Universal Mind

The more that is learned about the human brain, the more closely it resembles insofar as function is concerned a servo-mechanism. For example, Dr. Wilder Penfield, director of the Montreal Neurological Institute, had discovered a recording mechanism in a small area of the brain, which apparently records everything that a person has ever experienced, observed or learned. During a brain operation in which the patient was fully awake, Dr. Penfield happened to touch a small area of the cortex with a surgical instrument. At once the patient exclaimed that she was "reliving" an incident from her childhood, which she had consciously forgotten. Further experiments along this line brought the same results.

When certain areas of the cortex were touched, patients did not merely "remember" past experiences, they "relived" them, experiencing as very real all the sights, sounds and sensations of the original experience. It was just as if past experiences had been recorded on a tape recorder and played back.

Many great thinkers of all ages have believed that man’s "stored information" is not limited to his own memories of past experiences, and learned facts. "There is one mind common to all individual men," said Emerson, who compared our individual minds to the inlets in an ocean of universal mind.

Edison believed that he got some of his ideas from a source outside himself. Once, when complimented for a creative idea, he disclaimed credit, saying that "ideas are in the air," and if he had not discovered it, someone else would have.

Searching for a new idea, or an answer to a problem, is in fact, very similar to searching memory for a name you have forgotten. You know that the name is "there," or else you would not search. The scanner in your brain scans back over stored memories until the desired name is "recognized" or "discovered."

In much the same way, when we set out to find a new idea, or the answer to a problem, we must assume that the answer exists already somewhere, and set out to find it. Dr. Norbert Wiener has said, "Once a scientist attacks a problem which he knows to have an answer, his entire attitude is changed. He is already some fifty per cent of his way toward that answer."

When you set out to do creative work whether in the field of selling, managing a business, writing a sonnet, improving human relations, or whatever, you begin with a goal in mind, an end to be achieved, a "target" answer, which, although perhaps somewhat vague, will be "recognized" when achieved. If you really mean business, have an intense desire, and begin to think intensely about all angles of the problem your creative mechanism goes to work and the "scanner" we spoke of earlier begins to scan back through stored information, or "grope" its way to an answer. It selects an idea here, a fact there, a series of former experiences, and relates them or "ties them together" into a meaningful whole which will "fill out" the incompleted portion of your situation, complete your equation, or "solve" your problem. When this solution is served up to your consciousness often at an unguarded moment when you are thinking of something else or perhaps even as a dream while your consciousness is asleep something "clicks" and you at once "recognize" this as the answer you have been searching for.