Our world is built up from bits of untested, unexamined, received truths. Example: Our body and our soul are different things – we say. The Indian philosopher Sri Aurobindo suggests they are the same thing, but in different states – like ice and water. Do we know? What is the state of our knowledge? How do we go about finding out?
Another philosopher Paul Brunton has said – modified by me:
Philosophy must concern itself with basic facts: relativity of time and space, illusions, feelings – the big question is what experience really is. We only know what our senses tell us – we are surface seers. All experience is made to fit into the pattern of our existing ideas. To know the world as it really is, we would have to expand our field of awareness to a higher dimension and find relations, both to other things and to oneself. Knowledge can exist only by being based on relations, and it is always relative.
The philosopher must split knowledge into two forms:
- the state of things as they are presented to our five senses
- the state of things as they really are in their essential nature
To understand reality we must first understand the unreal.
Scientifically viewed things in their ultimate character are indeed fields of electronic and protonic energies moving at speeds – a state of absolute rest does not exist – that is an illusion. The universe is not so much a structure as a flow, it is the microcosmic world of atoms: electrons are constantly rotating, protons are ceaselessly vibrating.
Thoughts are constantly flowing – mentalism demonstrates that our experience of the whole world is nothing but our thoughts of it. The ultimate stuff of the universe is light, restlessness being the ultimate state of the universe, and where reality is.
Modern science began by studying and describing the properties of things, and it can end only by discovering their ultimate substance, and this will land it in metaphysics. Atoms are not the last word nor matter the last substance. Atoms have been divided and found to be waves. The worlds is not a stable one but a process of happenings and the universe is in a state of permanent change.
Thing’s actuality reveals itself as mentally made – ideas and emotions, there is nothing else. Mind and the world are inextricably intertwined, mind is the only reality – mentalism is the doctrine that concludes that there is nothing but mind, we cannot step outside our mind. Ideas can not exist separately without a thinking being to hold or generate them. A full suspension of the mind’s activity results in sleep or coma, full resumption of it in wakefulness.
There is also another factor present underneath the individual experience of the world, a creative and contributive factor which is beyond his control and his consciousness. The individual and the unknown super-individual gives an 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 that a super-individual is present as a mental factor.
Our sense-impressions arise from a creative power of our own minds which functions independently of our intentions and above our conscious self. There must be an unknown cause for the constant succession of thought forms – a super-individual mind must be present.
Existence cannot be limited merely to what is given in human sensations, there must be a universally diffused mind – a primal, permanent and self-subsistent one, a boundless mind which is a supreme mind. We are not merely the self-absorbed witnesses of our own impressions but also the co-sharers of a common experience, a constantly perceiving permanent super-mind.
The very act of thinking is a creative one as it manufactures its own time and space. The cosmos in its entirety is but a thought form of a cosmic thinker, working subconsciously behind the individual mind, and which will fill the gap we have in our understanding. We must recognize the working of another mind upon our own. This then is a third thing which must be a higher form of consciousness.
The presence of an omnipresent mind must recognize a relation not only between the world and the individual but also between the world and a universal mind.
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. Their own multiple existence in a single larger mind can be described as thousands of cells existing in a single larger body. This determines one man’s world experience from within himself and also determines another man’s. There is a hidden unity enclosing all human minds – the universal mind – the supreme mind – the World-Mind – is the soul of nature.
Remove thought and you remove things; annihilate mind and you annihilate matter. Man has difficulty with this partly because its paradoxical unfamiliarity and partly because of his own deep-rooted prejudice in favour of materialism.
Mentalism defines the universe in this way, and science has taken the first step towards the discovery of this truth. Whatever science has been in the past – the world is just one’s thought! Will science lead us to mentalism?
Who can tell – but when we do not know the important thing is to keep on speculating, making guesses and hypotheses. One day we will surely know.
(Note: A proton is the mobile part of the water molecule and is the carrier of energy/signals in biological systems. Protonic conduction takes place in the aqueous system present in all living matter – bioproticity.)