The Meaning of Mentalism - Part 1

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Dear All,

 

We concluded Dr. Paul Brunton's 'Prefatory', where he said that:

 

(p.17) I write for the few who, awakened by the world war into seeing that

neither dead materialism nor blind mysticism can alone suffice, have had many a

question brought to their lips and who therefore seek a higher truth which

includes what is of worth in both views and yet transcends their defects. Men

must come and knock at the doors of such a school out of their own interior

prompting, out of their own hard reflections upon the meaning of the afflictions

and elations of life, out of their own awakened desire to suffer blindly no

longer. They must come to the condition written of by Virgil: " weary of

everything except to understand. " And the awful experiences of this war-mangled

era, with its living horrors and buried hopes, will have brought not a few

amongst mankind nearer to such a condition.

 

If these thoughts were really too far out of the world to reach the people who

are haplessly [unhappily] inside it, then they would have no right to lift a pen

and stir ink. But because mind is the unacknowledged basis of all living,

knowledge of the truth about mind cannot do other than provide a better support

to such living. And that this is so, that the hoariest truths about reality and

its shadows can be brought into touch with the practical concerns of personal

and national life, should become abundantly clear to anyone patient enough to

study the teaching in its fullness.

 

These leaves are sent out across the window without adolescent illusions about

their reception and if a few of them shall flutter down to rest awhile beside a

friend or two and remind him of his divine origin and destiny, it shall surely

be enough.

 

The Wisdom of the Overself, Chapter 1, p. 15-17

 

Here now, is Part 1 of 'The Meaning of Mentalism'. We must understand that Dr.

Brunton is trying to break through the conditionings--the 'way of seeing things'

of the hard-core intellectual. He takes the reader step-by-step to see that

things are not necessarily as they seem to be, through the senses, but that

there is a greater reality. It is an arduous task, and laboured at points. But,

Dr. Brunton feels it is worthwhile if it helps to open up a person to their

spiritual awareness. i agree that it is worthwhile also.

 

So, enjoy!

 

violet

 

 

 

 

The Meaning of Mentalism - Part 1

 

(p.18) We must begin to philosophise with the hard facts of experience, not with

the unchecked pre-suppositions of fancy. Knowledge that does not begin with

experience can never attain certainty but only dwell in the region of

conjecture.

 

But, alas! the first fact is an extremely awkward one. Experience itself is not

really what it seems to be. The suggestive studies of the earlier volume in the

relativity of time and space, the startling glimpses of the magical spell which

illusions can cast upon us, the revelatory discoveries of the mentalistic nature

of all things no less than the semantic analyses of meanings and the words in

which they are clothed, have combined to put us on our guard against the

deceptions of the senses and the tricks of consciousness; in short, to make us

somewhat wary of this thing that is called experience.

 

Man fits every experience into the pattern of his existing ideas. It seldom

occurs to him that his pattern is so faulty and so limited that only by going

outside it can he find out what his experience really means. Kant in his

speculative way and Einstein in his scientific way have told and taught us that

ordinary human perception is confined to mere appearances; that, indeed, it

never gets at what is ultimate in this world and is condemned to view the God of

Reality under graven images. We know only what the senses tell us. Our

experience is purely relative to them. Therefore we never get at the absolute

truth about things but only at the way they affect our senses.

 

Let us look at a simple example. It is well known that our eyes are constructed

like little cameras. Now if Nature had constructed them instead, as she could

easily have done, like little microscopes we should all see every day a world

astonishingly different from the one which we actually do see, whilst if she had

constructed them like little telescopes we should all see an amazingly different

sky every night. She could have altered the vibration-range of our ears so that

they would catch numerous clear sounds where at present we catch only dead

silence. (p.19) Nay, she could have gone still further. We have five kinds of

sense experience but Nature could just as easily have given us five extra

senses, an addition which would have magically transformed us into super-human

beings. Who knows that these things may not yet happen, albeit with evolutionary

slowness; that Nature may not take it into her head one day to alter her

handiwork in this fashion?

 

Again, the eye sees a smooth surface when it sees a polished table-top whereas

through a powerful microscope it sees the same table-top as an extremely rough

surface composed of miniature hills and valleys. Are we to believe the naked eye

or the microscope? This analogy is a just one--for the unphilosophical majority

are also surface seers. They do not suspect that relativity governs all

existence, including their own. Thus everything has a double character or aspect

and this is why we need a double standpoint. Are we to take only the practical

view or also the philosophic one?

 

We perceive only partially and incompletely when we perceive anything through

the senses. When we set up the presentations of the eyes, ears, hands, tongue

and nose, that is, when we set up human experience as really being what it

purports to be, we are merely surface seers. The things of our experience really

bear to the things as they are in themselves, a relation, resembling that of the

hat coat shirt trousers and shoes which a man wears to the man himself. The

senses help us to know certain things only by shutting out many more things from

our range of experience. Hence to know the world as it really is, we would have

to expand our field of awareness to a higher dimension.

 

When two railway trains are moving in the same direction at the same speed, a

passenger seated at a carriage window in one train will not witness any movement

on the part of a traveller seated in the other train. Each would, in fact,

regard the other as stationary if he had only the evidence of sight to inform

him. This is a familiar everyday experience both of the meaning of relativity

and the meaning of illusion. We cannot trust all we experience as being accurate

nor can we trust all accurate experience as being more than merely relative. To

be aware of anything is to be aware of its relations, both to other things and

to oneself. (P.20) Therefore knowledge can exist only by being based on

relations, that is to say, it is always relative. The philosopher must split

knowledge into two forms: (a) the state of things as they are presented to our

five senses (b) the state of things as they really are in their essential

nature. The first yields a view based on appearances whereas the second yields a

truer one. Taken merely by and for itself the practical standpoint must

necessarily confess that truth is unattainable, but taken as a pointer to the

need of an absolute standard of reference, it plays its part in the quest of

truth. The appeal to practical criterions may silence our doubts about the

reality of what is given to us in material experience but it will not solve

them. For to understand reality we must first understand the unreal.

 

The Wisdom of the Overself, Chapter 11, p. 18-20

Dr. Paul Brunton

Samuel Weiser, Inc., York Beach, Maine

ISBN 0-87728-591-8

Library of Congress Catalog No. 83-60833