Awakening Of Soul Sleep

by: Helen Rhodes

Aspiration. The Subconscious Mind. Law of Suggestion, Concentration, Meditation, Affirmation. The Silence. Sleep as the Great Opportunity for Development.

If I should falter more or less
In my great task of happiness
If I should move among my race,
And show no glorious morning face,
If beams from happy human eyes have moved me not,
If morning skies, books, and my food and summer rain
Knock on my stubborn heart in vain,
Lord, thy most pointed pleasure take
And stab my spirit broad awake;
Or, Lord, if still obdurate I,
Choose thou, before my spirit die,
Some piercing pain, some killing sin,
And to my head heart run them in.

--Robert Louis Stevenson

AWAKENING

Awakening is the being born again, the entering upon a process of spiritual growth from spiritual infancy to mastership, dependent upon a nourishment of food peculiar to its needs. Every normal process of life and nature symbolizes the supernormal needs. As our food grows our physical body, so does that which feeds the spiritual self grow its substance.

The food of the soul is aspiration. Spiritual maturity does not happen. The soul only stirs in its sleep at first, from impacts from without, and sinks into lethargy as the experiences pass, conscious only of itself in all the world, as it seeks response in the contentment of material life. Only by constant recurrence of stimuli can awakening come. Just as the connecting paths are made between the brain centers by presenting the same stimuli again and again, and a vibration set up that forces its own track of communication like threads across the soft substance, so, in like manner, every thought has its vibratory action of silent force in the subconscious. For every act on the physical plane there is a cell inflation in the brain, and whatever is expressed is also impressed and the process duplicated by the superconscious activities.

When a soul is sufficiently disturbed to cognize repeated impacts from without, a regular avenue of vibration is established thru which experience is poured to waken the dreamer. The phenomenon of a double personality or many personalities is but One man, One soul in partial stages of coma, responsive to some stimuli and dumb to others.

The subconscious mind is the potent and unseen magnet polarized to its feeling or emotional self. It remembers and stores up knowledge, it scents danger where none can be seen. It knows where words are foolish. Spiritual apprehension is the thought of which human action is mere utterance, its own sure guide is the motive and purpose within itself. It obeys and becomes our servant or master just as we elect. When it is fed upon aspiration it parallels its growth with its quality and environs itself with it.

Aspiration is the irrigation of ideal. The magnet for any result is thought potentized by aspiration; then you may ask what you will, it will bring it to pass.

The method of communication with the subconscious is thru the law of suggestion which becomes self-direction and centered in a thought matrix enters into relationship with its idea and radiating it, grows by its own intention.

The subconscious mind sees and is capable of knowing and revealing to us all things. Not that it functions on various planes but that the aura of each person holds as in solution the content of past experience, and intelligible to subconscious perception. Apparitions, psychic visions, etc., are believed by many psychologists to be a subconscious perception of things near or remote, as they are or have been, not as they will be. Futurity is not a subconscious faculty.

It may discern near events already foreshadowed in the aura. The high potency life makes no reckoning with psychic visions and apparitions which imperil the dreamer thru his own instincts. We are obsessed by ideas, not by dead entities. Bodies are not taken possession of by astral imps. The doorway to this life in the body is thru birth and race tradition. The planes are separated by non-conductors, each plane recording its own experience, which is merely an extension in consciousness. Developing positive spiritual power does not lie in the regions of automatic writing, or in paralyzing any brain center thru self-hypnotism, but in raising the plane of consciousness thru a positive process of analysis, proof, and understanding, keeping in great highway of sane scientific revelation, not side tracked and lost in the coma of conceit and ignorance.

The subconscious activity is forced into action by the mental machinery which, as it works, involves every atom of the person. The objective mind obtains during waking coma and registers its reflexes as emotion and will on the subconscious; then when demands are made upon the will it responds as it has been trained. True will power is adaptability. Degenerated will power is obstinacy. The first belongs to ripe understanding, the latter to childhood and senility. One is immovable and inert, unable to cope with circumstances, the other is educated for response and increased power.

The subconscious is the totality of impressions. Fleeting experiences do not register. No action becomes habit, no method resolves itself into principle until it is carried over and lodged in the subconscious convolutions of the psychic body. How to tap its abundant source is to apprehend the Law of Suggestion. This is a communication with our real self in another and more patent form. No one who is familiar with the methods of ordinary scientific education today questions the law of suggestion. The government of France defends and supports its methods for medical purposes in preference to giving anesthetics. The facts of hypnotism prove that the subconscious mind will execute the commands of the objective mind.

In therapeutic hypnotic treatment a definite process is entered upon and the steps outlined by the operator. In spiritual awakening the goal alone is held before the subconscious and it is left to itself, to right itself by a light superior to the direction of the objective mind.

No one method can disclose the pearl of great price to all questioning souls. Each temperament makes its peculiar demands; there are many ways for many men, but one goal. Among the sayings of Jesus recently found at Oxyrinchus is the following: “Let not him who seeks cease until he finds; and when he finds he shall be astonished; astonished, he shall reach the kingdom, and having reached the kingdom he shall rest.”

In these days of predigested foods short cuts to a high potency life are inevitable, but there is no patent appropriation of infinite love; the whole nature is to be returned and throughout a lifetime we are given opportunities to test experience and reconstruct results. “Ask thy lone soul what laws are plain to thee, thee and no other, that is the law for thee.”

So long as one aspires, daily putting ideals into circulation thru the avenues of homemaking, housekeeping, business relationships, keeping much in the open air, there is no danger of morbid introspection. Unless we make use of our ideals they are nothing but spiritual anesthetics.

When the awakening comes rapidly the novitiate overflows with precious truth and would proclaim his way as the only way. Remember it was your way, it may not be another’s way. God is good; he meets us where he finds us and lures us heavenward according to our interests and needs. By living our beliefs instead of talking about them we win where words would lose. Let development have her way and your own will come to you in joy, work, love, and prosperity.

You can have no permanent values until you radiate a vibration that draws the demand for which you are the supply. You must be the magnet that attracts, you, yourself are it. Be still and know!

Do not demand nor limit the action of another. A mother longing for a letter from her song long overdue, grasped his photograph, demanding with intense feeling that he write her at once. He wrote that some hour a cruel, defiant, graceless letter. If she had been patient, sending out continued love and no restrictions, a different mood might have dictated a different letter.

If you are a worker do not think you can make another person buy your work. Mental sandbagging meets with mental resistance. They will get your thought about anything you can say. You exchange subconsciously. You cannot go out and attract friends. You must be the magnet that attracts. You cannot transfer the thought matrix to another and command its growth as you must when you order your own power. Do not attempt to control another. Do not try to make of yourself a special providence to every one you meet. Wait until you are asked, lest you be considered an obstructionist. The form of suggestion should be for self-awakening and development to increase and intensify one’s worth. Go in to win, in yourself, not to hypnotize anyone else. You will not need to. Do not separate yourself from your work. You work is you, put yourself in it, it is then alive and attracts attention. Send out thoughts of love and freedom to the whole world to help, but not for personal influence. You need all your time for your own mental housecleaning; adverse currents are playing across your life constantly, and as you add to the power of good you subtract from the power of evil.

When knowledge of this human dynamo is the common property of the race, it becomes so thru centuries of subconscious consent, affirming involuntary action on the part of the mind, refusing the unfit and knowing the good, we can hope to have a responsive mind as we have a physical body. It has taken centuries to produce subconscious regulation of the circulation, and it will take centuries more for the gathering of truth sediment sufficient to manifest natural and easy discrimination, and by added reincarnations the final truth of cause and effect become a law in the perceptions.

There is more in life than a cut and dried philosophy adopted as principles behind which small souls retreat with an air of superiority whenever a difficult situation demands vigorous, broad, and sympathetic treatment. Truth has been called by Professor James “a species of good”; as such, truth becomes a process, and it permeates all acts and filters thru all effort. It is a becoming process, not a fixed state, adjusting and readjusting as higher values emerge and release higher forms of truth.

The reflex of intellectual conviction is stored in the subconscious and becomes our power initiative. The Psychcoma is buffeted thru new applications of old truth or species of good, these experiences being the alphabet of the divine vocabulary thru which we learn by constant analysis of the laws of life. We learn to know when there are “open doors,” when we should go and come; we allow small truth values every experience, rising higher and higher in perception as augmented data clarifies vision. This is a clairvoyant sight which is positive awareness, not psychic negation. We cease to hurry, we dare to wait, we learn to know that success must mean some addition to the sum of human happiness, we have the courage to couth the worth of ideas before money. A truth, therefore, is not absolute, rather it is relative. All truth is precious but not sacred. Nothing is more sacred than the awakening from the soul-sleep; this is the fruit of truth, it is not a question of facts but of vision. Each man becomes an individual explorer into the deeps of his own life; faith is his unseen guide, the symbol of light in the visible world.

Physical life is the ego exerting itself into matter, and it withdraws with the result of the effort. The self would reach into the unseen and demand the consolation of the reassembling of its family, or such members of it as are agreeable, in a future state. Awake! Life is experience! You need just such human relations to develop and awaken; don’t cling, another life will draw you into other filial relationships and obligations with another family; all life is a brotherhood, so give to every living creature sympathy and love.

Be observant of hindrances, they are friendly. When the inner process of thought is making use of aspiration and mediation one needs to give no anxious attention to obstacles. Constructive thought leaves behind all that cannot be used in the upbuilding process. All instability, anxiety, uncertainty and pain are ways for producing a full-fledged, self-poised human being, and when sorrow has done its work release will come; but wait patiently, let the law work. Prepare the soil of your own nature for the incoming peace, it cannot enter until strife is stilled.

The silence is “the secret place of the Most High.” It is “The Most High Place”; your most high. Higher than that, we cannot go now. It is the meeting place between the human and divine. No prophet has divined a relationship between the Creator and the created that transcends God as a loving father and we his children. Know that the Father knows what is best for you; that while he works you also must work and supplement his work. Pray unceasingly and when you say “Thy will be done” get behind that statement and “will that God’s will be done.” Make it your strongest affirmation. This is not to be taken in the spirit of resignation and renunciation, but for positive accomplishment to which you may tack your highest and deepest motives and hopes. Renunciation is an unhappy word for outgrown impedimenta. We easily renounce what we have outgrown. To renounce is to “let go,” and may be a positive process in acquiring power and not negative resignation in any sense.

Professor James calls prayer “commerce with God.” You make yourself negative to the highest good of which you are capable of receiving. Say often, “I am negative to God alone and positive to all the world.” You do not want secondhand thoughts, you do not need to be on the wires for warmed-over transmitted messages. Tap the source, go direct to God, talk to him; this is the spirit of truth, the Comforter, the Holy Spirit. Such a life is not a passive life, awakening is alertness! Awareness! The coma yields to perception!

You do not get into the silence, you earn the silence thru concentration and meditation. Concentration and meditation is an advance step which begins where breath control leaves off. From having control of the breath, understanding how to inhale and exhale, the power of thought to develop harmony, now begins the development of the power of concentration and meditation for specific needs.

Concentration is defined in chemistry as “to intensify in strength by removing valueless constituents.” Meditation is “to fix in the mind.” Concentration of thought force is a composite blending and coordination of fugitive yet affiliated impulses. The polarization of any thought center guarantees the dissolving of every unrelated and undesirable of every unrelated and undesirable element. Intentness magnetizes that thought center and a mental reflex is obtained which constitutes a demonstration.

Concentration is a positive condition and meditation is the negative. Concentration first selects, reasons, determines, then it invites the subconscious thru meditation to give up its secrets. Thru the silence of concentration comes the stillness of the mental machinery and the conscious mind demands and affirms, then waits and suspends action for meditation to yield its answer. The one goal is the cultivation of the subliminal self so that it may direct instead of being directed by the objective physical mind. The subliminal self could do all things and tell us all things if we would educate our motives to express truth instead of expediency, and whatever its bidding, it will be modified by the dreamer’s capacity to understand and rightly value truth.

Going into the silence is not an experience given over to devotees; it is a normal conscious process for self-development. It cannot be appropriated, it must be earned. There is no other way to reach it except thru concentration and meditation. Whenever there is failure to realize the silence there has been neglect in preparing the way.

The conscious and the subconscious are distinct and unrelated spheres of consciousness. Thru concentration and meditation is sought the union of the two.

The most important consideration is to have a certain time and place. If it is possible have a tiny room for this purpose with nothing there but a table and chair or prie Dieu, and a picture or symbol upon which the eyes and thoughts may rest in inspiration.

Most important of all is to have a definite time. Then keep that appointment with your own soul. It is your waking hour, a precious moment; be as regardful of this moment as you would to any demand from a friend. Enter into this communion as expectant as you await the ringing up of the curtain at the play. When you have established an intimacy with your own soul, there will come a time when you will require no set time or place to enter this cosmic place, but every unoccupied moment, the time spent on street cars and every moment of waiting will give this opportunity.

You concentrate when your whole interest is involved. This is induced thru forcing the attention to follow certain methods until externals drop away. There is no more effectual method that to close the eyes and observe mentally one’s own breathing as given in “Transmutation,” following as an appointed guard on duty, slowly visualizing the process and silently saying, “I now inhale with the lungs, now with the diaphragm, now the abdomen, now centering at the solar plexus; I exhale with the abdomen, now with the diaphragm, now with the lungs,” ending with spraying the thought and breath upward along the spine and then as in a shower over the entire body.

In training the attention to consciously follow each movement with accuracy, in a few moments distractions cease and from the forced manipulation of the breath quiet comes, and the matters about which you desire knowledge may be focused in the mind and one by bone the questions considered reasonably, quietly, firmly. Say “I seek to know ‘this; and ‘this’,” naming what you are working out. At first work for conditions, not things. Seek to manifest peace, joy, harmony, health, and take but one statement for a meditation, varying the statement from day to day as desired. When you resolve to awake, you will mentally assort during concentration your inclinations, capacity, and avenues open to you. You can concentrate upon and cultivate successfully but one line of work at a time, and every bit of experience will assume a possible relation to it. Slowly analyze your problem step by step, pushing effect upon cause back to a starting point. When reason has done its best, slowly relax thru measured breathing, release all responsibility, let go of the world and ideas, and say, “I now release thru my conscious mind the wisdom regarding (mention the subject under consideration);” or, “I rise into the realm of all knowledge and ask to be shown the way.” Then sit in the silence and enjoy it from ten minutes to one hour, feeling yourself the center of a circle with all distractions far out on and beyond the circumference.

This is meditation and the Silence. Confusion is on the circumference. Get back into the cosmic peace and abundance and “let go” the entanglement of cross purposes. You cannot attain concentration on nothing and you cannot maintain meditation on nothing. The silence is dynamic with awareness, which polarizes on the plane of aspiration. You may raise your vibrations to whatever level you desire. Feel the stillness of your thought, your body, your being, the universe. Feel yourself the center of that universe. Surround yourself with the inhalation of the spirit of truth or God; take a spirit bath in its clarifying atmosphere; see none but yourself and God; inspire the universal will and so magnetize your consciousness with your oneness with God. So shall your entire environment vibrate with power to draw the highest to you. Thru your union with this silent brotherhood of thought a vibration is intensified which includes you in this rhythm. You become a channel for all like motives and the focus is in your environment. Friends, home, all material things respond to the law of vibration. Congestion is confusion and disorder. I know of no more powerful corrective than forcing one’s self to keep one’s belongings in perfect order and condition. Disorderly closets and bureau drawers are demoralizing in a real way. Every outward symbol sensed deeply enough to be felt, images itself upon the superconscious, which, in turn, reflects itself in events.

To invite prosperity and to have a part in the circulation of money, your own circulation must be free from congestion. Hoarding things makes a plague spot of decayed cells. Attics and trunks stored with unused things are a menace. Distribution and order is the law of inflowing supply and no bargain days except for needs. Affirm “I give and receive money freely.” This does not mean indiscriminately and wastefully, but wisely and well. We sometimes make too much of money when we say we do not want it, because we do not want our needs supplied and merely saying it does not convince. One does not acquire spiritual power because he is rich or poor, but in spite of it.

The joy affirmation does not remain in the ether but must be manifested. So with peace and health; these conditions involve material processes and can and do manifest as money. Fill yourself with the elemental source, it will assume as many shapes as your needs dictate. Whatever thought you wish realized, think intently with the whole being, soul and body. This law is inherent in every life. The dreamer produces a dream parallel to his awakening. The condition of manifestation is to be, rather than to merely believe. To be involves bringing into subjection every faculty, to be able to order our thought atmosphere and concentrate at a moment’s need so that negative conditions shall immediately resolve themselves into positive conditions; in short, to polarize every separate and divided interest into an undivided, universal spirit.

Music study would cease to be drudgery if the pupil could be taught to read the music silently, feel the melody, get into the rhythm and then play it. All study would yield double returns if one entered the subjective state for a short time before trying to think or write. You do not need to use force, you obtain the silence and then speak your desire.

Thru the silence a strong desire makes connection with other and needed factors. The result may not be anything we counted upon, but unexpectedly a turn in our affairs is accomplished. All education and development are subconscious. Whatever book is studied, turn its pages as you impress certain statements upon the mind, saying, “I bring into my conscious mind the knowledge of ------,” or “Now do I draw from my superconscious mind the knowledge of this ------,” or, “Now do I bring into manifestation my knowledge of ------,” or, “I give forth what is in me.” If the mind wanders, reset it a thousand times if necessary and know what you are thinking about and why. Spend no time in denials, an affirmation holds within itself a denial. The only from a denial should take is to direct the subconscious to “let go” or certain tendencies, saying, “I let go of fear, or sickness,” etc. This is a command without the use of not. The physiological process forces inflation of the group of cells corresponding to the thought center. If such a group is inflated thru denial, then you have made one more obstacle in the way of affirmation.

The night time should mean opportunity for supplementing our work and wisdom. The cessation of the physical functions releases the soul from its control and limitation. The experiments of Professor Elmer Gates as Washington are open to any one, and the experiences of inventors and students have given us data for the subconscious activities. Not long ago a student spent half the night trying to solve a problem. Worn out with repeated failure he went to bed. When he awakened in the morning he found the problem completed on the paper as he had left it. He realized that he had been a somnambulist and that his subconscious mind had given up the knowledge he had failed to perceive. In the days when witches were burned this would have been credited to witches or to a spirit who had intervened to help, but we now better now.

The soul does not go to the Himalayas, nor London, nor some other planet. It is here but released from the limitation of the mental and physical machinery and awake on its own subconscious plane where feeling is sight, will is understanding, and perception is hearing.

You do not sent your soul or subconscious mind out; you, yourself, go, or rather, you awake subconsciously. A last thought to float in the consciousness is, “I go tonight to seek wisdom and to manifest it thru my conscious mind.” If some special need exists say, “I go tonight to connect with ------ (work or money) and to bring it into manifestation.” For a long time the novitiate would better confine himself to charging the subconscious mind at the moment of sleep with “I seek wisdom from the infinite source.” Be not too hungry for things.

The purpose of sleep is not merely to rest the body thru suspension of the mental machinery, but it is a dream just as full of activity as the waking dream, and we may double our power and usefulness by directing it. The daytime is nothing compared to it. When the power of self-direction is understood the daytime will be used as a secondary condition in which the objective consciousness waits to receive and adjust the results accomplished during sleep. One need never worry nor hurry, simply affirm and wait, never passive but with the perceptions active in the highest degree, making ready for the manifestation of the thing to be wrought out.

We should lie down to sleep not from weariness, but because we wish to go consciously into the subconscious alive to the importance of receiving what it has to give. Welcome sleep as a privilege, taking time to lay aside all worry, anger, fear, grief, that the soul may be impressed with a clear and definite message, then ask of it what you will, so you require attention to but one thought at a time. Keep that thought uppermost and insistent, that it may float in the margin of consciousness and unify the impulses. Say, “Now do I draw the wisdom of my inner life into my conscious mind,” or, “Now do I draw from my inner life the knowledge of this ------.”

The time wasted in undirected sleep might be used in working out all life’s problems. The subconscious is not tired; night is the daytime of the soul on its subconscious side. The student, writer, artist, inventor, may educate himself while he sleeps by directing his subconscious. Say with the last waking thought, “I demand that this knowledge pass into my consciousness,” or for health say, “I restore my body tonight,” or, “I now renew my entire being.” Supplement this tremendous power by meditating upon the same subject during the appointed silent time. The desired knowledge will flow to you or when you take up the subject upon which the subconscious has worked your thoughts will come faster than you can well manage them. Demand specific things if need be, but we sometimes get what we ask for and wish we had left it to a higher power.

When the high potency life rules the moment of waking and the beginning of the day should enunciate a statement of rejoicing and thanksgiving regardless of our personal opinions. Thru the night unseen helpers have companioned you, now expect the unexpected, affirm and wait, your own is on the way to you. You may not enjoy hunger and various phases of incompleteness, but expect and affirm and work.

As you waken say, “I greet the day with love and send forth joy and peace to all the world,” or, “I drink in infinite life and I breathe out infinite love.” Always try to make a complete circle of your affirmation by including a receiving power and its manifestation, as “I receive life from the divine source and I now manifest health.” Constant affirmation keeps one positive to all less than the desired good.

In the Revised Version of the Bible, Psalm 127.2 reads, “For so He giveth to His beloved in sleep.” This bit of ancient wisdom is suggestive. Keep your material needs, if possible, for the daytime meditation at first, and at night lift yourself into the realms of wisdom.

The superconscious self is a store-house of wisdom gathered thru countless age; each for himself may gather from this infinite supply.

About the Author

Helen Rhodes