be for him, and how completely he has been depending upon the habit 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 or faculty of the human soul by which it knows, as distinguished from the power to feel and to will; the thinking faculty; the understanding.  The same authority defines the word Reason as follows:  “The faculty or capacity of the human mind by which it is distinguished from the intelligence of the inferior animals.”  We shall not attempt to go into a consideration of the conscious Intellect, for to do so we would be compelled to take up the space of the remaining lessons of the course, and besides, the student may find extended information on this subject in any of the text books on psychology.  Instead we will consider other faculties and planes of mind which the said text books pass by rapidly, or perhaps deny.  And one of these planes is that of Unconscious Reasoning, or Intellect.  To many this term will seem paradoxical, but students of the unconscious will understand just what is meant.