The Master Mind Book

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE SLAVE WILL AND THE MASTER WILL All deep students of psychology discover that the / Will is the innermost garment of the Ego?the mental sheath which lies beneath all the others, and which clings closely to the substance of the Ego, so closely that it can scarcely be distinguished from its wearer. And so, the race has become accustomed to identifying the Will with the Ego. For instance, we speak of a "weak will," or a "strong will," a "vacillating will," or a "persistent, determined ' will"; when we really mean to indicate the different degrees of the activity and expression of the Ego 1 itself. Perhaps you will get more clearly this conception of the Ego behind the Will, if we continue our illus- " tration of the Ego as sleeping in the case of the great masses of the race, half-awake in the smaller portion of the race, and wide-awake in the elect few who may be called the Master Minds. While this illustration is of course figurative, it is based upon the actual facts of the case before us, and, moreover, comes so closely to the real manifestations of the Ego that it may be used in almost a literal sense. The sleeping Ego is like a person wrapped in slumber, who is almost unconscious, but who will "turn over,"or "move over" at the command of the bedfellow. In some cases the degree of waking- consciousness is somewhat higher, as in the case of the child who, half roused from slumber, will do what it is told by its parent, but without clearly realizing just what it is doing. This illustration may becarried even still further, and the sleeping Ego compared to the somnambulist, or "sleep-walker," who "goes through the motions" of performing many . tasks and actions, but who is but very dimly conscious (or practically unconscious) ...Read More