=1 "Man the thinker"
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Man the thinker
Our forefathers distinguished between thinking – the manipulating, shifting, adding and subtracting of ideas – and the ideas themselves. The mechanical part of thinking takes place in the brain. You see an image and you compare it with something you have already seen. But the images themselves have their origin outside. Ideas also have their origin outside, in a mental world to which you, as a mental being, have access and where you can contemplate them as the shining numinous beings they are. In ancient times people called them gods, or heavenly visitors, “the infinite's great-eyed seraphim thoughts”[1]. To think that they have their origin or home in your brain-case is truly naive and a sign of the ignorance of our age.
Our brains, like the circuitry of electronic brains, are only tools. They are no more the birthplace of the ideas of good, justice, beauty than the electronic brain is the birthplace of the notion of adding and subtracting.
Provided our logic is vast enough, everything in this universe will appear logical. Everything exists and happens according to strictly logical reasons. Our thinking is or can be logical because the universe we live in is logical, was logical long before we started to think. Still most people have the feeling that while some things may be logical others are not. To the extent that they fail to understand a thing (a shipwreck, a volcano, even a cold) they conclude that it is not logical, somehow outside the logical universe.
The are even professors of physics or researchers in organic chemistry who live from 9 AM to 5 PM in an orderly logical universe but who, at 6 PM, deny that it is logical that somebody could have foreseen, for example, that Aunt Emma would break her leg in an automobile accident, or that it is possible to discover an absolutely valid ultimate value by meditation. These people call themselves logical positivists, but they have faith in this universe only in the laboratory.
In the same way religious people speak about Providence when a baby is gently and safely deposited on top of a sand dune by a tidal wave, but not when a similar tidal wave carries away a whole fishing village.
In general, these problems arise because, in this strictly logical universe, a biological brain has difficulty understanding and following the rules. Wishful thinking, day-dreaming, all kinds of phobias and obsessions, superstitions and unreasonable desires, laziness, quick fatigue prevent it from applying even those rules it does understand.
Man would like to live in a society without poverty, and society could be rich enough for that, but he is not yet ready to share what he has with the poor, so he lives in a society with poverty, and everybody suffers from this poverty.
He would like to live in a society without crime, but he is not ready to undertake the logical steps to attain such a society. On the contrary, he sends his juvenile delinquents into special houses where they have exclusively asocial company.
Or he sends his first offenders into prisons knowing well that they will be turned out a few years later as professionals.
He isn't even ready to stop smoking in spite of the logical consequence: lung cancer. He drives stinking automobiles around his cities thus not only polluting the air he breathes but knowing that as a result of his driving there are every year some 50,000 deaths and 150,000 maimed, many more casualties than in Viet Nam.
He would like to live in a world without war, so what does he do? Create a world state and abolish armies? No. He creates more states, more armies, and more weapons, which according to his logic are the surest way to peace.
He knows that sooner or later he has to leave his body, but he lives as if he were to be in it forever. He rarely prepares another centre or support for his consciousness than his little ego. He is too illogical to prepare himself to live in eternity, or the thinks he can do that with some pre-logical mumbo-jumbo. 99% of his thought processes are immersed in his subconscious. Whatever his relations are to reality, they are continuously obscured by the glandular activities of his body.
Our idea that we are the master of our brain could make us the laughing stock of the universe. Sex-ridden, food-ridden, fear-ridden, endocrine-directed slaves that we are, we may be able to shift a few ideas around in our heads, but we are even less masters of our brains than an IBM 304 is. After all, when an IBM has finished its task it can shut itself off, but we can't do that, even when we go to sleep. Few people on earth are masters of their brain. We are most likely to meet them in Asia, and would recognize them by definite signs. They are never impatient. Each one of them has a magnificent computer to play with – a computer with 10 billion neurons which can provide endless entertainment. If they repeat what other people have said it is only in a playful way. They never take themselves or anybody else or any doctrine very seriously. No event seems tragic to them. They can do tricks with their brain as with a well-trained circus horse which we couldn't repeat, so that what they say we will probably understand only after ten years or so of cognition. Then we will be struck by its luminous truth.
In our brain work we stumble from error to error and finally by mere chance pick up a truth. They proceed from knowledge to knowledge and walk like a giant whose feet touch only the mountain tops. They can contemplate an idea from all sides at the same time and for a long time. To them the world of mind and what is above it is not strange, shadowy and nebulous as it is to us. It is their home. Our material world which is so solid to us is transparent to them, and there are other worlds for them whose doors open only in the total silence of mind, where “my eyes and God's eyes are one and the same”[2]. But that is another story....
Our central nervous system is operational only in part. All its higher faculties – intuition, inspiration, illumination, identification – occur only sporadically and in rare intervals. Once these are conquered and possessed we will no longer act as our animal ancestors did, on or against the things and beings around us. But simply by climbing into the identifying common consciousness we will be able from there to act on the consciousness of the stone, the plant, the animal.
Man is still young and full of potentialities of which he has yet no idea. Even as he is today, he has literally billions of brain cells waiting to be utilized. If he has any limits, we are not yet able to perceive them. And if after some millions of years limits appear to our descendants, they may be able to incarnate further in some other race, more evolved, more plastic, limitless.