(*Categories twenty and twenty-one have this same introduction in the CD ROM edition.)
Categories nineteen through twenty-one bring us to a critical turning point, a stage of profound deepening, in our understanding of self and world: properly understood, they provide a fresh basis for conduct, tap a deeper inspiration for living, and catalyze daily spiritual practices.
Relativity, Philosophy, and Mind is the composite title we devised for categories nineteen, twenty, and twenty-one as published together as a single volume (volume thirteen) in the printed edition of The Notebooks. Because of a unique light these three sections lend to one another, we continue to suggest that readers consider the three categories in relation to one another. This combination should be very helpful to readers who have had difficulty with earlier presentations of similar, but not identical, ideas in The Hidden Teaching Beyond Yoga and The Wisdom of the Overself. It should also be inspiring to new P.B. readers, giving them important keys to getting more from those two earlier books than was possible for many of us in previous years.
Many of us who read those earlier books, for example, were able to follow P.B.'s ideas on relativity without much difficulty. Intellectually, we could acknowledge the relativity of observer and observed; we could assent to the epistemological notion that all we experience, all we know is a product of our own minds. But we were considerably less amenable to the metaphysical premise that the natural universe is mentally constructed, that Mind is the essential substance of all that is. In the way that it addresses this particular problem, the Notebooks structure is a significant improvement on the earlier books.
P.B. here distinguishes much more carefully the ideas on relativity from those on mentalism. He also gives much more detail about what the essential intermediate step that bridges them involves--the step of achieving a balanced individual wholeness and assuming a philosophical perspective. The present structure of first, the ideas on relativity, second, the components essential to a philosophical perspective, and third, the ideas on mentalism makes the latter much easier to appreciate. His elaboration of the important distinctions between these three sets of ideas makes the transformative power of mentalism considerably more obvious. In the process, however, the reader will still have to do some real thinking. The Notebooks format doesn't provide a continuous sequence of reasoning intended to transform outlook from materialism to mentalism. The "missing" key is the reader's own mind, which must discover, develop, and apply this sequence for itself. P.B. has simply provided here the ideas needed to accomplish that discovery under one's own power.
The Reign of Relativity encompasses the current scientific development of Einstein's widely acclaimed Theory as well as the ancient observations of Shankaracharya. P.B.'s interest here is not so much to reiterate that Theory in layman's terms as to show the extent of relativity's domain and to explore the implications of its principles for spiritual development. His approach combines intellectual analysis and the cultivation of intuition through straightforward mystical exercises. His intention is to take us deeper than the superficial familiarity with the concepts of relativity and on to a full awareness of the substantial questions to which it gives rise.
Insight into the nature of relativity brings an understanding that what we see and know is directly related to our organs of perception and knowledge. Through exploring both the subjective and objective elements of relativity within becoming, as well as the relativity between being and becoming, we learn that what we perceive has neither more nor less reality than our own perception. The world of our everyday experience is consequently understood to possess, at the very least, a different reality than we had unconsciously assigned to it. It is clearly not what it appears to be--that is, among other things, it is not a field of fixed material objects that necessarily exist in their own right with the same forms that our perception gives them. Our physical senses, our awareness (or unawareness) of motion and location, our states of consciousness--in short, all the various elements of our mind-body complex--are at the very least contributing factors to the world of our experience. We say at the very least because even at this level of the teaching the question arises as to whether or not the so-called objects possess any self-identical extension at all independently of the relational factors in perception.
Recognition, real recognition, of the inexorable relativity of both "objective" phenomena and "subjective" faculties is a major, and usually unsettling, event. The unsettling feeling that accompanies it has a genuine basis: deep inside ourselves, we know that the faculties we are currently using are unreliable vehicles for ultimate truth, and we feel the urgency of discovering a more reliable means to knowledge.
Reactions to this situation have been dramatic, with implications reaching into a variety of fields. For some, the sense of the world's reality is undermined; for others, the sense of reason's reliability is threatened; for almost all, the possibility of authentically objective knowledge, non-psychological knowledge, is seriously challenged. If everything is relative, the cry goes out, is there then no Truth but only truths--tentative truths totally dependent on the standpoint taken? For some, the only ultimate Truth is that everything is relative; for others, Truth remains as that which is beyond the relative, revealing the relative as totally illusory. Each of these extreme viewpoints lends itself to a variety of interpretations, and there exists a spectrum of viewpoints between them. The range extends from the nihilistic "nothing is sacred'' to the Buddhistic "sacred No-thing,'' and from Pantheism to Theophany. Each interpretation serves as a basis for action and has tangible repercussions in daily living. Each is eminently challengeable. Each is an idea in our minds. How do we test the reality of these ideas we have about Reality? This is where Philosophy meets us: now we need it, and now its disciplines become genuinely meaningful.
Category twenty, What Is Philosophy?, meets us at the core of this so called Kantian dilemma and points beyond psychology to reliable knowledge and durable selfhood. Everything now points to the need for a more reliable faculty of knowledge, and philosophy sets out to develop one. It brings in the dimension of "the moral law within'' and outlines a complete system of self-development oriented toward the awakening of an entirely new and nonpsychological faculty: insight. Relativity having turned our minds to the apparent dichotomy of being and becoming, What Is Philosophy? turns them toward a deeper level of our own being in which they can be realized as twin poles of a single reality that is our own truest self.
The philosophic training addresses the need for individual wholeness, and for the ability to distinguish between the reliably real and the merely apparent. Each faculty of the human psyche is fulfilled: neither feeling nor intellect nor will nor sensation is allowed to dominate all the others or to improperly subsume the role appropriately filled by one of the others. Then these faculties are all integrated under the guidance of the developing intuitive faculty and brought to a balance appropriate for that particular psyche. When this balance is achieved, insight arises: a faculty latent in all us but active only in the few who have achieved sagehood.
Once the philosophical viewpoint and experience is made more clear, the ideas of mentalism become more transparent. These ideas are not intended to produce a devaluation of the natural universe and practical experience; neither are they intended to evoke despair with respect to the possibility of ontological knowledge. They are intended to awaken us to what mind really is.
Category twenty-one, Mentalism, addresses the fact that most of us, without really investigating the knowledge-situation, assume that we know what we mean when we say "my mind.'' We find out that we don't. And as we awaken to what mind in its deeper layers is, mentalism becomes a celebration--not only of the mind's deeper reality but also of the intelligent universe.
The presentation of mentalism involves two levels. On one level, we are simply requested to try a different approach to reasoning about the knowledge situation. Showing how unsatisfactory the materialist presupposition proves to be, P.B. asks us to try a different premise. Let's see what happens if we work with the presupposition that mind is first, rather than last, in the perceptual series. Does this presupposition prove more satisfactory? For many of us, nothing more than honest, scrupulous thinking is required to evoke a resounding Yes. On a deeper level, P.B. tells us that this premise, experimental to reasoning, is in fact a firsthand experience in advanced stages of meditation. Its verification is available to anyone who will intelligently pursue the experiment.
At this deeper level, we see mentalism not as reality reduced but as reality revealed. Rather than to reduce the world to mere ideation, it shows the importance of ideation. It reveals the presence and accessibility of fathomless untapped power within us to improve--through improved ideation--our immediate selves and consequent circumstances. But most importantly, P.B. takes great care to assert that he is not here presenting just another form of philosophic idealism, and certainly not a solipsism. He does not challenge the superpersonal reality of the natural universe--only our materialistic conception of that universe. Implicit in his position is that the materialistic conception that has such power over our thought-processes is itself an idea, and a thoroughly unsatisfactory one. His final stance is that "science, which began by repudiating mind and exalting matter, is being forced by facts to end by repudiating matter and exalting mind. '' More detail on the relationship between the individual mind and a deeper, universal mind appears in categories twenty-five through twenty-eight. These categories are present on this compact disk and also bound together in the printed edition as volume sixteen, Enlightened Mind, Divine Mind.
Editorial conventions here are the same as stated in the introductions to Perspectives and The Quest. Likewise, (P) at the end of a para indicates that it also appears in Perspectives, the introductory volume to this series.