THE ILLUSION of INSIDE and OUTSIDE
Everyone you speak to has this illusion: you say " the world is out there, I am here; and inside, some mysterious place inside, the world is reflected within me." That the world is out there, my mind is inside, and the world is mirrored in my mind... and this is the common view even among 20th century scientists. [15]
AD: Here is a question:
"The world appears to be outside us, but is it?" (Paul Brunton 10v/11/45--21b-prj.0 unpublished)
AD: For instance, the white on that wall, is that outside you?
S: Well, no.
AD: you can't give me the correct answer without a good reason.
S: I experience it as outside of myself.
YOU ARE NON-LOCAL
When you say "I perceive that object" and you analyze every aspect of that perception, you'll see these are simply ideas. Because that is all you experience, ideas. Green is an idea, the feeling of smoothness is an idea. The whiteness out there is an idea in the mind. Right? But if whiteness is an idea in the mind, then your mind has to be out there too.
Let's make it worse. You are looking at a cloud a hundred miles away. And it is a nice white fleecy cloud. If you analyze the experience of whiteness, it's an idea in your mind, right? Then that white fleecy cloud is in your mind… The mind includes you here and the whiteness over there. And so is this body in your mind. And all of that is within the mind.
Well, where is the limit? There isn't any limit. Because the mind has no size, no dimensions, no shape, no form. It is formless.
MIND IS IMMEDIATE: P.38.
“What you first have to understand, without any doubt, without any hesitation--you have to understand it because you reasoned it out over and over--is that what you experience all the time is your mind. All that we know directly, indubitably, without any hesitation, is the fact that anything I experience is a thing in my mind. You have to actually get the feeling of that.
AD: Just think of it: how do you know anything? No matter what it is that you know, you now through this intangible undimensioned unfeatured principle, intelligence. It has no qualities, it has no way of being recognized, you can’t say of it “it is” you can’t say of it “it isn’t.” You cannot say it is both or neither. And yet it makes possible for a universe to appear and disappear. So which one is more real? Think about it… [Columbus 1970]
…Let me put it this way: the most immediate experience you have is that of your own mind. all that we know, directly, indubitably, without any hesitation, is the fact that anything I experience is within my mind. If you got that, you've got it. Because that is our immediate environment. We live in the mind. We are the mind. If there is no mind, there is no thought, no feeling,. Mind is the primal existence.” LIM
“When you think, it's by the mind that you know that you're thinking. When you feel something, it is by the light of the mind that you know that. The immediacy of your experience is of the mind's functioning....
I KNOW THAT
AD: And I don't care if you're talking about Sirius, the stars, or whether you're talking about the tree in front of me. They all fall under the same category of "known." I - know - that.
As soon as you analyze the experience, you have the knower and you have what is known. Nobody can get around that. No one.
“If what I am saying is true, then you are a mystery to yourself.
Wouldn't that be so? Because if we can't understand how knowledge arises, all we can say is that we know we have knowledge. You don't know who you are. All that you know are these images that are constantly in front of you.” LIM
When you speak about mentalism to people they get the strange idea that you are denying the existence of a certain object, whereas what we are saying is: "No, we are just telling you what that object is. It is a thought. We are not denying its existence, we are explaining it."
THERE IS NO MATTER: THERE IS NO THING THERE
If you try to get to what is the stuff that underlies the tree, there isn't any stuff underlying the tree. Just like the modern physicists who try to find out what is the nature of matter, prior to its existence as a wave or a particle. They found out there isn't any thing there.
AD: If you analyze an object in depth, you'll come up like the modern scientist and say there's no substantial thing there, there's only whirling protonic and electronic energies, there's nothing there, no thing is there. All you have is a package of tendencies which is not an independent thing of any kind. [we would have to ask the scientist] point blank: what do you mean, matter?
They'll tell you point blank: "We can't tell you what it is. If we tell you what it is, then we are talking about some thing, an atom. All right we can talk about an atom. But when you break down the atom to the particles that constitute it, when you get to the ultimate particles and you break them down, then you don't have any particle any more." What do you have? And all they can tell you is, "We’ve got certain tendencies, a matrix of possibilities, which can get converted either into a particle or a wave, but until that happens we don't know what those things are, what that is." They will not speak about it as an objective thing. That's what twentieth century science has come to--quantum mechanics. [46:30]
The same way I would ask you, if you told me, well there is a matter here that exists independent of all the qualities or characteristics that I perceive in it. I would ask you, well, show me what you're talking about. Because if you analyze an object, a chair, a table, a brick and you analyze it in depth, you'll come up with the scientist and say there's nothing there, there's only this whirling protonic, electronic energies, there's nothing there, no thing is there. The Buddhist will do the same thing. They'll analyze it and show you there's nothing there. There isn't any substratum underlying the appearance of an object. And it's frightening because we all like to think that underneath appearances there must be some reality. But the fun of it may be that there isn't any
THE GAP IN THE PHYSIOLOGIST EXPLANATION P.28
How did a physiological process become a mental event? They haven't answered it and they won't. It's impossible to answer the question in that fashion. They are going to have to explain to us how a sensation which is supposedly a physiological happening gets converted into a process of knowing. So if you think about it very intensely you'll see that the problem of knowledge is still a difficult problem that each one has to understand. [LIM 91]]
They say, "then," "after," "somehow," the molecular activity in the brain is replaced by an idea, a thought, and then you see the object. And we pointed out that you can't proceed in that whole analysis to the point where consciousness arises. There is a break in the logic which you cannot surmount. You can’t cross over from a so-called material world to a mental world. You have a process in physiology and then you have a process in consciousness? --I don’t know what you are talking about.
In other words the physiological process doesn't explain how an idea arises in my mind because I can show you that if you go step by step there is one step where you have the so-called material event and the next step where you supposedly have the mental idea. And you didn't show me how you got from one to the other. Now, if this is true, then you are a mystery to yourself. You don't know who you are.
And they have been saying for over a hundred years, "Well don't worry, we'll solve it. We'll solve it." And philosophers have been telling them, "Don't worry, you'll never solve it." This is a problem that’s very, very ancient, and it’s been thought out by great thinkers and we think we know what we are talking about. … But the scientists at this point, although they claim that they will eventually solve it, the problem is not solvable. Because it cannot be solved that way
DREAM ANALOGY P.47
Imagine you are dreaming and you appear in your dream and you look at a tree and you say, "I see a tree." Now who is seeing the tree? The dream character or you who are having the dream? When the dream person says "I see a dream tree" that dream person doesn't see anything. The person who is having the dream sees the tree.
There are times--when a person is under bereavement or extreme grief, for example--that the world is so devaluated that he sees it's a ghost, it's a shadow, it's not a reality, it's a thought. He devaluates the world immediately. And then he sees it for what it really is.
When you experience the world as a dream you know you are getting closer to its reality. It is an intuitive understanding that dawns--that the mind projects the world, then experiences the world that it projects.
DEEP ROOTED HABITS P.38
S: Why do we so stubbornly want to think that there is something out there?
AD: Well, that is the nature of any habit.
When we think that there is a thing out there, independent of my mind, that is a habit which was ingrained in us for a long time. Those are habits that have to be rooted out. ...by constantly going over the teachings, understanding them until they are perfectly clear in your mind. So that when the thought tries to express itself as "that is a thing" you say "No, that is a thought." In other words you begin to see, in the precision of your language, that your habits are changing... They are so deeply rooted.
S: Yes, but what we're after, isn't it the idea of a tree in the World Mind?
AD: No, what we are after is to experience that tree as a mental phenomena. That's what we're after first. Until a person has got himself to that level, to speak about understanding the Idea - the "Idea" in the Platonic sense - is a waste of time. There's no way I could try to, or anyone including any of the great mystics, could try to convey to you what the nature of an Idea is in itself. You know, that's out of the question. To speak about the Idea as an eternal presence, immutable and powerful enough to manifest itself yet always remaining identical with itself- these will be words that you'll memorize, you won't understand what they mean. You have no experience of that kind of a world. So let's stay where we have to learn so that we can go into it.
YOU HAVE TO THINK IT OUT P.39
...To follow this line of reflection to its inevitable end demands courage and candour of the highest kind, for it demands as ultimate conclusion the principle that knowledge being but ideas in the mind, the whole universe is nothing but an immense idea within one's own mind. For the very nature of knowledge is thus internal, and hence the individual mind cannot know any reality external to itself. It believes that it observes a world without when it only observes its own mental pictures of that world. 21.2.108
Any time a person wants to think something through, he has to really immerse himself very deeply and get to the bottom of it through concentrating inwardly. You are going to have to make the same kind of effort to understand mentalism. you are going to have to think it out for yourself. [172]
S: But it is funny when the physicists have accepted that there is no matter, how can the other branches of science go on...?
AD: How come I have so much difficulty convincing you? The same thing.
These scientists are subject to the same cultural mores and influences that you are. They're subject to the inherent ignorance that is built into every human being, all right, and we could go on and on. And the scientist is as much a human being as you and I. And his ignorance is just as pervasive as yours and mine. … Not even Einstein can accept it. And for forty years all he did was disagree with quantum mechanics,
REFLECTION AND MEDITATION
“we can arrive at such conclusions not only by a straight line sequence of reasoned thinking but also by a re-orientation of consciousness during advanced mystical meditation.” --The Wisdom of the Overself ch. 2
you can get [this understanding] by constantly reflecting and trying to understand the very nature of the world, just like you can understand that the sun does not rise, even though you see it rise. You can actually come to that by constant reflection and analytical analysis. And then you can come to that again if you go into meditation, lets say, and you succeed in getting your mind absolutely still. You will see that everything is an idea. You'll not only see it, you'll feel it. You'll know it. And then the next moment when there is thoughts agitating the mind, again you'll be back in the ego and you'll say: "That object is a material thing."
So the technique that we employ is that the question has to be answered, providing it's a legitimate question. So questions keep coming up as to the nature of mentalism. They must be answered, because until they are answered, you won't be satisfied. But once you have answered every question as to the nature of the objects that we experience, and whenever the question comes up, you can answer it no matter what, where it's attacking you from, you can answer it, all right? Now you're in a position to understand mentalism.
Now how do I get to prove in my own experience, that I AM, alright, that the I AM or the greater consciousness includes within itself the whole world-idea? I've got to do meditation in order to get the experimental proof that this is so. The other way is still theory; until you can experience the Witness-I yourself, until you can actually experience that your consciousness includes everything, until you can actually experience the transformation of your being into thought, this is all theory. So on the one hand, mentalism is like the theoretical side, and meditation is the practical side. The two of them together will put your feet on the ground, from then on the infinite journey begins.
So the first thing is we have to try to theoretically to understand something about mentalism. And that's difficult. And then the next thing is, if you have some understanding of mentalism, then you want to be able to realize a little bit of it.
When a person tries to understand mentalism and he has to think very deeply and profoundly over and over again, and then he tries to realize it in meditation and he gets a glimpse. Now he's on his way.
When you experience the world as a dream you know you are getting closer to its reality. It is not the reality yet. It’s an intuitive understanding that dawns up, that the mind projects the world, then experiences the world that it projects. And all that it could project are its own ideas.
OPENS YOUR HEART P.39
...When you get this feeling that you're experiencing ideas, it is like you are getting closer to the mind-stuff, which is not rigid.
Once you being to realize, “Now I understand, this is really what I am, I am the mind,” you open yourself up inside to let things happen; whereas the other way you are closed. You don’t let anything happen. You figure the world is hostile, so you put up your defenses.
But once the person understands, he says, “The whole world is a projection of my mind. No matter what I experience, I can only experience my own mind, my own thoughts, my own feelings.”
So once I really begin to understand that, then I open myself up; I become receptive, and then the higher mind could start flowing in.
Looking into Mind Copyright 2019