Chapter VII: The Nature of Mind
1904 original text, YOGeBooks typeset transcription; original text extent only
Most of the problems in our psychological life are due to the sundering of that which is not separated in actual existence. Look within, and if you look truly you will note that every moment your mental life is an evolution. Every moment you are feeling, thinking, willing, and doing. These are not separate parts of your life, they are more or less distinguishable phases of an interchanging whole.29 Now you are more conscious of yourself as desiring to realise a great ideal, and now you are painfully toiling in the valley to attain the great height. But you are no less truly your ideal self. You have not lost your hold. Your will is no less strong. The same soul is now seen in the toils of action rather than in the quietude of contemplation. But activity does not cease when you contemplate, and when you act you are still a resident of that eternal realm whose peace knows no waning. You cannot think without in a measure being active. You cannot think without willing, that is, paying attention, when you attend you act, and when you act you think. You seem to be mentally disjointed only because the apex of consciousness is so small that you cannot pay attention to your whole self at once. But in reality what you discover in successive moments you are all the way along.
Source notes
17. See the Dhammapada.
18. Chap, vi, 34.
19. For a scientific discussion of the phenomena of attention, see James, Psychology vol. i., chap. xi.
20. For further aspects of attention see Stout, Analytic Psychology, i., 189. Stout carefully distinguishes mental attention from its physiological accompaniments. Hence it is made clearer that we are able to direct attention from within.
21. See his Psychology and Life.
22. Psychology, i, 8.
23. Ibid., p. 402.
24. Note also the close connection between feeling and will. Wundt points out that “without the excitations which feeling furnishes we should never will anything.…Feeling, therefore, presupposes will, and will feeling.” See also Höffding, Outlines of Psychology, p. 98.
25. Psychology, Briefer Course, p. 448.
26. For an account of the various stages of consciousness and self-consciousness as related to the more ethical aspects of mental life, see Professor Palmer’s admirable little book, The Nature of Goodness, Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1903.
27. Professor James’s account of habit is important in this connection. See his Psychology, vol. i.
28. Professor James’s Psychology, i, 123.
29. The term “will,” for example, refers to the whole meaning of our conscious life. See Royce, Outlines of Psychology, p. 334, et seq. Professor Royce’s treatise contains many practical suggestions of great value. For example, see his account of inhibition and self- control, pp. 70-80. “What, in any situation, we are restrained from doing is as important to us as what we do.…‘Self-control’ is an essential part of health.…You teach a man to control or to restrain himself so soon as you teach him what to do in a positive sense. Healthy activity includes self-restraint, or inhibition, as one of its elements. You in vain teach, then, self-control, unless you teach much more than self-control.”