I’m reading this book that someone at work gave me: The Game of Life and How to Play It by Florence Scovel Shinn. I haven’t gotten very far into it but the first chapter has already brought up an interesting concept.
The book is along the same lines as The Secret (which I haven’t actually read, but I’ve read about it and I think I grasp what The Secret is). Florence breaks down the mind into three departments:
The subconscious is: “simply power, without direction…Whatever man feels deeply is impressed upon the subconscious mind, and carried out in minutest detail.”
The conscious is: “the mortal or carnal mind. It is the human mind and sees life as it appears to be…it impresses the subconscious.”
The superconscious is: “the God Mind within each man, and is the realm of perfect ideas.”
I learned all the id/ego/superego stuff in high school, but the term “superconscious” isn’t familiar to me, at least not described like this.
“In [the superconscious] is the “perfect pattern” spoken of by Plato, The Divine Design; for there is a Divine Design for each person. There is a place that you are to fill and no one else can fill, something you are to do, which no one else can do. There is a perfect picture of this in the superconscious mind. It usually flashes across the conscious as an unattainable ideal – something “too good to be true.” In reality it is man’s true destiny (or destination) flashed to him from the Infinite Intelligence which is within himself.”
A part of me knows this is just one person’s theory; it’s not really something that can be proven or shown through science. But the rest of me thinks that it makes sense and fits in line with the kind of view I’ve been taking on the world. I like the idea of The Secret – attracting to yourself the things that you want. I also like the idea of the Divine Design – that things are predestined for me and that the choices and actions I make resound within this overall life plan that is already in place.
I know that a lot of people are against this idea for just that reason: they don’t want to think that they don’t actually have any say in the way their life turns out. But the Divine Design doesn’t eliminate free will.
Probably if I’d read this book three years ago I would have dismissed it as yet another psycho-babble self-help book. But this year the way things have been falling into place, Drew and I keep saying to each other that everything happens the way and when it’s supposed to.
A year and a half ago we had just moved back to California and we kept saying that 2010, after crazy 2009 with its engagement, cross-country move, and wedding, would be the calm year of just working and paying off debt. But apparently that wasn’t part of the plan for us, and it’s just been this year that we’re finally, finally starting to make great strides forward.
I don’t know whether we managed to finally attract these things to us, or if it was just part our Divine Design, or if our collective superconscious finally made our jobs materialize. Or a combination of all three. I guess it doesn’t matter how it happened so much – I’m just so happy that it did.
That’s actually what caught my eye in those paragraphs about the departments of the mind: that this perfect picture of my future already exists inside me somewhere and that when I’ve had those flashes of the way things could be, it’s not “too good to be true” – it’s inevitable. That’s a good feeling.
The Cameraphone Diaries 