Excerpts from

  Elmer Gates and
the Art of Mind Using
by Donald Gates




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CONTENTS

Chapter 1 Early Tendencies and Influences
Chapter 2 Further Insights, Impulses and Purposes
Chapter 3 Quiescence and the New Introspection
Chapter 4 Bodily and Environmental Conditions
Chapter 5 The First Period: Awakening to Predilections
Chapter 6 The Beginning of a Scientific Art of Mind-Using
Chapter 7 Attention Dirigation & the Newest Introspection
Chapter 8 More Mind: Mind-Embodiment and Brain-Building
Chapter 9 Steps Toward an Art of Discovery
Chapter 10 A Final Test
Chapter 11 In Honor of an Important Event
Chapter 12 The Laboratory Epic
Chapter 13 The Laboratory Epic - Part Two
Chapter 14 The Chevy Chase Record
Chapter 15 The Bridge to Validation
Chapter 16 A Cosmos of Consciousness
Chapter 17 A Dominancy Won
Chapter 18 The Business Dominancy Lost
Chapter 19 The Growing Ideal
Chapter 20 Time: All There Is
Chapter 21 The First Message: The Twelve Volumes
Chapter 22 The Second Message: The Institutional Work
Chapter 23 The Third Message: Teachers and Pupils Association.


Chapter 1

Early Tendencies and Influences

The drama of Cosmos and me! The plot is evolution to more mind, and the end is esthesia.
-ELMER GATES, "Introspective Diary"

Looking back over his life in one of his frequent analyses, Elmer Gates, in 1910 (at age 51) summarized it thus: "If the mind that I inherited from The All enabled me to attain to these discoveries, it was because I was able to discover an art of mind-using; and if I could not have caught the fundamental insight, it undoubtedly would have been achieved by some other brain—now, or epochs from now.

"I happened to be 'ready' to let these dawning ideas 'sit for their portraits' (as Emerson said), and I was in that condition of utter mental freedom that made it possible for me to interpret my mental functionings without modifying them by superstition and prejudice.

"I attained to the basic insight that led to the mentative art (psychurgy), and the rest followed naturally and inevitably. I accomplished the discovery of the mentative art because I had the advantage of the knowledge that had been accumulated by thousands of pioneers in many domains, because my mind had the good fortune to escape the blight of myth and superstition, because my judgment was undeviated by 'authorities,' and because I was trying to do that kind of work that was then the culminating tendency of this period."

Earlier he had written: '"From my earliest youth I have been clearly aware of a special aptitude for the study of mind and Consciousness, and an imperative impulse has urged me onward from day to day, lured ever by the sweet anticipation of further discoveries that would reveal more of that wonder of wonders Consciousness and the human mind.

But there has been ever present another factor that has imperiously controlled the whole course of my life: an overwhelming conviction that it was my imperative duty and privilege to carry on this mission as a World Work rather than as an individual career and almost regardless of the interests of a career.

This feeling, this decree of my whole nature was so urgent that no other interests or influences were ever able to modify it." (Elmer Gates used the word consciousness with two distinct meanings: with a small c it meant a conscious state; with a capital C it meant the more fundamental Consciousness underlying a conscious state.)

There is no better example than Elmer Gates to show, from his own observation, "that a man to the extent that he is predilectively awake and aware is something more than an individual force; he is also and more largely a product of the total progress of the world in which he is an integral part."

In his life especially, the urge to progress was not wholly of an intellectually definable nature but also largely came out of the mind's sub consciousness as strong impulses to do or not to do, and as insights into the nature of things that evolved themselves out of the general fund of conscious and subconscious functionings. Out of them came growing conscious purposes that were "resolute in getting certain things done and later on found themselves justified when they were at last accomplished."

Elmer Gates had strong hereditary tendencies to good health, long life, patient industry, and scientific pursuits. His ancestors (Swiss, German, Dutch, English) for a least six generations were of long life, with large and strong bodies, fair skin and chestnut-brown hair. They were moderately well educated, of considerable mechanical ability, influential in their spheres, exceedingly active, of good musical ability, extremely practical and honest, and without any record of crime, vice, drunkenness, deformity, or chronic disease. Six generations before, a Swiss professor, the earliest ancestor of record, had gone from Berne to Berlin to teach mathematics and to preach. There he married an intellectual German girl. Their eldest son married a Holland Dutch girl; and their eldest son married an
English girl and emigrated to the United States with a number of other people to escape religious persecution.

Most of them settled in Pennsylvania at the beginning of the eighteenth century with the Pennsylvania Dutch; and a few, among them his ancestors, settled in Virginia. The next generation went to Ohio, where Elmer was born on May 6, 1859, of the fourth generation in America. On both paternal and maternal lines of descent his ancestors were Protestant religious teachers, who at some trade or profession or agriculture made their own comfortable livelihood, always refusing pay for preaching.

His father, Jacob Goetz (the way the family name was spelled then), in addition to operating his farm, was a schoolteacher, an architect, a millwright, a manufacturer of agricultural machinery, a Baptist preacher, a good writer for religious journals, a fairly good mathematician, and an omnivorous reader of historical, religious, and
philosophical books.

His excessively tenderhearted and highly conscientious mother, Phebe (daughter of J. Diederich, an architect), was deeply religious, fairly well educated and well read, and lovingly unselfish to an almost incredible degree. To the simplicity, health, normality, happy dispositions, integrity, and intense moral and ethical and religious
nature of his parents, Elmer Gates credited his first and best start. Fortunately, we can follow his account of his original points of view and those psychological events, which led his mind to evolve the art of getting more mind, and of using it more efficiently.

He was born with such predilections and into such surroundings and influences that very early in life he was able to take the first steps into his new and interesting line of research in the study of mind and mental methods, which with unswerving devotion became his consecrated lifework. His preponderant predilection for the natu-
ral sciences led him, while quite young, into an eager and earnest study of their elements, and into a study of his own mind, which he
instinctively regarded as part of nature.

He studied not mainly from books but from nature. He studied objectively by direct observation and experiment (as in botany, geology, chemistry, physics, and astronomy), and subjectively by paying systematic attention to the workings of his mind (its mental states and processes), which were not less interesting than the most wonderful phenomena of objective nature. It never occurred to him to regard them as other than natural phenomena.

More interesting than mixing chemicals, classifying crystals or working in electricity, the mental phenomena had a greater degree of reality to him (as mental states with actual qualities and durations and interactions and sequences, and as spontaneous and willed processes of states) than they had to anyone he knew. A mental state
rising into his consciousness and culminating and changing into another state and disappearing was to him as much of an objective event taking place in nature as the fall of a meteorite or the sprouting of a seed. Accordingly the "subjective" laboratory inside his own mind was a far more wonderful place than any external laboratory could possibly be.

His first objective laboratory was in a corner of an old fashioned rail fence, the corner roofed over and the sides boarded in, and inside a blacksmith's anvil and furnace and tools, and a shelf for chemicals and apparatus. Unfortunately, a photograph of it, as well as one of his parents and himself as a boy, were stolen.

Great was his pleasure when he did something new, or "fixed" something for someone. The interest that most children find in story books, he found in getting knowledge and in making things. The objects in his "museum" took the place of toys; experiments in his "laboratory" took the place of games. He did not like a story unless it was true; fairy tales did not interest him.

His juvenile laboratory, as small and incomplete as can be imagined, was to him "the holy shrine wherein by experiment the Oracle was consulted at all hours, day or night, and the universe was the Sacred Temple where Nature (including Mind and Consciousness as the most important part) was worshipped, accepting the sciences and arts as a `Bible' that is being constantly revealed by mentation." Such was increasingly his outlook from his twelfth to his twentieth year.

By a fortunate combination of the religious beliefs of his parents and governess and early teachers, he heard but few of the superstitions and fairy stories and mythologies that are usually "fed to unsuspecting childhood," and consequently by training as well as by nature his mental attitude was such that the extravagant impossibilities of these myths and fables were of no interest.

Thus the plain facts of the sciences and the ordinary phenomena of consciousness were not insipid, but on the contrary held his attention with an almost breathless and unflagging interest. So also, despite a natural longing for the symmetrical completeness and seeming finality of philosophy, he was led by predilection and circumstance into the more wonderful possibilities and realities of scientific knowledge rather than into the uncertain and ever-shifting regions of speculation.

His first teachers were his parents, and also that remarkable and well-educated woman, Virginia, of whom he said the highest praise seemed inadequate (never mentioning any but her given name). She made her home with his parents and acted as a sort of companion and teacher, and with his other early teachers and tutors took great care to teach him the elements of the sciences by firsthand observation and experiment.

His school life was in his home much more than in the public schools. This home amid the serene surroundings of a farm in Ohio, unusually isolated for being near a city such as Dayton (not large then), was to him "replete with the animated quiet of the woods."

His father and mother taught him the earliest rudiments of an education: reading, writing, arithmetic, German and English, the use of tools in his father's several workshops (carpenter's and cabinetmaker's tools, general machine-shop and machine tools, agricultural implements, clock maker's tools, soldering and brazing
outfits, jeweler's tools, and so on). They taught him as systematically as if they were running a school for his sole benefit; and this instruction was kept up even while he was going to high school.

The governess Virginia, who had been educated for teaching school, assisted in this instruction, taking more and more of it in her charge as he grew older. She nurtured his love for the natural and encouraged his inherited aspirations toward a moral and religious life. His isolation from social distractions, and the sincerity of his
early teachers, had much to do with the natural development of his early tendencies. By tendencies he meant predilections and mental
abilities; and by influences, whatsoever promoted or hindered them.

The instructions given by these teachers from his fourth to his fourteenth year, the four years in high school, the three years in teachers normal school, and short elective courses in several colleges constituted his early education up to his twenty-fourth year. During all that time, however, he had a much more extensive, thorough, and practical education from private tutors and experiments in his labora tories than from any formal schooling.

The educational systems and curriculums of that time left their graduates, even those who had undertaken to perfect themselves in some specialty, in a deplorably impractical state; and so "woefully weighted down with undue respect for authorities and so misled by unproved theories and hypotheses that when they attempted to enter the practical work of their vocation they had to commence at the beginning with practical men and learn their trade or profession from the bottom up, where they should have started."

This had a pronounced effect on the general policy and plan of Elmer Gates' life, because it was depressingly evident that the established courses of college instruction were not adapted for the kind of training he needed. He was determined that those instincts, predilections, and impulsions of his mind that tended toward new routes of observation and introspection and original lines of thought and discovery should not be limited or distorted or diverted from their natural course by any attempt to make his mental methods and capacities conform to time-honored academic patterns.

If by reason of any degree of variation from the average mind his own had developed and started in new directions, he did not want it turned back into the old ruts by crowding it through the established and narrow school curriculums. In this work of self-education he sought the advice of educators and technical specialists and books, noting everything that would fit him for his work; and every day he also carried on his experimental research into the mind and consciousness.

After this unusual education he more definitely and intensively specialized in his own laboratories than he could have done in any college, for there was not a university in the world that had facilities or teachers for training in the lines into which he had entered. Wilhelm Wundt, the father of experimental psychology, established the first psychological laboratory in Germany in 1879. G. Stanley Hall, a student of Wundt's, established the first one in an American college, at Johns Hopkins in 1883. J. McKeen Cattell became the first professor to occupy a chair of psychology exclusively, at the University of Pennsylvania in 1888, where a laboratory was also
established. William James became a professor of psychology in 1889, publishing his Principles in 1890. Munsterberg started at Harvard in 1889.

Elmer Gates had been at work in his own and different way since 1872, at age thirteen. At various times and for a number of special researches he had in his private laboratories specialists from whom he learned the particular knowledge and skills in various technical arts and techniques in physics, physiology, psychology, chemistry, microscopy, bacteriology, and other fields in preparation for his serious work....


Elmer Gates and the Art of Mind Using"
by Donald Gates




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