Atheists who demand all their cult members excommunicate freethinkers hypocritically protest Irish Blasphemy Laws
fasgnadh
> Free Lunch gets in trouble with atheist Commisars for speaking:
>> On Sun, 03 Jan 2010 23:27:40 GMT, fasgnadh <fasg...@yahoo.com.au> wrote
>> in alt.atheism:
>>
>>> Dakota wrote:
>>>
>>>> Any religion that calls for the indoctrination of children is clearly
>>>> employing oppressive psychological manipulation.
>>>
>>> Forced indoctrination in atheism in in the USSR, Maoist China, Pol Pot's
>>> Cambodia, and other atheist regimes
>>
>> Of course we all know that the indoctrination was in Communism, not
>> atheism.
Rubbish! CHILDREN were forcibly indoctrinated in atheism:
"Atheism is the natural and inseparable part of Communism."
-Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin)
http://www.atheistnexus.org/photo/2182797:Photo:8295?context=latest
http://www.atheistnexus.org/photo/2182797:Photo:8290?context=latest
"Our program necessarily includes the propaganda of atheism."
- Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin)
But it was not just the Atheism of the leadership,
but of the entire State apparatus;
"the state established atheism as the only scientific truth."
- Daniel Peris,
"Storming the Heavens: The Soviet League of the Militant Godless"
Cornell University Press 1998 ISBN 9780801434853
"Criticism of atheism was strictly forbidden"
"Between 1917 and 1940, 130,000 Orthodox priests were arrested.
In 1918, the Cheka under Felix Dzerzhinsky executed over
3000 Orthodox clergymen of all ranks.
Some were drowned in ice-holes or poured over with cold water
in winter until they turned to ice-pillars.
- John Shelton Curtis, The Russian Church and the Soviet State
(Boston: Little Brown, 1953)
The Atheist leadership's policies were implemented under
the Red Terror, via gulags and executions, the use of
every arm of the state for anti-religious propaganda
and the forced indoctrination of CHILDREN! B^[
>> Does that matter to you?
Yes, it is abhorrent.
The Qu'ran say "There must be no compulsion in religion.
The Majority Religious societies we live in are democratic and free,
preserving rights to think, believe and speak...
But EVERY atheist regime was a brutal, oppressive tyranny!
And any atheist who went against the Central Committee
could be excommunicated for NOT TOEING THE PARTY LINE:
> Why is anybody still responding to, and therefore making visible again to
> those who've already plonked it, (not to mention ecouraging it), that
> particular attention-seeking idiot?
According to atheist Group-Think, the entire atheist Borg must obey
the Central Committee and not talk to free thinkers who have
been excommunicated.. lest they be plonked themselves! 8^p
In the old days they would have just Shot HIM! 8^p
> Just sayin'...
And these hypocrites pretend they support FREE SPEECH??
BWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAAHA
Their response to ideas they can't deal with is ABUSE,
SLANDER, POST FORGING, and ANYTHING ELSE TO SILENCE,
not debate, those with rational points of view!!!!! B^p
--
alt.atheism FAQ:
http://altatheismfaq.blogspot.com/
http://groups.google.com.au/group/alt.atheism/msg/7c0978c14fd4ed37?hl=en&dmode=source
"Atheism is the natural and inseparable part of Communism."
-Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin)
http://www.atheistnexus.org/photo/2182797:Photo:8295?context=latest
http://www.atheistnexus.org/photo/2182797:Photo:8290?context=latest
"Our program necessarily includes the propaganda of atheism."
- Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin)
http://www.atheistnexus.org/photo/2182797:Photo:6348?context=latest
http://www.atheistnexus.org/photo/2182797:Photo:17478?context=latest
"How can you make a revolution without firing squads?"
- Lenin
http://www.atheistnexus.org/photo/2182797:Photo:17475?context=latest
http://www.c96trading.com/Nagant_NKVD_300h.jpg
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/telegraph/multimedia/archive/01001/Tsar-family_1001874c.jpg
fasgnadh
> On Jan 3, 6:27 pm, fasgnadh <fasgn...@yahoo.com.au> wrote:
>> Dakota wrote:
>>> Any religion that calls for the indoctrination of children is clearly
>>> employing oppressive psychological manipulation.
>>
>> Forced indoctrination in atheism in in the USSR, Maoist China, Pol Pot's
>> Cambodia, and other atheist regimes
>
> Orthodox Church in Russia.
Oh you poor ignorant atheist imbecile.. 'Russia' is NOT the USSR! B^]
China is NO LONGER Maoist! B^]
And you simply don't have a clue; B^D
With the Catastrophic failure of state atheism in the Union of Savage
Slaughter and Repression(USSR) and Mao's Cultural Devolution and Great
Leap Backward.. BOTH of those former atheist states have EMBRACED
religion, and hundreds of MILLIONS of former atheists have become believers:
"With the gradual liberalisation that developed with
Deng Xiaoping's open door reforms, religion was no
longer proscribed. In 1982, the constitution was
amended to allow Chinese people considerable freedom
of religion."
http://cbbc.org/china_guide/religion.html
"At the first world Buddhism forum in East China's Zhejiang
Province last year, the Chinese government acknowledged
the active role religion plays in building a harmonious society."
"For example, religious beliefs have helped cut down crime
to a large extent,"
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2007-02/07/content_802994.htm
"religion has been enjoying a resurgence in China over the
past 20 years, as Communist Party disapproval has eased"
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6337627.stm
"Religious believers thrice the estimate
By Wu Jiao (China Daily)
"A survey has found that the number of religious believers
is three times bigger than the official estimate.
The poll of about 4,500 people, conducted by professors Tong
Shijun and Liu Zhongyu of Shanghai-based East China Normal
University from 2005 till recently, found that 31.4 percent
of Chinese aged 16 and above or about 300 million are religious."
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2007-02/07/content_802994.htm
Incredible! in just a few short years the new converts from
atheism In JUST ONE COUNTRY, far outnumber the slow increase
in tiny atheist numbers in the rest of the WORLD! B^D
BWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAAHAA
# Subject: Re: US religious now at 85% - It's GOD in a LANDSLIDE!!!
# -Atheists wallow at 2.3% worldwide, 0.7% in the USA! -a pitiful
# fraction of the minority of non-believers! B^D
#
# From: fasgnadh <fasg...@yahoo.com.au>
# Newsgroups:
# alt.atheism,aus.religion,alt.religion,aus.politics,
# alt.politics.republicans, alt.politics.democrats,uk.politics.misc
# Message-ID: <8QNtl.26734$cu.1...@news-server.bigpond.net.au>
# Date: Wed, 11 Mar 2009 12:07:32 GMT
#
# American Religious Identification Survey, Summary Report March 2009:
#
# "Self-identification of U.S. Adult Population by Religious Tradition
#
# 2001 2008
#
# Religious 167,254,000 (80%) 182,198,000 (80%)
#
# Agnostics 991,000 (0.5%) 1,985,000 (0.9%)
#
# Atheists 902,000 (0.4%) 1,621,000 (0.7%)
#
#
#
# BWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAAHAHAHAAHAHAA!
#
#
# 0.7% of Americans!! B^D 2.3% worldwide!!! B^D
#
# 'NON-RELIGIOUS' DOES NOT = ATHEIST, YOU DISHONEST CRETINS!
#
#
# EVEN THE AGNOSTICS BEAT YOU!!! **AND** they grew FASTER!!!! B^D
> JohnN
You must feel pretty humiliated right about now.
Seon Ferguson
why do you hate free speech?
fasgnadh
fasgnadh wrote:
> JohnN defends the indoctrination of children by atheists Lenin/MAo:
>> On Jan 3, 6:27 pm, fasgnadh <fasgn...@yahoo.com.au> wrote:
>>> Dakota wrote:
>>>> Any religion that calls for the indoctrination of children is clearly
>>>> employing oppressive psychological manipulation.
> >>
>>> Forced indoctrination in atheism in in the USSR, Maoist China, Pol Pot's
>>> Cambodia, and other atheist regimes
>>
>> I'm sure this is news to the millions of Muslims in China and the
>> Orthodox Church in Russia.
Oh you poor ignorant atheist imbecile.. 'Russia' is NOT the USSR! B^]
China is NO LONGER Maoist! B^]
And you simply don't have a clue; B^D
And NO OTHER ATHEIST WILL CORRECT YOU, because they are
ALL as ignorant as you:
http://cbbc.org/china_guide/religion.html
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2007-02/07/content_802994.htm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6337627.stm
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2007-02/07/content_802994.htm
BWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAAHAA
>> JohnN
> any way,
Any way.. we have had NOTHING but complete BULLSHIT from lying
atheists.. what more can they make up to distract from the
GREATEST, MOST PROLONGED MASS INDOCTRINATION OF CHILDREN
IN HISTORY:
The atheist indoctrination in the USSR, Maoist China,
Pol Pot's Cambodia and North Korea.
And atheists IGNORE it, to whine about laws which only
come into effect if they deliberately OFFEND others! pffft!
Weak as piss! B^[
> the difference is not state but parents who are mostly doing
> the religious indoctrination on their kids.
So how do you know it's taking place.. cameras in homes?
WHERE'S YOUR PROOF of this alleged 'indoctrination' by parents,
and why would you think that is worse than atheist re-education
camps in the USSR or under Maoism?
> It is not much different.
Except I have copious PROOF of the SYSTEMATIC atheist state
propaganda and indoctrination and all you have given us
is you BELEIFS and OPINIONS! Worthless without PROOF!
And atheists NEVER have any for THEIR beliefs! B^]
# http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_atheism#Wolak2004
#
# "State atheism is the official promotion of atheism
# by a government, typically by active suppression of
# religious freedom and practice."
# - "Protest for Religious Rights in the USSR:
# Characteristics and Consequences,
# David Kowalewski,
# Russian Review, Vol. 39, No. 4 (Oct., 1980), pp. 426-441,
#
#
# "An atheist, Pol Pot suppressed Cambodia�s Buddhist religion:
# monks were defrocked; temples and artifacts, including statues of
# Buddha, were destroyed; and people praying or expressing
# other religious sentiments were often killed.
# ...the government emptied the cities through mass evacuations
# and sent people to the countryside. Cambodians were overworked
# and underfed on collective farms, often succumbing to disease or
# starvation as a result. Spouses were separated and family meals
# prohibited in order to steer loyalties toward the state
# instead of the family.
#
# About 1.7 million Cambodians, or about 20 percent of the population,
# were worked, starved, or beaten to death under Pol Pot�s regime."
# - http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761579038/pol_pot.html
#
# The Cambodian Genocide:
http://www.lietuvos.net/istorija/communism/communism_photos2/392millones.jpg
#
# "The country's 40,000 to 60,000 Buddhist monks,
# regarded by the regime as social parasites,
# were defrocked and forced into labor brigades.
# Many monks were executed; temples and pagodas were
# destroyed or turned into storehouses or jails.
# Images of the Buddha were defaced and dumped into
# rivers and lakes. People who were discovered praying
# or expressing religious sentiments in other ways
# were often killed.
#
# The Christian and Muslim communities were among the most
# persecuted, as well. The Roman Catholic cathedral of
# Phnom Penh was completely razed.
#
# The Khmer Rouge forced Muslims to eat pork, which they
# regard as an abomination. Many of those who refused were killed.
# Christian clergy and Muslim imams were executed."
# - http://countrystudies.us/cambodia/29.htm
#
# "Forty-eight percent of Cambodia's Christians were killed
# because of their religion."
#
http://www.lietuvos.net/istorija/communism/communism_photos2/44camboyano.jpg
#
#
# "the state established atheism as the only scientific truth."
# - Daniel Peris,
# "Storming the Heavens: The Soviet League of the Militant Godless"
# Cornell University Press 1998 ISBN 9780801434853
#
#
# "State atheism has been mostly implemented in communist
# countries, such as the former Soviet Union,[1] China,
# Communist Albania, Communist Afghanistan, North Korea,
# Communist Mongolia and Poland under communist rule also
# promoted state atheism and suppressed religion.
# - Forced out: the fate of Polish Jewry in Communist Poland.
# Wolak, Arthur J. p 104
#
# In these nations, the governments viewed atheism as an
# intrinsic part of communist ideology.
> geode
Atheists all choose to live in open, free, democratic
MAJORITY RELIGIOUS societies, neve in some atheist state
shithole. Why is that? Apart from the obvious HYPOCRISY
which afflicts you all.
Virgil
fasgnadh <fasg...@yahoo.com.au> wrote:
> >> I'm sure this is news to the millions of Muslims in China and the
> >> Orthodox Church in Russia.
>
>
> Oh you poor ignorant atheist imbecile.. 'Russia' is NOT the USSR!
Is Fasgnadh saying that what was in Russia before the revolution was
somehow outside of the USSR after it?
> # From: fasgnadh <fasg...@yahoo.com.au>
> # Newsgroups:
> # alt.atheism,aus.religion,alt.religion,aus.politics,
> # alt.politics.republicans, alt.politics.democrats,uk.politics.misc
> # Message-ID: <8QNtl.26734$cu.1...@news-server.bigpond.net.au>
> # Date: Wed, 11 Mar 2009 12:07:32 GMT
> #
> # American Religious Identification Survey, Summary Report March 2009:
> #
# American Religious Identification Survey, Summary Report March 2009:
#
# "Self-identification of U.S. Adult Population by Religious Tradition
#
# 2001 2008 % Increase
#
# Non- religious 29,481,000 (14.1%) 34,169,000 (15%) 15.88%
#
# Religious 167,254,000 (80%) 182,198,000 (80%) 8.93%
#
# Agnostics 991,000 (0.5%) 1,985,000 (0.9%) 100.30%
#
# Atheists 902,000 (0.4%) 1,621,000 (0.7%) 79.71%
#
> GREATEST, MOST PROLONGED MASS INDOCTRINATION OF CHILDREN
> IN HISTORY:
That would be the Roman Catholic Church over millennia.
>
> WHERE'S YOUR PROOF of this alleged 'indoctrination' by parents,
Ask any RC parent whether his children are being given such "education",
and they will tell you all about it.
But there is a better way, of Good without God:
In article
<da5b25cb-e210-40f1...@r5g2000yqb.googlegroups.com@,
Immortalist <reanima...@yahoo.com@ wrote:
@ ...an alternative to traditional religion by the Humanist chaplain at
@ Harvard University
@
@ With the current state of the economy, the ongoing wars that rage
@ across the globe, and the unsettling changes to the earth's climate,
@ questions about the role of God and religion in world affairs have
@ never been more relevant or felt more powerfully. Many of us are
@ searching for a place where we can find not only facts and scientific
@ reason but also hope and the moral courage needed to overcome such
@ challenges. For some, answers to the most challenging questions are
@ found in the divine. For others, including the New Atheists, religion
@ has no place in the world and is, in fact, an "enemy."
@
@ But in Good Without God, Greg Epstein presents another, more balanced
@ and inclusive response: Humanism. With a focus on the positive, he
@ highlights humanity's potential for goodness and the ways in which
@ Humanists lead lives of purpose and compassion. Humanism can offer the
@ sense of community we want and often need in good times and bad, as we
@ celebrate marriages and the birth of our children, and as we care for
@ those who are elderly or sick. In short, Humanism teaches us that we
@ can lead good and moral lives without supernaturalism, without higher
@ powers . . . without God.
@
@ In this constructive response not only to his fellow atheists Richard
@ Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris but also to contemporary
@ religious leaders such as Rick Warren and Jim Wallis, Epstein makes a
@ bold claim for what nonbelievers do share and believe. At a time when
@ the debate about morality rages more fiercely than ever�and when
@ millions are searching for something they can put their faith in�
@ Humanism offers a comfort and hope that affirms our ability to live
@ ethical lives of personal fulfillment, aspiring together for the
@ greater good of all.
@
http://www.amazon.com/Good-Without-God-Billion-Nonreligious/dp/0061670111
Virgil
fasgnadh <fasg...@yahoo.com.au> wrote:
> Rubbish! CHILDREN were forcibly indoctrinated in theism
And those who aren't don't become theists.
>
> And these hypocrites pretend they support FREE SPEECH??
Those who fight for free speech, like the Irish atheists who challenge
laws designed to squelch it, do more for it than even Fasgnadh can do
against it/.
> Their response to ideas they can't deal with
It is their brave response to attempts to limit free speech that
fasgnadh is objecting to.
January 1, 2010
Atheist Ireland Publishes 25 Blasphemous Quotes
Filed under: Atheist Ireland, Campaign, Freedom of Speech, Is this
Blasphemy?, Quotes — Michael Nugent @ 12:33 am
From today, 1 January 2010, the new Irish blasphemy law becomes
operational, and we begin our campaign to have it repealed. Blasphemy is
now a crime punishable by a €25,000 fine. The new law defines blasphemy
as publishing or uttering matter that is grossly abusive or insulting in
relation to matters held sacred by any religion, thereby intentionally
causing outrage among a substantial number of adherents of that
religion, with some defences permitted.
This new law is both silly and dangerous. It is silly because medieval
religious laws have no place in a modern secular republic, where the
criminal law should protect people and not ideas. And it is dangerous
because it incentivises religious outrage, and because Islamic States
led by Pakistan are already using the wording of this Irish law to
promote new blasphemy laws at UN level.
We believe in the golden rule: that we have a right to be treated
justly, and that we have a responsibility to treat other people justly.
Blasphemy laws are unjust: they silence people in order to protect
ideas. In a civilised society, people have a right to to express and to
hear ideas about religion even if other people find those ideas to be
outrageous.
For more of this, see:
http://blasphemy.ie/2010/01/01/atheist-ireland-publishes-25-blasphemous-q
uotes/
Virgil
fasgnadh <fasg...@yahoo.com.au> wrote:
> Dakota wrote:
>> Any religion that calls for the indoctrination of children is clearly
>> employing oppressive psychological manipulation.
And Fasgnadh would impose such evil on all children.
Special Care
http://www.hyponoesis.org/html/brunton.html
Paul Brunton: THE MEANING OF MENTALISM
WE MUST begin to philosophise with the hard facts of experience, not
with the unchecked presuppositions 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. 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 superhuman 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. 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.
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 arid 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. 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.
We cannot trust our eyes and ears and hands in this matter for their
range is too limited to show us the true 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! This 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. 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 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 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. The worlds 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. leer 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 adroit 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 own 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 ;educe the universe. 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.
Scientists may well tell us after deep research that all physical
substance is in incessant motion and that its atoms are congeries 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. 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 eve 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 leases 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 ~ 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; thinks being
our ideas and ideas finding 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. 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 the 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 not only by a straight-
line sequence of reasoned thinking but also by a reorientation of
consciousness during advanced mystical meditation.
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. 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 presuppose
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. 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 bath 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. The world-scene from which
they believe they have conveniently eliminated an observer,
presupposes by its very existence the coexistence 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.
It is quite a misconception of the position of mentalism to make it
assert that the world does not exist when we are not thinking of it or
that a mountain disappears when there is no man to behold it but
revives again when somebody is present! This is only the critic's
assertion of what he wrongly believes mentalism to be. What mentalism
really asserts is that the world's existence in itself without a
knowing mind alongside it con never be established. Every materialist
unconsciously assumes the presence of such a mind when he assumes that
the world can exist independently. A world which is not an object of
consciousness has y et to be found. Even when he thinks the world away
from himself and foolishly believes that it is still present
independently of a percipient mind, he is quite unaware of the fact
that he is setting up an invisible spectator to whom it must appear as
the world. Let him try to talk of a bygone planetary scene or an
unvisited polar region without talking of it in terms of some being's
perception of it; the feat cannot be done.
If finally it be objected that the world does not actually disappear
from existence when we cease to think it, as during deep sleep for
example, the answer is that if by this the critic means that it does
not disappear for the sleeping man then the objection is utterly
inadmissible, but if he means it continues to exist for those who are
awake the mentalist must agree with him completely in this. What he
overlooks in the former case is that the thesis still remains for he
has again unconsciously thought an imaginary spectator into being and
made him the unsleeping observer of the world, which now exists in the
mind of this imagined percipient.
Finally let us not forget what is an irreversible law of all world
experience: full suspension of the mind's activity results in sleep or
coma, full resumption of it in wakefulness. The deduction must
therefore be made that the mind's activity, namely, thinking, is
indissolubly connected with the experience of the world that comes
with wakeful state. Indeed, it is this very activity that gives rise
to such experience. For mind and nothing else contributes all the
elements of its own experience. And this is all that mentalism claims,
that the known and existent coincide and defy the efforts of the
keenest intelligence to sunder them.
If we really try to think of a mindless world, we find the feat to be
an impossible one. For existence pre-supposes life of some sort and
life pre-supposes intelligence of some sort, too. And intelligence
indicates of course the presence of mind. Consequently, if we take
mind out of the world, we are forced to take away the world itself.
There is then only an utter blankness. If we understand this, then the
question what happens to the world during the inter-perceptual
intervals between the periods of actual awareness of its presence and
the kindred question of how a pre-historic uninhabited planet could
have been observed become impossible and consequently unaskable ones.
The questions are wrongly put: they presuppose what cannot be admitted
and no answer is therefore possible. An unobserved landscape itself
certainly ceases to exist for us the moment we turn away and cease to
see it but a similar idea may continue to have an independent
existence in other observing minds. But the problem involved can be
reshaped and re-expressed in other terms: What mind is involved in
these cases?
After all, this world in which we live move and have our being every
moment and every hour, comes to our notice only because our body is
sensitive to it in five different ways, because we feel, see, hear,
smell and taste it. Its colours shapes and distances, for example,
exist for us only because they exist for our eyes. They are
experiences of the eyes; they are sense-impressions. But sense
impressions are themselves meaningless if they are not supported by or
given to an individual mind which has them. If the reality of the
known world lies in sense-impressions, then the reality of such
impressions lies in a living mind. The individual, therefore, stands
behind the world although, paradoxically, he is also included in the
world.
This paradox must be cleared. For if we make the mind of an individual
the sole source of his experience, then we fall into the piquant
situation of making him the sole creator and governor of this vast and
varied cosmos of shooting stars and circling planets. But this is an
absurdity. His mind may issue a decree but a tree will refuse to turn
into a river at his bidding. It stubbornly remains a tree. Therefore
it is clear that there must be another factor somehow present
underneath the individual experience of the world, a creative and
contributive factor which is as beyond his control as it is beyond his
consciousness. It is to the united activity of these two elements -
the individual and the unknown super-individual - that we must look
for an intelligible explanation of the existence and structure of the
experienced world. Thus although we started with sense-impressions as
our first view of what is real in the experienced world, we are
compelled to conclude with a superindividual mental factor as our
final view of what is real in it.
In the first volume it was no more than hinted that the uninhabited
early world must have been as much an object of consciousness to some
mind as is the inhabited world of to-day. The moment has come to step
across this gap in explanation. The statement in the eleventh chapter
of that volume must be expanded to lead the reader Lip to the higher
position which will now be unveiled.
It has been found that our sense-impressions do not arise from a
separate and external material world. They must therefore arise from a
creative power of our own minds which functions independently of our
intentions and above our conscious self. But although we know that our
own minds do play a subconscious part in the making of experience as
in their drawing upon the capital of previous experience, we cannot
squeeze the birth of things solely into our limited finite minds, do
what we may; no human being is personally and voluntarily responsible
for the world around him. And yet we are faced by the proven fact that
these things and this world are nothing other than thought structures
and their beginnings must be the product of some mind. There must be
an unknown cause for the constant succession of thought forms which
are presented to us for experience. This cause exists and must be
accounted for. The thought-forms which enter individual consciousness
must therefore be the mental correlate of a super-individual mind,
which possesses the power both to form them and to impose them on the
individual mind.
Why then should they not arise in a mind more unlimited than ours and
to which even now we unwittingly belong? Why should we limit mental
possibility to the little circle of one man's experience? Why should
we not conceive of the whole of things, selves and the world as being
originally thought into being by a super-human mind which exists in
intimate relation with our own. For we have no right to insist on
making the world an object of consciousness only to a being possessed
or the five senses, that is to say, only to a human or animal being.
This would be an anthropomorphism of experience, an illegitimate
setting up of a limited experience as being the highest possible form
of all experience.
Existence cannot be limited merely to what is given in human
sensations, to pictures of what is presented to the five sense organs
only. It is an error to limit existence to being a mere content of the
limited human consciousness. Even a little investigation shows how
absurdly limited this consciousness is for it cannot even see the
millions of beings inferior to man in the form of microbes which fill
the air. That a being superior to man may have a place in this varied
universe, must lie granted by the intelligent. Man cannot be the last
word in Nature.
The universe is ill a sorry state indeed if it has nothing better than
the present form of human consciousness to show for all its endless
travail, all its sharp pains. It is unreasonable to believe that when
there are a myriad different forms of life in the universe below man
in the scale of evolution, there cannot also be some other forms above
him, nay that there cannot also be some ultimate form of supreme
intelligence which takes a cosmic view of things? It would then be
impertinent indeed to foist on such a superior intelligence only the
senses developed by man's partial experience, when it could become
world-conscious in its own larger way.
It must be a universally diffused mind or it could not catty the
consciousness of the myriad things and beings in the world. It must be
a primal, permanent and self-subsistent one or it could not take in
all the changes and vicissitudes incessantly occurring within the
continuous duration of the world. It must always be linked with the
universe or it could not be an observer of the universe. It is such a
boundless mind which would be the necessary observer of an uninhabited
world or an unvisited scene. And not merely on the basis of right
reasoning alone but on the basis of ultra-mystic insight also, the
hidden teaching affirms the existence of such a supreme Mind.
We are not merely the self-absorbed witnesses of our own impressions
but also the co-sharers of a common experience. Despite the relativity
of detail in all observations made in time or space, a hill is not a
hill to one person and a river to another. Its general identity as a
hill is a fact for all observers. The sensations of millions of men
are connected and at least superficially alike for the same physical
universe presents itself to all. This connection indicates that they
have a common ground. The fact that similar perceptions of the
external world exist for others as for ourselves shows that we are all
bedded in one and the same constantly perceiving permanent Super-Mind.
A landscape present during wakefulness and also during dream will in
both cases appear externally in space. But whereas the first one will
be seen at the same time by all other creatures possessed of eyes who
happen to be there, the second one will be seen by ourself alone. For
the first scene originates independently of our personal thinking
whereas the second arises out of our personal thinking alone. This
difference is as important as is the similarity that both landscapes
are purely mental. It exists because we all live in a universe of
ideas and because the first landscape does not cease to exist for its
original thinker, the all-inclusive cosmic mind.
The same answer will fit the further objection that the world's
existence does not depend on our voluntary thinking, is not the
personally willed product of each isolated and individual mind, but is
forced upon the individual's senses, whether it please him or not.
Even those who can understand that mind is both actor and spectator in
this universal drama of lights, colours, sounds, smells and feels; who
can comprehend that the very act of thinking is a creative one
inasmuch as it manufactures its own time and space; who can appreciate
that the cosmos in its entirety is but a thought form and that nothing
can come into human experience which does not come as thought, cannot
understand how when they have no deliberate intention of creating a
world, their thinking can do so and yet remain wholly unaware of the
inner workings of the process when it is taking place. The world-image
floes not come into existence at their arbitrary will; it is something
given to them. They experience it within themselves alright but they
know they do not originate it.
The doctrine of a cosmic thinker, working' subconsciously behind the
individual mind in a manner shortly to be explained will fill this gap
in their understanding. They must here recognize the working of
another Mind upon their own. If the individual and his space-time
world are indissolubly joined; if it is the individual's consciousness
which by its very nature includes world; and if therefore
consciousness is the reality of both; this is because both are but
manifestations of a third thing which itself transcends them and which
must therefore be a higher form of consciousness. If the similarity of
sensations has to be accounted for, this arises because the higher
consciousness which stimulates all individual minds into the activity
of sense-perception is one and the same thing - a common universal
blind.
The world which spreads itself out before our gaze is thus an
intimation of the presence of an omnipresent Mind which imprints it OD
our senses from within. Every object is therefore not only an idea in
an individual mind but also in the universal one. For the latter is
not an arbitrary creator nor something separate from and independent
of the individual. Both contribute to the making of the individual's
world. How all this happens and the psychological process whereby the
individual mind receives these ideas is described in the following
chapter.
How is it that the world continues to exist during the many intervals,
such as sleep, when it has become non-existent in the sensations of
many individuals? How does the furniture in a closed room continue to
exist when there is no perceiving person inside the room itself? How
indeed did the whole cosmos exist before it existed in the sensations
of living creatures and how will such sentience continue after all
these creatures have perished? The only possible answer to all these
questions is that we must recognize a relation not only between the
world and the individual but also between the world and a universal
mind. Further, we must recognize that the mental operations of all men
are in the end related to each other and this is why they all see the
same world in the same space-time order.
What is this relation? It is nothing less than their own multiple
existence in a single larger Mind as thousands of cells exist in a
single larger body. That which determines one man's world experience
from within himself also determines another man's. There is indeed a
hidden unity enclosing all human minds as a larger circle encloses
many smaller concentric ones. Hence if an unvisited Polar region is
unknown and unthought by anyone else, it is at least known and thought
by the universal Mind. Its primal existence is not conferred by human
but by divine thought. A I thing is not solely an idea in an
individual consciousness even though it is this consciousness' own
idea. Therefore the mentalist need not deny the existence of all these
things which have not at any particular moment entered his field of
experience.
What shall we call this supreme Mind? Such a nebulous term as God must
first be defined before it can properly be used. But it has already
acquired so many different meanings in so many different intellects
that a definition which will be satisfactory to all is difficult,
perhaps impossible to find. Therefore we are justified in using a self-
explanatory term. And such a term - the World-Mind will henceforth be
used throughout this book to indicate this universal Intelligence. Put
into poetical language, the World-Mind is the Soul of Nature.
Can Things Be Thoughts?
But experience takes a twofold form. There are not only the things
which are presented to our attention by surrounding environment but
also the thoughts which we present to ourselves introspectively. How
can the external world, which is so obviously the same for all of us,
be placed on a level with the internal world of our personal and
arbitrary fancies? How can its rigid and unyielding form, which is
relatively at rest and stable, be equated with the plastic inward
world of thinking, which is pulsating in flux? Things are in a state
of fixity but the thoughts about them constantly change. The images
and ideas appear or vanish more or less according to our will and
yield themselves to our desires, whereas the sense-impressions are
more or less unaffected by our will or wish. Moreover the physical
world forces itself upon us independently of our control whereas the
imaginations about it are subject to our control. How is it possible
to bring into one and the same category an idea lice that of a memory
of a tree, which represents the inner process of knowing about a tree,
and the actual tree itself? Nobody finds that both the images of
individual fancy and the objects of bodily experience are the same in
his experience but everybody does feel a strongly- marked difference
between them.
This is perhaps one of the bulkiest stumbling-blocks in the path of
most students of this doctrine. It is indeed this striking contrast
which forces mankind to assume that the surrounding objects which make
up its earthly environment are substantial and real whereas it assumes
that thoughts, ideas, memories, and mental pictures are comparatively
unsubstantial and unreal. How then can they be one and the same in
substance?
The answer is that this distinction is certainly a genuine one but it
is only of degree and not of kind; it is a distinction without a
difference; it does not destroy the essentially mental character of
the world outside. What is usually called a thing is a creation, as
will be shown later, primarily of the cosmic mind. What is usually
called a thought is the creation solely of the human mind. But ideas
differ in the force, the intensity and the vividness with which they
arise in consciousness. Nevertheless they remain ideas. Although only
mentalists accept the objects of physical experience as mental states,
everybody without demur accepts the thoughts about them as such. Now
thoughts arise solely for the individual who has them whereas things
exist for all alike. This is the second important distinction between
them.
Why is there such obvious difference between the two categories of
experience if both are really mental in character? Why do we seem to
be so certain and definite about our experience of things? The answer
is that we experience the one under a different set of conditions from
the other, although both sets are purely mental. The difference
between material things and thoughts like recollected memories is
exactly like the difference between the experiences of wakefulness and
those of dream, that is the former are common to all but the latter
are quite private. The strength with which a sense- impression forces
itself upon us lies in its cosmic origin, the weakness with which a
fancy arises within us lies in its human origin. Thus, anyone can
reconstruct physical sensations by using memory images, but the
reconstructed sensations lack the sharpness, strength and actuality of
the original ones.
Ordinarily we do not grasp the fact that we are here dealing with a
difference only in the quality of our awareness but make the mistake
of believing it to be a complete difference in kind. It arises not
only because of the cosmic origin of our environment but also because
the mind is sharply and continuously focussed when outward-turned but
only vaguely and fitfully focussed when inward- turned. The
consequence of the first activity is external physical experience and
of the second, internal imaginative experience, but they are both of
the same ultimate mental tissue. Hence at certain moments of
heightened intensity even the thought-forms of the second group take
on all the compelling actuality of the first one. Such moments are
experienced by a lover separated from his beloved, by the poet painter
and novelist at the high points of their creative moods and by the
advanced mastic sunk in deep devoted contemplation on his ideal saint.
We need not deny that external things seem quite different from
internal thoughts but we must emphatically deny that - however heavy,
however solid they may be - they can possibly exist outside the mind's
own experience. The comparative weakness of private fancies, the
comparative strength of sense-impressions, and the undeniable
difference in sharpness, actuality and immediacy between these two
classes of thought, deceive us into non-recognition of their concealed
sameness, of the fundamental oneness of stuff out of which they are
wrought. This will also explain why the mind should split its activity
in such a manner that one type of experience is public whereas the
other is private and peculiar to personal outlook, character and
feeling. The World-Mind possesses the power to send forth its
imaginations, to project its thought constructions and to fill its own
seeming void with countless thoughts of things in such a way that they
are apprehended by all mankind. Each individual spontaneously receives
these ideas through his own mental operations. The stubborn
persistence of the world-idea, the similarity of the total impression
which it makes on countless minds, the sense-felt vividness and
concreteness of it, are really powerfully and mesmerically imposed
upon us. Our thoughts and fancies about it are relatively feebler and
fainter efforts. It is held to our gaze and experience by the World-
Mind's thinking as though it were stable and fixed and reflected
accordingly into our individual minds. We write 'as though, advisedly
because even this stability and fixity of the external world exist
only according to our own present time standards. What is fixed for a
million years by the reckoning of our finite mind can easily be
equated in World- Mind's thinking to a single second! For time is a
purely relative affair.
All such questions will however answer themselves as the present
exposition unfolds. They arise in the minds of people who have
consciously or unconsciously by setting up the existence of matter as
an entity by itself. They have in very fact imagined the materiality
of the world through taking it for granted, and are consequently the
victims of what they have themselves created. For life has planted
them in a universe of thoughts whereas they have taken it to be a
universe of matter!
What then is the essential difference between the idea of a remembered
episode which arises voluntarily in the mind and soon vanishes and the
idea of a lofty mountain which arises involuntarily in the mind and
persists throughout many human lifetimes? Both ideas are inevitably
and ultimately ephemeral, although the first may endure for a few
moments and the second for a few hundred thousand years. The felt
distinction between both blinds us to the fact that not only is the
act by which an object is known mental, but the object itself is
mental too. Whatever we perceive outside us is certainly outside the
body and in the place where we perceive it. But as the body, the thing
seen and the space in which both exist are themselves proven
fabrications of the mind, the ultimate view can only be that the whole
thing is an appearance in consciousness.
We know only our mental states, although some of them appear as
'things'. We see only our mental images, although some of them appear
to be outside. The man of the world receives a shock, which produces
laughter in most cases but terror in a few, when he is told that if he
stands aside in detachment from his experience, then all the pageant
of moving creatures, all the long lines of streets and houses which
environ him become only forms taken by his mind. For he believes this
to contradict every moment of his experience and to conflict with his
most cherished notions. Hence he refuses to turn an intellectual
somersault but immediately scorns such obvious nonsense. The doctrine
of the 'mentalness' of everything seems indeed at first sight to
involve such a reversal of his natural ways of thought as to be
assuredly an absurd one.
He has indeed to undo the work of vast periods of time, of prolonged
evolutionary epochs covering countless rebirths, when the need of
coping with external environment reigned imperiously above the need of
inward reflection about that environment and about himself. Thus arose
the habit of looking outward through the five senses alone, of taking
matter to be a real entity instead of taking it to be a thought, of
misunderstanding his own experience and being finally incredulous of
the fact that it is only a form of consciousness.
But why should the common-sense criterion of absurdity be regarded as
the final and conclusive one? It is the irony of human ignorance that
those who loudly assert the mentalist to be deluded, are themselves
steeped in delusion! For the essence of their error consists in
believing that when the mentalist denies the existence of matter he
also denies the existence of things and people or else turns them into
mere spectral ghosts of their former selves. On the contrary, he says
that they are certainly there. And he admits that they are present not
within our heads but outside them. Only, he points out, they are
mentally made. He does not deny the existence of solids liquids and
gases. Only, he remarks, they are mental existences. He accepts the
feeling of resistance and the touch of pressure as indicating the
presence of a solid body but declares that these feelings are really
sensations of the mind itself.
Just as a single seed may, as it grows and matures, show itself in a
variety of ways as stem, leaf, flower and fruit, all of which are so
different in our experience, so the mind shows itself too in a variety
of ways as substantial, fanciful, earthy, watery and gaseous, which
are admittedly different but our experiences of them are still no less
mental in origin. Just as the senses of sight touch and taste tell us
that fluid milk, soft butter, congealed cheese and solid bakelite seem
wholly different from each other whereas reason tells us that they are
only four successive forms of one and the same essential substance, so
the senses yield us many different kinds of experience but reason
tells us that they are only experiences of one consciousness, not of
different kinds of matter. Mind is like the one soil out of which all
the different grasses plants trees vegetables fruits and cereals grow.
Everything we see is generated by mind, however varied its appearances
may be.
Thus we may firmly grasp this bleat fact that the world is
externalized in and by the mind. All the differences between the
various elements such as water earth and air do not invalidate it
because they are really differences in mental experience. Mind may
wear a thousand disguises as widely different as stone and gas but we
must pierce through all to the hidden actor itself. Both stone and gas
exist only through and for our mind.
Nor does the mentalist deny the existence of all those things like
electrons and protons which science uses to explain the world-stuff
but he says that they too are ultimately ideas. His typewriter does
not change its nature as an item in his experience merely because he
has come to apprehend that in the end it is a thought-form. It remains
what it always has been and he continues to tap its keys as before. He
knows that his experience of the world, which includes his experiences
of its tangibility, even though they are not the direct products of
his own consciousness, are nevertheless the variations of it. He knows
too that the events which occur within that experience do not happen
to him from outside but rather from within his field of awareness.
It would be a gross error therefore to mistake mentalism as committing
itself to the doctrine of the world's non-existence. The mere
affirmation that the world is a form of thought definitely implies
that as thought - but not as an independent material entity - it must
certainly exist. The student must fully and clearly understand that
when it is said that matter as such is meaningless and non-existent,
we do not also say that the form of experience which passes itself off
as external is meaningless and non-existent.
He who can appreciate the truth of these statements will also
appreciate their astonishing consequences. Anybody who believes that
the innumerable forms of the material world and the countless phases
of existence are ultimately more than mental ones, believes in
materialism, even if he has read the New Testament, the Bhagavad Gita
and all the ancient and modern mystics. The well-known Indian doctrine
of 'maya,' when stripped of the thick growth of exuberant
mystification which entwines it, simply means that matter is an
illusion of the mind.
In what, finally, has the mentalist's progress consisted? Not in
moving from a lower reality to a higher one, but in moving from a
lower concept of reality to a higher one; that is, from matter to
consciousness itself. Yet the critic would foolishly tear out of
existence this one thing which alone makes that existence seem real,
this one principle which experience, rightly understood, presupposes!
We may deal with the admittedly hard problem of world existence in two
ways; we may either shelve it or solve it. The materialistic theory
pushes it behind an unknown and unknowable 'matter' and thus merely
shelves it, whereas the mentalistic theory actually solves it. Remove
thought and you remove things; annihilate mind and you annihilate
matter.
When a man first hears of mentalism he is opposed to it partly because
of its paradoxical unfamiliarity and partly because of his own deep-
rooted prejudice in favour of materialism. He does not like this
doctrine of mentalism because it rocks his sense of reality like an
earthquake. When however he has studied it a little this prejudice
begins to wither away and he becomes reconciled to the idea as a
possibility. When he has studied it thoroughly and experienced the
mentalness of the world in yoga contemplation or in moments of heavy
bereavement, the incontestable grandeur of this liberating doctrine
takes entire possession of his heart and mind. Even he who holds or
puts forward materialism, who says: "This is the universe as I define
and observe it," thereby interprets the universe and merely holds or
puts forward his idea of it. Could he but comprehend what he is doing,
he would comprehend that he is giving his assent to mentalism. He is
indeed, however much the fact be disguised from his own self, a
mentalist who has not yet risen to the level of reflective self-
awareness!
The outstanding consideration for all mentalists to-day is that
science has taken the first step towards the discovery of this truth.
Distinguished men like Jeans and Eddington have given a mentalist
momentum to scientific thinking and consequently deserve our high
praise. This is so and must be so because the human mind cannot rest
in materialism. It will he led by its own necessary evolution through
successive stages to the truth of mentalism and thence to the majestic
finality of what is ultimately real. Whatever science has been in the
past, whatever it is in the present, the affirmation may be
unhesitatingly made that it will be nothing less than mentalistic in
the end. It will be driven to endorse out of its own practical wisdom
what an Asiatic sage wrote thousands of years ago out of his immediate
insight in the Maitri Upanishad: "The world is just one's thought!"
Quoted from: Paul Brunton: The Wisdom of the Overself (York Beach, ME:
Samuel Weiser, 1969). Used by permission.
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© 1999 by Tom Arnold. All rights reserved. Send comments and questions
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URL: http://www.hyponoesis.org/
Updated: 10/27/99