What follows is a series of documents which were posted by me on to the Science & Spirituality Mailing List on the Spiritweb Internet server. These posts represented an attempt by me to place the intellectual foundation of mentalist philosophy once again in the public domain. It was my intention to express mentalism in a deliberately provocative manner in the hope that by so doing a lively debate of the principles expressed would ensue. I was disappointed!
There was however a small core of readers who consistently expressed intelligent interest in the ideas expressed. As a consequence a number of readers were referred to the work of my own teacher, Dr. Paul Brunton, and a summary of some of the discussions on the subject of perception were included in the Autumn 97 issue of the internet magazine for the spiritual site, The Order of the Dorje Cross (www.dorje-cross.org).
The text of the original posts has been amended somewhat to make it meaningful in the context of a series of sections, each with it's own theme. I hope the ideas expressed here unfold in a rational sequence. At the time of writing the series is not complete. I may consider completing it if I receive any positive feedback from visitors to Fanghorn (my original web site - now defunct). In the meantime, read, inwardly digest, and experience a paradigm shift in your world view.
Top of PageIt has been my experience, under the guidance of my teacher, that the majestic faculty of reason is able to extract from a carefully thought out starting position new information which goes beyond the starting position and which throws the light of deeper understanding upon it. Reason goes beyond logic, because logic is only really capable of re-arranging the starting data and presenting it in a different form, and it also has no method inherent in it of preventing fallacy or error from being included in the starting position itself.
By reason I mean balanced judgement, the careful weighing of alternatives and the accepting of one conclusion or another on the basis of what is reasonable in the light of the weight of evidence. This is the application of intellegence to determine the truth of falsity of a premise. Another word often used to describe this type of intellectual endeavour is discernment - discerning the true from the false, the real from the imaginary.
However, a big problem is that it is extremely difficult to prevent distorting factors from creeping in while trying to make these balanced judgements, and this is why I am an advocate of a personal self-discipline which must be imposed when such judgements are being made. and which is known as the Philosophic Discipline.
During those times when the student deeply considers these subtle issues it is necessary to put aside bias, prejudice, predilection and preference, and to consider the questions from a perspective which demands Truth rather than opinion, which is therefore profoundly impersonal, and which is prepared to accept whatever findings may manifest regardless of whether they are to the taste of the enquirer or are what he expected to discover.
It must also be clearly understood that I am only expressing my own findings in these articles. Each person who reads this must examine his/her own experience (perhaps along the lines suggested) and determine whether the suggestions I make resemble in any way their own experience. Needless to say, any feedback would be much appreciated.
These essays are an intellectual starting point in a journey which has the potential to lead the student to the glorious discovery of what is real in an absolute sense, but a journey must start with the first step, and on this quest the first step is to investigate what it is that we actually know as fact.
My Position
I find myself in an interesting and enigmatic world which on an initial assessment seems to comprise of three distinct modes of experience all of which relate to something, a feeling or sense of I-ness or selfhood which I have come to know as Me. This 'I' becomes apparent because I am able to discern it from a field of experience which seems to be overtly 'not-I', particularly during the second and third modes of experience described below.
The three modes of experience I know as deep sleep, dream sleep and awaken consciousness.
In deep sleep I do not recall any experience of any kind, but I do recall the fact of having slept. Also, even though it seems as if there is a break in consciousness during deep sleep, I remember events that happened before its onset. Thus there is a continuity of my person, my selfhood, which must persists through and is therefore present during deep sleep, but which seems to have been withdrawn into some strange latent mode or condition. At this stage of the enquiry deep sleep presents a mysterious enigma - but it may prove a fruitful field of enquiry. Investigations into the metaphysics of sleep will be reserved for a later time.
Regarding dream, (which from here on will be the way I refer to dream sleep), it seems in many ways to be similar to awaken consciousness, but there are differences which seem to be significant.
The similarities are that in dream I experience a world of apparently three dimensions of space and one of time, and I experience events and objects through senses which seem related to my body (more of this in the next section). I also seem to relate and react to other dream people within the dream.
The differences between dream and awake experience are clear. The most obvious is that during dream I am not normally aware of the possibility of awake experience, but when I am awake I am not only aware of the possibility of dream, but often have a clear (but disjointed) recollection of the content of dream experience. Also, awake experience in normally vivid and clear and seems to have an element of cause and effect about it, whereas remembered dream images are frequently disjointed, and the time sense can be wildly altered - at least from the perspective of being awake.
Because awake experience seems the most vivid and therefore the most significant, the initial part of this enquiry will be aimed at an analysis of the state of being awake. But the other two states must not be forgotten, nor should they have any less a claim to our attention as a legitimate field of study, for normally one third of our lifetimes experience is spent in sleep and dream - that is 20 years in a 60 year long life. Most formal academic philosophers restrict their enquiry to the awake state (though not all), and so it is not surprising that conclusions are therefore perplexing, paradoxical or simply wrong.
In the awake state there is an apparent further split in modes of experience. The sense of 'I' mentioned above is strong, and seems to be closely associated with an intimate set of impressions which I know as my body. This 'I' seems to reside physically within the body, although it's exact location is not obvious. This sense of I has two other fields of experience over which I seem to have partial control at least. These are the fields of intellect and feeling, of thinking and emotion. There is a strong impression that these two fields are non-physical - mainly because although their effects have a temporal relation to each other and other objects, they do not seem to have a material or spacial aspect. The collection of my feelings and thinking seems to reside in the 'I' entity and are collectively known as my mind. There are purportedly other layers or deeper aspects to this personal mind but I am not consciously aware of them.
The body is experienced as an object which exists in the same three dimensions of space and one of time that together comprise space-time within which all other objects and events seem to exist. The body object also seems to hold within it the means by which itself and other objects in this space time world are revealed to my experience - the specific means in question being the senses. All experience of the world apparently external to the apparently immaterial mind are revealed by these senses - sound, touch, sight, taste and smell, although there may be other senses on operation, these five are the most clearly defined.
Detailed examination of sense experience needs to be set aside for a future section.
The whole universe revealed to me through the senses seems to be made of solid, liquid and gaseous substances which seem to be themselves made of matter, although pure matter apart from it's sensory properties is never experienced.
The perceived objects appear to move and to react to each other and my body (which is also an object) in ways which are predictable to a greater or lesser extent depending on circumstances. The rules which define the way in which they react are collectively known as the laws of nature, and seem to have been determined to a large extent over many years by dedicated scientists.
Comment will be made regarding the findings of science in future posts.
This then, is a summary of my starting point. Here I am, I sleep, I dream, and I live in an awake condition. I have a body and a mind which seems to be associated with the body, and the body lives and moves in a space-timed world of other objects and events with which it interacts. There seems to be a rational about the way the 'physical' objects move and react to each other. My mind seems to be comprised of thoughts and emotions. and all of this whole kaleidoscopic panorama of experience seems to revolve around a personal centre of gravity which I know as Me, 'I' or my selfhood.
Top of PageAt the end of the first section the conclusion reached was that
Here I am, I sleep, I dream, and I live in an awake condition. I have a body and a mind which seems to be associated with the body, and the body lives and moves in a space-timed world of other objects and events with which it interacts. There seems to be a rational about the way the 'physical' objects move and react to each other. My mind seems to be comprised of thoughts and emotions. and all of this whole kaleidoscopic panorama of experience seems to revolve around a personal centre of gravity which I know as Me, 'I' or my selfhood.
Seeing that the wakeful condition occupies the largest portion of experience, and that it feels the most vivid of the three major states, it seems worthwhile to aim our initial enquiry into that state.
The overriding factor in ordinary wakeful experience is the existence of and our interaction with the three-dimensional universe which our senses reveal to us. If we look at the history of the scientific attempts to understand the working of the universe at large we see that up until the time of Great thinkers like Galileo, Copernicus, Newton and others the generally accepted view was a Geocentric one where Mankind and our planet occupied a privileged position in creation, and that we and our world had been created by God. And then along came these revolutionary thinkers and effectively removed God from the picture and demoted Mankind from the lead role in creation to a position hardly warranting the title of a Bit Part Player.
The newly discovered laws of motion and thermodynamics made the universe a predictable place. God didn't need to propel planets in their orbits, because the inverse square law did it instead. The movement of objects was predicted by applying these new principles to Lumps of matter, which had measurable properties like mass, velocity and direction. The growth of technology and industry was unbelievable, electricity was discovered, and magnetism, and the internal combustion engine, and science reigned supreme.
At least until Einstein came along and introduced a spanner in the works known as 'the observer'. Although the rate of technological advance did not slow down, the clear cut nineteenth century materialism took a body blow under the name of Special Relativity. Suddenly, the common everyday world of phenomena had to take account of the proven fact that the way things appeared depended upon where you were standing. The treasured 19th century world of precise measurements and a fixed Space and Time, was replaced with an elastic space and time and measurements that varied depending on where the measurement was taken. And to top it all, at the same time that Einstein was upsetting the macrocosmic apple cart, the microcosmic scientific view was being similarly revolutionized by the Quantum Theorists.
For quantum theory was having it's own encounter with 'The Observer'. This time it seemed that an observer was a required necessity if any observation was to be made and to be meaningful at all! These findings prompted the great scientist, Sir James Jeans, to remark in his classic book 'The Mysterious Universe', published in 1930, to state that:
Today there is a wide measure of agreement, which on the physical side of science approaches almost to unanimity, that the stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine. Mind no longer appears as an accidental intruder into the realm of matter; we are beginning to suspect that we ought rather to hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter- not of course our individual minds, but the mind in which the atoms out of which our individual minds have grown exist as thoughts.
These views arise from the intuitive appreciation that the presence of an observer implies the co-presence of a conscious principle - ie of mind.
This is the great contribution which 20th century physics has played in the development of human thought - the universe cannot be considered separate from the conscious principle, the mind, which observes it. But more of that later.
The next subject for our enquiry is the physical processes by which we seem to gain our understanding of the world - the senses themselves.
We will initially take sight as an example, although the process is essentially the same for the other senses.
Light lands on an object, is reflected off of the object, and enters the eye through the pupil and lands on the retina, the light sensitive membrane at the back of the eye. This membrane consists of two types of cells which are sensitive to light known as rods and cones. Rod cells are sensitive to light intensity, and contribute to our black and white vision. Cones are sensitive to light frequency and contribute to our colour vision. They are both particularly sensitive to changes in intensity and frequency.
When light falls upon them it induces an electro-chemical reaction which is transmitted to neighbouring nerve cells across a gap between nerve cells called a synapse. The nerve fibre from the retina is called the optic nerve, and travels from each eye to the back of the opposite side of the brain to an area called the visual cortex. The signal is transmitted along the optic nerve as an electro chemical impulse, the details of which are understood in detail by modern physiologists. The signal reaches the brain and is distributed across a volume of the brain as a kind of electro-chemical ripple or vibration.
Remember that what triggered all of this is the landing of light from an object external to the body, on to the retina at the back of the eye. At no time in the process so far can the physiologist point to a process or a part of the process and say with confidence, conviction or certainty that the electro-chemical vibration has entered consciousness as a percept.
In fact, the jump from electro-chemical vibration to perception in consciousness can not be explained in this physical model of the process of perception. All of the sensory mechanisms end with a similar vibration rippling over or through a part of the brain, and are similarly unable to explain how the gap from physical to conscious phenomena can happen.
But happen it does, and in the next section of these ramblings I will examine dream, illusions, and hypnotism, as well as having a closer look at the components which make up what we know as our perceptions, to see if we can begin to discover how this physiologist's gap is finally bridged.
Top of PageSo far we have found that the leading edge of scientific discovery is arriving at conclusions that hint that mind may be a fundamental part of our universe rather that a by-product of some physical process. We also found that the generally accepted description of the way that the senses work has a profound difficulty in that it is unable to explain the arisal of awareness of the sensed objects at the culmination of the sensory process. In order to advance from here I would like to consider the three topics at the head of this paragraph. In a future section I will attempt to draw all these various threads together into a coherent and rational explanation (or description) of our knowledge of the world.
The first of the three topics is illusion, and by way of an example I have included a GIF image file to this document which has pictures of 12 common optical illusions. I hope my readers will be able to view these pictures without problems. If not, then Email me and I will send a copy of the file direct. The file is called Illusion.gif and should be readable by most graphics packages. It can be sent in any of the common graphical formats. The descriptions of each illusion depend upon viewing the image file with the same aspect ratio as that in which it was scanned.
Here is the included file:
From here I will assume you have seen or can see the illusions.
Fig.1 shows 4 lines of apparently different lengths, but measurement with a ruler will reveal that they are in face all exactly the same.
Fig.2 shows an image of a circle which appears flattened at the points where the internal square touches the circumference, but if it is checked with a compass it will be found to be a perfect circle.
In Fig.3 the two horizontal lines appear curved in the middle, but if checked with a ruler will be found to be perfectly straight.
Fig.4 shows two squares that appear stretched at the top left corner, but in fact they are both perfect squares.
In Fig.5 most people would guess that it is the upper of the lines to the right of the rectangle which is a continuation of the line on the left, but if checked it will be found that it is the bottom line which continues it.
Fig.6 will sometimes appear to simply be an intersection of two lines, and at other times will appear as two lines at right angles to each other lying on the floor and being viewed obliquely from above.
Fig.7 will sometimes seem like a simple arrow shaped design, and at other times will look like a piece of folded paper, alternatively with the fold close to or further away from the observer.
Fig.8 looks like a three dimensional cube, but the side closest to the front varies as it is viewed.
If fig.9 is viewed at an angle the two lines will hardly look parallel, but they are.
In Fig.10 it seems as if the line on the left of the two vertical lines is continued it will meet the right vertical line at a point above where the right line meets it, but in fact they meet at the same point.
In Fig.11 is seems as if the upper arc is a continuation of the circle below the two horizontal lines, but it is in fact the lower of the two arcs.
and lastly, it is almost impossible to believe that the image of the hat in Fig.12 is as wide as it is high, but if measured such will be found to be true.
Now what information can we gather from these strange geometrical curiosities. The images themselves are simply arrangements of lines on a flat surface, but we experience or interpret some of them as if they were in fact in three dimensions, and we misconstrue certain elements of other of the images in ways which are quite simply different from the actual two dimensional image itself.
It is not the sense impressions which are at fault here, because the eyes can only report a faithful representation of the image in front of them. The error lies in our interpretation of the images! Furthermore, once we have made an inaccurate or distorted interpretation, we then superimpose that interpretation out into the three dimensional world and experience the error in the image on the paper (or screen). And a further point of significance is that even though we are made aware of the error of perception, the misinterpretation of the images, the illusion is not dispelled but persists. For what is happening is that the misinterpretation occurs in the mind of the observer, in the evaluation of the sense experience, and then this error is projected outside into the three dimensional world and experienced as if it were a property of the external object itself. The illusion, an idea, is experienced as if it were a thing!
Thus we are being led to the conclusion that the mind may experience it's internal ideas as if they were external and independently existing things. What further evidence can we gather for this astonishing claim?
There are many examples from the annuls of Hypnotism which demonstrate this astonishing principle clearly. A subject may have the suggestion implanted by a hypnotist that a particular object is present, and he will actually see the object even though it is not physically there. When questioned later the subject will confirm that the object was experienced just like any other, ie it had weight, color, form, size etc. and was experienced as existing in it's own right separate from the physical body. But where was the object in actuality - it can only have existed in the mind of the subject!
So once again we come across a vivid case where ideas internal to the individual mind are experienced as if they were independent three dimensional objects. It seems that the mind can take it's own ideas and spatialize and temporalize them and then experience them as if they were separate from the experiencing mind. This sounds ridiculous to the modern rational man, but is it?
Who has not walked through a park at dusk and mistakenly taken a bush to be a robber hiding in ambush? The classic example from vedanta is the snake in the rope illusion. A man walking down an alleyway at twilight sees a coiled shape which he takes to be a snake, and consequently refuses to advance further. When questioned he will claim that he saw a snake. But the illusion is dispelled when on closer inspection the coiled shape is found to be a coil of rope. The later discovery does not alter the fact that the man saw and experienced a snake, but the snake was in fact only a mental construction which he projected outside his body and superimposed over the actual sensory experience. His idea was experienced as if it were a thing.
Lastly let us consider the nightly experience of our dreams. In dream we construct whole panoramas, whole worlds of experience, and we then populate those worlds with people, things, animals etc, and yet the whole dream experience is a mentally constructed one. The objects and people in the dream are spread out in three dimensions of space, and the events of the dream are spread out in an ordered time sequence, but both the space and the time, as well as all of the objects experienced in the dream, are found, on awakening, to have been purely a mental construction.
There can be few clearer examples of the unbelievable creative power of the mind. It can take hold of an idea which is entirely a construction of imagination, it can project this idea out into a time-space framework, which it then proceeds to experience as if it was separate from the observing mind! If we ask where the dream space and dream time originated from. the only conclusion can be that the mind didn't only create the objects experienced, but also created the space-time in which they were subsequently placed and in which context the dream objects were experienced.
We are now drawing closer to a revelation. We are glimpsing the unbelievable creative power of the mind in creating it's own reality. In the next section I will take a closer look at these sense impressions which reveal our world to us, and attempt to take a step or two forward in our understanding of common experience.
Top of PageLet us briefly review our findings so far.
Initially we reviewed the findings of physical science, in particular the findings of relativity and quantum mechanics. Relativity told us that the world will appear different to differently placed observers, that there is no absolute frame of reference to which we can refer when measuring what we see in the external world. Quantum mechanics has found also that the observer plays a major role in the creation of the observed world. The implication being that the observer is an integral part of all we know of the world. From this we concluded that the trend of current scientific thought was leading inexorably to the conclusion that in some way, shape or form consciousness must be an integral part of the known universe, because the concept of an observer is meaningless to our understanding if we try to divorce it from the co-existing concept of an observing mind.
Then we briefly examined the process of sense perception and found that the conventional understanding of how the senses work was flawed, because it failed categorically to explain how the electro-chemical vibrations in the brain (being the end of the nerve pathways from the sense organs) are translated from movement of physical matter to idea in consciousness.
The next installment looked at illusions, hypnotism and dreams, and came to the astonishing conclusion that the individual mind seems to have the ability to project it's own ideas into three dimensional space and then experience them as objects separate from the body, just as any other object is experienced, and that it is not always obvious just what in our experience is a creation of our own minds. Furthermore, the study of illusion also revealed that even when we have been made aware that we are experiencing an illusion, that knowledge does not always dispell the experience of the illusion.
We now need to examine a little more closely just how we gain our knowledge of the external world. What exactly do our senses tell us.
We will adopt a traditional reductionist approach at this stage, because hopefully from the level of detail we may be able to rise to a higher perspective illumined by a measure of understanding.
Let us once more use sight as an example.
As stated before, the sensitive part of the eye which responds to the light reflected from the objects we ultimately see is called the retina. Let us imagine that we are looking at a beautiful fountain pen. Light falls on the pen from some local or ambient light source, and some of that light bounces off of the pen and travels to the eye and is focused by the lens of the eye in such a way that a small inverted image of the pen falls on the retina.
Here we have the first stage of abstraction from the pen itself. For it is not the pen itself which impinges upon the eye, but reflected light.
Now, also as stated earlier, the retina consists of light sensitive cells called rods and cones. The cones are sensitive to light frequency and are sensitive to colour. These are mainly grouped in the centre of the retina. The rods are sensitive to light intensity, that is black and white vision, and are mainly grouped around the periphery of the retina. Also, research has discovered that the sensitivity of both type of cells diminishes if they are subject to constant unchanging stimulus.
Now each of these cells can report one piece of information. Cones report colour, rods report brightness. The light from the pen which is focused on the retina causes many of the rods and cones to fire, but the message that is transmitted along the optic nerve is not that a pen is being seen. The message is an encoded form of the information that a certain array of colours, brightnesses and contrasts has fallen on the retina. To believe that the image of a pen is transmitted to the brain would be similar to believing that actual sounds travel along a telephone wire, which is absurd.
Each piece of information is technically known as a sensation - that is it is the single product of a single event in the sensory apparatus. If we pick up the pen, we receive sensations triggered by the nerve cells in the hand and fingers which inform us separately of its relative size, its hardness, its smoothness, its shape, and from muscular sensation we may receive relative information concerning its weight.
But if we pause for a moment to reflect, although there seems to have been an external event which triggered the sense impressions, the actual impressions transmitted along the nerves to the brain all originated from sense instruments within the body. The sight signals are actually a result of the rods and cones being triggered in the eye. The feelings of touch, smoothness, weight, hardness etc are all signals which are caused by an event within the body, and are once again an abstraction from the pen itself.
All of these sensations reach the brain, but as yet there is no awareness of the pen. All there is is a set of encoded signals, each signal which contains some information which originated in the sense organs. What we must attempt to explain is how these various sense impressions can be converted into the experience of the beautiful pen which we see and feel laying comfortably in the hand.
Here an aspect of mind comes into play which we have not mentioned before in these considerations, and that is memory.
The received sense impressions must be examined in the light of our previous experience, they must be analysed and categorized until the recognition dawns that the various sense impressions are in fact the impressions of a pen. Another factor in this process is anticipation. To a great extent much of our experience is anticipated, and this aids speedy recognition.
All of this categorization of the raw sensory data happens in the twinkle of an eye, and it normally happens below the threshold of consciousness. These various and speedy processes recognize the incoming data as being the sensory data equivalent to the experience of a pen, and then, only after that recognition, the raw data is re-combined, projected into a mentally created space/time external to the body, and finally experienced as a separately existing three dimensional pen.
We never, ever, under any circumstances have any experience of the physical pen composed of matter which is the apparent initial cause of our actual experience of the pen. What we directly experience is a mentally constructed image projected into a mentally constructed space- time - in other words - an idea. And this same reasoning applies to everything which enters our field of awareness.
This is a truth which is well known to both psychologists and physiologists, but which is largely ignored because when taken further it begins to undermine the whole materialistic base upon which contemporary science is built.
For stating the matter as plainly as it can be stated, the world of 'matter' is forever out of reach, because all we can ever know of the external world is what is revealed to us by our senses, and if the sensory process is carefully examined it reveals that what the senses actually reveal to us is our own ideas, our own mentally constructed images projected into a mentally constructed space and time.
Many scientists will accept the contention that we only know our own internal image of the world and our environment, but continue in the belief that the internal image is an accurate mental reconstruction of the external 'solid' world of matter. But a little reflection will lead to the inescapable conclusion that all talk of 'matter' as existing apart from our sensations is an inference only.
Remember how easy it is to be fooled by the senses, even though we know we are being fooled. Rutherford proved beyond any doubt that there is vastly more space in so-called physical objects than there is substance, so where does the solidity and substantiality of the chair on which I am sitting actually exist? It exists in the only place it can exist, in my sensations of the chair which we can ultimately trace to a construction of my own mind which I project externally to my body and experience as the solid and substantial chair.
Reflect deeply on these ideas, and examine your own experience to see if you can begin to sympathize with them. These ideas were presented thousands of years ago in the ancient teachings of the upanishads, they are not new. But now, with the present situation in physics, physiology and psychology we have a unique opportunity to re-present them in an acceptable and 20th/21st century form.
We have not finished our enquiry by a long way, but we are approaching the stage when we can undermine once and for all the mistaken doctrine of materialism upon which so much of our present culture is based. But in order for these ideas to take root deep reflection is required. There may be a temptation to suggest a solipsistic interpretation of these ideas, but that would be premature. For before we succumb to the temptation to jump to conclusions there are other aspects and attributes of our experience that we need to consider. For example, if the world is indeed a mentally constructed one, what does the fact that we all seem to have a remarkably similar experience tell us about the origins of that experience? Also, how much is our experience dependent upon the much mis-understood faculty of attention.
Top of PageAs usual, a recap.
In the last installment we delved more deeply into the process of perception, and came to the conclusion that what we really know is our own ideas. The world is a mental construction manufactured by consciousness from the raw material of the senses, and interpreted in the light of past and anticipated experience.
The criticism could be made that the reflections so far, although they threw considerable light on how we form our world experience out of the stuff of sensation, do not actually bridge the gap in the physiologists explanation of how the electrochemical reports of the sense instruments are transformed to idea in consciousness.
Firstly, it would be useful to examine another faculty of the individual mind which we have not mentioned so far, the faculty of attention.
As you are sitting at your computer reading this page (or elsewhere if you have printed it out) I want you to quickly shift your attention to the feeling of pressure from the seat on which you are sitting. Ok, you can feel it, but there is a good chance that until I asked you to direct your attention to that particular sensation you were not actually aware of it.
Have you ever been watching a program on television and suddenly realized that you have missed a large portion of the program because your mind had slipped into a reverie and was off on its own following a train of ideas unrelated to the TV program.
The reason why you did not feel the pressure of the seat, and that you missed the portion of the program, was because you were not attending to them.
In the case of the pressure from the seat, the physical sense cells in the skin of your body were faithfully performing their function of transmitting the encoded pressure signals through the appropriate nerves, up the spine to the brain center, but until your attention was selectively directed towards the sensation in your conscious awareness, it did not exist for you.
Similarly with the TV program. You were still looking at the screen, and the eyes were correctly focussing the little inverted images on the retina; the rod and cone cells were doing their job of encoding the images and transmitting the signal through the optic nerves to the visual cortex, and the correct electro-chemical vibrations rippled through the brain. But there was no conscious experience of the image, or for that matter of the sound track, because the attention was not focussed on that particular set of sense impressions.
From this we can clearly see that just because the sense instruments send their messages to the brain, we do not necessarily experience the apparent result of such messages in the form of sensations. The power of selective attention brings the sensation into 'focus' as it were, and we interpret the sensations as previously discussed, project them into space outside of the body, and then experiencing the object.
Remember also, that at no time does the 'matter' of which the object is purportedly composed, impinge itself on out consciousness. The only thing we know are our sensations - the concept of a sensation is meaningless unless it is regarded as an object of consciousness. But in order for an image to arise in consciousness it must be essentially comprised of the same 'stuff', and that stuff is mind.
If you try to imagine a 'matter' which exists apart from the sensed qualities you will find the feat impossible. Picture an object, say a car. Take away its colours, its form (shape), its solidity, its weight, and you will have no experience of a car. If there is a car apart from the sensations of the qualities, then it is forever outside the possibility of experience.
If you argue that the rocks in the middle of an uninhabited desert exist, but their is no consciousness present to experience the sensations produced by them, then in picturing the uninhabited scene you have unwittingly placed a conscious observer at the scene in your imagination, because only by so doing can you bring the scene to the minds eye and determine that it is uninhabited!
Let us go back to the physiologists gap.
We know of the sense instruments, and of the trail of events up to the electro-chemical message reaching the brain, because we have done experiments which have shown us what happens. But the fact remains that our experience of our bodies is as much an experience of sensation as that of any other object. Hands, eyes, nerves, and brain are as much objects in consciousness whose presence is revealed by sensation, as is anything else.
What we actually know is the idea born of sensation which presents itself to our conscious awareness. Until we become consciously aware of an object we do not know and can not know that it exists. It is only after the awareness dawns that we make the mistake of assuming that there is an independently existing physical object composed of matter which was the original cause of the sensation - and once we make this classic and habitual error, we then have the problem of explaining how this imagined 'matter' interacts with the reality of mind and consciousness. We 'know' that mind is real, because we all experience it's effects - ideas, sensations, thoughts, etc. But we only infer the existance of matter after we have already had the direct experience in consciousness .
So the solution to the problem of the physiologists gap is really quite simple - There is no gap, because there is no matter which interacts through the senses to 'cause' our perceptions. The problem only arises because we assume the material object is primal and that the idea in consciousness is secondary, and in some way dependant upon or related to this physical thing. But we now have discovered that the truth of experience is that the experience of the thing in consciousness is primal, and that the matter of which it seems composed is secondary, inferred, and therefore imaginary.
The obvious question which arises is - ok, I admit that matter is inferred, that we never experience the external world directly, that all of our experience is experience of our own ideas - but the fact remains that the world does seem solid and substantial, and that I can not claim the responsibility for the creation of all the physical objects - I feel that a large part of my experience is 'given'.
The first question is accepted - the world is a substantial and solid experience, but the fact is that the substantialness and solidity are qualities revealed by the senses, ie by sensation, and are therefore ideas in consciousness. Note that even though the sensations are experiences of the qualities of external objects these sensations can not be said to be external to the body as the organs which generate the sense stimulus are within the limits of the body. Furthermore, although the objects which we infer as being the cause of the sensory stimulation are purportedly external to the body in space, they are nevertheless within the all-encompassing range of mind, for analysis shows them to be constructed entirely by the imagination from the raw material of inference upon sensation - they are ideas in the mind. In any case, by definition, nothing that exists outside of mind could ever be experienced, could ever be known.
The second question, that of the origin of our physical experience, will be addressed in the next section.
As an aside I would really like to know if there is any interest in the ideas expressed here, or if I am to be regarded as on of the many eccentric owners of web sites. Alternatively it could be that these notes send the readers to sleep, or even that you are all advanced philosophers/metaphysicians, and therefore these ideas are all old-hat to you. Whatever may be the case, if you find these ideas interesting or useful, please EMail me via the button on The Author page listed in the contents to the left.
By the way, a system of thought similar to these ideas as presented so far was advocated by the great philosopher Bishop Berkeley under the grand title of Subjective Idealism. For those interested I would recommend a read of his "Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonius in Opposition to Sceptics and Atheists". But although many of his ideas agree with modern thinking as outlined above, he did not take his reasoning far enough, but restricted it largely to the awake experience.
Top of PageWe have found that we live in a world of our own making. We receive through the senses a kaleidoscopic array of sensations which we interpret in the context of the pattern of our pre-existing world-image. These sensations are formed into mental images which we project into a mentally created space-time framework separate from our bodies, and then experience them as if they were also separate from our minds.
The fact is that ordinary perception is confined to mere relativistic appearance, and can never get at what is ultimate. Experience is, and can only be, relative to our sense reports. We only know sense reported attributes, and our world image is always relative to them.
If the sense instruments operated differently then we would experience a vastly different world. The eyes could have been formed like little microscopes or little telescopes or be sensitive to either different light frequencies or a vastly wider range of frequencies. What would our common world image be like then?
Nature could easily have given us more senses, and so made us into virtual supermen compared to our present normal and limited condition.
Science tells us that the smooth surface of the table which I see in front of me is actually an extremely rough surface covered with pits, and ruts and scratches which are not visible to the naked eye. What am I to believe, as I have two conflicting views?
The fact is that for normal practical life, the limited view revealed by the senses is perfectly adequate, but when we are considering experience from the philosophical perspective we have to admit that the senses enable us to know certain attributes of the objects and things in the world around us, only by shutting out many more attributes from the range of our experience. Our brief examination of illusions showed us that we are unable to trust experience as being accurate, we cannot take it at it's face value. We must always take account that the experiences are subject to the limitation of relativity.
For in order for us to be aware of a thing, we must also simultaneously be aware of its relation to other things and to ourself. The awareness of the relations between the things of our experience is an integral part of the awareness of the thing itself.
Look at a stone lying by the side of the road. It is obviously at rest and remains constant and unchanging from moment to moment. But is it?
It is actually flying through the solar system relative to the other planets at many thousands of miles an hour. - Hardly at rest then! Also, physics tells us that the atoms and electrons and other sub-atomic particles of which it is made are actually in a constant state of flux, with the electrons whizzing around the nuclei of the atoms at prodigious speed. Also, by virtue of the quantum probabilities inherent in the sub-atomic structure, the stone ends up slipping through our intellectual fingers as virtually un-graspable!
Nowhere in this vast universe of ours is there anything that can be said to be absolutely at rest.
Science has also shown that the very solidity of the objects of our experience is illusory. Even the ground on which we walk has been shown to be almost wholly empty space.
So where then is the matter that 19th century science claimed it understood so well?
The new science, particularly quantum theory, now tells us that atoms are not the last word nor matter the last substance. The constituent parts of atoms have now been described as particles or waves depending on what you are looking for. If we ask what these waves are, we are told either probabilities or energy, and so it goes on. The description of objects now changes from lumps of matter to evanescent tissues of events. The 'stuff' of which the world is made is a process of happenings, a series of dynamic events. The universe begins to take on the aspect, not of a collection of objects, but of a flow, a process, ever changing through time.
If we accept the ultimate substance as being energy, we run into the same problems that we came across when we tried to identify matter. For if we ask the physicists to show us some energy, all they can show us is the various forms that it takes - sound, light, heat etc. We never see energy 'in itself'. As a detectable reality energy is as illusive as matter, although the theory of energy is useful for practical purposes.
In the end, the materialistic view is a view based upon belief and not on reason. Neither matter nor energy can be shown to exist apart from our sensations, and our sensations have been shown to reside within conscious awareness - ie they are attributes of mind. It is more that likely that science will eventually move to the position which finally accepts that energy itself is an attribute of mind - not the feeble individual human mind, but the Universal Mind which lies hidden behind all our little minds - but I go ahead of myself...
This teaching, of the mental nature of the experienced world is known as Mentalism. It can be summed up in the following statement:
That all things in human experience without any exception are wholly and entirely mental things and are not merely mental copies of material things; that this entire panorama of universal existance is nothing but a mental experience and not merely a mental representation of a separate material existance; that we can arrive at such conclusions not only by a straight-line sequence of reasoned thinking but also by a re-orientation of consciousness during advanced mystical meditation.
But it may be objected that mentalism is self defeating, for in the far distant past when the planet was uninhabited there were no humans to think of it, no consciousness to hold the idea of the planet.
If we survey the vast array of things and events of modern times, we may view them as being so many separate ideas or so many separate appearances to an observer, but whichever view we take we also find that the common factor which links these separate experiences together is the mind which knows them. A perceiving mind must always be present with the events and objects, for they are in that mind and of it. The sequence of continuity gets its continuity from the experiencing minds own continuity.
Ideas can not exist without a thinking being to hold or generate them. We know of the world through the senses because we simultaneously know of our own existance. To think of the world at all pre-supposes the co-existance of a thinking mind.
The thinking self is surrounded by the not self- all that is external to the body - the surrounding world. The two cannot be separated. The very concept of self implies it's being distinguished from not-self. Both pre-supposes the existance of the other. The self exists through the world, and the world exists through the self in a mystical union - they are inter-locked. Although dealt in experience as separate and opposed, they are known in analysis as joined and united. They always appear together, always exist together, and always vanish together. Never, in common experience, is the mere self alone.
The error of materialism arises because of the striking contrast between the surrounding world of things and the internal world of thoughts, but the materialist fails to notice that they are both only distinguishable but not separable from the knowing self. Although the two ends of any act of external awareness, the knowing self and the known not-self, always seem to be at opposite ends of the spectrum to each other, they are in fact in indissoluble union in every act of awareness. They are apart in space, but not in awareness itself. Things can not be separated from the knowing consciousness. The belief that the world can exist without being present for some consciousness or other is absurd.
To return to the the question of the distant uninhabited past of the planet, the sciences of archeology, geology, astronomy and biology have painted a fascinating picture for us of vast eras of geologic time when no humans were present on the earth. But it is still only a picture, and a picture which consciousness now makes real for us. All the myriad images of the pre-historic world are just that - images - ie constructions of the imagination. We can only imagine the uninhabited planet if we imagine it as being seen by a consciousness, by an observing mind who was present at the scene and thus able to note the fact that it was uninhabited. No conception of these past ages can be made unless they are conceived as being present to a perceiving mind.
All that is said of the planets history before it was visited by life, can only be said by unconsciously placing a living observer present at the scene who is thus able to think the scene into existance. How else can the prehistoric volcanos and earthquakes and blue seas and lightening be thought of unless they are thought of as being seen, the thunder as being heard.
It becomes clear that in the objection concerning the uninhabited past, there is actually present an unreckoned observer. A planet apart from perception simply cannot and does not exist. No existence can be thought of without it being a known existance, and thus by simultaneously thinking of an knowing consciousness. The world scene from which the critic believes he has eliminated an observer presupposes the presence of just such an observer by its very existence.
However, care must be taken to avoid the misconception that we are here asserting that the world does not exist if we are not thinking about it or that a mountain disappears if there is no one present to behold it, but magically re-appears as soon as an observer turns towards it. What we are asserting is that the world's existence in itself without a knowing mind alongside it can never be established. The knowing mind is always presupposed, even when talking of such a separately existing world. A world which is not an object of consciousness can not and never will be found.
If the objection is made that the world does not actually disappear from existence when we cease to think of it, for example as in deep sleep, then we have to insist that for the sleeper it does in fact disappear, but of course it continues to exist for those who remain awake.
In experience, whenever the mind ceases its thinking activity, such as sleep, coma or swoon, the world does vanish, but only to re-appear as soon as thinking and wakefulness resumes. The deduction can be made therefore that it is the mind's activity of thinking which gives rise to the experience of the world.
It is impossible to think of a world without the co-existence of mind. If we remove mind from the picture, the world vanishes along with it. The question of what happens to the world between periods of actual perception is unanswerable because it presupposes what cannot be admitted. An unobserved landscape does cease to exist for us as soon as we turn away from it, but a similar idea may have an independent existance in other observing minds.
We stand in danger of making the individual mind the sole source of its experience, but this would be an absurdity. A man may issue a mental decree to turn a tree into a river, but the tree will stubbornly refuse to be so transformed and remains a tree. Therefore it is clear that there must be some other factor behind or underneath or within the individual experience of the world. This other factor exists and is a creative and contributive factor which is as much beyond individual control as it is beyond individual consciousness. Furthermore this creative factor must not be limited to being behind just one individual mind, but must be a common factor in all minds. This factor will be the source of the tree's continued existance in all of the observing individual minds, and is therefore a kind of super-individual consciousness.
We found that our sense impressions do not arise from a separate, external and independently existing material world. They must therefore arise from a creative power within our own minds but which functions independently of our intentions and above our conscious self. We found that we play a major part in the creation of the objects in the external world, through drawing on our previous experience for example, but we cannot hold the individual solely responsible for the world around him. And yet we have found that the surrounding objects are nothing but thought structures, and their beginning must therefore be the product of some mind. There must be an unknown cause of the succession of thought-forms which are presented to us for our experience. This cause must be a super-individual mind which possesses the power to form these thought-forms and to impose them on the individual mind.
The concept of this super-individual mind will supply the subject matter of the next section.
Top of PageAt the end of the last installment we had tentatively introduced the idea of a super-individual mind or consciousness which somehow imposes the idea of our sense-experienced external world upon us. We need to examine this idea in much greater detail, and it is well worth reviewing the thought rational which led us to consider the possibility in the first place.
We have determined, through a careful and detailed study of the process of perception, a number of startling facts. The most significant of these facts is that we never ever come into direct experience of the physical world of matter which at first glance seems to be the source of our world experience. We have found that all that we can ever know are our sense impressions, and that those sense impressions themselves partake of the nature of consciousness themselves - they are ideas.
We discovered that the actual world of our experience is a mentally constructed one. We receive the sense impressions and after interpreting them in the context of our memory of past experience, our anticipation of future experience, our predilection, prejudice and bias, we finally create out of the fabric of our own minds the objects of our experience and the space and time in which they are spread. We freely admitted that the objects so experienced are indeed external to the body, but they are not external to the mind. For whatever is external to the mind, if anything, is and will remain forever unknown.
Furthermore we began to appreciate that the world of common experience is in fact only a shadow of the world of actuality. The studies of the senses also showed us that the world of sense revealed that experience shuts out vastly more information than it reveals, or to put it another way, common experience is relative to and limited by the senses through which it is revealed.
Objects which from our limited perspective seem static and relatively motionless, from another perspective consist of a never-ending maelstrom of activity; apparent solid objects consist of more space than anything else, and the static nature and solidity of our experience are a consequence of the misinterpretation of our sensory experience, and are therefore imagined.
We also began to appreciate a relationship not only between the objects of our experience. but also between those objects and the mind which becomes aware of them. The mind, we tend to regard as our 'self', and the objects of our experience we tend to regard as the 'not-self'. And through this we began to discern the not normally noticed fact that the experience of 'self' and the the experience of 'not-self' always arise together, always persist together, and always disappear together.
When we wake up we become aware of the world only because we simultaneously become aware of our self. Throughout the period of being awake the self and not-self are continuously present, and when the experience of self subsides, as in sleep or swoon, so does the experience of the world. Never, in the realm of ordinary experience, is self found or experienced without not-self, and the concept of any kind of experience without the presence of self is absurd.
Materialism arises largely because of the difference in the intensity and relative permanence between the world of objects external to (and including) the body and the world of internal thoughts and imaginations. But reflection shows that although they are indeed different in intensity, they are in fact made of the same stuff - mind.
And now I would like to move on to a little thought experiment. But one which is largely within the experience of most people.
------
Three friends go into the uninhabited desert a and set up a camp next to a large boulder. They take with them an unusually large timer device, somewhat like an egg timer in design, but large enough to measure a duration of a couple of days.
The timer is started, and for the first 24 hours they take turns sleeping so that at any one time two of the friends are awake. Then, they change the arrangement and all sleep at the same time - while the timer is still going. Prior to all going asleep they check the timer, and they check it again on awakening. All sounds simple enough.
But there are two things we must consider from the mentalist perspective - the first being the large boulder, and the second being the timer.
Each of the friends will testify that the boulder was present to their senses prior to sleep, that their experience of the boulder disappeared when they fell asleep, and that it re-appeared to their experience when they woke up. Furthermore, during the time when each of the friends was asleep during the first 24 hours, the other two friends who remained awake will testify that the boulder was still present for them.
It is also worthy of note that when the boulder was seen by the three friends, that each saw it from a slightly different physical (that is space-time) perspective.
We have already determined that the boulder, being an object of perception for each of the friends, is a projection into space-time of their own processed sense perceptions. This scenario also shows that even when one of the individual space-time projections of the boulder was withdrawn, the boulder was still present for the other two. The same of course applies to the timer, but in the case of the timer, by virtue of the measurements they took before and after they all went to sleep at the same time, they were able to determine that it continued to operate even when they were all asleep, and had consequently all withdrawn their individual boulder and timer constructs, and that there was consequently no human observer present.
The first set of considerations shows that the source of their experience of the boulder does not lie in the individual mind, but is something which is given to it. All the friends will testify to the general similarity of their experience, but none of them can change the boulder into something else by a mere wish, or make it disappear from their environment. It is an element of their experience which is imposed on them, but it must have been imposed from within, rather than from outside of their individual minds.
Once again, their experience of the timer is the same, but the evidence points to the fact that the timer continued to operate as expected while they were all asleep, ie. while there was no human observer of it, and therefore that it must have been present to some other consciousness while the three friends were asleep. Indeed, it seems quite reasonable to deduce that the consciousness which imposed the timer on the senses of the three while they were awake and which re-imposed it when they awoke, is the same consciousness that sustained the active timer in consciousness while they were asleep.
This consciousness acts from within the individual mind, for we have already re-iterated over and over again that nothing external to consciousness can ever be conceived of, never mind come within the realm of experience. Furthermore, the same consciousness which imposes the sense impressions of the timer and the boulder (and indeed of all objects) is present in each of the individual consciousness.
It is also reasonable to deduce, that this larger consciousness is the same consciousness which holds other aspects of experience which are revealed (ie - given) to us when we are able to alter our normal sense perspective by technological means. The boulder really is relatively stable and solid from the normal perspective, but if we change the range of our senses with scientific equipment we experience (as given) the other co-existing attributes such as constant motion and large emptiness. The consciousness which holds all of these relative perspectives must itself transcend or be beyond the various perspectives it can hold.
We also came to the conclusion that our sense impressions were inseparable from our self-awareness, and indeed both arise together in our experience. It therefore is reasonable to deduce that if the source of the objects of our experience is this higher universal form of consciousness, then that same consciousness must also hold our relatively puny human minds within itself, in much the same way that a human body is composed of many individual cells.
It is indeed an error to limit the possibility of experience and consciousness to what we know in our common experience - ie what is presented to the five senses. It would be a sad thing indeed if human consciousness, with its frailties and errors was indeed the best that universal development had managed over the apparent endless duration of universal existance.
What other features can we deduce regarding this universal aspect of consciousness which we have begun to realize may be the very ground of our personal existance, and is most definitely the source of our experience.
It must be a truly universal mind, for otherwise it could not carry the consciousness of the millions and millions of individual things in the world. It must be primal, permanent self-sufficient and changeless, for if it were not it would not hold all the changes and vicissitudes occurring incessantly within the continuous duration of the world. It must always be present, everywhere - that is it must be continuously linked to the world, or it could not be an observer of the world. It is this boundless consciousness which is the observer of the uninhabited planet, the unvisited arctic scene.
The Mentalist teaching affirms the existance of just such a mind, both on the basis of right reasoning, and on the basis of ultra-mystic insight which has been mentioned elsewhere.
We are not just the self-absorbed witnesses of our sense based experience, but are co-witnesses of a common experience. It is true that detailed comparison of one persons experience against another does reveal the presence of relativity based differences, but the general similarity of experience cannot be denied. A hill is not a hill to one person, a tree to another, and a box of oranges to yet another. All agree to it's general nature as a hill. This similarity shows that we are all embedded in one and the same constantly perceiving Super-Mind.
A detailed study of just how this Universal mind interacts with our individual minds will be undertaken in a later section, but at this stage we must recognize the working of this other mind upon our own minds. If the things of our perception and experience and the individual consciousness are indissolubly joined; if the individual consciousness includes the world, and both partake of the nature of consciousness; this is because both are manifestations of a third thing which includes them but which itself transcends both, and which is therefore a higher form of consciousness.
Every thing in our experience, every single sensed object that presents itself for our experience, thus becomes an intimation, a symbol, of the omnipresent mind which imprints it on our senses from within. Every object is not only an idea in the individual mind, but is, at the same time, an idea in the universal mind. For the universal mind is not an arbitrary creator, is not something separate and independent from the individual mind. Both contribute to the making of the individual world of experience. The Universal mind gives us what we shall experience, but the individual mind contributes the form that the experience will take.
And now we must think of a term to use for this higher, universal consciousness - one which will not be ambiguous or have a different meaning for each user of the term. The term 'God' is useless in such a context, even though it may appeal to some. I propose then, along with my own teacher, that the term used should be to a large extent self- explanatory - and to that end the term World-Mind will be used henceforth in these writings to refer to this universal intellegence.
The discovery of the existence of this awe-inspiring World Mind is a profoundly significant one in our search for the real meaning of our experience. But remember that even with this startling advance there is still much left to learn. We have discovered an unexpected unifying principle which operates through and within our own experience of the world - but we have as yet hardly touched the surface, for most of these considerations have been based on our awake experience. There are still the realms of dream and sleep to be investigated, and indeed the deeper ramifications of the discoveries made thus far.
The mystery deepens!
Top of PageA detailed study of our senses and the manner in which we become aware of ourselves and the world has led us to some unexpected and strange, but indisputable conclusions. It turns out that we only know our mental states, although some of these mental states appear as things; we see only our own mental images, although some of them appear to be external to us. If we can train ourselves to take a detached view of our own experience, the realization dawns that all the grand pageant of worldly life, all the great cities and civilizations, all the vast continents and their millions of inhabitants, even the depths of the solar system and beyond, are all just forms taken by the mind.
For many people this rationally inescapable conclusion seems to contradict every moment of common experience, and results in either refusal to accept it, the laughter of ridicule, or in a few people a simple terror as they find themselves faced with an existential crisis of unprecedented proportion. For they are being asked to reverse the beliefs which have been bred into them throughout their whole life, and indeed beyond. The acceptance of physical matter as having an existence independent from the apparently immaterial mind is a habit of thought which is accepted as being self-evident, and yet our enquiries have shown conclusively how mistaken this habit proves to be.
It is sadly ironic that the materialists who loudly assert the mentalist to be deluded, are themselves steeped in delusion. Their error consists in thinking that by denying the existence of matter, the mentalist is also denying the existence of things, or at least is turning them into mere spectres of their former selves. But the fact is that the mentalist says that the objects of our experience are most certainly present, and outside our heads, not within them; furthermore, these objects display all of the normal properties of solidity, weight, form, mass etc. The only difference is that the mentalist adds that the existence of these objects is a mental existence only.
Many things in our experience can take different forms, while being comprised of essentially the same substance. Soot and diamond are found to be the same substance; milk, butter, cheese and bakelite are all forms of the same substance. The senses tells us they are different but reason informs us of their essential identity. In a similar way, mind can manifest in experience as solid, liquid, vapour, sound, colour, shape, thinking etc, but without any of them losing their identity as mental constructions. The world is externalized in and by mind, and the vast variety of forms and experiences does not and cannot invalidate this fundamental truth.
The mentalist does not assert that the world does not exist. The affirmation that the world is a thought-form implies that as a thought, but not as independent matter, it must certainly exist. Saying that matter does not exist is not saying that our external experience is meaningless or non-existent.
From this it can be seen that anyone who does believe that the multitude of forms are ultimately other than mental in their nature, believes in materialism. Regardless of which spiritual or religious teaching they may follow, no matter how many spiritual books they may have read, whichever teachers and gurus they may have studied under, if they hold the view of an existance apart from a mental existance, they are materialists. This is the essential teaching of the Indian doctrine of maya when stripped of the mystique which surrounds it - Matter is an illusion of the mind!
Our further studies showed us that this vast universal drama is given to us for our experience by a super-individual mind which we called the World Mind. The sense perceptions are imprinted on our senses from within our own minds by the Word Mind which is the background and co- creator, with us, of the world. The World Mind gives us the content of our experience, and we individually construct and interpret that content and finally project it into the common form of our space-timed world.
We further concluded that this World Mind:
- must be a truly universal mind, for otherwise it could not carry the consciousness of the millions and millions of individual things in the world.
- It must be primal, permanent self-sufficient and changeless, for if it were not it would not hold all the changes and vicissitudes occurring incessantly within the continuous duration of the world.
- must always be present, everywhere - that is it must be continuously linked to the world, or it could not be an observer of the world. It is this boundless consciousness which is the observer of the uninhabited planet, the unvisited arctic scene.
The World Mind holds all the innumerable individual minds within itself as its own ideas, and imposes the sense perceptions upon them through the senses, which the individuals then externalize into space-time where they are experienced as the external universe.
Now it is helpful at this stage to review how people hold and manipulate ideas within their own minds, as this will give us some useful indication of how events unfold at the universal level.
We have considered how, when a person in not paying attention to something, then for that person at that time there will be no experience of the object. Let us use as an example your name. In this context this is a good example, because what we are actually concerned with is where the name is when it not actually the focus of attention. Now ordinarily we do not think about our own name, but whenever we are called upon to sign something or to advise someone of our name it glibly rolls from the tongue or is written without any effort. We say that it remains in memory, but it does so at a level below that of conscious awareness. That is, for us, when we are not actively thinking about it, it does not exist. This memory must exist as a subtle potential for manifestation which only becomes active, which is only actually manifested when it becomes the subject of our conscious attention.
We bestow our conscious attention upon any aspect of our being, and that act brings the object into being for us. The most obvious example is when our whole personality is withdrawn in the state of deep sleep. As our attention is withdrawn progressively as we fall into slumber, so does our awareness of our environment, and eventually our personality, fades until it is no more. On awakening all that was withdrawn again becomes the subject of our attention, and so dawns again in experience. Where was our personality while we were asleep? It did not cease to exist as such, for we are aware that the person I am today is a continuation of the person I was yesterday, but it was no longer manifested in its externalized form. It was absorbed into the mind which had created it out of it's own mental substance, and there remained as a potential for experience until that potential was actualized the following morning.
In a similar way does the World Mind bring the Universal Being into existance, and so, periodically is the universe similarly withdrawn. But even in the periods of withdrawal it would be a mistake to assume that it does not exist. The World Mind manifests the myriad forms of universal being out of it's own mental 'stuff', and, just as, as will be demonstrated later, the World Mind's own nature is eternal and undying, so are its Ideas also eternal and undying. There has never been a time when it can be said that the Universe did not exist, and there will never be a time when the Universe will not exist, simply because the Mind which periodically thinks it into existance is itself eternal and undying. In those intermittent periods of withdrawal, of apparent non existance, the Universe still exists, but as a potential for manifestation.
Thus there is no moment in Universal history when it can be accurately said that the Universe was created. It has never had a beginning which does not prove to be a symbolic one for human purposes only, and consequently it will never have an ending. It was never started, so it will never finish! It is eternal because the stuff to which we can ultimately trace it is Mind, to which there is no conceivable beginning and no conceivable ending. Mind, was, is and always will be, and therefore the same applies to its creation, the Universe.
In order to draw a circle on a piece of paper, we must place our pencil on the paper and start to draw. But when the circle is complete it becomes clear that the starting point was only a temporary one. The finished circle has no beginning and no ending, In the same way, any moment which we assign as a beginning to universal existance must have only a symbolic and relative value to the person assigning that point. The point in time taken by current physics to be the moment of the Big Bang is such a point. If we glibly assert that there was no time until after the Big Bang, then we are obliged, in imagination, to place an observing consciousness present prior to the Big Bang to note the timeless nature of existance at that time! This seems to leads to the impossible paradox that the time before the Big Bang did exist, but it is not a paradox if we realize that the consciousness that we refer to in this situation is itself outside of time! This is the eternal consciousness of the World Mind.
Whoever is able to glimpse the truth hidden behind these imperfect words may also be able to perceive the parallel truth - that causality, cause and effect, is also only a temporary and relative truth. Whatever event we take to be the starting point will itself have been caused by a previous event or collection of previous events. Any event taken as the starting point has a limited and symbolic truth only, just as the starting point of the circle ceases to have any absolute meaning once the circle is complete.
Every event, has as it's cause, an infinite regress of causes, of which, each also has an infinite regress of causes. Similarly every event has an infinite progression of results, and each result has its own infinite progression.
Thus to ask when the Universe was created cannot be answered, because the question itself contains certain assumptions which cannot be admitted. The question cannot be answered, not because philosophy, metaphysics or mentalism are ignorant, but because it is unaskable in the first place.
But if we have to question the validity of causality from this philosophic perspective, that does not cancel its valid application in practical affairs. It may not be tenable from an ultimate and universal perspective, but it's immediate and relative application remains intact.
So philosophically, we arrive at the conclusion that the notion of a sudden first creation is untenable, and that the related notion of the creation of something out of nothing is equally untenable. But believers in a Deity made in Man's magnified image ascribe the genesis of the universe to just such an act.
Looked at from the point of view of physical manifestation, the universe comes forth out of nothingness and passes away back into nothingness. But mentalism shows that there is always the presence of the eternal hidden reality in the background - the presence of Mind. The universe is only its manifestation, and if all causes are traced back to their own cause, the chain goes back and back until the symbolic root of all causes is reached, the Mind in which the Universal existance is forever and eternally held as Idea. Thus Mind embraces all things but is itself embraced by none.
The universe has the same origin as any idea, that is in and for a mind. The correct way to regard the relationship between the universe and its creator is to see it as being similar to the relation between any human idea and the mind which holds it. The World Mind does not need to create the Universe out of nothing, because it creates it out of its own Universal self. It does this by projecting the universe as it's idea.
Top of PageOnce again we continue to expand and deepen our understanding of this astonishing discovery made a couple of sections ago. We started with the individual and an investigation into what is actually real in our experience, and we have ended at this stage with the majestic concept of the universal mind which holds all individual minds within itself and which gives them the raw material in the form of ideas or seed thoughts, which after they are processed by the individual are spatialized, temporalized and finally experienced as the external world.
As our investigations continue we will once again turn to a close examination of the individual consciousness, and we will begin to see the real and wonderful significance of this underlying unity we have discovered, but prior to proceeding to that stage it is worth taking a time out to consolidate our findings so far. For it is an easy thing to under-estimate the significance of the discovery of the World Mind. To aid in this consolidation I propose to take a few lines out of that classic of Eastern Religious literature, the Bhagavad Gita, and compare the words therein contained in chapter 11 to our philosophical findings.
Consider a couple of the facts we were able to deduce in previous installments.
The World Mind imposes the sense detected world on to the individual mind from within - this must be so, for if it were not, if the World Mind was completely separate from the individual consciousness, then such imposition would not be possible. Furthermore, the same World Mind is the unitary root of all individual minds, which we deduced by noting that all individuals experience the same world, subject of course to relativistic differences of interpretation and standpoint. A tree is a tree to all observers, and so the source of the sense impressions must be the same universal Mind.
We also took care to note that the ordinary form of human consciousness of the world is a very limited one, and that to assume that human consciousness is the highest that universal evolution has achieved is anthropomorphic error of the highest magnitude. Through the use of technology we are able to expand, shrink, and otherwise enhance the God given sense instruments, and have thus become aware of apparently unlimited reaches of space containing other solar systems, galaxies, planets, nebulae etc. At the other end of the spacial spectrum we have delved into the heart of the nuclear world, discovering strange and wonderful particles with properties which defy the imagination. But even with these vastly improved ways of apprehending the world, it would be a supreme arrogance for us to claim that the human range of experience is the highest or sole form of consciousness which exists.
In the context of our own world, we see vast arrays of plants and animals which we naturally regard as alive in their own right. We are forced to presume that these entities possess various forms of awareness of their environments, for if this were not the case they would simply be inert. The only explanation for the way that a plant bends towards the light is that there is some primitive but definite awareness of it's environment. It is true that our technology can create mechanisms which to a certain extent can mimic such behaviour, but we nevertheless intuitively understand that the responses of these other entities are more than just mechanical.
Imagine the vast array of plants and creatures, trees, grass, fungii, fish, insects, and also imagine the vast variety and types of awareness which are being manifested through them. Even single celled creatures, and the millions upon millions of cells which comprise the bodies of the larger plants and animals could be said to possess awareness, and hence life, in their own right.
And then recall that wherever the world manifests in individual experience, at any level, there also is the World Mind as the unitary root, foundation and source of both the individual entities existance and the experience of the world that manifests through the individual. The World Mind experiences its creation, the Universe, through the individuals which it also creates. The external world and the entities which inhabit it are manifested by Word Mind together, co-exist through being upheld by the World Mind together, and finally dissolve back into their source together when the appropriate time for dissolution arrives.
And now I will quote from Chapter 11 of Sir Edwin Arnold's wonderful translation of the Bhagavad Gita, The Song Celestial. In this chapter of the book Arjuna has learned much of the nature of God from Krishna, but is aware that he has not seen Krishna's real form, but only the appearence which Krishna is manifesting for earthly eyes. Arjuna begs his teacher for the opportunity to see Krishna's true form, and his wish is granted. But Krishna points out that earthly eyes are incapable of experiencing his real form, and so he temporarily bestows on Arjuna a mystic vision, and the narrator of the Gita, Sanjaya, relates Arjuna's experience in the following words:
Then. O King! the God so saying,
Stood, to Pritha's Son displaying
All the splendor, wonder, dread
Of His vast Almighty-head.
Out of countless eyes beholding,
Out of countless mouths commanding,
Countless mystic forms enfolding
In one form; supremely standing,
Countless radiant glories wearing,
Countless heavenly weapons bearing,
Crowned with garlands of star-clusters,
Robed in garb of woven lusters,
Breathing from His perfect Presence
Breaths of every subtle essence
Of all heavenly odours; shedding
Blinding brilliance; overspreading-
Boundless, beautiful-all spaces
With His all-regarding faces-
So He showed! If there should rise
Suddenly within the skies
Sunburst of a thousand suns
Flooding earth with beams undeemed-of,
Then might be that Holy One's
Majesty and radiance dreamed of!
So did Pandu's son behold
All this universe enfold
All its huge diversity
Into one vast shape, and be
Visible, and viewed, and blended
In one Body - subtle, splendid,
Nameless - th'All-comprehending
God of Gods, the Never-Ending Deity!
The chapter goes on to relate much more than this, and I recommend it to all list members. Arjuna's reaction is one of wonder, and of fear, for one of the forms through which Krishna reveals himself is as time, which brings about the undoing of all created form.
But throughout the chapter is the theme of infinite diversity as a manifestation of the non-dual unitary nature of Krishna. It is not wise to introduce religious or mystical ideas into a discussion which purports to be of a philosophical or metaphysical nature, but I hope by this example to show how reason, carefully used, is able to bring us to a point which enables the rational verification of mystical experience.
This same Cosmic Vision (known as the Beatific Vision in Christian mystical theology) has been described by many people, some from modern times. Paramahansa Yogananda described his own experience of it in his book 'Autobiography of a Yogi', the german medieval mystic Jacob Boehm wrote of it, as did his fellow countryman Eckhart. In our own times the Philospher/mystic Paul Brunton has verified the reality of the mystical vision, and Sri Krishna Prem describes it in detail in his book 'The Yoga of the Bhagavad Gita'. And I have corresponded with two individuals who have born witness to the reality of this experience. For this is not just a pretty poetical image, nor is it just a intellectual construction, although it is both of these. It is a real and profound experience which is experienced at a certain stage of spiritual growth. But it is exactly that, a vision, an intimation of a higher and universal level of consciousness.
Just as is the case with Arjuna in the Gita, the vision ends and the quest proceeds. But it's legacy is confirmation in experience of the findings of the intellectual quest - a glimpse of a higher reality.
In the next section I will consider the little know fact that there are two types of Karma, general and special. General karma is that timeless universal law which governs the continuity of conscious entities, including the World Mind itself, while Special karma only comes into operation when Self-awareness dawns in one of the countless conscious entities, and which bestows responsibility for thought and action as it's legacy.
Top of PageThose of you who have read the other pages on this web site may have read the dissertation on karma which I have placed there. But karma has many perspectives, and I will approach this discussion from a slightly different one - one which follows on from my previous articles with this title.
To recap our findings thus far.
We have deduced through a process of strict reason the majestic concept of the universal mind which holds all individual minds within itself and which gives them the raw material in the form of ideas or seed thoughts, which after they are processed by the individual are spatialized, temporalized and finally experienced as the external world.
We came to this discovery after a detailed analysis of what we actually know in experience, leaving aside inference, preference, predilection and imagination. For the fundamental fact of all experience is that it is contained within, presented to, experienced by mind, and that all aspects of any experience are mental in their fundamental nature, including the totality of the objects and sensations of which those experiences are comprised. Consciousness is our nature, and a separately existing world comprised of matter which is the first cause of our experience only exists in our imagination.
At the end of the last section I stated the following hint as to where we would be travelling next on our journey of discovery:
In the next episode I will consider the little know fact that there are two types of Karma, general and special. General karma is that timeless universal law which governs the continuity of conscious entities, including the World Mind itself, while Special karma only comes into operation when Self-awareness dawns in one of the countless conscious entities, and which bestows responsibility for thought and action as it's legacy.
All karma operates through the faculty of consciousness known as memory. The World Mind remembers all of its previous phases of manifestation, at both the universal level and at the moment-by-moment level within a universal cycle. It brings forth the ceaseless procession of images of planets and stars and solar systems and oceans and living creatures etc. etc., out of its own constructive meditation, and in an orderly manner, because each successive manifestation of the whole creation and of the entities which subsist within the grand whole are born as the consequence of the earlier memorized manifestations which preceded it in this eternal never-ending creation.
I am as I am at this moment as a consequence of what I have been throughout the whole of the beginningless past. Remember the (paraphrased) words of Krishna in the second chapter of the Bhagavad Gita: "That which is, never was not, and never will not be! Ending and beginning are dreams.".
The same applies to my town, my country, my planet.....
This first aspect of karma, what we have called the General Law of karma, is a principle inherent in MIND at all levels and which is simply the law of every entities own continuity. From planet to protoplasm, every entity inherits through time the characteristics of its own previous existence, and by so doing adjusts effect to cause.
The universe itself becomes possible through this vast mind-bogglingly (?) complex process of the mutually interacting karmic energies of the individual entities which comprise the cosmos. The World Mind does indeed imagine the universe into existence, but not in any arbitrary way, but by natural continuity as the consequence of all the remembered universes that have previously existed. These energies interact, modify, evolve, in short - change - through time, from one moment to the next, from one universal cycle to the next, in what constitutes a perpetual self-actuating system. But it must always be remembered that the system itself depends upon World Mind for its own continued existence and continuous activity. The thought forms and their karmic forces carry on their activities, intertwine, interact and evolve of their own accord in the presence of World Mind, just as plants grow of their own accord in the presence of sunlight. But they owe their very existence and sustenance to that presence.
When the collective energies of the individual entities exhaust themselves the universe lapses into latency, and a cycle of world history draws to a close. The ideational activity of World Mind ceases and the universe dissolves into latency in much the same way as the personality is absorbed into its latent state during deep dreamless sleep. The break is only an apparent one however, partly because, just as when we awaken the following morning we continue as the same person from where we left off the previous night, and partly because the break cannot be measured in terms of time as we ordinarily know it, because all ideational movement ceases, and the time of common experience is essentially a measure of change rather than of duration. Throughout the period of latency there is no change; no movement of thought at any level. The universe retreats and the World Mind rests from its labours. But dawn follows night, and with the arrival of the cosmic dawn the World Mind recommences the re-imagining of all things once again. The same karmas begin once more to germinate. The eternal universal existence becomes active, and the visible world of experience comes into being once more, the cosmic heritage of all those which had preceded it; the characteristics of the previous cosmos determining the nature of the succeeding one.
Work followed by rest, becoming and being, a rhythm similar to the respiratory cycle of living creatures, is what we find when we try to understand the relation between the World Mind and its relation to the universe. This present universe is not the first, nor is it the last. It is but a single unit in a beginningless and endless series. Each is the heritage of the preceding one, the precipitation of karmas which have succeeded in bringing about their own realization.
The universal history is a history of an endless chain of alternate cycles of potential being and actual becoming. It is a process which proceeds according to strict karmic law, and not by chance. Neither is it the consequence of the arbitrary commands of a personal creator or God as many religionists believe.
Even the modern scientific concepts of evolution are only half correct, as the real process is a rhythm of growth followed by decay, of evolution followed by dissolution, one following the other with inevitable sequence. The combination of these phases makes up the universal movement which knows no end. As my own teacher has written:
The universe of forms ever returns to its starting point; it is without beginning and will be without end; this is why it is subject to birth and death, degeneration and renewal, that is to change, It is like an ever-rolling wheel moving onward through these alternating aeons of activity and rest. Hence the ancient teachers represented it under the figure of a revolving Swastica-wheel
It was intended that in the next section we would take a closer look at the part that memory plays in this process, and thus move a step or two closer towards understanding the place that individual consciousness has in this vast universal panorama. Sadly, however, nothing further has been written to date. But despite this it is my own feeling that the foregoing words, inspired by the masterful work of Dr. Brunton, stands alone as an introduction to the metaphysics of Mentalism
Top of Page