Conscious Mind, Higher Mind

Conscious Mind, Higher Mind

A friend of mine recently asked me why it so often seems that our Dreams are so much wiser than our selves – is it not our own minds doing the dreaming? And so shouldn’t our dreams be just as typically stupid as we’ve grown to expect all of the other products of our minds to be?

Well, this brings to mind something I read of Samuel Johnson, the famous Philosopher of London, a good writer and an intimidating speaker who once had a dream in which he was at table with a group of Philosophers whose good sense and powerful diction left him feeling quite an idiot. He remarked that in Reality such an assembly did not exist – that there simply were not people smarter than himself, and furthermore he was puzzled that such superiority could be from his own mind. And he wondered what he was doing wrong that he could not tap into that Superior Intelligence while awake and conscious.

So how can the Mind seem to be able to so transcend itself? Well, look at it this way – picture the mind as a huge glob of filaments. Ordinarily all of these filaments are dark. Each filament, when lit, displays a certain concept, memory or association to be perceived by Consciousness. Consciousness creeps along through these neural-mental filaments lighting one filament after another. The brightest filaments are NOW, but the glow of light within the receding filament accounts for our memory – our ability to visualize, which allows us to see our memories, but certainly not as intensely as we can perceive our NOW.

The movement of consciousness through this blob of filaments creates a intricate and convoluted line representing our linear consciousness. The lines become habitual, creating well worn paths in the mind, which gives us our habits and even our personalities. This is how our Conscious Mind seems to be organized. The important thing to understand is that this Line, though it may have wriggled about through many parts of the mind could not have possibly become acquainted with every possible filament or pattern of filaments.

However, there may be another Way of Knowing, which deals with quite the same Mind, all these same filaments, but which experiences the content of the filaments all at once, holistically. Not limited to linear creeping about from one thought to the next, this Higher Way of Knowing may know everything in the Mind all at once.

How does this Model of understanding the Ordinary Mind and the Higher Mind help us with our understanding of Dreaming? Well, in our ordinary Linear Conscious Mind which creeps along accustomed paths through the mind, lighting up its one filament at a time, the vast remainder of the Mind is largely unknown. But the Higher Mind can see how close the Conscious Mind comes to Patterns and Truths within that Great Mass of the Entire Mind. Ways are left open and lines are opened up and new areas of the Mind are prepared for conscious discovery.