The Meaning of Mentalism - Part 2

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Dear All,

 

In Part 1, we concluded with Dr. Paul Brunton's words of:

 

(p.19) 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. 19-20.

 

Here now, is Part 3 on 'The Meaning of Mentalism' by Dr. Brunton.

 

Enjoy,

 

violet

 

 

 

 

The Meaning of Mentalism - Part 3

 

(p.20) It is not so easy to tell what a 'thing' is as the man who has never

stopped to reflect upon the point may believe. For, guided by the unquestioned

impressions which he gets through the eyes and fingers, he takes it for granted

that it is obviously at rest and remains constantly the same, when in fact there

is such a continual circulation of its secret elements, such a shifting play of

its electrons, for example, that the thing in itself slips through intellectual

fingers as ungraspable. This seems strange and sounds absurd, yet,

scientifically viewed, things in their ultimate character are indeed fields of

electronic and protonic energies moving at prodigious speeds. Nowhere in this

vast universe is there, strictly speaking, such a state as absolute rest.

Whenever we believe that something has been found in such a state, we merely

entertain an illusion. For its rest is only relative. It is, as Einstein has

pointed out, only an 'appearance' of rest. Actually even the particles of a

stone lying seemingly inert by the roadside are swarming in incessant motion.

 

If we penetrate into the hidden structure of the microcosmic world of atoms,

what do we find? Its electrons are constantly rotating, its protons ceaselessly

vibrating. If we look into the human consciousness we find it in motion with a

constant whirl of thought and sensations. Is there any thought which has more

than a momentary existence? When we analyse our consciousness we find that

thoughts too numerous to count stream through it. They succeed one another

incessantly. They are born in an instant but die the next moment.

 

Mentalism demonstrates that our experience of the whole world is nothing but our

thoughts of it. (p.21) These thoughts, as will be explained in detail, have no

continuous existence and vanish only to be succeeded by others which are similar

(but not identical) and thus give the illusion of smooth continuity. Hence the

world we know is in a state of ever-becoming rather than of settled being. Thus

a law of movement rules everything material and mental. Now motion implies

unsettlement, the dropping of an old position, thing or thought for a new one:

that is it implies change. But this makes the universe not so much a structure

as a flow. The reality of the world lies in its restlessness. The vaunted

stability and solidity which the senses place before us are mere

appearances--this is the verdict of reason. Such therefore is the inescapable

illusoriness of the 'form' which human experience takes.

 

A mechanism which is used for night advertising signs nicely illustrates this

point. If two small adjacent boxes are fitted with electric bulbs which are made

by a suitable mechanism to light up alternately, at any single moment either one

of the bulbs will be illuminated or none. Yet whoever looks at them will see a

continuous light flickering back and forth from left to right and back again.

Even at the moment when no burning bulb is registered on the retina of the eyes,

when no glowing light is actually in existence, the eyes report the contrary!

Here we must remember our earlier studies, which demonstrated that the mental

process involved in seeing sense-illusions and the mental process involved in

seeing so-called material things, are similar.

 

Provided sufficient heat is brought to bear upon it, there is no substance, not

even the hardest of metals, which cannot be melted and then transformed into

gaseous vapour. And provided sufficiently powerful microscopic investigation is

brought to bear upon a gas, it reveals itself as made up of scintillating points

of 'light' which are in perpetual movement. And yet ordinarily the senses tell

us nothing of light as being, from the scientific standpoint, the ultimate stuff

of the universe or of restlessness as being the ultimate state of the universe!

 

There is never a moment when the perpetual world-vibration pauses, never a

fraction of a moment when the oscillation of any atomic energy comes to rest.

Nothing abides. Because it wants to be more truthful, science has recently come

to speak in its descriptions of Nature as consisting not of things but rather of

a tissue of events, a continuous series of happenings, that is a process.

 

(p.22) We cannot trust our eyes and ears and hands in this matter for their

range is too limited to show us the true state of Nature. Only the untutored and

unscientific now hold the naive belief that the world is solid stable and

stationary, otherwise, than in appearance. For they set up the familiar

experiences of everyday as their standard of explanation. Theirs is the

'finger-philosophy' which makes what is felt by the fingers into a criterion of

ultimate reality! The common conception of the world is of course, essential for

practical life because it has a limited truth of its own, but when we rise to

the philosophic standpoint we discover that it does not resist scrutiny.

Perfectly right though it be in its own place, such a view becomes wrong here.

For it does not exhaust all the possibilities of the universe. Thus reason

reverses the judgment of the senses and philosophy silences the voice of

opinion. " Culture inverts the vulgar views of Nature...Children, it is true,

believe in the external world. The belief that it 'appears only' is an

afterthought, " was Emerson's wise comment in his 'Essay on Nature'.

 

What science has discovered with the help of cunning instruments, ancient sages

discovered more than two thousand years ago with the help of concentrated

thought alone. " No man can twice enter the same river, " asserted Greek

Heracleitus. " Whoever perceives in truth and wisdom how things pass away in this

world, in his eyes there is not 'It is' in this world, " declared Indian Buddha,

who also pointed out that nothing remains the same for two consecutive moments.

 

But still farther back in time than these two men was this doctrine taught by

ancient sages from Asia in the East to America in the West. They taught, exactly

like modern scientists, that the entire universe is in incessant motion and that

this motion takes a rotatory, wheel-like circular form. And they went still

further by pointing out that as the point where a circle originally begins or

ends can not be indicated, so the points in space or in time where the cosmos

originally begins or ends can not be indicated too. It is indeed quite

immeasurable. Hence they represented both the way in which the world is made and

the immeasurable flow of things within it under the illustrative symbol of the

Swastika, which is another form of the wheel. (p.23) Its crossed spokes stand

for the polar axis crossed by the equatorial line whilst its rotating activity

stands for the fact that the earth is dynamic and not dead 'matter.'

 

Science has turned solid matter inside-out and found it practically empty. The

emptiness of material substance is disproportionately and fantastically immense

when compared with the tininess of the electrons incessantly moving within it.

This means that the very ground we walk on is almost wholly empty space. But our

sense of touch makes it feel firm, compact, motionless and impenetrable. This

particular sense furnishes us indeed with an illusory experience, due of course

to the limited range within which it can work. It is not surprising therefore

that, as even more important facts have unfolded themselves, some prominent

scientists have already begun to affix their reluctant sanction to the belated

discovery that materialism, the doctrine that everything which is present in

physical sense experience is the final reality, the belief that the concept

called 'matter' does represent something which is the ultimate existent thing

within such experience, the view that the universe consists only of this matter

in motion, is an untenable theory.

 

The Wisdom of the Overself, Chapter 11, p. 20-23

Dr. Paul Brunton

Samuel Weiser, Inc., York Beach, Maine

ISBN 0-87728-591-8

Library of Congress Catalog No. 83-60833