The Meaning of Mentalism - Part 4

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Dear All,

 

We concluded Part 4 with Dr. Paul Brunton's words of:

 

(p.25) 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. 25.

 

Here now, is Part 5.

 

Enjoy,

 

violet

 

 

 

The Meaning of Mentalism - Part 4

 

(p.25) Scientists may well tell us after deep research that all physical

substance is in incessant motion and that its atoms are congeries [collections]

of whirling energies, but all the same we really do see solid and stable things.

No argument can do away with the plain fact of this everyday experience. We

stand in the presence of a startling paradox. How shall it be resolved? Can we

take two conceptions which stand so far apart, so widely opposite, and bring

them together? The answer is yes. Sunlight, when passed through a clear glass

prism, turns out to be not what it seems for it breaks up into seven colors. A

diamond scintillates in the light yet it has the same chemical constitution as a

piece of black charcoal. First sight is therefore not necessarily true sight.

The senses can tell us something about things as they appear to be but little

about things as they really are. And if we turn back to the first volume of this

work we can learn through the investigation of illusions that it is perfectly

possible to see different forms and shapes which have no other existence than

mental existence.

 

If we see a thing at perfect rest and science tells us it is really in a state

of perpetual restlessness, then we are entitled to conclude that the anomaly is

caused by the limitations of our own perceptions which in the end are only our

own consciousness. The stability which we see cannot be anything else than a

mentally constructed one. We are entitled to relegate the thing's actuality to

the realm where it must have always been, namely, of the mind. (p.26) This is

the fundamental meaning of all changes of form as it is the fundamental

explanation of all relativity. The paradox becomes rationally explicable and

thus disappears if we realize that when our experience of the time-space-matter

world is traced to its hidden origin, it reveals itself as mentally made.

 

Thinking and feeling make up the world we know, for every sensation is thought

or felt as such. In what, apart from the entire congeries of ideas and emotions,

does this world consist? There is nothing else. There is no physical world in

the sense in which the unenlightened man assumes there is one. There is only a

continuous series of thoughts which manifest themselves from moment to moment

except in dreamless sleep. Perception and thought are but phases of the mind's

action with the first depending on the last. We think and the world appears. We

lapse into thoughtlessness, and the world disappears. The conclusion that the

mind and the world are inextricably intertwined is inescapable. When we make a

final analysis of the whole world, it is found to be of very different stuff

from that which it appears to be. For every individual material object from

solid rock to fleecy cloud, resolves itself into a fragment of mind, i.e., an

idea. The immense multitude of such fragments whose totality forms the universe

are nothing else than varying modifications of a single original element --

Mind. We must glimpse this great truth that Mind, as a non-material essence, is

the ultimate being out of which both energy and matter have been born.

 

The World's Relativity

 

Mentalism derives its name from its fundamental principle that Mind is the only

reality, the only substance, the only existence; things being our ideas and

ideas find their support in our mind. Mentalism in short is the doctrine that in

the last analysis there is nothing but Mind.

 

Experience certainly seems to place things outside it but the mentalist analysis

reveals that they are mental products and hence we cannot really step outside

them - because we cannot step outside our mind. It was shown in the first

volume, when considering the enigmatic existence of the world and when turning

the searchlight of scientific examination upon the working of our five senses,

that the objects of which they become aware have their place only in the mind

and that the whole world is a mentally constructed one. (p.27) It was not

possible however in such an introductory book to provide adequate explanation

and final proof of this doctrine of mentalism - so startling and so unbelievable

as it seems when first heard of - or to clear up some inevitable difficulties

and explore fully into its profounder significance. The present work may help to

fill this gap.

 

When we look more deeply into the physical world, whether it be in the form of

common experience or in the form of scientific revaluation of that experience,

we find that it is really the world of what our senses tell us. Our senses can

only tell us about the colour, size, bulk, weight, form, hardness, temperature

and other properties of a thing; they can not tell us that there is also a

separate stuff or 'matter' which exhibits these properties. When we say that

there is such a stuff we are merely stating an opinion, not a piece of

knowledge. For when we look more deeply into what the senses tell us we find

that it is what our own minds tell us.

 

Everyone grants that we are aware of things in the world only in the way in

which our senses are aware of the properties they exhibit. But the mere physical

contact of the senses and their environment does not suffice to produce such

awareness. Something more is needed. Only as we are mentally conscious of what

the senses tell us are we conscious of the world at all. Strive as we may, do

what we like, it will always be impossible to get over this 'mentalness' of the

only world about which we have any right to talk. Not even materialists can get

over it. Not even they can show us a world entirely free from such 'mentalness'.

 

The term 'mentalism' as used here does not mean the half-baked form which, under

the name of 'objective idealism', some of its elementary tenets have assumed in

the doctrines of a number of Western and Indian metaphysicians who have only

half-overcome the materialistic tendencies of their outlook. They distinguish

between mental things and material things and say that although we can know only

the former, the co-existence of their material external counterparts must still

be admitted. By mentalism we mean more precisely this: 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 existence is nothing but a mental experience and not merely a mental

representation of a separate material existence; that we can arrive at such

conclusions not only by a straight-line sequence of reasoned thinking but also

by a reorientation of consciousness during advanced mystical meditation.

 

(p.28) But the materialist in his turn may now put in a pertinent nose to allege

that mentalism would theoretically blot out the entire existence of the universe

before it could appear in a perceiving mind, for whilst the planet was

uninhabited during tremendous periods of geologic time there would exist no

human being to think of it, no idea to represent it. Therefore it could not be

accounted for! Here too the orthodox religious critic may object that no human

observer could ever have observed either the event of divine creation or the

period of planetary preparation which followed it - for human beings had yet to

be created by God - and consequently no human mind could have personally known

anything about it at the time; thus no idea of it could have come into

existence.

 

Some preface is necessary before this criticism can be answered. Now whether we

view the present-day world which is perceived by the senses as consisting of so

many separate ideas in consciousness or as so many separate appearances to an

observer, we cannot bring it to stand utterly alone and isolated in a

self-dependent existence. Something unifies all these shifting items of

experience, tethers all these varied external events together. When we work out

their significance we find that this thread on which they are strung is the mind

which knows them. Some perceiving mind must always be present at the same time

along with them for they are in it and of it. The sequence of experiences gets

its continuity from the experiencing mind's own continuity. There is no

self-sustained reality, no independent existence in the 'known' world--which is

the only one we can intelligently consider--apart from mind. Whatever is

thought, felt or observed is somehow related to a mind which thinks feels or

observes.

 

To believe that ideas can exist separately without a thinking being to hold or

generate them is to believe an absurdity. We get the knowledge of the world's

existence through the five senses only because we also get the knowledge that we

ourselves exist. Ideas cannot hang in the empty air. They must have a ground

upon which to rest. That ground is there always, whether it supports thoughts or

not. (p.29) It is this mental principle which enables us to doubt the face-value

of material appearances because their own existence refers to it. To think of

the world at all pre-supposes the simultaneous existence of a thinking mind.

 

Now the thinking self is surrounded by the not-self, that is, by everything

external to its body. Whatever is included within this external sphere is called

the world. The two cannot be separated. The very idea of a self implies its

being distinguished from what is not the self, that is, what is external to it.

Therefore both pre-suppose each other's existence. The self exists through its

world and its world exists through it; both are inter-locked. For although

'felt' 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. Actuality does not yet permit us to separate this relation

between the two. They are always present together in ordinary consciousness,

never in our common experience is the mere self alone.

 

Much of the materialism which professes itself unable to understand mentalism

because it is blinded by what it feels to be the striking contrast of outside

things to inside thoughts, is due to the neglect of noticing that they are only

distinguishable but not separable from the knowing self. These two elements in

any kind of experience--the knowing self and the known not-self--always stand as

contraries but this does not prevent them from being in indissoluble union in

every act of awareness of such experience. They may seem apart in space but they

are not apart in the awareness itself. A thing cannot be disconnected from some

knowing consciousness and our studies in illusion have shown that this

'mentalness' need not prevent it from being experienced as external to the body.

 

Thus whatever we experience is always coupled along with the experiencing self,

or, in the more technical language of Einstein, the observer enters into every

observation. Hence the two are inseparably coupled in each indivisible moment of

individual consciousness. The belief that the world-idea can exist without being

present to some such consciousness is absurd.

 

With this preamble it is time to take up our critics' objections again. The

nebula which cooled down into the solar system, deposited its strata and

upheaved its mountain ranges, no less than the gigantic dinosaurs and myriad

herds of vanished animals, are said to have preceded us in time. (p.30) The

sciences of geology, astronomy and biology have painted a fascinating picture of

the prehistoric past for us. But it is still only a picture. And what else than

consciousness now renders it existent to us? We forget that after all these are

only our mental reconstructions, that is our imaginations. All that we know of

the Stone Age in Europe, for example, is something constructed by our

imagination. We imaginatively depict it as being abruptly seen by someone. The

fact of an imagination existing points beyond itself to the existence of a mind.

The fact of an appearance points to a living observer of this appearance.

Neither an imagination nor an appearance can be accounted for unless it is

traced to some such consciousness.

 

If the principle of relativity when thoroughly understood has revealed each

thing as an appearance, the latter implies the existence of some thinking being

to whom it appears. What is said about the world's earlier life by the physical

and biological sciences, for instance, cannot be said save as implying the

presence of an unconsciously supposed living observer who is able to think it.

For how can the brown rocks and blue seas be thought of at all unless they are

thought of as being seen? And how can anything be seen at all unless it is seen

in someone's consciousness? The two things - scene and sight, the existent and

the known - exist in an almost mystical union. Whom Nature hath joined together

let no man put asunder! Has not the teaching of relativity revealed that,

consciously or unconsciously, the observer is always there in every act of

perception as in every act of description?

 

It should now be clear that in the objections raised by both the materialist and

religious critics, there is present an unreckoned observer, for even when they

think of a time when the planet was uninhabited they are only thinking of it in

terms of some mind's perception of it; nor is it possible for them to do

otherwise. A planet apart from such perception simply does not and cannot exist.

By sheer necessity, they unconsciously place themselves or else some imagined

living observer in a perceptive relation with the uninhabited planet and then

only proceed to talk about it! They can think of no existence which is not known

existence. (p.31) The world-scene from which they believe they have conveniently

eliminated an observer, presupposes by its very existence the co-existence of

such an observer! Whoever sets out to mention or describe an uninhabited world

or an unvisited scene is forced to assume as the basis of his reference the

presence of someone who experiences either world or scene.

 

The Wisdom of the Overself, Chapter 11, p. 25-31

Dr. Paul Brunton

Samuel Weiser, Inc., York Beach, Maine

ISBN 0-87728-591-8

Library of Congress Catalog No. 83-60833