“VALUES EXIST ONLY IN THE MIND.
A young mother suffering from eclampsia said, “Doctor, isnt it strange, I couldnt wait to see the baby and now I dont care if I never see him.” She died in a terrific convulsion the next day.
A successful business man had worked himself clear to the top in a large corporation and was finally elected president. A few weeks later he said, “I have at last reached the goal I set for myself more than thirty years ago and now it doesnt mean a thing to me. I am more dissatisfied than any time that I can remember.” The homoeopathic remedy, a months vacation and the setting up of a new goal at which to aim all combined to reestablish values in this man mind and now he is forging ahead again in his accustomed stride.
This case serves to illustrate the old saying, “It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive”. There must be direction and purpose to ones thought and effort or there is just no use and no meaning in life.
It is said that one can have no interest or concern about anybody or anything unless the mind dwells, at least to some degree, upon that person or thing. If there is no focus of attention, no concentration of thought, there can be no mental registration and therefore no feeling, no emotional reaction, no love, no hate, no sorrow or grievous disappointment. Beauty is said to lie in the eye (mind) of the beholder, for what is beautiful in the opinion of one person is just so much nothing to somebody else.
Read over the rubrics under Mind in Kents Repertory and see what strange thoughts, fantastic imaginings and dire impulses it is possible to have. The list, long as it is, only touches the outer fringe of that vast universe of the mind where every sublime and every diabolic possibility coexist.
A good antidote to a feeling of pride and superiority is to occasionally recall the fact that “the soiled garment from which we shrink today may have been ours yesterday, may be ours tomorrow.”.
One of the greatest needs of these turbulent times is the general recognition and assumption of individual responsibility and the realization that there is no such thing as immunity to the operation of natural law, that the law is absolutely impersonal and, in the fullness of time, wholly just.