The Meaning of Mentalism - Part 3

[Guest guest]

Dear All,

 

We concluded with Dr. Paul Brunton's words of:

 

(p.23) 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. 23.

 

Here now, is Part 3.

 

Enjoy,

 

violet

 

 

 

The Meaning of Mentalism - Part 3

 

(p.23) The old science said that the physical world is merely a shifting mass of

rigid lumps of cold dead matter, of indivisible particles called atoms. But when

asked what was this substance which it named matter, it became somewhat

incoherent. It could not explain without admitting that vast unsolved mysteries

were involved in the answer. And finally the new twentieth-century facts, which

were first discovered out of the apparent emptiness of a vacuum-tube and later

developed out of experimental research into subatomic working, forced the old

science to liquidate itself. With it went the belief in an ultimate matter which

exists in space, changes in time and affords a foundation for the universe.

 

The new science now openly declares that atoms are not the last word nor matter

the last substance. Atoms have been divided and found to be 'waves.' Waves of

what? we ask. Certainly not of matter but of energy, it replies. A sum of

dynamic processes has replaced the old-time storehouse of inert [unmoving]

substances. But beyond the discoveries made by radio-active research was the

revolution begun by relativity theory and carried further by quantum mechanics.

For this has replaced the old-time world-structure of inert substance by a

series of dynamic events. (p.24) The world's stuff is not a stable one but a

process of happenings. The universe is a 'becoming'--not a thing, and certainly

not a material thing. The world's stuff is not an inert mass but a series of

changeful happenings. We live, in short, in a world where the first and final

reality is not an immobile thing but an ever-active force which, astonishing but

true, 'appears as though it were a thing'.

 

Thus the scientists who have discarded belief in matter still believe in energy.

The latter has become their ultimate 'stuff'. But the energy out of which they

would derive the world, is as uncertain as matter. For when we ask for its

production we get only its supposed " transformations " , that is, sound, heat,

light, etc. We do not find a pure energy-in-itself. Why? Because it is a

conceptual creation useful only for practical purposes. Scientists have never

perceived it. All that they have perceived of it are its 'appearances' of sound,

light, heat, etc., but never the isolated energy itself. As a detectable

reality, it is still as uncatchable as matter. As a mathematical theory for

practical purposes and as a calculator's symbol for technological purposes it

takes a useful place, but it is still a supposition. It is supposed to work

behind the universal movement, but it has never yet been exposed to view.

 

In the end, the final justification of the materialist is not reason, as he so

fondly thinks, but mere belief. For it is only by an act of simple faith that he

accepts the testimony of sense-experience. The science of the nineteenth century

boasted that it alone dealt with the real world. The relativistic science of the

twentieth century has begun ruefully to admit that it can deal only with a world

of abstractions. For it has found that it is handling only some particular

characteristics of a thing--nothing more--and certainly not the thing in itself.

It is steadily moving in a particular direction which will compel it--and this

prediction will be fulfilled during our century--in the end to see, through its

own facts and its own reasoning, that the world-stuff is of the same tissue as

that out of which our own ideas are made. It will then be seen that energy is

not the prime root of the universe, that ultimate reality being mental in

character cannot be limited to it and that it is but one of the chief aspects of

this reality and not an independent power in itself. Mind is itself the source

of the energy to which science would reduce the universe. (p.25) Energy will be

found, in short, to be an attribute of mind, something possessed by mind in the

same way that the power to speak is possessed by man. This is not of course that

feeble thing which is all we humans usually know of mind and which is but a

shadow, but the reality which casts the shadow, the universal Mind behind all

our little minds which we shall shortly study here.

 

Modern science began by studying and describing the properties of things; it can

end only by discovering their ultimate substance. But in order to attain this

end it is slowly being forced, by the revolutionary significance of its own

discoveries, to turn a somersault which will land it in metaphysics. In the end

its final conclusions must merge themselves into those of metaphysics, which has

found out that matter is nothing more than a mere verbal invention and that

energy is nothing more than the activity of mind.

 

The Wisdom of the Overself, Chapter 11, p. 23-25

Dr. Paul Brunton

Samuel Weiser, Inc., York Beach, Maine

ISBN 0-87728-591-8

Library of Congress Catalog No. 83-60833