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The Ninth Lesson: The Mental Planes.633
mind. And tomorrow morning let him find out which shoe the habit mind
has been putting on him first and then try to reverse the order and notice
how flurried and disturbed the habit mind will become, and how frantically
it will signal to the conscious mind: “Something wrong up there!” Or try
to button on your collar, reversing the order in which the tabs are placed
over the button—right before left, or left before right, as the case may be,
and notice the involuntary protest. Or, try to reverse the customary habit
in walking and attempt to swing your right arm with the movement of your
right leg, and so on, and you will find it will require the exercise of great will
power. Or, try to “change hands” and use your knife and fork. But we must
stop giving examples and illustrations. Their number is countless.
Not only does the habit mind attend to physical actions, etc., but it also
takes a hand in our mental operations. We soon acquire the habit of ceasing
to consciously consider certain things, and the habit mind takes the matter
for granted, and thereafter we will think automatically on those particular
questions, unless we are shaken out of the habit by a rude jolt from the
mind of someone else, or from the presentation of some conflicting idea
occasioned by our own experience or reasoning processes. And the habit
mind hates to be disturbed and compelled to revise its ideas. It fights against
it, and rebels, and the result is that many of us are slaves to old outgrown
ideas that we realize are false and untrue, but which we find that we “cannot
exactly get rid of.” In our future lessons we will give methods to get rid of
these old outgrown ideas.
There are other planes of mind which have to do with the phenomena
known as “psychic,” by which is meant the phases of psychic phenomena
known as clairvoyance, psychometry, telepathy, etc., but we shall not
consider them in this lesson, for they belong to another part of the general
subject. We have spoken of them in a general way in our “Fourteen Lessons
in Yogi Philosophy, etc.”
And now we come to the plane of mind known to us as Intellect or the
Reasoning Faculties. Webster defines the word Intellect as follows: The part