The Ghost in the White House Part 19

In other words, the way to get one's way with people is to know and extend one's consciousness down deeper into one's subconsciousness in one's own mind, so that one draws on the conscious and the subconscious in one's own mind at will, so that gradually having the habit of drawing on the conscious and the subconscious in one's own mind at will, one soon makes oneself master of the conscious and the subconscious in the minds of others.

I do not precisely know this, of course, because I have never practiced having my own way with other people as much as I would like, but my theory and my observation of others who have practiced on me leads me, in speaking for all of us to believe this: The way for a man to do who wants to get his own way with people is to heighten his consciousness, deepen his consciousness down into his subconsciousness, live more abundantly in soul and body, deeper down and higher up and further over into himself than others. Then he gets his way with others because everybody wants him to, almost without knowing it or anybody's else knowing it.

A man who does this becomes like any other great force of nature. The indication seems to be that what the artist in a man or the engineer in him does with the genius in him namely: the driving down of an artesian well of consciousness into his subconsciousness, the using of his new brain tracks and old ones together--is the secret of getting one's way for all of us, whether with Nature or with one another.

Of course, the hard part of this program to arrange for is the new brain tracks to put with the old ones both in getting our own way with other people and with ourselves.

This part of my book deals with what is a very personal problem for most of us--what new brain tracks are really like, how they work, and what people can do to get them.

III

WHAT IS CALLED THINKING

The one special trait that stands out in all new brain tracks in common, is that n.o.body 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.

As I remember it the first thing that made me really wake up to the truth about ears was the fact that I never seemed to want to speak if I could help it, to an audience all made up of women, like a Woman's Club, or all made up of men, or to an audience all made up of very young people or of very old people, or of people who presented a solid front of middle age.

The trouble with a one-s.e.xed audience or a one-cla.s.sed audience seems to be that they all stop right in the middle of the same sentence sometimes and change to their outside ears all at once and before one's eyes. In any audience representing everybody when any one person feels like it, and goes off on some strange psychological trail of his all alone, one can keep adjusted and one soon begins to find that an audience of men and women both is easier to stand before than one which gives itself up to easy one-s.e.x listening, because the ducks and dodges people make in one's meaning, the subterranean pa.s.sages, tunnels and flights people go off on, from what one says, all check each other up and are different. When the women go under the men emerge. The same seems to be true in speaking to mixed ages. Fewer pa.s.sages are wasted. Middle-aged people who remember, and look forward in listening always help in an audience because they seem to like to collect stray sentences cheerfully thrown away by people who have not started remembering much yet, or by people who do not do anything else.

I do not want, in making my point, to seem to exaggerate, but so far as what people do to me is concerned if people would get up and go out of a hall each sentence they stop listening or stop understanding, it would not be any worse--the psychological clang of it--than what they do do. It would merely look worse. The facts about the way people listen, about the way they use their two sets of ears on one, snap one out of their souls, switch one over from their real or inside ears to their outside ones, in three adjectives, are beyond belief. And they all keep thinking they are listening, too. One almost never speaks in public without seeing or expecting to see little heaps of missed sentences lying everywhere all around one as one goes out of the hall.

What is true of one's words to people one can keep one's eye on, is still more true of words in books.

If I could fit up each reader in this book with a little alarm clock or music box in his mind, that would go off in each sentence he is skipping without knowing it, n.o.body would disagree with me a minute for founding what I have to say in this book about changing people's minds upon the way people do not listen except in skips, hops and flashes to what they hear, the way they do not see what they look at, or the way they think, when they think, when they think they think.

(For every time I say "they" in the last paragraph will the reader kindly read "we.")

If there were some kind of moody and changeable type all sizes, kinds and colors, and if this book could be printed with irregular, up and down and sidling lines--printed for people the way they are going to read it, if the sentences in this chapter could duck under into subterranean pa.s.sages or could take nice little airy swoops or flights--if every line on a page could dart and waver around in different kinds and colors of type, make a perfect picture of what is going to happen to it when it is going through people's minds, there is not anybody who would not agree with me that all these people we see about us who seem to us to be living their lives in stops, skips and flashes probably live so, because they listen so.

If the type in the pages in this book dealing with Mr. Burleson could be more responsive, could act the way Mr. Burleson's mind does when he reads it--that is if I could have the printer dramatize in the way he sets the type what Mr. Burleson is going to do with his mind or not do with his mind with each pellucid sentence as it purls--even Mr. Burleson himself would be a good deal shocked to see how very little about himself in my book, he was really carrying away from it.

If in Mr. Burleson's own personal copy of this book, I were to have this next chapter about him that is going to follow soon--especially the sentences in it he is going to slur over the meaning of or practically not read at all--printed in invisible ink and there were just those long pale gaps about him, so that he would have to pour chemical on them to get them--so that he would have to dip the pages in some kind of nice literary goo to see what other people were reading about him, he would probably carry away more meaning than I or any one could hope for in ordinary type like this, which gives people a kind, pleasant, superficial feeling they are reading whether they are reading or not.

IV

LIVING DOWN CELLAR IN ONE'S OWN MIND

What I saw a little three-year-old girl the other day doing with her dolly--dragging its flaxen-haired head around on the floor and holding on to it dreamily by the leg, is what the average man's body can be seen almost any day, doing to his mind.

One feels almost as if one ought to hush it up at first until a few million more men have made similar practical observations in the psychology and physiology of modern life when one comes to see what our civilization is bringing us to--what it really is that almost any man one knows, including the man of marked education--take him off his guard almost any minute--is letting his body do to his mind.

A very large part of even quite intelligent conversation has no origination in it and is just made up of phonograph records. You say a thing to a man that calls up Record No. 999873 and he puts it in for you, starts his motor and begins to make it go round and round for you. He just tumtytums off some of his subconsciousness for you. Whether he is selling you a carpet sweeper or converting your soul, it is his body that is using his brain and not his brain that is using his body.

With the average man one meets, his body wags his brain when he talks, as a dog wags his tail. The tongue sends its roots not into the brain but into the stomach. (Probably this is why Saint Paul speaks of it so sadly and respectfully as a mighty member--because of its roots.)

The main difficulty a man has in having a new brain track, or in being original or plastic in a process of mind is the way his body tries to bully him when he tries it. The body has certain tracks it has got used to in a mind and that it wants to harden the mind down into and then tumtytum along on comfortably and it does not propose--all this blessed meat we carry around on us, to let us think any more than can be helped.

I saw some wooden flowers in a florist's window on The Avenue the other day--four or five big blossoms six inches across--real flowers that had been taken from the edge of a volcano in South America--real flowers that had chemically turned to wood--(probably from having gas administered to them by the volcano!)--and I stood there and looked at them thinking how curious it was that spiritual and spirited things like flowers instead of going out and fading away like a spirit, had died into solid wood in that way. Then I turned and walked down the street, watching the souls and bodies of the people and the people were not so different many of them as one looked into their faces, from the wooden flowers, and I could not help seeing, of course, no one can--what their bodies--thousands of them--were apparently doing to their souls. After all the wooden flowers were not really much queerer for flowers than the people--many of them--were for people.

From the point of view of the freedom and the plasticity of the human mind, from the point of view of spiritual mastery, of securing new brain tracks in men and women and the consciousness of power, of mobilizing the body and the soul both on the instant for the business of living, it is not a little discouraging after people are twenty-one years old to watch what they are letting their bodies do to them.

Left to itself the body is for all practical purposes so far as the mind is concerned a petrifaction-machine, a kind of transcendental concrete mixer for pouring one's soul in with some Portland Cement and making one's living idea over into matter, that preserve them and statuefy them in one--just as they are. Unless great spiritual pains are taken to keep things moving, the body operates practically as a machine for petrifying spiritual experiences, mummifying ideas or for putting one's spiritual experiences on to reels and nerves that keep going on forever.

There is ground for belief (and this is what I am trying to have a plan to meet, in these chapters) that the reason that most of us find talking with people and arguing with them and trying to change their minds so unsatisfactory, is that we are not really thorough with them. What we really need to do with people is to go deeper, excavate their sensory impressions, play on their subconscious nerves, use liver pills or have a kidney taken out to convince them. Talk with almost any man of a certain type, no matter what he is, a banker, a lawyer, or a mechanic, after he is thirty years old, and his mind cannot really be budged. He is not really listening to you when you criticize him or differ with him.

The soul--the shrewder further-sighted part of a man, up in his periscope has a tendency to want to think twice, to make a man value you and like you for criticizing him and defend himself from you by at least knowing all you know and keep still and listen to you until he does, but his body all in a flash tries to keep him from doing this, hardens over his mind, claps itself down with its lid of habit over him. Then he automatically defends himself with you, starts up his anger-machine, and nothing more can be said.

What a man does his not-listening with is not with his soul, but with his machine. The very essence of anger is that it is unspirited and automatic. The spirited man is the man who has the gusto in him to listen, in spite of himself to what his fists and his stomach do not want to let him hear.

Of course when a man keeps up a thing of this sort for a few years--say for twenty or thirty years--the inevitable happens and one soon sees why it is that the majority of people--even very attractive people one goes around talking with and living with, after thirty years, become just splendid painted-over effigies of themselves. One has no new way of being fond of them. One looks for nothing one has not had before. They go about--even the most elegant of them--thinking with their stomachs.

Thoughts they get off to us sweetly and unconsciously as if they were fresh from heaven--as if they had just been caught pa.s.sing from the music of the spheres, are all handed up to them on dumb waiters from below.

V

BEING HELPED UP THE CELLAR STAIRS

Most of us feel that the national crisis that lies just ahead calls in a singular degree for new and creative ideas and brain paths, both for our leaders and our people.

We realize--whatever our personal habits may be that the great ma.s.s of the driving ahead that is to be done in this nation in its new opportunity, must come whether in business, invention or affairs, from picked men here and there in every business and in every calling, who insist on thinking with their heads instead of with their stomachs.

The question of how these men who seem to strike out, who seem to do more of their thinking above the navel than others, manage to do it--the question of how other people--a hundred million people can be got to follow in these new brain tracks for a nation--these new ways for a nation to get its way, is a question of such immediate personal and national concern to all of us, that I would like to try to consider for a little what can be done toward giving new brain tracks to the nation and what kind of people can do it.

The men who do it, who are going to begin striking down through the automaton in all of us, are going to begin taking hold of people's minds and re-routing and recoordinating their ideas and are going to be the more important and most typical men of our time. The man I know who comes nearest to doing it, to practicing the new profession of being a lawyer backward, who has a technique for giving his clients real inspirations in believing what they do not like to believe about themselves, in seeing through themselves, is P. Mathias Alexander, in the extraordinary work he is doing in London, for people in the way of reeducating and recoordinating their bodies.