LET US RETURN to our locomotive engine. Even when you stretch your hand out and feel that it is standing there in space, separate and apart from you, still the whole event occurs within your consciousness and nowhere else. For space is as mental as time.
The locomotive engine is but a mental construction. Try to become aware of it without those characteristics which produce the sensations of its existence within your mind. You will find the feat impossible. Think away its colour, form, hardness, weight; think away all its properties, in fact, and what will remain? There will be nothing left, because it is through the sum of these properties that you are able to perceive the engine there at all.
“Admittedly,” you may say, “the engine must disappear for me when there are no sensations of it; but have we not forgotten the substance of which it is made, the stuff to which these characteristics belong, the root of all these properties?”
Let us reflect if this be so. Can you see this substance? “Yes,” you answer, “it is green.” But that which you see as green is a colour and it has already been shown that colours do not inhere in the things themselves. If your alleged substance is really there then it should possess no colour at all. Can you see a colourless substance in the engine? You will be forced to admit that you cannot, and that when you think of it without simultaneously thinking a colour you are compelled to imagine that some colour must subsist in it and that therefore colour is a part of matter. This, however, is an illusion on your part, because science has demonstrated that the colours of every object which we see, have seen, or are likely to see do not form a part of the object itself but come into being through the play of light rays upon it. In other words, the colour is really an optical interpretation of the light itself and not of the object revealed by the light. The physiological analysis of sight proves that the production of colour is the work of the eyes, while the sensation of colour is the work of the mind. The feat of imagining a colourless matter is impossible; no matter how hard the mind may strive not to do so, it will have to assign some kind of colour to every seen substance, because the two must coincide together. Therefore it is impossible to separate colour entirely from any perceived object.
But this leads to a curious situation. For the colour cannot exist within us while the thing itself exists without us. They must both be together, and as we find that colour finally has a mental existence, so must the object’s substance or “matter” also possess a mental existence. Both are built up out of mind and nothing else.
“But how is it that colours vary if they are interpretations? What is the cause of these changes?” This question brings up the complex problem of cause and effect. Immanuel Kant pointed out that this relation was a natural form of human thinking, that it is the mind which begins by believing that there is such a thing as cause and consequently seeks for it, and that there is a mysterious unapproachable substance-in-itself whose presence gives us the idea of material substance. What the hidden teaching has to say concerning such a substance will be explained here, but the more difficult problem of cause and effect must be reserved for the further volume. “But,” you will add, “even if I cannot see this substance, nevertheless I can feel it with my fingers.” To this the reply is that what you feel are solidity and roundness, resistance and impenetrability. But these are qualities which reach you as muscular sensations and therefore belong to your mind. They are not apart from it. They are not the nonmental substance you allege them to be. It is impossible to separate the size and figure of an object from the colour and the feeling which it produces when touched. That is, we cannot put the former outside and the latter inside the mind. They both exist and from their nature can only exist together. We are able to identify a form by its feel and colour, and if we put the latter in one place and the mass or volume in another, then we are doing violence to the very act of perception and rendering it impossible. Therefore the final conclusion is that the entire object and not merely a part of it, the entire matter of which it is composed, can exist only mentally.
The earlier objection that if this doctrine of perception be true, then a large locomotive engine should not be either heavy or hard if it is composed solely of mental substance may again be mentioned as inadmissible. For we may now perceive how it has confused issues and failed to grasp the true nature of the doctrine. Nobody denies the hardness and the heaviness of the vehicle. We accept both because they come to us in the form of sensations. We actually feel that we can touch but cannot shift the locomotive engine and that it is hard and heavy. Yet the hardness, heaviness, and resistance of which we become aware are known only by the mind and within the mind. This proves that the mind is entirely capable of experiencing every kind of sensation whether it be of hardness or softness, or whether it be of heaviness or lightness. Therefore it is erroneous to declare that what is mental cannot be experienced as such substantial and touchable sensations. Were that correct, then we could never have dreams!
At this point you may retire in annoyance, or if you remain it will be to persist stubbornly in asserting that there is and must be something more of the engine’s stuff than mere sensations, that no delicate nervous registration like a sensation could possibly resemble a substantial thing like matter.
We are forced here to ask a direct question and demand a direct answer: “What is this ‘matter’ like?” Do what you will, rack your reason, and torment your knowledge as you may, you will be unable to speak of it except in terms of sensation. You will be unable to assert in what single instance matter is different from sensation. Any view that you take of it will necessarily make it visible or touchable, smellable or hearable or tasteable; that is to say, will make it reside in your sensations and hence in your mind. Let your awareness of the engine be bereft of all sensations and there will be no engine left for you to be aware of and no material stuff to remain as a residue. Why therefore should anyone believe in this mysterious matter? We may believe in sensations because we know they exist, but this alleged matter cannot be truly grasped either by hand or mind. Substantiality exists as a sensation of the mind, whereas substance by itself exists only in imagination. The critic’s matter is simply an unnecessary addition to his sensations; it is fictitious and nonexistent. When closely peered into it collapses as a mere figment of the human mind. True, pure mind is in itself as remote from sight, as alien to touch and as empty to human perception as matter. But whereas we know its effects in thoughts, ideas, and images, i.e., in consciousness, we never know any effects of matter at all.
A dictionary tells us that matter is the substance of which a physical thing is made, and it is in this sense that the word is used here. But when we open its pages again we learn that substance is the essence or most important part of anything, and that physical means that which is of matter. The upshot of all these definitions is merely this: that all the things around us are essentially material, and that matter is matter! Looking into the dictionary has been a vain exertion. What we have really learnt is nothing more than, in Hamlet’s phrase, “Words, words, words!” The application of semantic analysis is most important here. We are often led away by the customary use of innocent-looking words to believe that they represent facts, whereas they represent only mere sounds. For analysis shows that the word “matter” is a meaningless one. We are entitled to write an interrogation mark all over it. We are entitled to pose the questions: Has anyone observed matter in itself, as apart from the objects in which it is supposed to clothe itself? Has it ever been accessible to the five senses of man? Has anyone ever observed it before the idea of it was formed? Thus to define matter adequately is to deny it.
The existence of matter or substance stripped of every quality which enables an object to exist for our senses is unthinkable. It is the totality of these qualities which constitutes the object; this we know, but the knowledge of matter itself is psychologically impossible. Apart from percepts, there is no trace of such a thing as material substance. We can pick up no object, whether it be a stick or a stone, which is not picked up in conscious experience, i.e., mentally.
Matter as an independent entity stands in direct antithesis to mind, unless we recognize that it is none other than mind. The notion of the latter’s immateriality will forever come into conflict with that of the former’s separate substantiality. That which is present before consciousness is hardly entitled to be regarded as being more real than the consciousness itself. Matter is not different from mind, although thought to be so by those who have not inquired deeply into it. This is as true of engines as it is of the steel rails along which they run. The mental not only explains the existence of matter but also its own existence, whereas it is utterly impossible to explain the mental by the material unobjectionably. It may be disconcerting to be told that matter is only an idea, but no mind has ever been able to form a conception of this phantom in itself, but only as it is thought to be. It is the act of a child to accept the sense-reports as really being reports of a material world, but that of a thinker to question them. If matter is theoretically sundered from mind it becomes a spurious substance, a chimera, which we may seek but can never find. Such a thinker will therefore uncompromisingly repudiate its existence.
Several thousand years ago, solely by the keenest possible concentration of mind, the Indian sage perceived what the Western scientist has merely begun to perceive in our own time—that matter is not the independent substance that it seems. Those who took college courses in physics hardly more than a single generation ago learnt of matter which has since disappeared from scientific reckoning, but where it has disappeared what scientist clearly knows? For his mind battles with the incomprehensible unless and until he is willing to turn philosopher. The unpalatable dilemma in which science will soon find itself and from which it cannot escape is: How does it know that there is a material object corresponding to the idea of it if it has never once seen a material object, and if it can never have any experience of such an object?
For one of the greatest theoretical achievements of science in this century has been the dematerialization of matter! The conception of matter has undergone such a radical and rapid change that no scientist now dare dogmatize about its existence. The notion that matter is substance has been replaced by the notion that matter is wave-energy. Nevertheless, the latter, although far more plausible, is still as much of an inference as the former. Matter, accepted by the man in the street, converted into waves of force by the man in the laboratory, is returned into mind by the philosopher. What we know of it is only sensation, and the sensations of light, stone, or iron are entirely mental in their origin.
We touch and grasp something firmly, we press and contract our muscles as we hold the solid thing in our hands, and thus seem to reassure ourselves of the existence of matter, but all that we have really done is to betray ignorance and show bias. Those who take matter to be real and, like impatient Dr. Johnson, stamp their feet impulsively on the ground to prove it, merely prove that they take their muscles as fit criterions of truth! Their triumph is grotesque and illusory. For the shape-showing muscular sensations of resistance and pressure are still sensations, and sensations in the end are events in their consciousness; that is to say, in themselves and not in matter. The muscular kind of sensation is ultimately as much mental as the visual kind.
Those who regard a perceptual world as a spectral one have not understood these explanations. For it is the solid and graspable world that we daily live in. The habitual assumption that some kind of mysterious substance called matter, of which all things are composed, exists outside this perceptual world deceives them. They do not comprehend that they have assumed its existence when they ought to have questioned it. There is not the slightest evidence that anything exists in this mind-fashioned universe which is not wholly mental. It should now be clear that when we are talking about “matter” we are talking about a delusive word and not about a thing graspable by the senses, about a vague abstraction and not a concrete object, about an illusion rather than a reality. For it can neither be pictured by imagination nor justified by reason.
Nevertheless our belief in matter—this vaguest of all vague abstractions—is almost incurably ingrained. This is because we habitually narrow the mind down to the confines of the head, wrongly believing it to be kindled inside the phosphorized cerebral mass instead of habitually expanding it to contain all things perceived. We believe that we see and touch matter and even move it merely because we do not grasp this fundamental point that mind is dimensionless and measureless. Thus mentalism is based on proven fact and not on mere inference as is materialism. The mentalist has the positive assurance that he is not affirming a supposition or a deduction as does the materialist, but rather an ascertained and irrefutable actuality. The materialist’s demand that we accept as real something which he himself confesses we cannot know in itself, and that we shall take as independent and external something which is really given only internally as an object of consciousness and which can be fully intelligible to us only through the activity of consciousness, is absurd.
Materialism does not adequately explain the higher mental life. It does not throw full light on why we can form abstract ideas, why we have the capacity to conduct thought along a line of pure reasoning, the power to judge between truth and error, the creative imagination of the artist, the inventive faculty of the scientist, the ability to construct generalized ideas, the metaphysical thinking of the philosopher, and, above all, why we can reflect about our own consciousness as being an immaterial thing. Materialism never even touches the hem of the garment of consciousness.
Yet such is the intellectual degradation of mankind that it irritably denounces the truth of mentalism as illusory and impulsively upholds the error of materialism as truth! Materialism succeeds in solving its numerous minor problems only by shutting its eyes to its single major problem—itself. For nobody has ever seen matter, nobody has ever handled it, and nobody has ever known where to detect its presence. Its existence is a bluff. Matter thus becomes a merely illegitimate entity in our explanation of the world, a fiction which works quite well for the purposes of practical life but becomes meaningless for the purposes of philosophical truth. When such an erroneous notion is seen for what it is it will simply vanish from one’s understanding and be regarded no more. One will still be active in the world of things, but they will no longer be “lumps of matter.” They will be ideas. They will no longer be in opposition to mind but integrated with it.
We have travelled far from the ordinary man’s argument that matter is much too self-evident even to need discussion. For we have converted it into a significant appearance, pointing to mind as its hidden reality. Yet it is a most extraordinary anomaly of human reason that consciousness, mind, is popularly regarded as being much less real than matter, although adequate reflection reveals it as being entitled to a status of reality which is unique and primary.
Popular belief, never having inquired into the truth of its intuitive beliefs, is alarmed when it first hears of this terrifying tenet of mentalism which throws doubt on a thing it has hitherto held to be beyond discussion. For there can be no way of reconciling the commonsense view of the world with the philosophic fact of mentalism.
In our earlier study of illusions and hallucinations we traced their origin primarily to the natural bent of the mind to externalize its own images and to see them as separate entities. It is now of grave importance to remember that even when we know any illusions to be such, and when we have discovered and mentally corrected errors of sense, still we cannot free ourselves from perceiving them in precisely the same way in which we perceived them formerly. Their appearance continues to persist contrary to our knowledge. We may see through the deception by our power of reason, but that does not cause the deception itself to disappear. We may know by reflection and reason that the appearance which presents itself to consciousness is illusory and yet we may be quite unable to resist its power of continued existence and its spell of solid reality.
This is a positive demonstration of the complex character of our percepts and of the mysterious power of the mind to impose its own manufactures upon our senses without our personal awareness and beyond our power of control, just as it does during dream.
The possibility and prevalence of these illusions should constitute a warning to all mankind and start them reflecting whether they are not subject to illusion in other matters which they habitually take to be correctly perceived. It should also guard against overconfidence when indignantly denying the frank hint that the materiality of the whole world may after all be a still wider illusion. Moreover, the public feats of jugglers and the staged phenomena of conjurers which compel us to see what is quite contrary to fact prove that illusions may be collectively shared by a large number of people at the same time; while they point to the important possibility of even the whole of mankind being susceptible to a general illusion. May it not be that the collective illusions of the world’s externality and materiality have arisen in the minds of all people because all share psychological and physiological similarities? When we discover how deep-seated hallucinations may sway the individual we are prepared for the further discovery that they may also sway and coerce the collective human race. And it is a fact that the forceful illusions of materiality and externality are indeed shared persistently by all men throughout the world. For this reason the ancient Indian sages compared ignorant mankind to a race asleep and dreaming, but compared the wise to those who were awake and fully conscious.
Belief in matter, in short, is belief in a gross but mesmeric illusion. This is the emphatic message of the hidden teaching to a materialistic age, a message that also yields a warning against the useless pursuit of mere phantoms. We destroy the power of a terrifying nightmare or unpleasant dream when we awaken and discover its unreality. Similarly we destroy the power of illusive matter—this idol with feet of clay whom myriads of blind worshippers have wrongly revered—over the mind when we awaken into Truth. Yet the stupendous difficulty of this revelatory task of philosophy may be grasped by comparing it with the task of convincing a dreamer while he is still dreaming that his environment of houses, persons, and conversations is an imagined one. We who are in the waking state live also in an imagined world, but the statement sounds as incredible to us while we are awake as it would to the hypothetical dreamer.
The wise old Greeks said that philosophy was death. We may interpret these words as we wish. Many dying and most drowning men perceive their past as a swift-rushing vivid dream. So far as human life is mental life it is a series of ideas, i.e., of the same stuff as dreams. Philosophy seeks to make men realize that the entire texture of life is pure thought, but it wants them to see it here and now, not when they are dying. For if they can awaken to truth when it is most needed, i.e., when they are in the midst of work and living, suffering and pleasure, health and sickness, they will know how best to deal with those alternating vicissitudes from which none can escape.
Let it not be feared, however, that we shall then become mere dreamers; on the contrary, after we shall have penetrated to the reality hidden behind and within both dream and waking we shall henceforth be done with dreams and learn to be truly and incessantly active not only for our own benefit but also for that of others. Whereas the ignorant live blindly, we shall live in the light, and whereas they cherish illusions, we shall cherish truth. We shall not flee from this dream of earthly life, for we cannot: it is not our individual finite mind that brought this dream into being and it is not our individual finite mind that can put an end to it. We shall accept it in all its comprehensiveness and not vainly seek to negate it. We shall firmly encourage action and not discourage it, but in the midst of our dream we shall be somewhat like a sleeping man who knows at the same time that he is asleep and dreaming. Thus we shall not suffer ourselves to be swept away by bitter nightmares or pleasurable reveries: always we shall seek peace in place of agitation.
We have laboured to cross a difficult frontier, but at different points of our journey a certain problem has met us again and again. It must now be faced. For the question will necessarily arise that if externally experienced things are but thoughts, do they exist at all? Is each object unreal? If so, how is it that our daily experience flagrantly contradicts such startling possibilities?
None need be alarmed. We do not deny the existence of a single thing that forms part of our world-experience. But we must get our minds clear about this problem.
The experiments of Michelson and Morley which preceded the experiments of Einstein demonstrated that the velocity of light remained constant when all ordinary experience, common sense, and scientific reason said that it ought to have risen to a much higher rate. Hence they were an astounding surprise. For this was not a mere piece of metaphysical speculation but a scientific piece of work performed with appropriate instruments. The experimental result contradicted what was expected and what ought to have happened. Science might have got rid of this awkward piece of data by conveniently explaining it away as an illusion of the senses. But to its credit it had the courage of accepting the “illusion” as a reality.
Is the brigand which the observer sees in the bush a real one or not? If not, what is it? That the brigand was seen means that he exists, even if he exists only as an illusion. This brings up an important difference—that between the meaning of real and the meaning of exist. We may here seek to profit again by the lesson learnt from the sixth chapter, where the need of analysing words for the factual rather than apparent meaning was strongly emphasized. It is necessary to consider the question and to discover what we mean by these terms, for relativity also raised the entire issue. Properly to do this we must first return to our earlier consideration of illusions.
Both the brigand and the bush share the common characteristic of being experienced, and only in this way do they certify to their existence. But the first is negated by closer investigation, whereas the second is confirmed by it. It is only when we find it impossible to reconcile the spurious knowledge of such an illusion with the content of normal experience that doubt begins to awaken within us and we are led to discover that it is illusory. So long as we remain content with the knowledge we have, we accept first impressions about things or people for what they seem to be, but when they come into direct conflict with other facts which emerge in the course of subsequent experience the question of their criterion of validity arises. Then the need of putting them to the test and where necessary correcting them is felt.
If an illusion is to be recognized as such, then the evidence of the senses is to be denied, while if the evidence of the senses is to be accepted, then we have two coexistent “realities” claiming to be one and the same thing. This absurd situation means that we are not to trust entirely to what our senses tell us about a thing’s reality although we may trust them to tell us about a thing’s existence. It means also that to call anything real is a dubious and dangerous procedure. What becomes of everyday experience of “matter,” for instance, when it is contradicted by pure reason? Therefore to appear is one thing, whereas to be is another. We must learn to take care to distinguish between the two concepts. The puzzling contradiction of illusions vanish when we understand that different standpoints produce different perceptions, that from the standpoint of reflective reason we may possibly perceive a thing differently than from the standpoint of sense-experience, and that it is a primitive attitude to take such experience as always possessed of decisive sanction. The existence of an illusion like the brigand seen in the bush cannot be denied. It would be absurd to reject anyone’s experience of it; for to deny an illusion is to deny the content of experience and to negate what is given in consciousness. All that we may rightly do is to reject a particular interpretation of it; that is to say, to reject its reality. It exists but it is not real.
We have in fact to distinguish between the various kinds of existence, for we now see that something can exist and be real while another thing can exist and yet be unreal. Here again the need of penetrating behind the facade of a word becomes plain. In an earlier chapter it was shown that the term fact was open to unsuspected interpretations, and so here analysis of the two terms exist and real proves useful, although everybody who has never reflected about the matter wrongly assumes he already knows this meaning!
These words mislead most people because they think that whatever appears to them or whatever looks like reality must necessarily be real. Their error is to be satisfied that merely because they perceive things the latter are therefore real things. Perception is no proof of reality. For we may have wrong perception and imaginary perception even among the so-called real perceptions! Men in delirium may see blue snakes and nobody dare deny that they are perceived. Such snakes must therefore be said to exist, for they do exist in the mind of the sufferers, to whom they are unquestionably real. Similarly nobody can deny that objective things exist, for they are perceived by the minds of men, who also regard them as unquestionably real, but in both these cases the philosopher is entitled to question not their existence but their reality.
Everybody can see and nobody can dispute that there is a brick wall confronting us, for instance. When it is said, however, that this wall can have only a mental existence, it is totally unjust, totally false, and totally stupid to misrepresent this assertion as meaning that the wall has no existence whatever. And when we say that we are touching this wall we do not mean that we are touching the shadow of a real wall called an idea, but that the touch itself is an idea, and that the various mental sensations of the wall is all of the wall we shall ever know, not that it is a copy of the real material wall, which appears to be somewhere beyond our body. It is preposterous and unintelligent to misconstrue the results of this analysis into a statement that a wall which is plainly beheld is but a shadow of the real wall and that the chair in which we now sit is but a mere copy of the real chair, which exists somewhere else in space. Both chair and wall do in point of fact exist quite as much for the mentalist philosopher as for the materialist, the difference being that the former by a profound and habitual reflection has pierced into the true nature of their existence. He has certainly never denied them away. And if such a philosopher thinks that the chair in which he sits and the pen with which he writes do not really exist, he will not go to the trouble of writing any book. And to those who would object that a mental reality is equivalent to no reality at all, he would reply that there is no other that we human beings know.
The word “real” has a meaning only when it is distinguished from the word “unreal” in the same way that one colour can only be distinguished by its contrast with another. Therefore no adequate definition of reality can be found until the proper meaning of its contrary is also found. Now people often make the mistake of thinking that because a thing is unreal it should therefore be invisible. Illusions prove the contrary. The world will be visible both to the philosopher and to the ignorant man, but whereas the latter will deem it to be just as he sees it, the former will deem it physically unreal but mentally constructed.
Objects are seen physically and externally but cannot exist apart from the mind’s construction of them. We are not asked to doubt the actual appearance of the things we see nor give up our belief in their existence: We are asked to ascertain the kind of their existence, whether it be illusory or real; and we are asked to distinguish the pretended reality of what is merely an idea from the genuine reality of what unchangingly is—a point into which we shall shortly inquire.
There is vital difference between the terms “unreal” and “nonexistent.” Let us not leap hastily past these words: we need to be most careful when we denounce anything as such. We may rightly speak of “a barren woman’s son” as being nonexistent. We may not however label the brigand seen in the bush as equally nonexistent but only as unreal. For he acquires existence, although not reality, by the mere act of being perceived. The two categories are totally different in meaning from each other and ought not to be confused. Nonexistent things must be carefully distinguished from existent ones when we class both as illusions. A unicorn and a round square belong to the first class because you cannot even think them or imagine them. They are hollow meaningless phrases, whereas a mirage seen in the desert belongs to the second because it is a discredited appearance. The former can never be observed under any conditions but the latter may be seen under certain conditions.
It is important that we take care therefore not to confuse absolute mental existence with absolute nonexistence. Everything which we see and touch really does exist. There is and there cannot be the slightest doubt of that, but it may not exist in the way in which we believe. It may exist mentally while not existing physically.
It is now needful to inquire still more closely what we mean when we use this word “real.” Are we able to form any picture in our mind to correspond with it? If we are, there is the bewildering situation that other people may and will form a different picture, giving it a different definition.
The notion which postulates the real as what can be weighed and measured, and which implies that all mental things are a kind of luminous haze floating above the “real” physical world and unable to affect it at all, is, as has been earlier shown in our study of matter, bad science and worse philosophy; we must protest against it. What then are the tests and characteristics of reality? To reply with most that experience of the external world of things is alone real, or to assert with a few that experience of the internal world of thoughts is alone real, is to ignore that such a view is based on the feeling of reality and to forget that we have a similar feeling during dream which both these views may denounce as unreal. Hence it is useless to judge by feeling. We must first find a definition that will hold always. Few people care to define so scrupulously; they want to judge by feeling or by temperament alone. The consequence is that they imagine reality, they study their own idea of it only, and thus lamentably fail to avoid deceiving themselves into accepting what merely pleases them, not what is true.
At one time science said that the reality behind the world was made of atoms, later it said that the real stuff was made of molecules, still later it said things were really electrons. Now it is beginning to stutter something else. Science now confesses that there is no guarantee that it has reached the last secret of the supposed world-stuff. Should it therefore not drop the word real from its vocabulary—and should we also not drop it—altogether? For both science and we are dealing only with what appears to us, with what is presented to us, but not with what is ultimately hidden beneath all these presentations of atoms, molecules, electrons, and what not. Having burnt its fingers, however, science has learnt to keep itself fluid to its conception of reality. Therefore it has now learnt never to put forward a final statement about this elusive word. Thus the path of human knowledge is a progressive awakening from illusory things which exist but which are ultimately unreal.
The fact finally known for what it is is the reality, whereas the final knowledge of the thing is the truth. This is correct only from the standpoint of practical affairs and until we reach the Ultimate. Then there are no two things, but unity, and hence no distinction between truth and reality. European metaphysicians have evolved a plausible doctrine which multiplies the degrees of reality. They would have come nearer to truth had they said that there exist degrees of the apprehension of reality. In that unity which is the unchangeably real there can never be any gradation whatsoever. For, as the ancient Indian philosophers—not mystics—have rightly said: that is real which cannot only give us certainty about its existence in its own right beyond all possibility of doubt and independently of man’s individual ideation but which can remain changeless amid the flux of an ever-changing world. Such a reality is, after the pursuit of ultimate truth, the foremost pursuit of philosophy, whether it be labelled “God,” “Spirit,” “Absolute,” or otherwise.
What has become of the millions of human beings who have died? What has become of the prehistoric palaces of unrecorded kings? What has become of those kings themselves? All have crumbled away into dust and vanished. But what has become of THAT which appeared in the forms of those men and buildings? Whoever took it to be matter did not even know he was dealing with mind. Our own inquiry into it must take us not only through the appearances of matter but also beyond the workings of mind. This is the inquiry into ultimate permanent reality; this is philosophy.
When it shall be our good fortune to come into the fuller understanding of such reality we shall find, as the old sages found, that this puzzling world does not stand in startling contradiction to it as we fear. For in a subtler sense which we do not grasp at present the one is no less real than the other. The world is not essentially an illusion. Ultimately it is as real as the world of this unnameable uniqueness that is the true God. Things therefore are not themselves illusory, but it is our apprehension of them, as furnished by the senses, which is illusory. Nobody need worry over the loss of matter. It is something which we have never possessed and consequently the loss is not a real one. The world which has been revealed by our thoughts is the only world we have known, although it is not the ultimate world that we shall know. Therefore the truth robs us of nothing. He who flees the world in ascetic disdain flees from reality; he should correct himself first and thus learn to understand aright what is that something which appears as the world. What it is, what that ultimate reality means to the life of man, is the second quest of philosophy after the quest of truth, because we soon find that both quests are involved in one another. And this is therefore the second reward which philosophy holds out to man, that he shall learn how to live consciously in reality rather than blindly in illusion.
We have been dealing with the cases of single objects and isolated things and found them to be ultimately ideas. But we have to remember that these fragmentary facts which are ideas appear continuously in our daily life. It is therefore now necessary to take them up into a unity, to connect them together into the world-process and thus relate them to the world in which we are living. We have discovered every inanimate thing and every living creature to be a mental construct. Now the whole world is only an assemblage of all things and all creatures in their totality. Have we then the courage to take the intellectual plunge, to be bold enough and march straight to the logical conclusion that the whole world is itself but an idea also?
The world is a world of relatives, a network of connected colours, sounds, spaces, times, and their dependent things; all things exist in relation to other things, but relations themselves are ultimately ideas. The limitless panorama of the passing world is a mental one. Such is the tremendous thought with which we are faced that age-old solar systems rolling through space are as much mental constructs as the pen which we analysed down to the point of regarding it as a pure percept. The universe in all its immensity consists in the end of a construct of mind. This is the psychological picture of our external world; it is a gigantic mental construct and nothing more. For perceptual experience stretches its embrace over everything and nothing known to man can stand outside it.
Mentalism alone provides an adequate explanation. It expounds the manner in which mind creates its own space to contain all the objects which it equally constructs from itself. Space is as much an idea as the things that seem to stand in it. If, as relativity has begun to show, space-time is the continuum of the world of material objects, then whatever this mysterious fourth dimension may be it can only be something that is within mind and therefore ultimately mental itself. Thus although we begin by contemplating the universe as being presented to mind we end by contemplating it as constructed by mind.
That a world exists around and outside our bodies is a certainty and not a deception. That this world exists around and outside our mind is a deception and not a certainty. For there is no such thing as existence outside or inside the mind. Ideas may be outside or inside each other but all stand in nonspatial relation to mind. There is no such thing as an extramental world of objects. Yet men are everywhere convinced of its existence! The human body is a part of the world, the world is an idea and the body must be an idea with it. If the world stands outside body it does not stand outside mind, but must fall within it. If the world existed outside the mind that perceives it, it could never be perceived at all, for the mind does not get beyond its own states, i.e., ideas.
The part played by the five sense-instruments is therefore to provide the conditions whereby man participates in the perception of objects as external to the body. The senses are the means whereby he shares the ideas of a material world which subsist in the dimensionless mind. The function of the body would then be to provide the conditions for that event which is the arisal of finite individual egoistic consciousness; without these conditions ultimate mind remains as it is, the mysterious and unique fact of all existence.
In that first moment when consciousness breaks into ideated being the silence of mind has spoken. Not that it needed voice nor that it needed listeners—but this is a mystery to be kept for a while in reserve. The ticktock of time and the impressive landscape of the universe exist only mentally. This world which weighs so heavily upon us is but Appearance, a shadow flung out of the Timeless. Thus we arrive at the final conclusion that, not because things are outside our bodies, nor because they are very far from our bodies, nor because of their immense size, nor because of their great number, nor because of the varied elements which compose them, can we deny the mental nature of those things. The notion of the world is, in the final analysis, fabricated by the mind. It is a transitory mental construction.
When we look out on a stretch of country scenery and observe a chain of hills far away with a small forest in the foreground we do not dream for an instant that we are looking on a reconstructed scene. The hills are so high and so substantial, the trees are so green and so leafy, that we take these for solid things not in any way comparable with the pictures the mind constructs during daydreaming. But the science of psychology teaches that the entire landscape is as mind-made as the images that pass through consciousness during reverie. Every time a percept appears in the mind it must necessarily be reconstructed anew and therefore no one thing can have continuous existence nor appear twice in the same experience. What does appear is an incessant reconstruction of what is believed to be the same thing, and this is the real secret of the mystery of maya, that celebrated but misunderstood Indian doctrine. In this way we learn the larger lesson of illusion, a lesson which is applicable not merely to our perception of solitary things but to our perception of the whole world.
This vault of Heaven under which we move,
Is like a magic lantern, this to prove:
The Sun there—is the flame; the World—the lamp,
And we the figures who revolving move.
—Omar Khayyam
But the solid objective world is not destroyed by mentalism. It is left precisely where it is. Its five continents are not denied, its impressive grandeur not banished. Only, for the first time it begins to be understood instead of being misunderstood.
The whole of your past is now a thought. The whole of your future is likewise a thought. The present is unseizable and indeterminable, as was shown in an earlier chapter. Even if you could catch it the past would at once claim it and it would be converted into an idea. Therefore all your life—which includes all its background of a panoramic world—is but a thought! If no other proof were available this alone would suffice!
Until you see that the world is only an idea you are a materialist, no matter how pious, how religious, how “spiritual” you think you are. You take matter for what it is not. When you find that the material universe is just a mental experience, then alone do you become liberated from materialism.
But the presence of ideas postulates the fundamental presence of mind, of that which makes us aware of ideas. Hence the materialistic picture of the world accounts for everything except the world itself! For it leaves out our conscious awareness of the world, which awareness is the only world we know. Any other world is merely an inferred one. Just as you cannot take the centre out of a circle and still keep your circle, so you cannot take the mind out of the universe and still keep your matter. Both are indissolubly bound together. All materialistic theories are shipwrecked on this fatal fact. Whatever we examine in this world, mind is present at the very beginning, for the former exists only to consciousness. Moreover, mind is also the final entity. It cannot be kept out of any reckoning at any point.
We are nearing the end of the first lap of our quest. We have brought the world down to the position of a great and grand appearance, but still a show. Every spectacle implies the existence of a spectator. What is this mystery that hides beneath the world-show? It might be thought that the weak point in mentalism is its likelihood of leading to the position that the world is one’s own personal mental creation, a position which would be demonstrably absurd. For it would imply that we could capriciously form new stars at will merely by imagining them or construct whole cities by the voluntary exercise of fancy. Moreover, the latter existed before we appeared in the world and will probably continue after we are gone, whereas our imagined stars and cities will vanish in a few moments. The Himalaya mountains are still there to someone else whether we think of them or not; their existence is at least relatively more permanent, whereas our personal thought of them is transient. They are beyond the control of our own mind to make or unmake them. How then can mentalism make the bold fantastic assertion that the majestic Himalayas are merely ideas, merely mental states of feeble humans who cannot even create a single cedar tree by thought, let alone the world’s mightiest mountain range?
This criticism is quite just, but it embodies a complete misunderstanding. While it must be rigidly maintained that every formed physical thing which exists must exist as a thought, we must not fall into the profound error which regards these thoughts as originating in the finite mind of a particular individual. They do not. They cannot. For this will lead to the further notion that there is no thing, no person and no world other than one’s individual self. Such is the erroneous conclusion which might be drawn from these statements. But such is not the finding of the hidden philosophy. The latter does not set up one’s little limited self as alone real and all else as illusory. This error is technically termed “solipsism.” Solipsism is sheer lunacy. Were it true this poor finite brain of ours would then become the creator and sustainer of the universe!
Every object is an idea; it is an idea present to man’s mind; but it is not created by man’s individual and independent mind. He merely participates in it. For when we inquire more deeply we shall find that his individual mind is ultimately part of a universal mind, and it is there that we must look for the origin of this idea. We dare not say that man himself creates the ideas of the material objects, but we can say that he has them. For an idea without a mind to which it belongs is inconceivable. The myriad manifestations of mind stand in striking contrast with the perfect and primary unity of the mind itself. The multitude of individual things that are really ideas must ultimately be ideas of an all-comprehensive mind. We must penetrate beneath the individual mind and lo! there is a universal mind as its hidden reality and as the origin of his ideas of material objects. Mentalism does not claim the world to be any individual’s creation. It claims that the world is this mind’s creation, not “my” mind’s creation. It does not teach that the world is a product of one’s individual mind, of one’s personal self. Common experience is alone sufficient to invalidate such a tenet. It cannot possibly be held by any philosopher who has investigated the nature of mind and self, an investigation which will be made at the proper point in the second volume of this work, where the higher mysteries of mind will be unfolded.
At this point we may again take up the two loose ends of yoga and philosophy and tie them together. For when the mind is better understood, then the proper place of mysticism and the extraordinary practices of yoga will likewise be better understood. It is much easier for one who has pursued such practices to grasp the truth of mentalism. He has already felt the world’s unreality, but those who have never practised find it difficult at first to credit mentalism. “How,” they say, “can this solid tangible world be only an idea? Nonsense!” The hardness of matter deceives them, but it is more easy for the yogi to convert this hard matter into imagination and thus the whole world into a thought.
Yoga was partly devised as a means of preparing the mind to accept the teaching of mentalism. For when the mind has become subtle, detached, and concentrated by the practice of a yoga system it can more readily grasp this difficult doctrine with conviction. The power which is developed by such practice to abstract attention from physical surroundings and focus it upon internal states or ideas proves its value as an accessory to philosophy by rendering the truth of mentalism less hard to accept. The mind that has never practised meditation or never engaged in the labours of artistic creation inevitably stumbles at the very threshold of this grand doctrine, whereas the flexibility and abstractiveness of the mind which has previously disciplined itself to the point of easily attending to its own thoughts with complete concentration and complete forgetfulness of its material environment assist it to walk across this threshold and perceive the heretofore hidden ideality of things.
The universality of mind and the implication of mentalism also make it possible for us of the West to begin to understand how strange faculties whose existence has long been known to hoary Asia may operate in perfect obedience to scientific laws; how telepathy, apparitions, thought-reading, and thought-transference, mesmeric feats, and all the marvel magic and miracle of primitive and medieval religious, mystical, and yogic history may be factually based; and how the little-understood energy of “karma” may be as universally and ceaselessly present as the equally mysterious energy of electricity and be just as precise in its workings and effects.
We have reached the position that the world is an idea but we have reached it through acute analysis of experience and with minds sharpened by concentrated reflection on ascertainable and verifiable facts. The yogi who succeeds in his practices of meditation reaches the same position, but he has reached it by reverie or trance based on subtle feeling. But feeling is not a valid standard for others. His conclusion is purely personal and therefore not of much value to them. When he is plunged in his meditation he has a vivid sense of the dreamlike character of the world, how like a great thought it really is. But when he tries to go farther and penetrate to the reality which so expresses itself, he fails to grasp the true relationship between the two and falls into confusion. He undervalues the world as a means of evolving the creatures within it. Henceforth he becomes temperamentally detached from the world, whose practical activities he comes to regard as a vain useless pursuit.1
One effect of unphilosophical yoga, apart from intermittent tranquillity, is to make man see the world as he would see a dream object and to feel acutely that the everyday experiences of ordinary existence suffer from unreality. Hence the mystic’s attachment for “escapism,” his dislike of useful activity, and fear of the practical world. But this is to stop halfway on the quest. It is certainly not the goal of philosophy. For the highest effect of philosophy is to make man feel the forms of this world to be dreamlike but to know it as real in a higher sense, its essence being nothing less than reality itself.
As the immature mystic receives the illusion of penetrating reality, so he also receives the further illusion of giving up his ego. This happens during meditation, and therefore intermittently, or more enduringly in the outer world through the development of a martyr complex or through the practice of external nonresistance to evil. The philosopher, on the other hand, first loses the sense of reality of ego through insight into its relation to the whole and then gives it up in the outer world through service to mankind. Hence the true sage is keen on constant action because he is keen on real service.
Yoga is a step, not a stop. When we are wiser we shall ascribe to it the significance of being a most important milestone on our road, but still a milestone. Its delight should not be permitted to deceive us. There is still much more of the road to be travelled. Those who are mystically inclined or religiously bent will inevitably weary of the foregoing pages and mutter impatiently at their semi-scientific detail. This is because they do not understand that we are engaged upon a momentous journey and that if we are using science we shall not remain in science. They yearn for inward ecstasies of the soul or new revelations of Deity. Let them learn that we are on the move. If we have taken this deep plunge into mentalism it is because there is no other route that we could take if we are to carry out the allotted task of leading them intellectually to the true God, the real “Spirit,” and to that satisfying realization of “soul” which can alone endure. The way to the promised land lies through the wilderness of seemingly arid facts; but this need not cancel out the enjoyment of peace-filled meditations. For right reflection upon these facts will yield understanding, and this, combined with mystical self-absorption, moral reeducation, and devotional reverence, is the yoga of philosophical discernment. We are not moving farther away from God, as the ignorant may wrongly think, but actually moving nearer. We need not give up the grandeurs of mystical ecstasy for dull and dry intellectualism, but may retain them, the while we discover a permanent satisfaction that will not come and go intermittently like these ecstasies.
Let not these criticisms be taken amiss. Let them not blind us to the true worth of yoga in its rightful place and within its lawful limits. There it can help much. And we may now see the deep and practical wisdom of the early Indian teachers who prescribed yoga to those whose intellectual power was not strong enough to grasp the truth of mentalism through reasoning, for thus these men were enabled to arrive at the same goal through feeling, not through knowledge. For the same reason these teachers also prescribed the study of illusions to ordinary people because the sciences of physics, physiology, and psychology were then too primitive to afford the comprehensively detailed analysis which has been made for modern students in the foregoing pages. However, the yogi untrained in philosophy is always in danger of losing his conviction that the world is idea because being based on feeling he is subject to the law that feelings are always liable to change. On the other hand, the yoga-prepared philosopher can never lose the profound insight he has gained through the use of synthesis. It is something that has grown up within him and achieved maturity. He cannot “ungrow” it any more than a year-old infant can “ungrow” itself and get back into its mother’s womb. Permanent certitude must come through making the truth of mentalism our own with a rigid certitude which needs no prop of fallible authority or fading emotion. Such certitude can arise when this truth is seen, not even as scientific theory but only as scientific fact.
Yet we must never forget that mentalism is only a step leading to ultimate truth. It is a hurdle which blocks the path of the truth-seeker. It must be climbed and crossed. In its own place this crossing is of vital importance. It is also a temporary ground which the questing mind must occupy while consolidating its first victory, the victory over matter. Once the consolidation is fully effected it must begin to move onward again; it must leave mentalism! The ultimate reality cannot consist of thoughts, because these are fated to appear and vanish; it must have a more enduring basis than such transiency. Nevertheless we may see in thoughts, to which we have reduced everything, intimations of the presence of this reality, and apart from which they are as illusory as matter. The further and final battle must lead to victory over the idea itself. Both materialism and mentalism are tentative viewpoints which must be taken up and then deserted when the ultimate viewpoint is reached. Then alone may we say: “This is real.” Hence if we must close this study with the questions, “What is a thought?” and “What is the mind?” regretfully left unanswered, this is because those answers belong to the further and final stage of our journey, which not merely the necessities of space and the compulsions of time bid us reserve for a later volume, but other reasons which are more important still. Meanwhile it is essential to study well this basis of mentalism, because upon it shall later be reared a superstructure of stupendous but reasoned revelation.
The foolish who cling to what is personal when all the pangs of a suffering epoch teach the futility of doing so will be dismayed at the apparent blankness of these teachings and they may turn away with a shiver. But the intelligent, who have learnt much, thought deeply, and suffered long, will be ready to accept it, blankness and all. For they will understand that in so doing they are accepting truth after lies, peace after pain, sight after blindness, and reality after illusion. If later they pursue it to its farthest end and gain the fullest realization, thereafter they shall beat out the measure of their days in an interior harmony that shall be more holy and more blessed than any ritual of religion could ever be, more serene than any yogic experience is likely to be.
Thus far we may not have outpaced, except in certain slight hints, the foremost Western cultural thought. If those who have pursued technical courses in philosophy find some of these tenets familiar, their indulgence is craved and they are asked to remember that these pages are written primarily for anyone who cares for truth, whether he has some academic acquaintance with philosophy or none at all. Ramifications of this doctrine are already known to the West under the technical term of “idealism.” Nevertheless it must be pointed out that this is a generic term covering contradictory tenets. Whoever studies in their totality the absolute idealism of Hegel, the subjective idealism of Berkeley, the objective idealism of Kant, and the nihilistic idealism of Hume, for instance, will depart bewildered and confused. For it will be like studying religion, a word which may mean the chantings of Central African tribal people around a grotesque wooden figure or the quiet still meditations of Quaker Christians. Nobody seems to know the truth about idealism or the falsity of it. There are idealists who accept God and idealists who reject God just as there are idealists who uphold the existence of matter and idealists who deny it. In any case beyond idealism all reflection shades down to twilight and then darkness, for even the proponents of idealism perceive nothing but mystery beyond it. Every step forward into that mystery that they venture to take causes them to lose their way in guesswork and speculation. Only the hidden Indian teaching has bravely and boldly explored and explored successfully the lands which stretch from idealism all the way to final truth.
Bishop Berkeley had the quaint notion that those whom he ignorantly termed idolators might be persuaded to relinquish their worship of the sun could they but learn that it is nothing more than their idea. It never dawned on his pious mind that the wise men among these sun worshippers were themselves as well acquainted as he with idealism. But partly because they could not lift the masses to such a metaphysical conception, they pointed to the sun as being the only thing in this earthly world which could fitly bear comparison with God. But there is neither the time nor place to enter into academic argument here. This book is not a treatise on metaphysics; it represents a formal and final testament of truth.
However, it may be advisable to explain to those who fear that the hidden teaching necessarily leads to atheism that the term “God” is not a term to our taste because it means all things to all men. But descending to an unphilosophic level it may be affirmed that we shall find God at the end of this quest, but it shall be God as He really is. It shall be neither the glorified man of religion nor the attenuated gas of metaphysics. Yet it shall still be the God whom men rightly but remotely revere in Oriental temples and Occidental churches, in sunsplashed mosques and grey brick chapels, but whom they tread underfoot and try to torture with their ignorant hatreds and intolerant persecutions of other men. We shall find the God whose caricatured image scornful rationalists or bitter atheists rightly reject and against whose cruelty they justly rebel, but whom they wrongly deny, for He is none other than their own ultimate self. We shall find the God whom lean ascetics seek but do not find in gloomy caves and starved bodies and upon whom satiated sensualists shut the door in night clubs and jazz halls, yet who paradoxically dwells in both cave and club unseen, unnoticed and unknown. We shall find that God whom meditating mystics and trance-wrapped yogis prematurely grope for within their hearts: God’s aura of peaceful light is all they touch, for the flame would shrivel their ecstasy-seeking ego in an instant of time; but once they have obeyed the angel whose sword shall sooner or later drive them back to the world they would forsake, and learnt what this thing is that surrounds them, search into the self will soon yield its final secret for them, as ancient Indian sages have pointed out. All these men who have vainly yet unconsciously tried to displace reality and who have set up for worship a God of their own imagination, a mere idol of their own making, philosophy will lead to the true God, whom they shall henceforth worship in full awareness of what they are doing. Finally, we shall find that elusive world-essence now unknown to scientists and which they think to be some kind of energy.
We may now begin to grasp why the ultimate path was always taught in secret. The books and texts were kept in the possession of the teacher, to be revealed and expounded only when candidates had travelled through the other paths. It would have been unwise to teach the general public. Men cannot bear to learn the truth about the real nature of this world, and so they flee from its first glimpses toward the immediate comfort of illusory existence. For the notion that there is a material world confronting them and existing outside them is instantaneous, immediate, and irresistible. It is not something which they arrive at by any laborious process of logical reasoning from something else: it is a self-evident overpowering intuitive perception which seems undeniable and which apparently does not depend on any worked-out case which is liable to be overthrown. Only a continuous series of clever questions spread over a long-drawn course of personal instruction could ever show the ordinary unreflective man that his materialistic realism is foundationless and that the philosopher’s thought-out mentalism is based on solid rocklike fact.
The great fear that descends on anyone when he learns that matter and space and time do not exist apart from man himself is unjustified. For this nonexistence does not deprive him of the sensations of matter and space and time. Is it not enough to see an apparently objective world extended in space and to watch its events extend in time and to feel its solidity? Mentalism does not rob him of these sensations which he experiences; it merely explains them. What difference does it really make to give up his illusions about them? Why should he demand anything more than truth itself? For philosophy must stick to facts; sensation is a fact, but matter, time, and space are proven suppositions. Here philosophy is far more rigorous than science. There is no tangible difference in his practical life and only a rectification of wrong notions in his mental life. Chocolate will taste just as sweet and just as delicious when he knows it to be a cluster of sensations as when he erroneously believed it to be a material substance, while the engines of his car will purr away as noisily as before. He will lose none of the things he cherishes, none even of the joys of life, only he will understand them correctly. For the streets, the houses, and the people around present precisely the same aspect to the sage as they do to the ignorant man. The former, however, is enlightened by reflection and thus knows that these varied forms are all mental; he knows too that mind is the stuff of all these productions, whereas the latter is quite blinded by unreflection to this truth. Mentalism staggers the simpleminded with its apparent profundity and complexity, yet once well inquired into and therefore well understood nothing could seem more simple or more apparent.
Thus the ancient Indian sages wrote down a teaching which foreshadowed some findings of the best modern Western scientists. The same science which gave us the bleak hopelessness of mortality and materialism last century will give us the bright hopefulness of mentalism in this one. Truth will be established on a basis of proven demonstration; it will need nothing mystical to support it. The time is riper for the world to come to this age-old truth, but it must come to it in terms of twentieth-century scientific concepts. This doctrine has remained insulated from the world long enough. Nor will it suffice merely to translate its teaching into Western tongues; it must also be constructively interpreted.
We live in an age of transition. Kings, governments, and constitutions have been hurled from their pedestals and familiar scientific concepts have been hurled out of laboratory windows. But the greatest transition of all in the world of twentieth-century knowledge is that which the front rank of scientific investigators is effecting before our eyes. This fundamental turnover in the outlook of educated men will consist of nothing less than bringing the whole world into the circle of thought and thus converting matter into idea. Just as the study of radioactive substance opened a new horizon for science when its old lines of research seemed to be at an end, so this study of the relation between the world and man, between matter and mind, will before long end in the discovery that the entire panorama of the world from telescope-seen star to microscope-seen cell which confronts our eyes is in reality a mental construction. It will destroy materialism root and branch, and will throw wide open the gates which lead to the infinite reality whose knowledge is Truth.