite our sin! There is an inference of God from nature and immediate knowledge of God in man's inner life; conscience and a link to a deity, which are organizing factors in our consciousness.

The causal element of soul holds a feeling instinct that it is morally possible for God to reveal immediate knowledge of himself to man! Theism has not been written yet, for it has never used all the facts in the case. He who denies personality to God must deny personality to himself. To say that God is "idea or principle" is to say that the things of thought are thought itself. Ideas and principles are but spirit tools with which the mind realizes selfhood. An idea is a mental form to hold thought and feeling and is always smaller than the mind that thinks it.

Time and space have to do with things and have little or no moral significance, because time and space relations have to do with the sense world, but when we rise to moral causes of God and self we think of conditions of being space-less and timeless. How long would it take to get to the one you love, if you were bodiless and love free? We have to wait for the body to be carted through its time and space relations while the quickest travel we have is slow to love.

God is eternal, immortal being, timeless and space-less. His love knows neither time nor space, only conditions. When we say God is not there, we mean He is not and cannot be in that condition! Love is not in the heart of the murderer and he has not eternal life abiding in him! God cannot be in sin, but to say that sin is unreal is to deny God the knowledge of His child's disobedience! Such teachers must necessarily deny the suffering of Christ and blaspheme His sacrifice, for if that be an illusion, then that sympathy that makes the world kin by tapping its love powers is gone. And mother can stand by the side of her suffering child denaturized unmothered (unsexed) stony-hearted and deaf to its pathetic cry and need of comforting love; The struggles and suffering of '76 and '61 ⁵ are unreal and the bronze button of honor is a perpetuation of a disgraceful illusion! And the words of him who stood on Gettysburg field with a heart breaking over his warring brothers - his words instead of being immortal are erroneous and worse than superfluous and though our hearts respond to them in what we thought was a noble amen of patriotism, we re mistaken, deluded, fooled! Yet so-called good thoughtful people ask us to become mental acrobats - on our feet today, on our heads tomorrow - in order to digest their dogmatic hash.

I can stand one all fools day, but when people seek to make all days all fools days for all the people, I choose rather my own natural birth day.⁶

Note the first heathen making his first image if you want to see the soul's natural photograph of God, He builds and reads into that statue of clay wood or marble the myths to create and explain the world to him. His ideas hold his profoundest thought and feeling of his being. It is always wrong to steal till sin has invented an excuse in barter for his God! He must appease the righteous wrath against sin, or gain forgiveness or balance evil by good work to gain any peace. And this idol has power to give him immortality!

It is not necessary for me to show that the soul is not dependent on the body: the body is rather dependent on the soul for directive energy. Electricity does not depend upon the wires for its existence, only a tool to do things. So with the body for soul here and hereafter in its rising development in God.

If as some few argue, the soul and the body are one, why is the soul ambitious when the body is weak? Why is there not soul loss and impairment of consciousness in the loss of an arm leg? Cranmer in 1556 held his hand in the flame without soul injury.

Soul is most conscious and active when least conscious of body. The crack of a whip has awakened, yet between the time of awakening and full consciousness a dream has been experienced that would taken months to realize.

The brain has been partially destroyed with soul consciousness unimpaired. A man fell on a saw, one hemisphere of the brain damaged.

But these are only negative ideas and there are positive elements of soul, foretokens of immortal destiny. We know that certain facts of experience are recorded on the gray matter brain, to be recollected later as needed. And there are others, we will not say, unrecorded in the brain memory, but recorded also in the moral nature. There are two forms of memory: one which has to do with this material world recorded on the tablets of the brain, the other recorded on the tablets of the heart; the one material, the other moral; the one holding the material meaning and record, the other holding the moral and spiritual record of life.

There are certain laws governing memory - brain records and spiritual impressions. We memorize rules of grammar, mathematics, physics and chemistry, and if the mind is not active in those fields the most of such rules will be impossible of recall at 60 years of age; but, on the other hand we can never forget the moral wrongs done, nor the blessings received, as I believe. In other words the records of conscience and the spirit of God are ineffaceable. We drop the one record at the end of our mortal time, while the other goes over with the soul itself. The man who has wronged another never forgets that wrong no matter how old, unless he has that transgression forgiven from above; and he ever remembers the good he has done others, following the rule of faith and love in God; in fact, these are keen spiritual comforts or intensely distressing disappointments in the last days of life upon earth.

But by adhering to His guidance, we find a path to the oasis that is a life of grace; and the more enduring and sublime earthly treasures of love and family. We need not wander in a desert. We have His map within us.

Let me close this lecture by a brief discussion of hypnotism. For this is a fond subject with the unconscious-minded, so much so that we wonder if their theory has not hypnotized their own mental activity that consciousness is truly sleep to them and what they need most is a continued prolonged and intensely profound sleep!

Hypnotism is that act of mind whereby the will either surrenders control, or commands the faculties by simple suggestion. We hypnotize ourselves to the habits of sleep and waking; and we are able to receive the suggestion of another.

You are lying down sleeping, someone comes into the room quietly; you do not hear him, he stands near and looks intently at you; you become restive and awake to the fact that someone is looking at you! A mind has bumped into a mind.

Hypnotism, where the subject comes partially and willingly under the control of another, will be most interesting to you. First the oppocator induces sleep. You must think sleep and will to sleep for him to get control. Then he may make you dance and jump and draw out of your memory every thought you have there, under the one idea strength of control. Note Prof. Lee: A man in Maine who was told to make a speech on temperance. He does and inspires his audience. He had heard formerly John B. Gough, Francis Willard, and Francis Murphy and he remembered the best from all of them- "a rattling good speech! Best ever!" - Lee

There may be little difference between the skills of a hypnotist and the crafty pastor who perceives just when the inattentive members of his congregation have begun to nod, and adjusts his dissertation to make suggestions to their slumbering undefended minds.

But consciousness is king here. You cannot be hypnotized against your will. And you can decide what you will do or will not do while under control. Waterman could not be induced nor compelled to take off his coat under any suggestion. Asked why, he answered: "Before I went under, I determined I would not take off my coat because my shirt is torn and there are girls in the class!"

Will, conscious will, is king. The operator cannot make a moral man do an immoral act. The hypnotist loses control the moment he suggests the subject deviate from his moral compass.

The accounting of an effective lecture: Some chastised, some soothed, some put to sleep, some awakened, and all enriched, whether they know it or not. And I thank especially the trusting slumberers who have left their subconscious minds in my care.

It is the conscious mind that argues, but the sub-conscious of our dream state will accept all sorts of impossible notions with little analysis. Be assured that the ideas I have suggested will not harm you; on the contrary.

And to the learned and revered scientists and mathematicians, well meaning and sincere, who have concluded the existence of God is preposterous; I would proffer an equation: That the notion that there is no God is equally preposterous.




Footnotes:


¹ from Sobieski, Civil War Veteran and popular temperance speaker, and Author of The Life-Story and Personal Reminiscences of Col. John Sobieski, 1900

² from Southwest From Bullfrog, by Rufus Milas Steele

³ from The Life and Labors of Bishop Hare, Apostle to the Sioux (New York, 1911) M. Howe, Jr.,

⁵ He is referring to the 1776 Revolution and the 1861 Civil War.

⁶ Reverend Oliver's birth day: April 1, 1875

Editor's note:

             



Copyright © 2018 John Oliver II