The Infinite Mind

There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. He that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has befallen any man, he can understand. Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent.

Ralph Waldo Emerson opened his 1841 essay, History with that statement. The mind is a hidden treasure. We know we have one, but we don’t know where it is. Emerson thought the individual mind is connected to an infinite mind. He said the infinite mind is filled with wisdom, and we tap into that wisdom to produce the knowledge that serves us in our particular time sequence. The infinite mind straddles time sequences and disperses its wisdom as needed. The need for wisdom is created by the sum of its parts. As the knowledge flows through times so does the awareness it brings with it. We capture that awareness in our individual mind and the infinite mind expands in the process.

We could call the infinite mind God, but we don’t, because it has no face, or characteristics that are familiar to us. We could say that mind is inside of God, and that would sound right since that association gives us the comfort of familiarity. So, if that is the case, then Emerson’s thoughts make sense. Everyone has a connection to the mind of God. We all have the ability to tap into the mind of a saint, the genius of an Einstein or the madness that exists from the distorted associations produced by others.

We use our mind to experience the knowledge that has been used in other time sequences by other minds. We just tweak it to conform to our beliefs. We are a whole part of a gestalt that continues to offer us what we want to know, but the issue is, we don’t know what we want to know. Immersed in that paradox, we create experiences, and from them we add more knowledge to the gestalt. But in that process we also add the gestalt to our mind.