I want you to weed your own mind. If seventeen people happen to own gardens, and have strong desires to keep their respective plots nicely cultivated and free from weeds, the probabili­ties are that those seventeen people will organize their individual working schedules according to seventeen sets of respective ideas.

Some of those gardeners will do their gardening before breakfast, while some will prefer to eat before doing any gardening work. Others will be inclined to do a little work before sitting down to the evening meal, while others will prefer to have supper first and do the little bit of daily gardening afterwards.

Now, it doesn't matter whether any of the hypo­thetical seventeen amateur gardeners work in their respective gardens before breakfast or after breakfast, before supper or after supper; or whether some prefer to have a regular "gardening afternoon" once a week, or like to do a little bit of work daily. Each and every one of the amateur gardeners will realize that there is no way to rid a garden of weeds except by pulling them up.

In this book I offer some valuable psychological seeds for you to plant and cultivate; but I am not going to adopt the methods of the crank and fanatic by endeavoring to impress you amateur psycholog­ical gardeners with the idea that the only time which you may devote to cultivating your respective psycho­logical gardens is by working according to any spe­cific routine.

Each person has his own particular methods of working; and the method which suits the disposition and convenience of one individual will rarely apply to another. Hence, in all probability, out of seventeen, seventeen thousand, or a hundred and seventeen thou­sand amateur psychological gardeners, each and every one will have his own little personal way of doing things.

In my own case I am able to do my most sustained thinking when I am walking. With me the acts of walking and thinking invariably go together. And as with intellectual thinking, so it has been with my free-association efforts: I generally accomplish my best results when walking also.

Now it happens that I like to walk; otherwise, probably, I should not do much of it. And, as I like to think (or think that I do), walking and thinking go together quite naturally with me; consequently I fairly readily dropped into the habit of doing my psychological gardening while walking.

Sometimes these little mental gardening efforts of mine are indulged in before breakfast; sometimes shortly before going to bed. Sometimes I devote a rather sustained exercise in this respect, while at other times I indulge in the briefest of "weed-pulling" exer­cises. I have no set rule in this respect; except to the extent that when I have weeds to pull I pull them, and each day try to do something in my psychological garden.

Most people who keep gardens do so for pleasure; few would look upon their gardening as work, and those who did would consider it pleasurable work.

In taking up psychological "gardening" no one will get very far unless he has an urge in that direction. If he has to work "by the clock," he will not accomplish much in his psychological development. The only promising rule to apply in psychological gardening is to make the work part of his daily life.

The physical gardener must become so saturated with the analytic aims that it becomes natural for him to apply the principles at any time, and in relation to every varying incident. He must acquire the analytic habit.

Your mental gardening should be spread over the following six broad departments of phenomena: Dreams, Cover-memories, Complexes and Fixations Exaggerated Reactions, Word-Dreams and False Troubles.

In the following chapters I will explain exactly what these departments are and how you can apply them to your own life.

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