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Chapter 2: The Psychological Foundation of Miracles 2
8. Respecting the True Power of the Mind (The Unconscious and Its Sublevels)
Everyone in this world experiences fear, and no one enjoys it. Yet it would take very little correct thinking to understand why fear occurs. Very few people appreciate the real power of the mind. Nobody in this world remains fully aware of it all the time. This is inevitable in this world because human beings have many things they must do, and often determine that they cannot engage in consistent thought observation. However, those who hope to free themselves from fear must realize certain things, and realize them fully, at least some of the time.
The mind is a very powerful creator and it never loses its creative force. It never sleeps. It is engaged in creative activity every instant, and always as a person intends even if they don’t realize it. Many ordinary expressions reflect this. For example, when someone says, “Don’t give it a thought,” they are implying that if you do not think about a thing it will have no effect on you. This is accurate regarding those experiences that are brought about by thinking about them, such as worry. This in turn implies that if you do think about such things, the thoughts have the strength to bring about effects, indicating their Power.
On the other hand, many other expressions are clear expressions of the prevailing lack of awareness of the Power of the mind. For example, the expression that something is “just an idle thought” implies that the thought will have no effect. The characterization of an action as “thoughtless” implies that if the action had had thought behind it, it would have been a different action. This may be true, but it also implies that the action had no thought behind it, while in reality no action is without thought. The expression “thought provoking” implies that interest has been stirred from an outside stimulus, while the expression “a provocative thought” implies that feeling has been stirred from within. In reality, all inward stirring comes from within. The mind alone decides what it will be stirred by and how, from stimuli both external and internal.
While expressions like “think big” give some recognition to the Power of thought, they still come nowhere near the truth. People don’t expect to literally grow larger when they utter these words, because they don’t believe them literally. It is hard to recognize that when thought and belief combine properly it creates a surge of Power that can actually move mountains.
It appears at first glance that to believe the mind is capable of such Power is mere arrogance, but that is not the real reason people don’t believe it. People prefer to believe that their thoughts have no real Power or can exert no real control over their experiences because they are genuinely afraid of what this implies. This is why fear occurs. In fact, it was the fear of the responsibility of such Power that caused the separated ones to mis-project a world of circumstances outside themselves as this world of illusion, seemingly beyond the control of those involved.
Therapists may try to help people who are afraid of their own death wish by depreciating the power of the wish and the mind that makes it. They even attempt to “free” their patients by persuading them that they can think whatever they want and that it will have no real effects at all. There is a real dilemma here that only the truly right-minded can be free of. Death wishes do not directly kill in the literal sense, but they do have harmful effects on non-physical levels. In this regard all destructive thinking is dangerous. A death wish joined with the Power of thought gives a person no choice except to react in some way inwardly to their wish (assuming they don’t carry out the wish outwardly), even if this means acting contrary to it. In such a case, a person can choose between:
a) some type of inner (i.e., non-physical level) death, based on the Power of thought joined with their wish;
b) fear, based on resisting this inner death (recall the previous discussion on fear arising from conflicted will); or,
c) depreciating the Power of their thought, which is the usual psychoanalytic approach. This does allay guilt, but at the cost of the illusion of rendering thinking impotent.
If you believe that what you think is ineffectual, you may cease to be overly afraid of it. But you are hardly likely to respect it, either. The world is full of endless examples of how human beings have depreciated themselves because of their fear of their own thoughts. In some forms of insanity the Power of thoughts becomes glorified, but this is only because the underlying depreciation was too effective for the mind to tolerate.
The truth is that there are no “idle” thoughts because all thinking produces results at some level. The reason people are afraid of paranormal or “supernatural” phenomena, and so often react against them, is that on some level of their awareness they know very well the Power of thought, and recognize that this Power not appreciated, or otherwise used unwisely, can be harmful. What they may not have realized is that it is only their own thoughts that can make them vulnerable to any such phenomena. People exposed or prone to the fear of vulnerability, for whatever reason, may wish it to go away, not realizing that it is they who are creating it through the lack of control over their own thoughts.
I mentioned earlier that I cannot release you from fear, because I, like Divine Essence, know that fear doesn’t exist in Reality, even though you don’t yet know this. If I intervened between your thoughts and their results, I would be interfering with a basic Law of cause and effect, in fact the most fundamental one there is in this world. I would hardly be helping you in the long term if I depreciated the Power of your own thinking. This would be in direct opposition to the purpose of this Course.
It is certainly much more useful to remind you that you do not observe your thoughts – that is, pay attention to them and keep them from being undisciplined and harmful – carefully enough, except for a relatively small part of the day, and somewhat inconsistently even then. You may feel at this point that it would take a miracle to enable you to do this, which is perfectly true. Human beings are not used to miraculous thinking, but they can be trained to think that way. All miracle workers have to be trained that way, and that is the purpose of this Course.
It is essential that I be able to rely on those who have chosen to join me in the Atonement. This means that I must remind them not to leave their minds unobserved or they will not be able to help me through doing their part. Miracle-working entails a full realization of the power of thought, and real avoidance of miscreation. Otherwise, a miracle will be necessary to set the mind of the miracle worker itself straight in order to perform the miracle each time, a circular process which would hardly foster the time collapse for which the miracle is intended. Nor would it induce the healthy respect that every miracle worker must have for true cause and effect of thoughts and their results.
It must be noted that miracles cannot free the miracle worker from fear. This is because both miracles and fear come from their thoughts, and if they were not free to choose one, they would also not be free to choose the other. When electing one course of action to engage in fully, you automatically reject another that you could be engaging in. It is much the same in the choice between electing the miracle or fear. By electing to allow your thoughts to be guided by right-mindedness or miracle-mindedness, you automatically reject fear. Fear cannot exist unless it has come about through misthought or mis-perspective.
Even very sincere seekers of Truth, in spite of their best intentions, are at one time or another afraid of the Divine, of Spirit, of me, of themselves, and of practically everyone and everything they are in relationship with. This can only come about because they miscreate, or conceive with fear, and then mis-project their inappropriate thoughts onto all that they fear. They then believe in their miscreations. This process cannot happen if they are not afraid of the Power of their own thoughts, that is, if they have the will to pay attention on an ongoing basis to their thoughts, and take their rightful role as director over them. Those who feel themselves vulnerable in this regard act, while in a vulnerable state, as miscreators because they misconceive Creation.
Many are willing to accept most of a training that does not ask them to change their minds too much, but leaves them free to leave their thoughts quite unattended most of the time. You persist in believing that when you do not consciously watch your mind, or pay attention to your thoughts, it is simply a result of being careless or unmindful. Given these tendencies, it is time to consider the entire world of the unconscious, or unobserved (unwatched) mind. This consideration may evoke fear because the unconscious is a common source of fright for many simply because they are unfamiliar with it. Approaching this as a new theory of the “basic conflict” – i.e., the conflicting reactions to fright (freezing, fighting, or fleeing) – may help to keep these considerations about the realm of the unconscious at enough of an intellectual level that any fear will be minimized and the truth that the unconscious offers will not escape you.
The unobserved mind with its unattended thoughts is responsible for the entire content of the unconscious that rests above the deepest sublevel of the unconscious, the miracle-level of mind. Many competent psychoanalytic theorists have made some contribution to the truth of the unconscious in this connection, but none of them has seen it in its entirety.
Pioneering psychologist Carl Jung’s most valuable contribution to the general understanding was an awareness of individual versus collective unconscious levels. He also recognized the major place of the true religious spirit, that of reverence toward the Divine, in his mapping of the unconscious. His archetypes are also meaningful concepts. But his major error lay in regarding the deepest sublevel of the unconscious as shared universally in terms of content (the collective unconscious), when actually the deepest sublevel is shared as an ability.
At the deepest sublevel of the unconscious, below the sublevel of the collective unconscious with its shared content of archetypes, is miracle-mindedness, the content of which is the particular miracle that an individual happens to perform in a given situation, and this content doesn’t matter at all. Each miracle is, in fact, unrepeatable because the content of each one is different and unique. This is because since I direct miracles in Union with Divine Essence, I make a point of avoiding redundancy. Unless a miracle actually heals it is not a miracle at all, and each healing situation is distinctive and requires a unique miracle. The content of this miracle sublevel of the unconscious is not recorded in the individual unconscious because if it were, miracles would not be reflexive, automatic, and involuntary, as they need to be. This is because in each miracle situation the individual would feel compelled to select from the recorded content of the unconscious – i.e., from the individual unconscious – between miracles that worked in the past in similar situations. However, the content of the miracle sublevel of the unconscious is a matter for the Divine Record, which is not within the individual at all.
All prominent psychoanalysts have made this one common error, which is that they attempted to uncover unconscious content. Unconscious activity cannot be understood in these terms, because “content” is applicable only to the more superficial subconscious sublevels to which individuals themselves contribute. These are the sublevels at which a person can readily introduce fear, and usually does.
Freud was right in calling the surface sublevel of the unconscious the “preconscious,” or “just prior” to reaching consciousness, and in emphasizing that there is a fairly easy interchange between preconscious and conscious content. He was also right in regarding “the censor” as a psychic agent in the preconscious for the protection of consciousness from fear. His major error lay in his insistence that this level is necessary at all in the psychic structure of the human mind. If the unconscious contains fearful content from which the psyche cannot escape without censoring it – repressing it during wakefulness and turning it into dreams or nightmares during sleep – the mind’s integration will be continuously threatened by such content and thereby permanently unstable.
The solution to this problem isn’t to attempt to control the fearful content of the unconscious, but to eliminate it altogether. This requires eliminating fear of the unconscious itself, which is simply fear of the unknown, since the unconscious by definition is what is currently not accessible to our conscious mind. When we are conscious of how the unconscious works, it is in this context no longer unconscious, and need no longer be a source of fear.
