EBS26: Awake, Remember and Understand

In its deeper implications. Memorial Day is, or can be, a good time to redefine the phenomenon of memory. This is a function of the mind that is normally taken for granted. Actually, there are at least six different memory influences on us:

1. Evolution. In the shape and function of the body there is evidenced an evolutionary memory of a physical need. It took man about 500,000 years to learn to polish a flint; and perhaps a million years before he wrote a bible. To all this we are heirs today.

2. Race Consciousness. This is the “carnal mind” that Paul refers to. It is a vast memory bank in the world’s soul that exerts a pull on us in beliefs in age, sickness, war, etc.

3. Heredity. What we are physically indicates hereditary memory in the shape of our nose or the color of our hair. We may be aware that one persons’s parents are two...and his grandparents four. But count back less that 600 years, and one person’s ancestors total more than 500 million...more than the entire population of the world at that time. Each of us today has something in his body from everyone who ever lived. There is a constant exchange of new atoms for old, and the atomic content of the body contains some octillion atoms and is completely renewed every five years. So, you probably have at least one thousand atoms in your body that were once in the body of Jesus...for he walked the earth and breathed and ate as we do.

4. Reincarnation. Your life today may well be the distilled essence of your soul memory of all the experiences of past lives. Some have reservations about the theory, but it is a “plausible conjecture”.

5. Subconscious Mind. This alone is what we usually consider to be memory.

Can you imagine what life would be without this kind of memory? Without the power to remember, life would have no continuity or meaning. However, the subconscious mind is not just a function of the brain, a memory bank to store information or to program motivational drives. The study of human potential often stops short and focuses entirely on the cerebrum. Human potential is but the outward expression of divine potential.

Certainly, the subconscious mind plays a vital role in our lives, and many of the limitations of mind,-body, and affairs can be attributed to negative patterns in the subconscious—patterns formed through memory experiences and which can be reformed in the same way.

Mental scientists center their entire program in the area of the subconscious mind, working to change old mind patterns and to program the mind with new ones. Auto-suggestion, self-image psychology, mind control and various techniques are used and with considerable effect. However, dealing with the mind at this level is to consider a part out of context with the whole.

6. Superconscious Mind. This is memory at a transcendent level—the key to realizing the Truth. In the subconscious mind you can remember what you have experienced or felt or known. In the superconscious mind, you can “remember” that which you may have never known or experienced. It is a remembering from within through intuition and inspiration.

Working solely with the subconscious mind in seeking to build into the mind positive patterns is like ignoring the power and guidance systems of a giant ocean liner and propelling it with a hand-driven paddle-wheel and a hand-directed rudder. It works, albeit laboriously, but it builds in patterns that may not at all be the patterns that you innately. Thus, you may become a self-manipulating robot, and the self doing the manipulating may be a frustration or confusion of the true self.

A common statement of mind science is, “A person is what he has put into his subconscious mind.” Thus, in education and in spiritual study, we endlessly try to feed learning experiences into the mind. The wisdom of Socrates needs to be reconsidered in this light. He refers to education as withdrawing wisdom from within the mind, out to where the person can examine and use that which was his from the beginning. Thus, the subconscious mind is intended to be a workshop of the mind, carrying the input that flows from within.

Jesus gave a clear example of the kind of remembering to which Socrates refers: “But the comforter, which is the Holy Spirit... shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance...” The Holy Spirit is the whole center of God. We say, “Wherever I am, God is.” This is the particular nature of Spirit. There is no diminution of the whole. Wherever Spirit is, it is there in its entirety. Man’s mind is a consciousness of the allness of Divine Mind. And the whole, or Holy Spirit, is always present—it is the superconscious mind, the transcendental memory mind.

We are like the Prodigal Son, forever journeying out into the “far country”, living at the circumference of experience, and dealing only with the memories of the subconscious mind. It is like being in a dream sleep, in which we forget who we are and what we are about. In the story the Prodigal “comes to himself” and says, “I will arise and go unto the Father.” He awakens and remembers who he is and where he was going.

Whenever we face a challenge of any kind, whether we seek guidance or healing or prosperity, it is not enough to work only to put some positive idea in the mind. The need is to awaken the Truth from within the mind, to awake and remember who we are. Be still and listen to the “inspiration of the Almighty” flowing forth into the subconscious mind from the superconscious mind. There will still be a kind of programming, but it will be from within, from the pattern “revealed on the Mount.”

The key to Jesus’ power was that He constantly called to “remembrance” who He was. We get lost in the imminence of things in exterior living. We see ourselves as sons of limitation instead of sons of God. He said, “Glorify thou me...with the glory which I had with thee before the world was.” And He was obviously remembering when He said, “Before Abraham was...I am.” This is but a dramatic way of saying that at the root of man is the self that is created in the image and likeness of God.

The real purpose of prayer and meditation is to awake, remember, and understand. It is the key to transcending the influences of evolution, race consciousness, heredity, reincarnation, and the memory patterns of the subconscious mind. It is to remember your oneness with God, to remember your perfect body and mind. So call all this to remembrance, and understand.

Solomon says, “With all thy getting, get understanding.” And the only way to do this is to awake from the dream sleep, and remember transcendentally. Remember that after all you are a spiritual being, living in a spiritual world, governed and sustained by spiritual law.