MENTALISM – Part 2
The Wisdom of the Overself – Volume II of Paul Brunton’s Major Opus
All Quotations from this Book – Compiler comments in black, quotes in color
Let us continue our study of what PB means by “a super-individual mental factor” and its relationship to individual human minds.
It has been found that our senseimpressions 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. … 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 thoughtforms which enter individual consciousness must therefore be the mental correlate of a superindividual mind, which possesses the power both to form them and to impose them on the individual mind.
It must be a universally diffused mind, or it could not carry the consciousness of the myriad things and beings in the world. It must be a primal, permanent and selfsubsistent 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.
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 SuperMind. … The world which spreads itself out before our gaze is thus an intimation of the presence of an omnipresent Mind which imprints it on our senses from within. Every object is therefore not only an idea in an individual mind but also in the universal one.”
PB explains that the world image does not come into existence at the arbitrary will of any given individual, but is something given to the individual. “They experience it within themselves, but they know they do not originate it.” Also, we notice that the mental operations of all individuals are related to each other.
“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. … There is indeed a hidden unity enclosing all human minds as a larger circle encloses many smaller concentric ones.”
PB uses the term “World-Mind” to indicate this universal Intelligence. He shows us how:
“The WorldMind 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 worldidea, the similarity of the total impression which it makes on countless minds, the sensefelt 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 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.”
A very important point that PB makes concerns the relative nature of the illusory quality of the world-image.
“It would be a gross error therefore to mistake mentalism as committing itself to the doctrine of the world’s nonexistence. 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 nonexistent, we do not also say that the form of experience which passes itself off as external is meaningless and nonexistent.”
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.
We may deal with the admittedly hard problem of worldexistence 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.”
In this fragmentary sharing from Chapter Two of The Wisdom of the Overself, we’ve briefly touched on some of the major points of this doctrine of Mentalism. For a fuller understanding we suggest study of that text along with the companion volume The Hidden Teaching Beyond Yoga, both of which are available at https://www.larsonpublications.com/shop/results.php?keyword=Wisdom+of+the+Overself&btn-submit=search
In the November e-teaching: Mentalism – Part III, we will contemplate “mentalism” from the perspective of Category 21 of the Paul Brunton Notebooks. This will deepen our understanding and perhaps expand the intuitive feltness of our grasp of this doctrine.
Compiled by Judy S.