This teaching will only be of interest to those who have long felt an aspiration towards higher-than-ordinary experience. It can be understood only by those who try to live it: all others merely think they understand it. Only those who have incorporated it in their lives for a number of years can know how intensely practical philosophy is.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Contemporary Influence > Whom it best serves

#24916M – 13.20.2.164

BA11 – ZZZ – DX

Philosophy will have little interest for those who are eager only for animal satisfactions and human selfishnesses. It is for more evolved types, who understand that a higher life is possible and worth working for.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Contemporary Influence > Whom it best serves

#24917 – 13.20.2.165

B_02 – ZZ – DK

If people are so determined to become the victims of their own egos that no words, no sage counsel, can stop them, there is no other course left except to leave them to suffer the consequences of their actions and thus learn the hard way.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Contemporary Influence > Some esotericism is still unavoidable

#24929 – 13.20.2.177

B_01 – ZZZ – DK

The need for secrecy must be treated with respect. It does not mean that the truth is to be suppressed for all time or for all men. It means that one must not speak of it to men whose mentality cannot receive it or whose character cannot be touched by it. It means that one ought not to put forward ideas whose ultimate destiny will be the same as their immediate one—to be resisted or rejected.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Contemporary Influence > Some esotericism is still unavoidable

#24932 – 13.20.2.180

BN – ZZZ – K

However useful religion is for the masses, it does not speak very clearly to the few who want the Truth and nothing but the Truth. From the small number of seekers interested in these teachings it is obvious that more than three-quarters of the people are not ready for philosophy.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Contemporary Influence > Some esotericism is still unavoidable

#24933 – 13.20.2.181

B_05 – ZZZ – K

The custodians of esoteric truth do not pursue a spendthrift policy. They do not give it away indiscriminately. They are not satisfied with its value being recognized by few people outside themselves. But there is nothing much they can do about it. The upward development of mankind can no more be forced than can the upward growth of an oak tree.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Contemporary Influence > Some esotericism is still unavoidable

#24939 – 13.20.2.187

BN – Z – K

Although more men are ready to receive it than ever before, philosophy's time has not yet come. There is still only a tiny minority which can recognize its truth, appreciate its worth, and practise its ethic.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Contemporary Influence > Some esotericism is still unavoidable

#24941 – 13.20.2.189

BN – ZZZ – D

It is too subtle for popular appeal, too selfless for popular emotion, too honest for popular thought.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Contemporary Influence > Some esotericism is still unavoidable

#24953 – 13.20.2.201

BN – ZZ – K

So many seekers are looking for occult "experiences," so few are looking for the understanding of truth, that philosophy could not, on this ground alone, become popular.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Contemporary Influence > Some esotericism is still unavoidable

#24963 – 13.20.2.211

B_05 – ZZ – K

Even many of those who have had the good fortune to come into contact with philosophy have either misunderstood it and so missed their opportunity, or neglected it because its disciplines seemed too troublesome.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Contemporary Influence > Some esotericism is still unavoidable

#24990 – 13.20.2.238

BN – X – D

Nature, which is God Active, governs man by her own laws, which bring him the results of his own doing.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Contemporary Influence > Dangers to be recognized

#24998E – 13.20.2.246

BA11 – ZZ – K

How many were those who, being unable to rise to the level from which Jesus spoke, were unable to understand him? He, a mystic, so far removed from interest in this world, was charged with political crime!

What Is Philosophy? > Its Contemporary Influence > Dangers to be recognized

#25009 – 13.20.2.257

B_11 – Z – K

The incapacity of some persons to receive the teaching is illusory. The fault lies really in the inefficiency of those who present it―in their failure to make it clear enough, vivid enough, logical enough, to render it intelligible.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Contemporary Influence > How philosophy presents itself

#25019E – 13.20.2.267

BSG_4 – ZZZ – DEK

The multitude of seekers after happiness, which means in the end seekers after their own sacred source, live on widely different levels of understanding and exhibit very diverse kinds of character. Why then should the whole of truth be presented all at once at a single time straightway to all of them, the young and the mature alike? No, it must be revealed gradually and slowly or, if abruptly, by stages.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Contemporary Influence > How philosophy presents itself

#25022 – 13.20.2.270

B_05 – ZZZ – K

The principles of chemistry have no individual's name attached to them. We accept them not because so-and-so discovered them, but because they can be tested and proven by anyone anywhere. So it is with principles and teachings. Because they are really factual, no names or personalities should be put forward as the guarantee of their correctness. They must be presented impersonally. This is a teaching which can and will be expanded; which is open to change, correction, and improvement—like every science. It asks us to look at the facts of life and see how they support it. They should be examined as actual facts found in Nature. The emphasis will be on these facts, and the personality of the teacher pushed into the background.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Contemporary Influence > How philosophy presents itself

#25025 – 13.20.2.273

B_02 – ZZZ – K

If the philosophical few realize that their doctrines have little appeal to the masses, they need not feel disturbed. They must acquire something of the patience which Nature herself possesses. Truth must be their hope and its ultimate power must be their reliance.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Contemporary Influence > How philosophy presents itself

#25035 – 13.20.2.283

BN – ZZZ – K

Philosophy is faced with the problem of educating each individual seeker who aspires to understand it. There is no such thing as mass education in philosophy.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Contemporary Influence > How philosophy presents itself

#25041 – 13.20.2.289

B_05 – ZZZ – K1

Such a teaching cannot indulge in propagandist methods or militant sectarianism. It must live quietly and offer itself only to those who are intellectually prepared and emotionally willing to receive it.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Contemporary Influence > How philosophy presents itself

#25042 – 13.20.2.290

BN – ZZ – K1

Such an exalted teaching is never to be forced on others; they must first feel the desire for truth, and that strongly enough to begin to seek for it. Each man therefore obtains the truths to which he is entitled. It is all a matter of ripeness.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Contemporary Influence > How philosophy presents itself

#25047 – 13.20.2.295

B_02 – ZZ – DK

The teaching does not have to go forth to meet people. They will find their own way to meet it as they develop through science, religion, art, and life.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Contemporary Influence > How philosophy presents itself

#25055 – 13.20.2.303

B_02 – ZZ – K

Because they sought to help the multitude for whom they came, rather than the elite, sages used the popular language to deliver their teachings. Hence Buddha spoke in Prakrit rather than in Sanskrit, Jesus in Aramaic rather than Hebrew.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Contemporary Influence > How philosophy presents itself

#25062 – 13.20.2.310

B_11 – Z – DMK

The philosophic movement must spread itself by teaching, not by propaganda.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Contemporary Influence > How philosophy presents itself

#25065 – 13.20.2.313

BN – ZZ – K

Adherence to philosophy is the most fundamental act of a man's life. He cannot be emotionally rushed into it, as he can into adherence to a religious cult. It is the result of growth.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Contemporary Influence > How philosophy presents itself

#25076 – 13.20.2.324

BN – X – D

The time has come to teach the masses principles which formerly they were taught in parables.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Contemporary Influence > How philosophy presents itself

#25077 – 13.20.2.325

BN – X – DK

If we wish to serve the many with this truth-offering, then the terminology which bewilders and irritates them must be absent from our speaking and writing, whether it be the jargon of metaphysics, the exoticism of Sanskrit, or the abracadabra of occultism; let us say plainly what we mean.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Contemporary Influence > How philosophy presents itself

#25078 – 13.20.2.326

UR_3.0 – ZZ – K

If philosophy hides its truth from mental unreadiness and its votaries from social persecution, it is, nevertheless, always ready when it is needed by any sincere seeker who has evolved to the requisite degree. If he has got enough religious prejudice and mystical superstition out of his mind to be free to think for himself, if he has lifted his character somewhat above the common weaknesses, if his sense of values is such that the Truth appears desirable above all things, then philosophy is the only thing to which he can turn for guidance and enlightenment—and philosophy will surely welcome him.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Basic qualifications

#25082 – 13.20.3.4

B_05 – ZZZ – K

To learn is to receive knowledge; but he who seeks to learn this Truth which is both behind and beyond all other truths must come with his mind, his heart, his body, and his will. With his mind because his thought must be pushed to its deepest measure. With his heart because his love is demanded more than he now knows. With his body because it is to be the temple of the holy spirit. And with his will because he may not stop this enterprise until he is through.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Basic qualifications

#25083 – 13.20.3.5

BN – X – D

Philosophical intelligence combines the intellectual faculty with the intuitive.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Basic qualifications

#25086 – 13.20.3.8

BN – X – D

The study of philosophy educates the mind in deep thinking. It must be approached in the spirit of scientific detachment.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Basic qualifications

#25088 – 13.20.3.10

BN – X – D

Something of the impersonality and detachment of the mathematician are necessary to the beginning philosopher.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Basic qualifications

#25089 – 13.20.3.11

BN – X – K

He is to be concerned solely with the reality, with that which Is, and not with the presentation of it which others have invented. 

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Basic qualifications

#25090 – 13.20.3.12

UR_4 – ZZZ – K

Unless men possess the right intuitional calibre, they cannot grasp this teaching, for it stands at an altitude beyond the reach of the gross and the materialistic.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Basic qualifications

#25092 – 13.20.3.14

B_02 – ZZ – DK

The courage to become independent of his own past beliefs is needed. The strength to set aside the patterns of thought imposed on his mind by long habit is required. These qualities may not necessarily have to come into action but they must be there.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Basic qualifications

#25093 – 13.20.3.15

BN – Z – DEK

Philosophy is for those who demand the ultimate, who are satisfied with nothing less and who have enough discernment to discriminate between it and its many substitutes.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Basic qualifications

#25097 – 13.20.3.19

B_02 – ZZ – K

Swedenborg: “Without the utmost devotion to the Supreme Being, the Origin of all things, no one can be a complete and truly erudite philosopher. Veneration for the Infinite Being can never be separated from philosophy.”

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Basic qualifications

#25106 – 13.20.3.28

BN – X – DK

In the study of modern science, in all laboratory analysis or examination of natural phenomena, great stress is laid upon the necessity for strict impersonality and freedom from every trace of wishful thinking, personal emotion, and prejudice. This is of equal necessity to the student of philosophy.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Basic qualifications

#25108 – 13.20.3.30

BA11 – ZZ – DK

If you wish to know the Truth, you must accept its disconcerting revelations along with the pleasant ones. You must be willing to practise inner detachment from everything and everyone as well as to enjoy the beautiful moments of rapture.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Basic qualifications

#25112 – 13.20.3.34

UR_2.5 – ZZ – K

It needs some courage to face facts as they are and the world as it really is, but this is better than harbouring illusions which are going to be relentlessly and painfully dispelled.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Basic qualifications

#25119 – 13.20.3.41

BN – ZZ – K

It is comforting only to the few who are prepared to part with their egoism, their pride, their sensuality, and their inertia for the sake of truth.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Basic qualifications

#25127 – 13.20.3.49

BN – ZZZ – K

A high level of general education is a distinct advantage for those who would take up such a study, but it is not an absolute essential.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Basic qualifications

#25134 – 13.20.3.56

BN – Z – K

Those who are cultivated, educated, and intelligent enough to appreciate what philosophy offers them may yet be blinded by prejudice or selfishness or be too stupefied from gorging the passions to do so.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Basic qualifications

#25138 – 13.20.3.60

BN – Z – DK

Sensitive and introspective minds will more quickly find their way to these truths than dull and extroverted ones.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Basic qualifications

#25139 – 13.20.3.61

BN – Z – K

If he is to reach this pure well of truth, its water untainted by bias or prejudice, he will do best by keeping independent.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Basic qualifications

#25140 – 13.20.3.62

BN – ZZZ – K

One should seek for knowledge of the Higher Laws governing life, for true purity of character, and for humility if he wishes to reach the Highest Truth.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Basic qualifications

#25142 – 13.20.3.64

BA11 – ZZ – DK

Truth already exists within man. He has to bring it from the centre to the circumference of his consciousness. If it is hidden from his view, that is only because he has not looked deep enough or has not cleared away the obstructions to his view. Those obstructions are entirely within his lower self, and may be removed by practice of the philosophic discipline.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Philosophic discipline

#25154 – 13.20.3.76

BN – X – D

He has first to find out what it is that keeps him from the higher self. And, this known, he will see the need and value of the philosophic discipline as a means of eliminating these obstacles.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Philosophic discipline

#25155 – 13.20.3.77

BN – X – D

The ability to discriminate between appearance and reality, between the false "I" and the true "I," is developed by subjecting the reports of the senses to the criticism of the intellect, by checking emotion with reason, by standing aside from all of these faculties with the intuition, and by diving deeper and deeper into one's essence in meditation.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Philosophic discipline

#25159 – 13.20.3.81

BN – X – D

The enigmatic questions which have long haunted the human mind and will long continue to haunt it and which will rise insistent in the mind of the aspirant are: What is he to seek? How is he to gain the objects of his search? What are the prospects of the fulfilment of such an aspiration and the hindrances likely to attend it? The answers to them are a gradual revealing which follows on the heels of the cultivation of certain attitudes to truth and to persons and things.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Philosophic discipline

#25160E – 13.20.3.82

UR_2.4 – ZEL1/5 – DEK

"What is he to seek?" He should seek Reality and the knowledge of it which is Truth. This is the Ideal which is set before him. This is to realize his spiritual nature and thus achieve his higher destiny. Because truth is so subtle and so hard to find, his search after it should be well guided, his knowledge of it properly tested, and his adventures in meditation morally and intellectually safeguarded. Truer ideas are needed; nobler standards are called for. Such ideals, truthfully formed, deeply held, and wholeheartedly applied, can only benefit man and not hurt him. He who has been given a glimpse of the Ideal will not be able to lie always asleep in the sensual. The finer part of his nature will revolt against it again and again.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Philosophic discipline

#25160E – 13.20.3.82

UR_2.4 – ZEL2/5 – DEK

The Ideal serves more than one useful purpose. It is not only a peak to whose summit he tries to raise himself by slow degrees. It is also a focus for meditation exercises, a guide for practical conduct in certain situations, and a compass to give general direction to his trend of thought, feeling, and doing. It causes the aspirant to feel that he has been led through varying events to the new path which now opens up before him, that a spiritual meaning must be given to the period of his life just closed. The sequence of events and the accumulation of experience will force him to face his problems in the end. If he can do this honestly, analyse them intelligently, and intuit them adequately, he may acquire a valuable new point of view.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Philosophic discipline

#25160E – 13.20.3.82

UR_2.4 – ZEL3/5 – DEK

"How is he to gain the objects of his search?" The truth-seeker will begin to turn inward in quest of unity with his own soul and outward in quest of unity with mankind. Life is the guide that is bringing him home to himself and to kindlier relation to his fellows. Life itself teaches and disciplines towards these great ends. The following of the integral philosophic quest, with life as the guide and teacher, will involve the re-education of moral character—which is done in part by constant reflection and special meditations on the one hand and discipline of the senses on the other, and in part by prayer, aspiration, and worship. In addition, if a man cultivates the habit of barring entrance to negative thoughts and of instantly throwing weakening ones out of his mind, his character will strengthen itself more quickly. The outcome will be certain relationships to oneself, to others, and to situations and things.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Philosophic discipline

#25160E – 13.20.3.82

UR_2.4 – ZEL4/5 – DEK

The ascent toward truth proceeds by steps. If at first the merits of a particular teaching or teacher impress the emotions unduly, it is also likely that a more critical study of the one and a more thorough experience of the other will show up unsuspected defects. The philosophic student tries to avoid undergoing these unpleasant changes by getting a balanced view of the pros and cons from the start. He ought not to be so swept off his feet by the great admiration felt for a genius or a doctrine that he has no clear perception of the former's defects or the latter's faults. He must maintain balance not only in the face of lower emotions but also of nobler ones.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Philosophic discipline

#25160E – 13.20.3.82

UR_2.4 – ZEL5/5 – DEK

"How is he to gain the objects of his search?" The truth-seeker will begin to turn inward in quest of unity with his own soul and outward in quest of unity with mankind. Life is the guide that is bringing him home to himself and to kindlier relation to his fellows. Life itself teaches and disciplines towards these great ends.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Philosophic discipline

#25160E – 13.20.3.82

B_05 – ZZ – DEK3

The student should seek clear ideas and warm feelings in his spiritual studies and devotional aspirations.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Philosophic discipline

#25163 – 13.20.3.85

UR_2.5 – ZZ – K

The goal is to obtain a higher consciousness which flashes across the mind with blinding light. All his effort, all his training is really for this.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Philosophic discipline

#25165 – 13.20.3.87

BN – X – D

Man's imperfect nature must be rendered utterly passive, its distorting interference utterly eliminated, before the divine truth can manifest itself in all its authoritative purity.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Philosophic discipline

#25170 – 13.20.3.92

BN – X – D

The philosophic discipline shows us how we are to treat ourselves. The philosophic morality teaches us how we are to treat others. It provides both abstract principle for theory and concrete rules for conduct.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Philosophic discipline

#25176 – 13.20.3.98

BN – Z – DK

The inexperienced and the unbalanced may measure spiritual progress in terms of emotional ecstasy or meditational vision, but the mature and wise will measure it in terms of character—its nobility, its rounded development, and its purity.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Philosophic discipline

#25178 – 13.20.3.100

BN – X – D

Philosophic life in our sense is not a matter of reading practical maxims. It is giving assent in action and offering wholehearted belief in feeling to the best values, goals, and purposes.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Philosophic discipline

#25184 – 13.20.3.106

BN – ZZ – K

The philosopher develops the principal sides of his human nature, that is, his intelligence by reasoning, his knowledge by study, his piety by devotions, his mystical intuitiveness by meditation, and his wisdom by association with those more evolved than himself.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Philosophic discipline

#25185 – 13.20.3.107

BN – X – D

Its aim is to produce a man who shall be humanly mature and spiritually secure, who shall be flesh and mind put to the service of spirit.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Philosophic discipline

#25187 – 13.20.3.109

BN – X – K

Thought, feeling, and will are the three sides of a human being which must find their respective functions in this quest. Thought must be directed to the discrimination of truth from error, reality from appearance. Feeling must be elevated in loving devotion towards the Overself. Will must be turned towards wise action and altruistic service. And all three must move in effective unison and mutual balance.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Philosophic discipline

#25189 – 13.20.3.111

BN – X – D

Only he who lives from moment to moment by the clear light of its teaching, by the deepest faith in its tenets, and by the ardent feeling of its worth is a true disciple of philosophy.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Philosophic discipline

#25193 – 13.20.3.115

BN – Z – DK

The disinclination to start practising meditation and the inability to sustain it for long when started are due in part to the mind's strong habit of being preoccupied with worldly matters or being attached to personal desires. This is why the study of wholly abstract metaphysical and impersonal topics is part of the Philosophic Path.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Philosophic discipline

#25199 – 13.20.3.121

BN – X – D

The earnest seeker who has already achieved a certain degree of awareness and understanding has the beginnings of what may be a splendid opportunity to make phenomenal progress in his present incarnation. But everything in this world must be paid for; the greatest treasures are attained only at the greatest cost. The aspirant must now embark on a do-or-die endeavour to lift his character onto a higher plane altogether; to purify his motives; and to be prepared to sacrifice all worldly objects first inwardly and, finally, outwardly—if called upon to do so. The spiritual returns are correspondingly great, however. They are: serenity, understanding, liberation, satisfaction, and the delight of perpetual communion with the divine Overself—while being always in Its blissful Presence.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Philosophic discipline

#25205E – 13.20.3.127

BN – ZEL1/1 – DEK

The mental tendencies which he has brought over from previous births, the effects of physical heredity and environment, the influence of society, and the suggestions of education—all of these have to be disciplined and purified, if he is to acquire truth without unconsciously deforming it.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Philosophic discipline

#25206 – 13.20.3.128

BN – X – D

Philosophy tells us that it is the business of everybody, nations as well as individuals, to look behind their sufferings and thus ascertain the causes of which these sufferings are merely effects. If men wish to start a better and happier life, it is needful that they should understand the lessons of their own past. If this happier existence is to be a reality, it cannot come about unless they break inwardly and outwardly with this past.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Philosophic discipline

#25209 – 13.20.3.131

BN – ZZ – DEK

The history of religious and mystical ideas should be investigated and studied from an impartial independent standpoint, without bias for, or prejudice against, with enough critical ability to sift facts from opinion yet with enough sympathetic interest in the subject to collect materials widely from time and place. This is not work for a dried-up pedantic scholar without inner experience of his own, nor for a gullible excitable enthusiast, nor for a self-limited committed scientist, nor for a tradition-bound, excessively past-worshipping, anti-modern, religio-scholar-mystic. With this work should be conjoined a comparative study of those ideas, which requires not only historical talent and learning but deeper inner knowledge, advanced and personal experience, and skill in communicating the higher yields of intellect, feeling, mystical intuition—in short, some philosophical equipment.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Philosophic discipline

#25223E – 13.20.3.145

B_03 – ZEL1/2 – K

There would be no place in such teaching for rigid dogma, no division into "official" monopolized truth and unenlightened unblessed invention, certainly no denunciation of heresy.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Philosophic discipline

#25223E – 13.20.3.145

B_03 – ZEL2/2 – K

Ignoramuses and blockheads find it easy and pleasant to criticize the backwardness and darkness of the Middle Ages and the periods of antiquity. Such criticism gives them the feeling of being on a superior plane altogether, of having truth where these earlier, and consequently unluckier, forebears had error. I personally do not take such a silly attitude. I criticize the past without denying its possession of spiritual treasures. The modern student should revere the teachers and study the teachings of antiquity. He will honour the lives and treasure the words of Jesus and Buddha, Krishna and Confucius, Muhammed, Plato, and Plotinus alike. But he should not confine himself to any single one of them alone nor limit himself within any single traditional fold. He must also lift himself out of the past into the present. He must reserve his principal thought, time, and strength for living teachers and contemporary teaching.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Philosophic discipline

#25224 – 13.20.3.146

B_12 – ZZ – K

Dr. Johnson understood the philosophical attitude rightly when he said that we have both to enjoy life and to endure life.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Philosophic discipline

#25226 – 13.20.3.148

BN – Z – DK*

It is vital to see clearly the difference between teachings that spring from and serve only the ego, and those that spring from and lead to the Overself.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Philosophic discipline

#25231 – 13.20.3.153

BA12 – ZZZ – DK

If you ask what reality is, in philosophy's view, the answer must be consciousness. If you further ask what man's work in this life is, the answer must be to become conscious of consciousness as such. But because, ordinarily, consciousness never discloses itself to him but only its varying states, he can accomplish this work only by adopting extraordinary means. He will have to steel his feelings and still his mind. In short, he will have to deny himself (his ego).

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Philosophic discipline

#25233 – 13.20.3.155

BA12 – ZZ – DK

We have deeply felt the force of Epictetus' outcry: "Show me a man modelled after the doctrines that are ever upon his lips. So help me, Heaven; I long to see one Stoic!" It is not less easy to preach than to practise in our own time. But here is the acid test which will reveal what is and what is not pure gold. On the basis of such a test, mankind seems to cry in vain for a single Illuminate.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Philosophic discipline

#25243 – 13.20.3.165

BN – ZZ – K

The practice of philosophy is not easy, but it is the only way to gain its advantages. When it takes firm root in day-to-day life, experience, behaviour, and activity, its truth is tested and survives, solidly confirmed.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Philosophic discipline

#25250 – 13.20.3.172

B_02 – ZZ – K

The quadrangle of religious devotion, metaphysical study, mystical meditation, and inspired action makes the tool for philosophic work.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Philosophic discipline

#25252 – 13.20.3.174

BN – X – D

The way is long and hard. It involves developing all the different sides of the personality. Prayer and meditation lead to the cultivation of intuition and aspiration—and these, at the same time, must be accompanied by the strengthening of will, plus study and reflection. All efforts should be made side by side, so to speak, to lead to a balanced psyche—the philosophic ideal.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Philosophic discipline

#25258 – 13.20.3.180

BN – Z – DEK

A time comes when the seeker is so thoroughly penetrated with philosophic ideals that the higher life will become the everyday life.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Philosophic discipline

#25270 – 13.20.3.192

BSG_4 – P – D

The initiation into wisdom—if it is to be lasting—is not suddenly given by any master; it is slowly grown by the experiences and reflection of life. Thought is gradually converted into habit, and habit is gradually merged into high character.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Philosophic discipline

#25271E – 13.20.3.193

BA11 – ZZ – DEK

Yes, we need to know the Truth, to discover what "is" in the world around us and in life within us, but we also need to feel and intuit it by experience. This coming-together makes for its realization.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Wholeness, completeness, integrality

#25293 – 13.20.3.215

UR_2.5 – ZZZ – K

If he is to be made whole, his everyday personality must put itself into perfect harmony with, and under the rule of, his super-personal Overself.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Wholeness, completeness, integrality

#25312 – 13.20.3.234

BN – ZZ – DK

Philosophy is not limited to work in meditation, although that is perhaps its most notable dramatic form. It is also applied in the area of everyday living routines and relationships. It is also active in work on character, emotions, and attitudes. It takes in the body and its diet.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Wholeness, completeness, integrality

#25323 – 13.20.3.245

BN – X – D

One must not be premature in demanding final union with the Overself. That comes only after years of all-round development. One must first prepare himself inwardly to receive it; only then may he expect the ultimate union. This preparation affects the whole personality—intellect, emotion, will, and intuition.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Wholeness, completeness, integrality

#25332 – 13.20.3.254

BN – X – D

A balanced development will not stimulate the intellect and starve the feelings, nor do the opposite. It will give the intuition the highest place, making it the ruler of reason, the check on emotion.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Wholeness, completeness, integrality

#25342 – 13.20.3.264

BN – X – D

The principle of balance is one of the most important of philosophic principles.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Balance

#25347 – 13.20.3.269

BN – ZZ – K1

All that is needful to a man's happiness must come from both these sources—the spiritual and the physical—from the ability to rest in the still centre, in the developed intellectual and aesthetic natures, in the good health and vigour of the body.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Balance

#25350 – 13.20.3.272

BN – X – D

Even our understanding of balance has to be corrected. It is not, for philosophic purposes, the mean point between two extremes but the compensatory union of two qualities or elements that need one another.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Balance

#25355 – 13.20.3.277

BN – Z – K1

The required condition of balance as the price of illumination refers also to correcting the lopsidedness of letting the conscious ego direct the whole man while resisting the super-conscious spiritual forces. In other words, balance is demanded between the intellect which seeks deliberate control of the psyche and the intuition which must be invited by passivity and allowed to manifest in spontaneity. When a man has trained himself to turn equally from the desire to possess to the aspiration to being possessed, when he can pass from the solely personal attitude to the one beyond it, when the will to manage his being and his life for himself and by himself is compensated by the willingness to let himself and his life be quiescent, then his being and his life are worked upon by higher forces. This is the kind of balance and completeness which the philosophic discipline must lead to so that the philosophic illumination may give him his second birth.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Balance

#25356 – 13.20.3.278

BN – ZZZ – K1

The basis of the universe is its equilibrium. Only so can the planets revolve in harmony and without collision. The man who would likewise put himself in tune with Nature, God, must establish equilibrium as the basis of his own nature.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Balance

#25357 – 13.20.3.279

BN – ZZ – DK1

It is not only balance inside the ego itself that is to be sought, not only between reason and emotion, thought and action, but also and much more important, outside the ego: between it and the Overself.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Balance

#25359 – 13.20.3.281

BN – Z – K1

A well-balanced person is not necessarily one who takes the measured midpoint between two extremes but one who lets himself be taken over by the inner calm. The needed adjustment is then made by itself. Although this avoids his falling into lopsided acts or exaggerated views, a merely moderate character is not the best result. More important is the 'surrender' to the higher power which is implicit in the whole process of becoming truly balanced.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Balance

#25361 – 13.20.3.283

BN – ZZZ – K1

The philosopher seeks to attain a proper equilibrium which will enable him to move within the world of turmoil, conflict, egocentric men, and materialistic aims and yet keep in continuous contact with the consciousness of his Overself.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Balance

#25377 – 13.20.3.299

BN – ZZ – D

The ideal of Balance keeps us from falling into dangerous extremes. The self-controls which follow detachment are meritorious but its lengthening into callousness is not. It is natural that the endeavour to follow this ideal of Balance will spill over into his judgements and opinions. We will want to see all sides of a matter, and especially all the weaknesses in our own views, all the sound points in opponent's views.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Balance

#25391M – 13.20.3.313

BSG_4 – P – DX

Man not only needs intelligence to find his way to the truth, he needs balanced intelligence.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Balance

#25395 – 13.20.3.317

BN – Z – K

When there is no collision between intellect and emotion, or between intuition and egoism, or between imagination and will, it may be said that one's inner harmony has been fully attained.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Balance

#25409 – 13.20.3.331

BN – X – D

A well-balanced man cannot be thrown down. He may be pushed about by circumstances but he will always keep, or return to, his centre.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Balance

#25414 – 13.20.3.336

BN – ZZ – D

When thought and feeling grow purer together, when knowledge and aspiration wax stronger side by side, when idea and action progress mutually, he will come to know this truth about the virtues and values of balance by his own self-experience.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Balance

#25422 – 13.20.3.344

BN – X – D

With knowledge, wisdom, and understanding developing in him along with devotion, aspiration, and reverence, and with the two trends culminating in appropriate action, his quest will be properly balanced, sane, and productive.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Balance

#25449 – 13.20.3.371

BN – X – D

Those who talk or write truth, but do not live it because they cannot, have glimpsed its meaning but not realized its power. They have not the dynamic balance which follows when the will is raised to the level of the intellect and the feelings. It is this balance which spontaneously ignites mystic forces within us, and produces the state called "born again." This is the second birth, which takes place in our consciousness as our first took place in our flesh.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Balance

#25463 – 13.20.3.385

BN – ZZ – DK1

The danger of a lopsided character is seen when humility reverence and piety are largely absent whilst criticism logicality and realism are largely present. The intellect then becomes imperiously proud, arrogantly self-assured, and harshly intolerant. The consequence is that its power to glean subtler truths rather than merely external data is largely lost.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Balance

#25464 – 13.20.3.386

BN – ZZZ – K1

The preliminary requisites to a lasting illumination are development and balance. If part of his nature is still undeveloped in relation to the finished goal and if all parts are off balance in relation to one another, the illumination will go soon after it comes. This balance of mind and life are essential.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Balance

#25467 – 13.20.3.389

BN – X – D

The balance needed by faith is understanding; by peacefulness, energy; by intuition, reason; by feeling, intellect; by aspiration, humility; and by zeal, discretion.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Balance

#25488 – 13.20.3.410

BN – ZZZ – K1

Neither the Buddhistic emphasis on suffering nor the hedonistic emphasis on joy is proper to a truly philosophical outlook. Both have to be understood and accepted, since life compels us to experience both.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Balance

#25489 – 13.20.3.411

B_17 – ZZ – K1

Inner balance is not established by setting two polar opposites against each other, as miserliness against extravagance, but by combining two necessary qualities together such as bravery with caution.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Balance

#25490 – 13.20.3.412

BN – ZZ – K1

By bringing into a fusion the masculine and feminine temperaments within himself, he also fuses knowledge and feeling, wisdom and reverence.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Balance

#25492 – 13.20.3.414

BN – X – D

When these two—the positive and negative currents—come together, the electric lamp lights up of its own accord. When these two—intellect and feeling—are properly coordinated, and the character is both properly developed and purified, the Overself in a person begins to shine of its own accord.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Balance

#25494 – 13.20.3.416

BN – X – D

Reason must walk side by side with emotion, science with mysticism, compassion with self-interest, action with thought. This balanced life and no other is the truly philosophic one.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Balance

#25504 – 13.20.3.426

BN – X – D

Such is the all-round development of the human psyche offered by philosophy. It balances mystical intuiting by logical thinking, religious belief by critical reflection, idealistic devotion by practical service.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Balance

#25508 – 13.20.3.430

BSG_4 – P – D

The Balance required preceding enlightenment is not only between intellect and emotion, thought and will, but also and mainly between the lower and the higher wills, between ego's desires and Overself's self-contentment.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Balance

#25509 – 13.20.3.431

BN – X – D

When the two wills, higher and lower, are brought into balance and perpetually held there, he has secured the necessary conditions for enlightenment.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Balance

#25510 – 13.20.3.432

BN – X – D

When the wisdom of experience is married to the drive of youth, tempering it but not paralysing it; when dreams are fulfilled in actions and ideals are reflected in emotions; when intuition reigns over intellect and guides will, man has achieved a worthy balance.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Balance

#25522 – 13.20.3.444

BN – Z – D

To obtain a balanced result it is necessary to make a balanced approach and not to rely on a single kind of effort only. The moral character must become involved in the quest of upliftment; the intellectual faculty must work at the study, as well as reflect upon the lessons of, life itself; the intuition must be unfolded by persistent daily practice of meditation; and the everyday practical life must try to express the ideals learned.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Requirements > Balance

#25534 – 13.20.3.456

BN – X – D

All yoga and mystic methods, as well as certain religious practices, although of the highest value as preliminary disciplines, are not the ultimate ends in themselves. If one has sufficient sharpness of mind—that is, sustained concentration on abstract themes—and sufficient freedom from any kind of egoistic preconception whatever, one can instantly grasp the truth and realize it. But who has that? Hence, these various methods of developing ourselves, these yogas, have been prescribed to assist us. Their practice takes a long time, it is true, but the actual realization is a matter of a moment. Nor can it ever be lost again, as can the feeling-ecstasies of the mystics.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Mysticism and mystical philosophy compared

#25542E – 13.20.4.8

B_11 – ZEL1/2 – K

All yoga and mystic methods, as well as certain religious practices, although of the highest value as preliminary disciplines, are not the ultimate ends in themselves. All these doctrines have their place for people of different degrees of understanding, and it is our duty not to destroy the faith of those who cling to them. But for those who want the highest Truth, and who are prepared to part with their illusions for its sake, there is only "the straight and narrow way, and few there be that find it". It is narrow only because the ego must be left outside the gate; it is straight because it goes direct to the final truth.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Mysticism and mystical philosophy compared

#25542E – 13.20.4.8

B_11 – ZEL2/2 – K

Mystical philosophy' is a better term than 'philosophical mysticism'.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Mysticism and mystical philosophy compared

#25550 – 13.20.4.16

UR_3.2 – Z – K

The philosophic aim is to overcome the difference between sporadic intuitions and steady knowledge, between spasmodic ecstasies and controlled perception, and thus achieve a permanent state of enlightenment, abiding unshakeably and at all times in the Overself.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Mysticism and mystical philosophy compared

#25556E – 13.20.4.22

BN – X – DEK

The mystically inclined who glory in their anti-rationality and impracticality may play the part of intellectual babes and worldly boobs if they wish to do so. But the philosophically inclined, realizing that they live in an era where the evil forces against which they must struggle have reached unparalleled intensity and revealed the most diabolic cunning, realize that they cannot afford such a luxury. They will consequently foster all the practical shrewdness, the critical intelligence, observance, and alertness they can summon up.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Mysticism and mystical philosophy compared

#25562 – 13.20.4.28

B_16 – Z – K

In the Buddhist's deeper meditational training—minutely described in the Abhidhamma collected and recorded by the Buddha's disciples—it is noteworthy that ecstasies first, and bliss next, cease about halfway along the path, to be succeeded by intense inner quiet for the advanced and terminal stages. Yet the texts on yoga which go beyond this halfway stage are few, and are studied by few. For it is at this point that mysticism ends, and real philosophy begins.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Mysticism and mystical philosophy compared

#25567 – 13.20.4.33

BN – ZZZ – K

The yogic viewpoint still embraces the phenomena of causation, however refined.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Mysticism and mystical philosophy compared

#25573 – 13.20.4.39

BN – X – K

Philosophy prescribes just enough meditation to make its votaries mystically conscious but not enough to make them forget the philosophic goal amidst its pleasures.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Mysticism and mystical philosophy compared

#25574 – 13.20.4.40

BN – Z – K

Philosophical understanding can bloom within him only after he has cultivated his metaphysical intelligence as well as his mystical intuition.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Discriminating analysis, mystical depth

#25593 – 13.20.4.59

BSG_4 – P – D

Truth will not insult intelligence, although it soars beyond intellect. Let the religionists talk nonsense, as they do at times; but holiness is not incompatible with the use of brains, the acquisition of knowledge, and the rational faculties.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Discriminating analysis, mystical depth

#25595 – 13.20.4.61

BN – X – K1

The use of metaphysical thinking as part of the philosophic system is a feature which few yogis of the ordinary type are likely to appreciate. This is both understandable and pardonable. They are thoroughly imbued with the futility of a merely rational and intellectual approach to reality, a futility which has also been felt and expressed in these pages. So far there is agreement with them. But when they proceed to deduce that the only way left is to crush reason and stop the working of intellect altogether, our paths diverge. For what metaphysics admittedly cannot accomplish by itself may be accomplished by a combination of metaphysics and mysticism far better than by mysticism alone. The metaphysics of truth, which is here meant, however, must never be confused with the many historical speculative systems which exist.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Discriminating analysis, mystical depth

#25598 – 13.20.4.64

BN – Z – K1

Continued and constant pondering over the ideas presented herein is itself a part of the yoga of philosophical discernment. Such reflection will as naturally lead the student towards realization of his goal as will the companion and equally necessary activity of suppressing all ideas altogether in mental quiet. This is because these ideas are not mere speculations but are themselves the outcome of a translation from inner experience. While such ideas as are here presented grow under the water of their reflection and the sunshine of their love into fruitful branches of thought, they gradually begin to foster intuition.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Discriminating analysis, mystical depth

#25600 – 13.20.4.66

BN – Z – DEK1

The logical movement of intellect must come to a dead stop before the threshold of reality. But we are not to bring about this pause deliberately or in response to the bidding of some man or some doctrine. It must come of its own accord as the final maturation of long and precise reasoning and as the culmination of the intellectual and personal discovery that the apprehension of mind as essence will come only when we let go of the idea-forms it takes and direct our attention to it.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Discriminating analysis, mystical depth

#25601 – 13.20.4.67

BN – X – K1

This is the paradox: that both the capacity to think deeply and the capacity to withdraw from thinking are needed to attain this goal.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Discriminating analysis, mystical depth

#25602 – 13.20.4.68

BN – Z – DK1

The mistake of the mystics is to negate reasoning prematurely. Only after reasoning has completed its own task to the uttermost will it be psychologically right and philosophically fruitful to still it in the mystic silence.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Discriminating analysis, mystical depth

#25603 – 13.20.4.69

BN – Z – K1

That keen rationality could and indeed should accompany sensitive spirituality is both practical wisdom and evolutionary necessity. A tendency to act the fool in worldly and intellectual matters is not a sign of mystical strength, as some aver, but a sign of mystical weakness.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Discriminating analysis, mystical depth

#25615 – 13.20.4.81

B_08 – Z – K

Such an attainment as philosophy proposes cannot be reached all at once. It must be approached through a series of preparatory steps. They will be slow in pace at first, but quicker later and sudden towards the end.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Keys to the ultimate path

#25620 – 13.20.4.86

B_02 – Z – DMK

It is a long journey from the condition of seeker to that of sage. But this is true only so far as we ascribe reality to time. To those who know that our human existence is a movement through events, but that the human being in its essence transcends all events and dwells in timelessness, this journey may be considerably shortened or swiftly brought to its destination. For that, the thorough understanding of philosophy and its incessant application to oneself is required.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Keys to the ultimate path

#25622 – 13.20.4.88

B_02 – ZZ – DMK

To the fearful, uninstructed seeker everything connected with a worldly life is a stop on his upward way. To the philosophically enlightened student, it is actually a step on his upward way. He redeems the earthly environment by thinking rightly about it, turns every earthly deed into a sacrament because he views it under a divine light, and sees a fellow pilgrim in the worst sinner.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Keys to the ultimate path

#25627 – 13.20.4.93

B_05 – ZZ – DMK

There are three things man needs to know to make him a spiritually educated man: the truth about himself, his world, and his God. The mystic who thinks it is enough to know the first alone and to leave out the last two, is satisfied to be half-educated.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Keys to the ultimate path

#25629 – 13.20.4.95

BN – Z – K1

It is not enough to know the internal self as the mystics know it. We must also know the real nature of the external world before we can realize Truth. This means that one will see oneself in the All and possess a perfect comprehension with the All.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Keys to the ultimate path

#25630 – 13.20.4.96

BN – Z – DEK

Is it possible to unite both ways, the active life in the world outside and the quiet life in the stillness within, and find no break, no essential difference, no falsification of the oft-stated idea, "God is everywhere"? The answer is Yes! and has been tested in ancient and modern experience. "What is the World?" gives the same reply as "Who am I?" Withdrawing from the physical sense-world as the mystic does or going into physical action with the senses engaged need not break the union, the awareness of Divine Presence.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Keys to the ultimate path

#25638 – 13.20.4.104

B_08 – ZZZ – K

Of course it is quite true to say that the truth is inside man, that he must search there. But it is also true that the truth is outside man and in the cosmos itself 'because he is a part of it'. Why be one-sided and reject the second direction in favour of the first or reject the first in favour of the second? Both are necessary to the full perception of truth.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Keys to the ultimate path

#25639 – 13.20.4.105

UR_6 – ZZZ – K

To arrive at a simultaneous consciousness of both states—the personal ego and the impersonal Overself—is possible, and has been done intermittently by some people such as mystics and artists—or permanently by philosophers.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Keys to the ultimate path

#25641 – 13.20.4.107

BN – Z – D

The philosopher cannot set the spirit apart from the body, nor the spiritual life from the worldly life—for him, they penetrate one another. He lives every moment in the awareness of his higher self. Yet this does not oppose nor interfere with, the awareness of his lower one.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Keys to the ultimate path

#25642M – 13.20.4.108

B_08 – ZZ – K

Philosophy takes its votaries on a holy pilgrimage from ordinary life in the physical senses through mystical life in the sense-freed spirit to a divinized life back in the same senses.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Keys to the ultimate path

#25647 – 13.20.4.113

BN – Z – DK1

The mystic will not care and may not be able to do so but the philosopher has to learn the art of combining his inward recognition of the Void with his outward activity amongst things without feeling the slightest conflict between both. Such an art is admittedly difficult but it can be learnt with time and patience and comprehension. Thus he will feel inward unity everywhere in this world of wonderful variety, just as he will experience all the countless mutations of experience as being present in the very midst of this unity.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Keys to the ultimate path

#25655 – 13.20.4.121

BN – Z – K1

What science calls the "critical temperature," that is, the temperature when a substance shares both the liquid and gaseous states, is symbolic of what philosophical mysticism calls the "philosophic experience," that is, when a man's consciousness shares both the external world of the five senses and the internal world of the empty soul. The ordinary mystic or yogi is unable to hold the two states simultaneously and, quite often, even unwilling to do so, because of the false opposition he has been taught to set up between them.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Keys to the ultimate path

#25656 – 13.20.4.122

BN – X – K1

The philosopher is satisfied with a noble peace and does not run after mystical ecstasies. Whereas other paths often depend upon an emotionalism that perishes with the disappearance of the primal momentum that inspired it, or which dissolves with the dissolution of the first enthusiastic ecstasies themselves, here there is a deeper and more dependable process. What must be emphasized is that most mystical aspirants have an initial or occasional ecstasy, and they are so stirred by the event that they naturally want to enjoy it permanently. This is because they live under the common error that a successful and perfect mystic is one who has succeeded in stabilizing ecstasy. That the mystic is content to rest on the level of feeling alone, without making his feeling self-reflective as well, partly accounts for such an error. It also arises because of incompetent teachers or shallow teaching, leading them to strive to perform what is impracticable and to yearn to attain what is impossible.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Keys to the ultimate path

#25659E – 13.20.4.125

BN – ZEL1/3 – K1

Most mystical aspirants have an initial or occasional ecstasy, and they are so stirred by the event that they naturally want to enjoy it permanently. They live under the common error that a successful and perfect mystic is one who has succeeded in stabilizing ecstasy. Our warning is that this is not possible, and that however long a mystic may enjoy these "spiritual sweets," they will assuredly come to an end one day. Too often he believes that this is the goal, and that he has nothing more about which to trouble himself. He longs for nothing more than the good fortune of being undisturbed by the world and of being able to spend the rest of his life in solitary devotion to his inward ecstasy. What philosophy says is that this is only a preliminary mystical state, however remarkable and blissful it be. There is a more matured state—that of gnosis—beyond it. He will not find final salvation in the mystical experience of ecstasy, but he will find an excellent and essential step towards salvation therein.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Keys to the ultimate path

#25659E – 13.20.4.125

BN – ZEL2/3 – K1

He who would regard rapturous mystical emotion as being the same as absolute transcendental insight is mistaken. Such a mistake is pardonable. So abrupt and striking is the contrast with his ordinary state that he concludes that this condition of hyper-emotional bliss is the condition in which he is able to experience reality. He surrenders himself to the bliss, the emotional joy which he experiences, well satisfied that he has found God or his soul. But his excited feelings about reality are not the same as the serene experience of reality itself. This is what a mystic finds difficult to comprehend. Yet, until he does comprehend it, he will not make any genuine progress beyond this stage.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Keys to the ultimate path

#25659E – 13.20.4.125

BN – ZEL3/3 – K1

It is here that the vital difference between the Ultimate and yogic paths becomes apparent. Ramana Maharshi took the stand which nearly all yogis take: that is, we need have nothing to do with the affairs of the world which we have renounced. Let us sit quietly and enjoy our inner peace. But on the ultimate path the goal is quite different. We begin after having passed through yoga, and having found peace. Then we seek truth. The latter when found reveals that the Overself is present in all men—nay, all creatures—as their ultimate being. We not only know this but FEEL it. So we cannot remain indifferent to the lives of others. Therefore—and now is revealed a great secret—when we attain liberation from the endless-turning wheel of reincarnation, we voluntarily return again and again to earth solely to help others, mitigate suffering, and reduce ignorance.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Keys to the ultimate path

#25663E – 13.20.4.129

BN – ZEL1/2 – DEK

So long as one creature lives in ignorance and pain, so long a true adept MUST return to earth. But this applies only to the adepts in WISDOM. The adept in yoga does not want to return to earth again, does not feel for others, and is happy in enjoying his exalted peace. He is quite entitled to this because he has worked for it. But he has not attained Truth, which is a higher stage. There is a tremendous difference in the goal we seek. The yogi's aim is a sublime selfishness; the true adept's is a burning desire to serve humanity. The successful yogi dwells in great peace and that suffices for him. Nevertheless yoga is an essential stage through which all must pass, for mind must be controlled, sharpened, and purified and peace must be attained before he is fit to undertake the great inquiry into what is Truth.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Keys to the ultimate path

#25663E – 13.20.4.129

BN – ZEL2/2 – DEK

He discovers that the world of matter is ultimately space and that all material forms are merely ideas in his mind. He discovers, too, that his inmost self is one with this space, because it is formless. He perceives the unity of all life and he has found Truth, the whole Truth.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Keys to the ultimate path

#25664ED – 13.20.4.130

BA11 – ZZZ – DEK3

It is the duty of an advanced mystic who wishes to attain greater heights for himself and be of greater service to others to try earnestly to graduate to the ultimate path. This does not demand that he give up any of his mystical practices or beliefs, but merely that he amplify and supplement them. He must first develop the trinity of head, heart, and hand, or reason, intuition, and action, and then bring them all into proper balance. If in addition he is inspired by the ideal of service, he will attract to himself the unseen help of those who are also dedicated to such service.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Keys to the ultimate path

#25665 – 13.20.4.131

BN – X – DEK

The hidden teaching starts and finishes with experience. Every man must begin his mental life as a seeker by noting the fact that he is conscious of an external environment. He will proceed in time to discover that it is an ordered one, that Nature is the manifestation of an orderly Mind. He discovers in the end that consciousness of this Mind becomes the profoundest fact of his internal experience.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Keys to the ultimate path

#25666 – 13.20.4.132

B_05 – ZZ – K1

The first step is to discover that there is a Presence, a Power, a Life, a Mind, Being, unique, not made or begot, without shape, unseen and unheard, everywhere and always the same. The second step is to discover its relationship to the Universe and to oneself.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Keys to the ultimate path

#25667 – 13.20.4.133

BSG_4 – ZZZ – DK1

Two things have to be learned in this quest. The first is the art of mind-stilling, of emptying consciousness of every thought and form whatsoever. This is mysticism or Yoga. The disciple's ascent should not stop at the contemplation of anything that has shape or history, name or habitation, however powerfully helpful this may have formerly been to the ascent itself. Only in the mysterious void of Pure Spirit, in the undifferentiated Mind, lies his last goal as a mystic. The second is to grasp the essential nature of the ego and of the universe and to obtain direct perception that both are nothing but a series of ideas which unfold themselves within our minds. This is the metaphysics of Truth. The combination of these two activities brings about the realization of his true Being as the ever beautiful and eternally beneficent Overself. This is philosophy.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Keys to the ultimate path

#25668 – 13.20.4.134

BN – X – DEK1

In the ordinary state, man is conscious of himself as a personal thinking and physical entity. In the mystical trance-like state, he loses this consciousness and is aware of the Divine alone. In the philosophic state, he returns to the ordinary consciousness but without letting go of the diviner one.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Keys to the ultimate path

#25669 – 13.20.4.135

BN – X – D

Whenever I have used the term "the centre of his being," I have referred to a state of meditation, to an experience which is felt at a certain stage. The very art of meditation is a drawing inwards and the finer, the more delicate, the subtler this indrawing becomes, the closer it is to this central point of consciousness. But from the point of view of philosophy, meditation and its experiences are not the ultimate goal—although they may help in preparing one for that goal. In that goal there is no kind of centre to be felt nor any circumference either—one is without being localized anywhere with reference to the body, one is both in the body and in the Overself. There is then no contradiction between the two.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Keys to the ultimate path

#25670 – 13.20.4.136

UR_3.2 – ZZZ – K1

Carrying in himself whatever he has found in study and meditation and prayer, he returns to the world to gain experience of life and to apply in practice what he has learned.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Keys to the ultimate path

#25676 – 13.20.4.142

BN – X – D

The knowledge got from metaphysics, the intuitive peace gained from meditation, must now be accompanied by practical work done wisely and altruistically in the world to express both. The student must evoke the strength to descend into this sharply contrasting activity. The quest is not a single-track but rather a triple-track affair. He must travel along it with his intelligence, his intuition, and his deeds. "All speak of the Open Path, only rare ones enter the complex path," wrote Shah Latif, the eighteenth-century Sufi poet. When rational thought and mystical feeling and self-alienated action are thus integrated into one, when life becomes a sincere and successful whole, it becomes philosophic. It may be that such a combination of qualities has been rare in the past, but it is certain that it will be necessary in the future. The world will need men and women as leaders who have their roots deep down in the life of the divine self but who have their intellects very much alert, their hands very much alive, and their hearts very much expanded.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Keys to the ultimate path

#25677 – 13.20.4.143

BN – Z – DEK

The term "insight" has a special application in philosophy. Its results are stamped with a certitude beyond mere belief, better than logical demonstration, superior to limited sense observation.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Insight

#25683 – 13.20.4.149

BSG_4 – ZZ – K

Philosophy seeks not only to know what is best in life but also to love it. It wants to feel as well as think. The truth, being above the common forms of these functions, can be grasped only by a higher function that includes, fuses, and transcends them at one and the same time—insight. In human life at its present stage of development, the nearest activity to this one is the activity of intuition. From its uncommon and infrequent visitations, we may gather some faint echo of what this wonderful insight is.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Insight

#25684 – 13.20.4.150

BN – ZZZ – K1

Intuition' had come to lose its pristine value for me. I cast about for a better one and found it in 'insight'. This term I assigned to the highest knowing-faculty of sages and was thus able to treat the term 'intuition' as something inferior which was sometimes amazingly correct but not infrequently hopelessly wrong in its guidance, reports, or premonition. I further endeavoured to state what the old Asiatic sages had long ago stated, that it was possible to unfold a faculty of direct insight into the nature of the Overself, into the supreme reality of the universe, that this was the highest kind of intuition possible to man, and that it did not concern itself with lesser revelations, such as giving the name of a horse likely to win tomorrow's race, a revelation which the kind of intuition we hear so much about is sometimes able to do.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Insight

#25686 – 13.20.4.152

BN – ZZZ – DEK1

All metaphysical study and all mystical exercises are but preparations for this flash of reality across the sky of consciousness which is here termed insight. The latter is therefore the most important experience which awaits a human being on this earth. If metaphysics or mysticism is regarded as an end in itself and not as a preliminary, then its follower misses what lies at the core of one's life.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Insight

#25689 – 13.20.4.155

BN – X – DEK

Insight may apparently be born suddenly, but it is really the culminating stage of a long previous development.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Insight

#25690 – 13.20.4.156

BN – ZZZ – DK

It flashes forth out of the darkness and must be seen. Whereas a book containing new and tremendous revelations of truth may be read but its meanings not seen because not understood, here, on the contrary, to see is to understand. Why? Because it is also "to be".

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Insight

#25691 – 13.20.4.157

BN – ZZ – K

Reason moves continuously around the idea of the Overself whereas insight enters it directly.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Insight

#25693 – 13.20.4.159

BN – Z – K

Insight is the flower of reason and not its negation.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Insight

#25695D – 13.20.4.161

BN – Z – K

The intellect is not able to get this kind of knowledge, not able to gain access to this higher dimension. But what is denied to it is granted to another of man's faculties—insight. True, this is still only a latent one in nearly all men. But it is there and, with the Overself's grace, can be unfolded.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Insight

#25699 – 13.20.4.165

BN – Z – D

It is not enough to attain knowledge of the soul; any mystic may do that. It is necessary to attain clear knowledge. Only the philosophic mystic may do that. This emphasis on clarity is important. It implies a removal of all the obstructions in feeling, the complexes in mind, and obfuscations in ego which prevent it. When this is done, the aspirant beholds truth as it really is.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Insight

#25702 – 13.20.4.168

BN – ZZ – K1

He who possesses insight does not have to use arguments and reach conclusions. The truth is there, self-evident, inside himself as himself, for his inner being has become one with it.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Insight

#25704 – 13.20.4.170

BN – ZZZ – DK1

It is out of the interplay of meditation, metaphysics, and altruistic action that insight is unfolded.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Insight

#25709E – 13.20.4.175

BSG_4 – P – DE

Whereas metaphysics seeks to lift us up to the superphysical idea by thinking, whereas meditation seeks to lift us up by intuition, whereas ethics seeks to raise us to it by practical goodness, art seeks to do the same by feeling and appreciating beauty. Philosophy in its wonderful breadth and balance embraces and synthesizes all four and finally adds their coping stone, insight.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Insight

#25712E – 13.20.4.178

BA11 – ZZZ – DEMK

When a certain balance of forces is achieved, something happens that can only be properly called "the birth of insight."

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Insight

#25715D – 13.20.4.181

BN – ZZ – K

Insight is a function of the entire psyche and not of any single part of it.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Insight

#25718D – 13.20.4.184

BN – ZZ – K

The ordinary mystical insight is also a transcendental one but there is this difference, that it is not pure, it is always mixed up with an emotion or a thought. Philosophical insight is utterly pure. It is a fusion of both knowledge and realization, understanding and experience.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Insight

#25720EM – 13.20.4.186

BSG_4 – Z – K

Where we speak either metaphysically or meditationally of the experience of pure consciousness, we mean consciousness uncoloured by the ego.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Insight

#25722D – 13.20.4.188

BN – ZZ – K

Nature teaches us here as elsewhere not to let patience break down. There is plenty of time in her bag. Life is an evolutionary process…

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Insight

#25728E – 13.20.4.194

BSG_4 – P – DE

On the highest plane all insights are one.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Insight

#25729 – 13.20.4.195

BN – X – K

A mystic experience is simply something which comes and goes, whereas philosophic insight, once established in a man, cannot possibly leave him. He understands the Truth and cannot lose this understanding any more than an adult can lose his adulthood and become an infant.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Insight

#25732 – 13.20.4.198

BSG_4 – ZZZ – DK1

Because he has worked for his prize, because he has undergone a patient and arduous training, and because he has taken every step on the way with full comprehension and clear sight, his inspiration is not here today and gone tomorrow but, when he acquires it, remains constant and is permanently kept.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Insight

#25733 – 13.20.4.199

BN – Z – D

The signs of genuineness in true insight include (a) conformity to facts of Nature and not merely logic of argumentation or speculation, (b) clear direct understanding of what it sees, (c) freedom from admixture of any kind of personal predilection, aversion, auto-suggestion or motive, (d) indications that the seer has fully overcome his lower self.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Insight

#25735 – 13.20.4.201

BN – ZZ – K

The ever changing world-movement is suspended and transcended in the mystical trance so that the mystic may perceive its hidden changeless ground in the One Mind, whereas in the ultramystic insight its activity is restored. For such insight easily penetrates it, and always sees this ground without need to abolish the appearance. Consequently the philosopher is aware that everyday activity is as much and as needful a field for him as mystical passivity. Such expression, however, cannot be less than what he is within himself through the possession of insight. Just as any man cannot express himself as an ant, do what he may, simply because his human consciousness is too large to be narrowed down to such a little field, so the philosopher cannot separate his ultramystic insight from his moment-to-moment activity. In this sense he has no option but to follow and practise the gospel of inspired action.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Insight

#25737 – 13.20.4.203

BN – X – K1

This is the true insight, the permanent illumination that neither comes nor goes but always is. While being serious, where the event or situation requires it, he will not be solemn. For behind this seriousness there is detachment. He cannot take the world of Appearances as being Reality's final form. If he is a sharer in this world's experiences, he is also a witness and especially a witness of his own ego—its acts and desires, its thoughts and speech. And because he sees its littleness, he keeps his sense of humour about all things concerning it, a touch of lightness, a basic humility. Others may believe that he stands in the Great Light, but he himself has no particular or ponderous self-importance.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Insight

#25739 – 13.20.4.205

BSG_4 – ZZZ – K1

He comes to the service of mankind by an indirect route. For his primary service is to the Overself. But after he makes this inward act of entire dedication to it, the Overself then bids him go forth and work for the welfare of all beings.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Service

#25744 – 13.20.4.210

BA11 – ZZ – K

To be able to contemplate the Overself as an ”other” is already an achievement of high order. But because it is, first, an intermittent one, second, an incomplete one, and third, an imperfect one, it is not yet the highest. In the latter there is final, permanent, and perfect immersion in the Overself.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Service

#25745 – 13.20.4.211

BN – X – D

His last task is to re-enter the busy world and dwell in it as focus for unworldly forces, to heal the suffering and guide the blinded.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Service

#25746 – 13.20.4.212

BA11 – ZZZ – DMK

He notes that other people's outer sufferings are greater than his own, while their inner understanding of those sufferings is less. He is both willing and ready to disturb his own bliss with their misery and he will do this not in condescension but in compassion. Saint Paul, following the master whom he never saw in the flesh but knew so well in the spirit, put all other virtues beneath compassion. Are the few who try to be true Christians, in this point at least, utterly wasting their time? For so say the yogis who would abolish all effort in service and concentrate on self-realization alone. Yet neither Jesus nor Paul was a mere sentimentalist. They knew the power of compassion in dissolving the ego. It was thus a part of their moral code.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Service

#25748E – 13.20.4.214

BN – ZEL1/2 – DEK

Neither Jesus nor Paul was a mere sentimentalist. They knew the power of compassion in dissolving the ego. It was thus a part of their moral code. They knew, too, another reason why the disciple should practise altruistic conduct and take up noble attitudes. With their help he may bring one visitation of bad karma to an earlier end or even help to prevent the manifestation of another visitation which would otherwise be inevitable.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Service

#25748E – 13.20.4.214

BN – ZEL2/2 – DEK

The last marks of the ego's grip will linger on him in various subtle forms. Perhaps the willingness to be saved himself while leaving behind so many others entangled in illusion is the final mark to be erased. But it is a mark which only philosophical mystics, not ordinary mystics, are likely to be troubled with. Only a compassion of unparalleled depth and immense impartiality will put anyone on such a course as voluntarily to remain on liberation's threshold so as to help the unliberated.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Service

#25751 – 13.20.4.217

BN – X – DEK

Philosophy rejects the egocentric ideal of the lower mysticism and why it trains its votaries from the very start to work altruistically for humanity's enlightenment. No man is so low in the evolutionary scale that he cannot help some other men with a rightly placed word, cannot strike a flickering match in their darkness, cannot show the example of a better life.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Service

#25752E – 13.20.4.218

BN – Z – DEK

There is a fundamental difference between mystical escapism and mystical altruism. In the first case, the man is interested only in gaining his own self-realization and will be content to let his endeavours stop there. In the second case, he has the same aim but also the keen aspiration to make his achievement, when it materializes, available for the service of mankind. And because such a profound aspiration cannot be banished into cold-storage to await this materialization, he will even sacrifice part of his time, money, and energy to doing what little he can to enlighten others intellectually during the interval. Even if this meant doing nothing more than making philosophical knowledge more easily accessible to ordinary men than it has been in the past, this would be enough. But he can do much more than that.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Service

#25756E – 13.20.4.222

BN – ZEL1/3 – DEK1

There is a fundamental difference between mystical escapism and mystical altruism. In the first case, the man is interested only in gaining his own self-realization and will be content to let his endeavours stop there. In the second case, he has the same aim but also the keen aspiration to make his achievement, when it materializes, available for the service of mankind. Both types recognize the indispensable need of deliberately withdrawing from society and isolating themselves from its activities to obtain the solitude necessary to achieve intensity of concentration, to practise meditative reflection upon life, and to study mystical and philosophical books. But whereas the first would make the withdrawal a permanent, lifelong one, the second would make it only a temporary and occasional one. And by "temporary" we mean any period from a single day to several years.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Service

#25756E – 13.20.4.222

BN – ZEL2/3 – DEK1

There is a fundamental difference between mystical escapism and mystical altruism. In the first case, the man is interested only in gaining his own self-realization and will be content to let his endeavours stop there. In the second case, he has the same aim but also the keen aspiration to make his achievement, when it materializes, available for the service of mankind. The first is a resident of the ivory tower of escapism, the second merely its visitor. The first can find happiness only in his solitariness and must draw himself out of humanity's disturbing life to attain it. The second seeks a happiness that will hold firm in all places and makes retirement from that life only a means to this end. Each is entitled to travel his own path. But at such a time as the present, when the whole world is being convulsed and the human soul agitated as never before, we personally believe that it is better to follow the less selfish and more compassionate one.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Service

#25756E – 13.20.4.222

BN – ZEL3/3 – DEK1

From all these studies, meditations, and actions the student will little by little emerge an inwardly changed man. He comes to the habitual contemplation of his co-partnership with the universe as a whole, to the recognition that personal isolation is illusory, and thus takes the firm steps on the ultimate path towards becoming a true philosopher. The realization of the hidden unity of his own life with the life of the whole world manifests finally in infinite compassion for all living things. Thus he learns to subdue the personal will to the cosmic one, narrow selfish affection to the wide-spreading desire for the common welfare. Compassion comes to full blossom in his heart like a lotus flower in the sunshine. From this lofty standpoint, he no longer regards mankind as being those whom he unselfishly serves but rather as being those who give him the opportunity to serve.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Service

#25758 – 13.20.4.224

BN – ZEL1/3 – DEK1

He will suddenly or slowly experience an emotional exaltation culminating in an utter change of heart. Its course will be marked by a profound reorientation of feeling toward his fellow creatures. The fundamental egoism which in open or masked forms has hitherto motivated him will be abandoned: the noble altruism which has hitherto seemed an impracticable and impossible ideal, will become practicable and possible. For a profound sympathy to all other beings will dwell in his heart. Never again will it be possible for him wilfully to injure another; but on the contrary the welfare of the All will become his concern. In Jesus' words he is "born again."

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Service

#25758 – 13.20.4.224

BN – ZEL2/3 – DEK1

He will find his highest happiness, after seeking reality and truth, in seeking the welfare of all other beings alongside of his own. The practical consequence of this is that he will be inevitably led to incessant effort for their service and enlightenment. He will not merely echo the divine will but will allow it actively to work within him. And with the thought comes the power to do so, the grace of the Overself to help him to achieve quickly what the Underself cannot achieve. In the service of others he can partially forget his loss of trance-joy and know that the liberated self which he had experienced in interior meditation must be equated by the expanded self in altruistic action.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Service

#25758 – 13.20.4.224

BN – ZEL3/3 – DEK1

The peace to which he has become heir is not self-absorbed rest from old activities that he deserts, but a divine awareness that subsists beneath new ones that he accepts.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Service

#25759 – 13.20.4.225

BN – ZZ – K1

When he first attains to this clear vision, he sees not only that which brings him great joy but also that which brings him great sorrow. He sees men bewildered by life, pained by life, blinded by life. He sees them wandering into wrong paths because there is no one to lead them into right ones. He sees them praying for light but surrounded by darkness. In that hour he makes a decision which will fundamentally affect the whole of his life. Henceforth he will intercede for these others, devote himself to their spiritual service.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Service

#25760 – 13.20.4.226

B_01 – ZZZ – DK1

After the desire for the fullest overshadowing by the Overself, which must always be primal, his second desire is to spread out the peace, understanding, and compassion which now burn like a flame within him, to propagate an inward state rather than an intellectual dogma, to bless and enlighten those who seek their divine parent.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Service

#25761 – 13.20.4.227

BN – Z – DK1

There is every reason why a human being who accepts the gospel of Inspired Action should become a beneficent force in the world. Whatever role falls to him in the game of life, he will play it in a vital and significant way. More than ever before in its history, the world's need is for such active philosophers.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Service

#25763E – 13.20.4.229

BSG_4 – P – DE

This ideal of a spiritualized worldly life on the part of an illuminate is held even where it might be thought the last place to be found—in Buddhism. For of the three Goals it sets before men, the last is that of the Bodhisattva. Linguistically, the term means one who is bent upon wisdom but technically the term means one who is destined to become a Buddha. Practically, it means one who stands on the very threshold, as it were, of Nirvana, but refuses to enter because he wishes to remain behind and relieve suffering humanity. This tremendous self-sacrifice indicates the tremendous spirit of compassion which actuates him. 'I cannot have pleasure while another grieves and I have the power to help,' said Gautama while yet a Bodhisattva.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Service

#25767E – 13.20.4.233

UR_3.2 – Z – K

That which sustains each individual mind is a universal one. Therefore, that which is best for him in social and ethical action must also fulfil the requirement of being what is best for all. Otherwise it is incomplete.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Service

#25769 – 13.20.4.235

BN – X – D

If his earlier life has been self-centered, the attainment of this stage will provide him with the opportunity to escape from our miserable planet and to pass into a world of harmony, peace, and light, although this escape cannot in the nature of things mature until his physical body dies. But if his earlier life has been compassionate and altruistic in ideal—however unsuccessful in practice—the attainment will provide him with the power to implement this ideal, the strength to realize it in actuality. The thought will then present itself to him, "How best can I serve mankind?" This will lead him to seek for ways of helpfulness appropriate to his times, environment, and circumstances. Naturally the knowledge that helping others toward a similar enlightenment is the best service he can render them will predominate, but he will understand that their physical existence cannot be separated from their mental one and that it may sometimes be needful as a step toward that ultimate purpose to take up a duty which seems to belong solely to the external sphere of things.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Service

#25770 – 13.20.4.236

BN – Z – K

Those who engage in unselfish service are temporarily loosened somewhat from the ego. This of course is true only to the extent that the service is done with pure, and not with ulterior or mixed or quite selfish, motives.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Service

#25772 – 13.20.4.238

BN – X – D

If those of higher ideals and unselfish character withdraw from society, leaving the world to be run by more materialistic and selfish persons, then society will certainly degenerate and thus bring karmic suffering upon itself. Wisdom, however, dictates the reverse policy.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Service

#25777 – 13.20.4.243

BN – X – D

The sage may invite co-operation in this work not for their personal aggrandizement but for the philanthropic enlightenment of the eager, questioning few.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Service

#25779 – 13.20.4.245

BN – ZZZ – K

His ultimate aim is to enjoy the blessed presence of the Overself in his heart. But it is not, as with inferior mystics, to enjoy it alone. He ardently desires to share it with others.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Service

#25785 – 13.20.4.251

BN – Z – D

If anyone can make a spiritual, aesthetic, reasonable, and ethical contribution to mankind, he serves God too, even if he belongs to no religion. For he is harmonizing himself with the World-Idea.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Service

#25792 – 13.20.4.258

BN – X – D

Whoever wishes to attract people to philosophy must start by supporting its preachings with the attractiveness of his own personal example in day-to-day living. He must continue by practising love to all and depending on the power of truth. He must end by praying for others in secret and offering himself to the Divine as a pure instrument of service.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Service

#25794 – 13.20.4.260

BN – X – D

When the Higher Power leads a man to a position produced by his constant aspiration to serve coupled with his personal qualifications for it, the strength and wisdom he may need to fulfil it will also be granted.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Service

#25795 – 13.20.4.261

BN – ZZ – D

To understand the mysterious language of the Silence, and to bring this understanding back into the world of forms through work that shall express the creative vitality of the Spirit, is one way in which you may serve mankind.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Service

#25796 – 13.20.4.262

BA11 – ZZ – DK1

The man who lives in the physical senses alone reaches and affects those other men only whom he can come into contact with physically. He is entirely limited by time and space. The man who lives in the developed intellect or feelings also reaches and affects those other men who can respond to his written or printed ideas or his artistic inspirations. He is limited only partially by time and space. But the man who lives in the godlike Overself within him is freed from time and space and uplifts all those who can respond intuitively, even though they may never know him physically. For in the spiritual world he cannot hide his light.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Service

#25797 – 13.20.4.263

BN – ZZZ – DEK1

It may be said that the world's supreme need is exactly what the illumined man has found, therefore his duty is to give it to the world. This is true, but it is equally true that the world is not ready for it any more than he himself was ready for it before he underwent a long course of purification, discipline, and training. Accepting these realities of the situation, he feels no urge to spread his ideas, no impulse to organize a following. However that does not mean that he does nothing at all; it only means that he will help in the ways he deems to be most effective even if they are the least publicized and the least apparent. He is not deaf to the call of duty but he gives it a wider interpretation than those who are ignorant of the state and powers which he enjoys.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Service

#25798 – 13.20.4.264

BA11 – ZZZ – K1

It is not by overmuch fussy activity that we necessarily serve others best. We may, if we have opened ourselves to divine influences, become radiations of such influences. Merely by being faithful to them, we become the best missionaries for them.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Service

#25803 – 13.20.4.269

B_01 – ZZZ – K

His personal destiny or spiritual dedication will decide his future course—whether deliberately to remain obscure and avoid the notice which excites opposition, or publicly to accept a mission and bring inspiration to a particular kind of activity.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Service

#25805 – 13.20.4.271

BN – Z – D

To come to a philosopher with expectations gleaned from religio-mystic circles, and to find that he refuses to play up to them, is to invite disappointment, perhaps even disillusionment. Yet, in being himself, in rigidly holding to the best he knows, the philosopher has really rendered the other a better service than if he had responded agreeably to anticipations. The ego's incapacity to recognize this does not destroy the seed that has been sown. Athens was handed truth by Socrates but handed him the cup of poison in return. But who knows what minds picked up thirty years later ideas he had left behind?

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Service

#25806 – 13.20.4.272

A241129 – ZZZ – K

No other work could measure up, in eventual importance, to the work to which his life is dedicated, however insignificant his part may seem to him at any time. "God regardeth the duty of proclaiming His message as the most meritorious of all deeds," wrote the Persian prophet Baha'u'llah. Once fully engaged in this endeavour, he will feel more and more that he is part of a movement which is on the coming wave. Meanwhile, although he is to do whatever he can wherever circumstances allow it, in the way of such service, he is not to be over-anxious about results, on the one hand, nor utterly indifferent, on the other. A calm spirit, a patient mind, must never be deserted, yet a rejoicing heart over anyone that is guided to the Quest must never be repressed. His task is one of the oldest in human history—to convince men and women that it is worthwhile asking themselves: What are the ultimate values of human life?

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Service

#25809 – 13.20.4.275

BN – ZZZ – DEK

The right way to help someone is to sympathize with the personal suffering, but to understand its inner necessity at the same time.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Service

#25810 – 13.20.4.276

B_17 – ZZ – K

Whoever by speech or by silence, by art or by example, helps to improve mankind or increase knowledge of the higher truth, renders the best service. No other charity or philanthropy equals this upliftment of creatures struggling—unwittingly or deliberately—to a purified, disciplined, and refined consciousness.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Service

#25811 – 13.20.4.277

BN – Z – D

The noblest calling in life and the most useful vocation is philosophical teaching.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Service

#25812 – 13.20.4.278

BA11 – Z – DK

The philosopher's work with others shines best in a literary function. There he gives light and healing, calm and hope to the many on their way who could never hope, owing to the lapse of time after his death or the distance in space before it, to encounter him in a consultative function.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Service

#25813 – 13.20.4.279

BN – Z – D

Whoever attains this, the topmost peak of the philosophic life, will naturally possess the capacity—rather the genius—to help the internal evolutionary advance of mankind. Indeed, it will be the principal and secret business of his life, whatever his external and conventional business may be. Those who stood closest to Jesus were asked to preach the gospel. Clearly therefore he conceived the spreading of truth to be their primary task. That other tasks, such as feeding and clothing the poor, had their own particular importance too, was acknowledged in his injunction to other persons. But that such tasks were secondary ones is clear inference from his instructions to the apostles. And in this critical passage of humanity from a used-out standpoint to a newer one which confronts it today, such a service is more than important.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Service

#25826E – 13.20.4.292

BN – ZEL1/3 – DEK1

Those who stood closest to Jesus were asked to preach the gospel. Clearly therefore he conceived the spreading of truth to be their primary task. In his own humbler way and in a quiet unobtrusive manner, remembering always that people will find the best account of his beliefs in his deeds, even the neophyte who has still to climb the foothills of philosophy can and must communicate so much of this knowledge as he finds men may be ready for, but not an iota more. His task is not, like that of the apostles, to convert them but to help them. He may be only a firefly with little light to shed but he should desert the esotericism of former centuries and try to enlighten others because he must understand the unique character of this century and see the dangerous gaping abyss which surrounds its civilization.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Service

#25826E – 13.20.4.292

BN – ZEL2/3 – DEK1

Moreover he may take refuge in the words of Tripura, an archaic Sanskrit text, which, if its archaic idiom be translated into modern accents, says: "An intense student may be endowed with the slenderest of good qualities, but if he can readily understand the truth—however theoretically—and expound it to others, this act of exposition will help him to become himself imbued with these ideas and his own mind will soak in their truth. This in the end will lead him to actualize the Divinity within himself."

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Service

#25826E – 13.20.4.292

BN – ZEL3/3 – DEK1

The truth-charged words of a philosopher are not for those who are neither seeking truth nor willing to accept it nor ready to understand it.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Service

#25832 – 13.20.4.298

BN – ZZ – K

Appreciation of these truths is the beginning of the philosophic life. Application of them is the end.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Service

#25833 – 13.20.4.299

BSG_4 – P – D

The discovery that our existence as well as the world's existence is like that of a dream need not alarm us, need not cause us to become impractical, inefficient, uninterested in life and half-hearted in action. For as we should prefer a pleasant dream during sleep to a horrible nightmare, so should we try to live this waking world dream of ours as pleasantly, as profitably, and as successfully as possible. If these doctrines cannot be made subservient to the ends of living, then they are metaphysical and not philosophical. For the business of the metaphysician is to lose himself in abstractions, but the business of the philosopher is to find himself in common life.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Service

#25837 – 13.20.4.303

BN – X – DEK

When what he receives from within at the intuitive level is transplanted without at the active level, it becomes complete.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Service

#25839 – 13.20.4.305

BN – X – D

There is a gratifying secret entwined with this injunction to serve mankind. Whoever gives himself in such service will inevitably receive a boomerang-like return one day when others will display a readiness to serve him. For karma is a divine law which brings back to him whatever he has given forth.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Service

#25841E – 13.20.4.307

BA11 – ZZZ – DEK

There is a gratifying secret entwined with this injunction to serve mankind. Whoever gives himself in such service will inevitably receive a boomerang-like return one day when others will display a readiness to serve him. For karma is a divine law which brings back to him whatever he has given forth. The area and depth of his own service will mark the area and depth of that which mankind will extend toward him. Only the form of it will be different because this will depend both on prevailing circumstances and his own subconscious or conscious desire. It may take only a mental or emotional form. The moral of this is that the wise altruist loses nothing in the end by his altruism, although the foolish altruist may lose much as the karmic consequence of his foolishness.

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Service

#25841 – 13.20.4.307

BN – ZZZ – DEK

A true power will inform the hands of those who will act at the behest of the god within, whose daily admonishment to him is: "Go out and live for the welfare of man the Light you find in the deep recesses of your own heart."

What Is Philosophy? > Its Realization Beyond Ecstasy > Service

#25842 – 13.20.4.308

BN – X – D

The goal of self-elimination which is held up before us refers only to the animal and lower human selves. It certainly does not refer to the annihilation of all self-consciousness. The higher individuality always remains. But it is so different from the lower one that it does not make much sense to discuss it in human language. Hence, those who have adequately understood it write or talk little about its higher mysteries. If the end of all existence were only a merger at best or annihilation at worst, it would be a senseless and sorry scheme of things. It would be unworthy of the divine intelligence and discreditable to the divine goodness. The consciousness stripped of thought, which looks less attractive to you than the hazards of life down here, is really a tremendous enlargement of what thought itself tries to do. Spiritual advance is really from a Less to a More. There is nothing to fear in it and nothing to lose by it—except by the standards and values of the ignorant.

What Is Philosophy? > The Philosopher > The Philosopher

#25847 – 13.20.5.5

BN – X – K1

Resurrection—to die and live again—is a symbol. It means to leave the ego and enter the Overself ‘in full consciousness’.

What Is Philosophy? > The Philosopher > The Philosopher

#25849 – 13.20.5.7

BN – Z – D

When the two selves become one, the inner conflict vanishes. Peace, rich and unutterable, is his.

What Is Philosophy? > The Philosopher > The Philosopher

#25851 – 13.20.5.9

BSG_4 – P – D

He has extended his consciousness to the Overself, displaced the ego from its age-old tyranny, and become the full human he intended to be.

What Is Philosophy? > The Philosopher > The Philosopher

#25852 – 13.20.5.10

BN – X – D

We who honour philosophy so highly cannot afford to be other than honest with ourselves. We have to acknowledge that the end of all our striving is surrender. No human being can do other than this—an utterly humble prostration, where we dissolve, lose the ego, lose ourselves—the rest is paradox and mystery.

What Is Philosophy? > The Philosopher > The Philosopher

#25853 – 13.20.5.11

BN – X – D

It is out of such a splendid balance of utter humility and noble self-reliance that the philosopher gets his wisdom and strength. He is always kneeling metaphorically before the Divine in self-surrendering renunciation and often actually in self-abasing prayer. Yet side by side with this, he is always seeking to develop and apply his own intellect and intuition, his own will and experience in life. And because they are derived from such a balanced combination, this wisdom and strength are beyond any that religion alone, or metaphysics alone, could give.

What Is Philosophy? > The Philosopher > The Philosopher

#25858 – 13.20.5.16

BN – Z – DEK

The philosopher will be a karma yogi to the extent that he will work incessantly for the service of humanity and work, too, in a disinterested spirit. He will be a bhakti yogi to the extent that he will seek lovingly to feel the constant presence of the Divine. He will be a raja yogi to the extent that he will hold his mind free from the world fetters but pinned to the holy task he has undertaken. He will be a gnana yogi to the extent that he will apply his reflective and reasoning power to a metaphysical understanding of the world.

What Is Philosophy? > The Philosopher > The Philosopher

#25860 – 13.20.5.18

BN – ZZ – DK

In observation a scientist, at heart a religious devotee, in thought a metaphysician, in secret a mystic, and in public an efficient, honorable useful citizen–this is the kind of man philosophy produces.

What Is Philosophy? > The Philosopher > The Philosopher

#25864 – 13.20.5.22

BN – ZZZ – K1

His thoughts are guided by the Overself, his emotions inspired by it, and his actions expressive of it. Thus his whole personal life becomes a harmoniously and divinely integrated one.

What Is Philosophy? > The Philosopher > The Philosopher

#25866 – 13.20.5.24

BN – Z – D

A man acts philosophically when wisdom and service become the motive power behind his deeds. These are the two currents which must flow through his external life.

What Is Philosophy? > The Philosopher > The Philosopher

#25867 – 13.20.5.25

BN – ZZZ – DEK

His wisdom must be equal to calamity or prosperity, the bad or the good—to all situations, in fact.

What Is Philosophy? > The Philosopher > The Philosopher

#25873 – 13.20.5.31

BN – ZZ – K

The flower grows into a balanced and complete entity. This is the way he is to grow. It is perfect in itself, and nothing need be added to it. This is the Ideal he is to realize.

What Is Philosophy? > The Philosopher > The Philosopher

#25879 – 13.20.5.37

UR_2.4 – ZZZ – K

In his practical life he will evidence a compassionate heart but a clear head, a strong will but a sensitive intuition.

What Is Philosophy? > The Philosopher > The Philosopher

#25880 – 13.20.5.38

BSG_4 – P – D

He is a scientist to the extent that he respects fact, a metaphysician to the extent that he wants reality, a religionist to the extent that he recognizes a higher power.

What Is Philosophy? > The Philosopher > The Philosopher

#25881 – 13.20.5.39

BN – X – D

Although he dwells in the Eternal, he lets the passing hour take from him what it needs. This is balance.

What Is Philosophy? > The Philosopher > The Philosopher

#25882 – 13.20.5.40

BN – Z – D

By starting to live from the core itself, we start to live harmoniously, undivided and whole.

What Is Philosophy? > The Philosopher > The Philosopher

#25883 – 13.20.5.41

BN – X – D

Neither the life of action nor the life of reason is able to satisfy him, nor even their combination, however good it be. He comes, in time, to the last question and, with the finding of its answer, to the life of intuition. Henceforth he is to be taught from within, led from within, by something deeper than intellect, surer than intellect. Henceforth he is to do what needs doing under the influx of a higher will than his merely personal one.

What Is Philosophy? > The Philosopher > The Philosopher

#25887 – 13.20.5.45

BN – Z – DEK

When he has silenced his desires and stilled his thoughts, when he has put his own will aside and his own ego down, he becomes a free channel through which the Divine Mind may flow into his own consciousness. No evil feelings can enter his heart, no evil thoughts can cross his mind, and not even the new consequence of old wrong-doing can affect his serenity.

What Is Philosophy? > The Philosopher > The Philosopher

#25890 – 13.20.5.48

BN – Z – D

The philosopher does not hold any views. Views are held by those who depend on the intellect or the emotions alone for their judgements. His dependence is on the intuition, the voice of his higher self.

What Is Philosophy? > The Philosopher > The Philosopher

#25894 – 13.20.5.52

BN – Z – D

The discovery of a philosophic truth is, in time and as it is lived, a deeply felt thing even though its expression or communication may be quiet and composed. The stoical side of the philosophic character does not destroy the warmth of this feeling. It will be present in the communication itself as freshness and originality, as if heart were speaking to heart and, for those who need it, head to head.

What Is Philosophy? > The Philosopher > The Philosopher

#25905 – 13.20.5.63

BN – ZZZ – K

He is idealistic without being fanatical, realistic without being materialistic, reformist without being obsessed.

What Is Philosophy? > The Philosopher > The Philosopher

#25915 – 13.20.5.73

BN – Z – K

Attention is forever being caught by some thought or some thing, by some feeling or some experience. In the case of the ordinary man, consciousness is lost in the attention; but in the case of the philosophic man there is a background which evaluates the attention and controls it.

What Is Philosophy? > The Philosopher > The Philosopher

#25923 – 13.20.5.81

BN – X – DK1

The enlightened man may outwardly appear to live like others, a normal and ordinary life, but whether he does so or not, there will always be this vital difference between him and ordinary men: that he never forgets his true nature.

What Is Philosophy? > The Philosopher > The Philosopher

#25924 – 13.20.5.82

BN – Z – D

The Stoic, whose highest lights are his ethical principles, may attain cold neutral peace. The philosopher, who lives by trans-egoic awareness, finds a gracious tranquillity.

What Is Philosophy? > The Philosopher > The Philosopher

#25927 – 13.20.5.85

BN – X – K

It is the difference in world-view which explains why one man fills his heart with anger and hate at exactly the same mistreatment under which another man fills his heart with forbearance and forgiveness.

What Is Philosophy? > The Philosopher > The Philosopher

#25936 – 13.20.5.94

B_14 – ZZ – K

Some part of his mind and heart will always be elsewhere, out of all this activity, above and detached from it all.

What Is Philosophy? > The Philosopher > The Philosopher

#25946 – 13.20.5.104

BN – ZZ – K

It is not that he becomes a mere onlooker at life—although during the pre-philosophic period this temptation is present—but that the difference between absolute reality and relative existence becomes all too plain.

What Is Philosophy? > The Philosopher > The Philosopher

#25947 – 13.20.5.105

BN – X – K

The ordinary man who loves comfort and desires possessions, property, or position is not acting wrongly. He is wrong when he lets himself get tied to them and suffers intensely at their loss. The philosopher may also have these things, but there is this difference: that he will be inwardly free of them.

What Is Philosophy? > The Philosopher > The Philosopher

#25948 – 13.20.5.106

BN – Z – K

A perfect degree of impersonality is unlikely to be found because it is generally unsought and ordinarily unattainable. But a large measure of it may be arrived at.

What Is Philosophy? > The Philosopher > The Philosopher

#25950 – 13.20.5.108

BN – Z – K

The modern philosopher cannot fail to be a most paradoxical gentleman. He works as actively and apparently as ambitiously as other men, relaxes with entertainment or with the arts, but withal keeps his innermost self aloof and detached from the scenes and agitations around him.

What Is Philosophy? > The Philosopher > The Philosopher

#25951 – 13.20.5.109

BN – ZZZ – K

The so-called dehumanized coolness of the philosopher is frightening to some, while to others its lack of negative passions and animal wraths is felt as a silent accusation, is catalytic in causing a feeling of guilt to arise—and so his company becomes uncomfortable.

What Is Philosophy? > The Philosopher > The Philosopher

#25954 – 13.20.5.112

BN – Z – K

He will grow into a great-hearted man with a clear insight into human motivation and a calm acceptance of men and women as he finds them. Something of Nature's patience in working out her evolutionary scheme will enter into his soul. When he thinks of those who have wronged him, he will spontaneously and effortlessly forgive them.

What Is Philosophy? > The Philosopher > The Philosopher

#25955 – 13.20.5.113

B_14 – ZZ – K

He takes people just as he finds them and events just as they happen. He does not outwardly express any desire for them to be different from what they are. There are at least two reasons for this attitude. First, he knows that the divine thought of the universe contains the idea of evolution. So he believes that however bad people may be, one day they will be better; however untoward circumstances may be, divine wisdom has brought them about. Second, he knows that if he is to keep an unruffled peace inside him, he must allow nothing outside him to disturb it. Because he regards the outer life as being as ephemeral as a dream, he is reconciled to everything, rebellious against nothing.

What Is Philosophy? > The Philosopher > The Philosopher

#25957 – 13.20.5.115

BN – ZZZ – K

Another characteristic of the philosopher is his capacity to see the point of view of all, of the sinner and the criminal, the weak and the ignorant, equally with that of the saint and the sage. This is born partly out of his developed intelligence, partly out of his profound impersonality, and partly out of his wide compassion. This leads to the consequence that when seeking practical remedies for social wrongs, or redress for private ones, he seeks beneath the surface for ultimate causes. A merely superficial view, which may deceive millions of people, is rejected by him. The punishment of a crime without accompanying ethical education, for instance, he regards as clumsy and inefficient brutality. Prison punishment, especially, should be set in a framework of ethical instruction which includes the doctrine of karma. Without such a setting its deterrent effect is not sufficient to make it more than a half-success and a half-failure.

What Is Philosophy? > The Philosopher > The Philosopher

#25958 – 13.20.5.116

BN – Z – K

He is able to determine precisely what ethical principle is their guiding and dominant force, and what mental status they have reached. Yet paradoxically enough, the greater clarity with which he can now view the souls of others does not diminish his tolerance but, on the contrary, increases it. For he understands that everything and everyone are the result of the previous experience which life has given them, that they cannot help being other than what they are, and that all occupy a certain place at some stage or other in the universal evolutionary scheme—even those who are actuated by devilish and evil characteristics. Instead of placing himself in inward opposition to the wicked and thus setting up conflict, he silently pities them in his own heart, for he knows that the karmic law will reflect back to its perpetrator suffering for every evil deed. On the other hand, he will not hesitate impersonally to perform a drastic punitive duty should it be his duty to do so according to his position in the outer world.

What Is Philosophy? > The Philosopher > The Philosopher

#25965 – 13.20.5.123

B_13 – ZZZ – K

The philosophical attitude maintains fairness and courtesy even toward those who attack philosophy.

What Is Philosophy? > The Philosopher > The Philosopher

#25966 – 13.20.5.124

B_02 – Z – K

He will know R E A L I T Y, and know it too as his own ultimate being, indestructible and ever-existent. Amid the most prosaic surroundings, deep in the core of his own heart there will be perfect calm for himself and goodwill for all others.

What Is Philosophy? > The Philosopher > The Philosopher

#25969 – 13.20.5.127

BA11 – ZZZ – DK

The philosopher more than other men is a cosmopolitan creature. He scorns the fierce nationalisms which run riot in the world and feels the truth of Jesus' message of goodwill towards all men.

What Is Philosophy? > The Philosopher > The Philosopher

#25985 – 13.20.5.143

B_12 – ZZ – DK

If you have understood philosophy you will follow no spiritual leader, be he P.B. or anyone else.

What Is Philosophy? > The Philosopher > The Philosopher

#25986 – 13.20.5.144

UR_2.5 – ZZ – K

When he has the confidence to speak from personal discovery and the authority to speak from a superior level, a few may then listen, but more will do so later.

What Is Philosophy? > The Philosopher > The Philosopher

#25990 – 13.20.5.148

BN – X – D

The philosopher accepts his predestined isolation not only because that is the way his position has to be, but also because his physical presence arouses negative feelings in the hearts of ordinary people as it arouses positive ones in the hearts of certain seekers. The negatives may range all the way from puzzlement, bewilderment, and suspicion to fear, opposition, and downright enmity. The positives may range from instinctive attraction to a readiness to lay down life in his defense or service. All these feelings arise instantly, irrationally, and instinctively. And they are unconnected with whether or not he reveals his true personal identity. This is because they are the consequence of a psychical impingement of his aura upon theirs. The contact is unseen and unapparent in the physical world, but it is very real in the mental-emotional world.

What Is Philosophy? > The Philosopher > The Philosopher

#25993E – 13.20.5.151

BN – ZEL1/3 – K1

There is a psychical impingement of a philosopher's aura upon the seekers. The contact is unseen and unapparent in the physical world, but it is very real in the mental-emotional world. It is truly a psychical experience for both: clear and precise and correctly understood by him, vague and disturbing and utterly misunderstood by ordinary people as well as pseudo-questers. It is both a psychical and a mystical experience for those genuine questers with whom he has some inward affinity, a glad recognition of a long-lost, much revered Elder Brother.

What Is Philosophy? > The Philosopher > The Philosopher

#25993E – 13.20.5.151

BN – ZEL2/3 – K1

Despite the generous compassion and enormous goodwill which he bears in his heart for all alike, it is the unpleasant contacts which make up the larger number whenever the philosopher descends into the world. Let him not be blamed if he prefers solitude to society. For there is nothing he can do about it. People are what they are. Most times when he tries to make himself agreeable to them, as though they both belonged to the same spiritual level, he fails. He learns somewhat wearily to accept his isolation and their limitation as inevitable and, at the present stage of human evolution, unalterable. He learns, too, that it is futile to desire these things to be otherwise.

What Is Philosophy? > The Philosopher > The Philosopher

#25993E – 13.20.5.151

BN – ZEL3/3 – K1

It is not an exclusiveness born of spiritual pride but of spiritual humility. For the philosopher feels profoundly that he must respect other people's viewpoint because it is the result of their own individual experience of life.

What Is Philosophy? > The Philosopher > The Philosopher

#25997 – 13.20.5.155

BN – Z – D

The philosopher is not interested in drawing attention to himself but only to his ideas, his discoveries, and his revelations.

What Is Philosophy? > The Philosopher > The Philosopher

#26002 – 13.20.5.160

BN – ZZ – D

Whatever his task or profession in the world may be, he will so contrive that it will become a labour for the good of his fellow creatures not less than for personal profit.

What Is Philosophy? > The Philosopher > The Philosopher

#26020 – 13.20.5.178

BN – ZZ – DM

The free soul has brought his thought and actions into perfect harmony with Nature's morality. He lives not merely for himself alone, but for himself as a part of the whole scheme. Consequently, he does not injure others but only benefits them. He does not neglect his own benefit, however, but makes the two work together. His activities are devoted to fulfilling the duties and responsibilities set for him by his best wisdom, by his higher self.

What Is Philosophy? > The Philosopher > The Philosopher

#26022E – 13.20.5.180

BN – ZEL1/2 – K1

The world is necessarily affected by his presence and activities, and affected beneficially. First, the mere knowledge that such a man exists helps others to continue with their efforts at self-improvement, for they know then that the spiritual quest is not a vain dream but a practicable affair. Second, he influences those he meets to live better lives—whether they be few or many, influential or obscure. Third, he leaves behind a concentration of spiritual forces which works on for a long time, through other persons, after he leaves this world. Fourth, if he is a sage and balanced, he will always do something of a practical nature for the uplift of humanity instead of merely squatting in an ashram.

What Is Philosophy? > The Philosopher > The Philosopher

#26022E – 13.20.5.180

BN – ZEL2/2 – K1

In every situation where he is involved with other persons, he will consider neither his own welfare solely to the exclusion of others nor theirs to the detriment of his own. He will do what is just and wise in the situation, taking the welfare of all into consideration and being guided ultimately by the impersonal intuition of the Overself.

What Is Philosophy? > The Philosopher > The Philosopher

#26027 – 13.20.5.185

BSG_4 – P – D

Is there a universal truth? Is there a doctrine which does not depend on individual opinion or the peculiarities of a particular age or the level of culture of a particular land? Is there a teaching which appeals to universal experience and not to private prejudice? We reply that there is, but it has been buried underneath much metaphysical lumber, much ancient lore, and much Oriental superstition. Our work has been to rescue this doctrine from the dead past for the benefit of the living present. In these pages we explode false counterfeits and expound the genuine teaching, the genuine philosophy.

What Is Philosophy? > The Philosopher > The philosopher's view of Truth

#26036 – 13.20.5.194

BSG_1 – ZZZ – DMK1

To arrive at great certitude is to arrive at great strength. Truth not only clears the head but also arms the will. It is not only a light to our feet but is itself a force in the blood.

What Is Philosophy? > The Philosopher > The philosopher's view of Truth

#26038 – 13.20.5.196

BSG_4 – ZZZ – DK1

Just as the sun can be seen only by its own light, so truth can be discerned only by its own self-revelation in the mind. That is, only by grace leading to insight. There is no other way.

What Is Philosophy? > The Philosopher > The philosopher's view of Truth

#26043 – 13.20.5.201

BN – Z – D

If the truth is that there is no truth, then those, like Jesus and Buddha, who claimed a transcendent insight were self-deceived fools.

What Is Philosophy? > The Philosopher > The philosopher's view of Truth

#26059 – 13.20.5.217

B_12 – Z – K

It does not matter that philosophy is a lone voice now, for it is an enduring one. Other and more orthodox voices will make themselves better heard but they will also fade eventually into silence. The truth can never perish but its counterfeits and substitutes, must.

What Is Philosophy? > The Philosopher > The philosopher's view of Truth

#26073 – 13.20.5.231

BN – ZZZ – K

Truth does not offer itself up to the call but awaits the right moment.

What Is Philosophy? > The Philosopher > The philosopher's view of Truth

#26082 – 13.20.5.240

BN – Z – K

Full knowledge of the Truth can be sudden or slow: the first way is through knowledge, the second through devotion and meditation.

What Is Philosophy? > The Philosopher > The philosopher's view of Truth

#26095 – 13.20.5.253

BN – X – D

If some aspects of the truth sadden us, other aspects cheer us.

What Is Philosophy? > The Philosopher > The philosopher's view of Truth

#26100 – 13.20.5.258

BN – X – K

These truths belong to every mortal even though their discovery has remained in a select and enquiring group. They belong to no particular people, no special time. They are as ageless as they are universal.

What Is Philosophy? > The Philosopher > The philosopher's view of Truth

#26102 – 13.20.5.260

UR_1 – ZZZ – K

Truth existed before the churches began to spire their way upwards into the sky, and it will continue to exist after the last academy of philosophy has been battered down. Nothing can still the primal need of it in man. Priesthoods can be exterminated until not one vestige is left in the land; mystic hermitages can be broken until they are but dust; philosophical books can be burnt out of existence by culture-hating tyrants, yet this subterranean sense in man which demands the understanding of its own existence will one day rise again with an urgent claim and create a new expression of itself.

What Is Philosophy? > The Philosopher > The philosopher's view of Truth

#26104 – 13.20.5.262

BA11 – ZZZ – DK1

The truth is that the hands touch and the eyes see but the surface of things. They do not touch nor see the completeness, the inner reality of things. In our ignorance we look upon forms as reality, we must needs have something to touch and handle if we are to believe in its real existence. The forms are alright where they are but they do not exhaust existence. That which tells us they are there, the consciousness which causes our senses to function and our ego to become aware of the results of this functioning, is itself closer to real being than the physical forms or mental images which are but tokens of its presence. We look always for mere forms and so miss their infinite source. We try to reduce life to arithmetic, to make one thing the effect of some other thing as cause, never dreaming that the sublime essence of both is unchanging and uncaused, formless and bodiless, the self-existent reality of Mind!

Mentalism > The Sensed World > The Sensed World

#26108 – 13.21.1.2

A251217 – Z – K

Our trouble is that our notion of what constitutes reality is incorrectly limited to the world of the five senses, with the sad consequence that we devise dozens of ways of finding happiness but never arrive at it.

Mentalism > The Sensed World > The Sensed World

#26109 – 13.21.1.3

BN – X – D

This thought that we are hermetically sealed in our five senses, that our sense-world is but a mere fragment of the total existence, and that such existence is itself a mere shadow of reality, is enough to awe us into a feeling of utter insignificance and helplessness. 

Mentalism > The Sensed World > The Sensed World

#26112 – 13.21.1.6

BN – X – K

Do the senses give you any real knowledge of a world outside your mind? Is it not rather that your sensations of such a world are only ideas inside that mind, and that you have no positive assurance of the existence of anything beyond those ideas themselves?

Mentalism > The Sensed World > The Sensed World

#26113 – 13.21.1.7

BN – X – D

He will come to see by experience, as science is coming to see by experiment, that this vast universe is real in its present form to his bodily senses only. As soon as his mind is freed from them, it takes on quite a different form, the old form having no further existence at all. He is then compelled to correct his false belief in the world's reality. If there were nothing more than the five senses, then this correction would make the universe an illusion. But the presence of mind in him makes it an idea.

Mentalism > The Sensed World > The Sensed World

#26116 – 13.21.1.10

BN – ZZ – K1

The distinction which is often made (especially by the school of Faculty-Pyschology) between sensation and idea or between sense-data and thought was once believed to be an actuality, but it is now believed to be only a convenience for intellectual analysis. A compromise view now regards our experience of the world as being a compound of the two, but a compound which is never split up into separate elements. This view represents a big step towards the mentalist position but is still only a step. And this position is that there is only a single activity, a single experience—thought. The idea is the sensation, the sensation is the idea. The sense datum which our present day psychologists find as an element of experience, is really their interpretation of experience. Hence it is nothing else than a thought. And that which it unconsciously professes to interpret is likewise a thought!

Mentalism > The Sensed World > The Sensed World

#26117 – 13.21.1.11

BN – ZZ – K1

What actually happens when you see something is that you become conscious of two pictures which are made upon the curved sensitive retinas of your two eyes. The reflected pictures—and not the solid thing itself—are all you directly know and hence all that you see. The whole world in which you really live and move is indeed only a picture-world!

Mentalism > The Sensed World > The Sensed World

#26121 – 13.21.1.15

BN – X – D

The real power to see, hear or feel, taste or smell does not dwell in the body. A deep unbiased analysis of the physiology of sensation will show that this power dwells in the mind.

Mentalism > The Sensed World > The Sensed World

#26129 – 13.21.1.23

BN – X – D

The totality of the immeasurably rich nature of the universe never reaches the human senses. This is not their fault. They cannot help but receive nothing more than a limited selection from it. There are numerous vibrations beyond their range and also beneath it. And yet we have the temerity to assert that the world of our experience, the only one we know, is the real world and that all others are illusory!

Mentalism > The Sensed World > The Sensed World

#26135 – 13.21.1.29

BA11 – ZZZ – DK1

A curious example, but one helpful to the enquirer, exists in the case of bodily pain. It is utterly impossible for us to imagine pain in the abstract—existing without any mind to be conscious of it. The word becomes quite meaningless if we try to separate it from someone or something to perceive or feel it. Its very existence depends entirely on being thought of, on being related to a conscious percipient. The sensation of being felt, this alone gives reality to pain. This fact refers equally to past or present pain. It should be easy to apply this analogy to the case of mere ideas, for the latter, like pain, can never come into existence without something, some mind, to think of them. Consciousness, on the part of someone or something, alone makes them real and factual.

Mentalism > The Sensed World > The Sensed World

#26138 – 13.21.1.32

BN – ZZ – K1

The body's surface organs explain the nature and reveal the qualities of things in our environment. But without the mind such explanation and such revelation could never be possible. This is easily proven. When we withdraw the mind from the sense-organs, as in deep thinking or profound remembrance, we alienate the environment and hardly observe the things in it. In other words, we sense ultimately only what the mind senses.

Mentalism > The Sensed World > The Sensed World

#26142 – 13.21.1.36

BN – X – D

It is not the five senses which know the world outside, since they are only instruments which the mind uses. It is not even the intellect, since that merely reproduces the image formed out of the total sense reports. They are not capable of functioning by themselves. It is the principle of Consciousness which is behind both, and for which they are simply agents, that really makes awareness of the world at all possible. It is like the sun, which lights up the existence of all things.

Mentalism > The Sensed World > The Sensed World

#26162 – 13.21.1.56

BN – ZZ – DK1

No discoveries made in a physiological laboratory can ever annul the primary doctrine of mentalism. The mechanism of the brain provides the condition for the manifestation of intellectual processes but does not provide the first originating impulse of these processes. The distinction between mind and its mechanism, between the mentalness of experience and the materiality of the content of that experience, needs much pondering.

Mentalism > The Sensed World > Body, brain, consciousness

#26169 – 13.21.1.63

BN – ZZZ – K1

The scientist's statement that the workings of the consciousness are associated with physiology of the brain and the nervous system does not contradict in any way the mentalist's statement that our experience of the separate existence of that brain and nervous system is itself a working of consciousness—that is, an idea.

Mentalism > The Sensed World > Body, brain, consciousness

#26174 – 13.21.1.68

A251217 – Z – K

Mind is its own reality: it does not need "matter" from which to derive itself.

Mentalism > The Sensed World > Body, brain, consciousness

#26177 – 13.21.1.71

BN – X – D

Consciousness really does exist whereas the things which it makes known are present only when they are perceived, felt, heard, or otherwise sensed by one or more of the five reporting agents. This consciousness is in itself always the same, unvarying, the one thing in us in which thoughts and bodies make their appearance and from which they also vanish.

Mentalism > The Sensed World > Body, brain, consciousness

#26184 – 13.21.1.78

BN – X – D

Psychology, like all the sciences, has to turn itself into philosophy the moment it puts to itself such a radical question as "what is mind?"

Mentalism > The Sensed World > The leap from sense to thought

#26208 – 13.21.1.102

BN – Z – K1

In their haste to assert that mind is only a function of brain flesh they use the very mind whose existence, unnoticed and overlooked, makes their assertion possible.

Mentalism > The Sensed World > The leap from sense to thought

#26223 – 13.21.1.117

BA11 – ZZZ – DK

Nowhere in the physical brain can any anatomist find that which creates thought, although he may find conditions in it which prevent thought or distort it or weaken it. This is because the principle of consciousness exists before the physical body's brain exists, while it lives, and after its death.

Mentalism > The Sensed World > The leap from sense to thought

#26225 – 13.21.1.119

BA11 – ZZ – DK

Only when an object is registered in consciousness is it really seen at all. Not even all the physical details of vision constitute the real experience of seeing it, for the awareness of it is not a physical experience at all.

Mentalism > The World As Mental > Mind, the projector

#26256 – 13.21.2.11

BN – X – K1

The mind deals directly with its objects and not through the intermediary working of ideas for the ideas are its only objects.

Mentalism > The World As Mental > Mind, the projector

#26258 – 13.21.2.13

BN – X – K1

All we can rightly say is that the idea of the world is present in our consciousness. The moment we assert that the real world corresponding to it is outside, independent, and apart from us, we assert a supposition.

Mentalism > The World As Mental > Mind, the projector

#26264 – 13.21.2.19

BN – X – D

The statement that we can know only our own sensations and that we do not experience the world directly constitutes the very beginning of the doctrine of mentalism.

Mentalism > The World As Mental > Mind, the projector

#26277 – 13.21.2.32

BN – X – K1

We are not asked to doubt the actuality of the ground beneath our feet or the music in our ears, but to understand that they have reached our consciousness because we have thought them.

Mentalism > The World As Mental > Mind, the projector

#26282 – 13.21.2.37

BA11 – ZZZ – K

The mind has the power to externalize the very thing it perceives.

Mentalism > The World As Mental > Mind, the projector

#26288 – 13.21.2.43

BN – X – K

A distinguished musician once said to me that the effective power and reality of music lay not in the sensory impressions it causes, but rather in the mental ones, not in the sounds that enter the ear but in the thoughts provoked by those sounds. He added that its essential features of time and number are mathematical ones—that is, mental ones.

Mentalism > The World As Mental > Mind, the projector

#26290 – 13.21.2.45

BA11 – ZZ – K

The difference between the chair thought and the table thought, the red thought and the green thought, the innumerable relationships among ideas, are all explicable by the fact that the mind's primary power is "image" making. This is a power which, in human beings, can be called into play deliberately and voluntarily, as we often do during wakefulness, or spontaneously and involuntarily, as we invariably do during dreams. The moment mind emerges from deep sleep and becomes active, it begins to "imagine" the wakeful world. What happens with men on a small scale happens also with the Universal Mind (God, if you like) on a cosmic scale. Its first activity is imagining.

Mentalism > The World As Mental > Mind, the image-maker

#26313 – 13.21.2.68

A251217 – Z – K

The mind exists and develops on its own latent resources and needs nothing from outside. There is nothing outside. Nevertheless, its imaginative and creative power calls into play an environment which seems to be outside and which elicits those resources.

Mentalism > The World As Mental > Mind, the image-maker

#26314 – 13.21.2.69

A251217 – Z – K

If Matter has any existence at all, it is as the externalizing power of the mind.

Mentalism > The World As Mental > Mind, the image-maker

#26319 – 13.21.2.74

A251217 – Z – K1

It is not possible to explain intellectually how sensations of the physical world are converted into ideas, how the leap-over from nervous vibrations into consciousness occurs, and how a neurosis becomes a psychosis. No one has ever explained this, nor will any scientist ever succeed in doing so. Truth alone can dispose of this poser by pointing out that sensations never really occur, but that the Self merely projects ideas of them; just as a man sees a mirage and mistakes it for real water merely by his mental projection, so people regard the world as real when they are merely transferring their own mental ideas to the world.

Mentalism > The World As Mental > Mind, the image-maker

#26323 – 13.21.2.78

BN – Z – K1

This is knowledge of the highest order, that everything around us and within us, every bit of Nature and creature, the experience of life with a physical body and of death without it—all are but forms of consciousness.

Mentalism > The World As Mental > Mind, the image-maker

#26342 – 13.21.2.97

BA11 – ZZ – DK1

In the end all our facts are mental ones, all our surroundings are known only as our own thoughts.

Mentalism > The World As Mental > Mind, the image-maker

#26345E – 13.21.2.100

BSG_4 – P – DE

It is not merely a personal speculation but a commonplace fact of science, an item of the accepted physiology of the senses, a known result of anatomical research, that the consciousness of what we see and feel is what we really experience, not the things themselves. In the end all our facts are mental ones, all our surroundings are known only as our own thoughts.

Mentalism > The World As Mental > Mind, the image-maker

#26345 – 13.21.2.100

BA11 – ZZZ – DK

It is not possible for sincere, scrupulous thinking to admit, and never possible to prove, the existence of a world outside of, and separate from, its consciousness. The faith by which we all conventionally grant such existence is mere superstition.

Mentalism > The World As Mental > Mind, the image-maker

#26349 – 13.21.2.104

BN – Z – K1

The world is never really given to us by experience nor actually known by the mind. What is given is idea, what is known is idea, to be transcended only when profound analysis transforms the Idea into the Reality.

Mentalism > The World As Mental > Mind, the image-maker

#26350 – 13.21.2.105

BN – Z – K1

It is not because a thing is existent that you think it but because you think it, even if involuntarily, that it is existent. And this thought of it is a part of your own consciousness, not outside you.

Mentalism > The World As Mental > Mind, the image-maker

#26352 – 13.21.2.107

BN – Z – K1

It is a generative idea. Here is a whole philosophy congealed into a single phrase: the world is an idea.

Mentalism > The World As Mental > Mind, the image-maker

#26354 – 13.21.2.109

BN – ZZZ – K1

The only world we know, the only one we can ever know, is the one within our mind. The first proof of this is that when it leaves the mind in deep sleep, it has no existence for us at all; the second proof is that when it re-enters the mind on awakening, the sense-perceptions which tell us of its existence re-enter it also.

Mentalism > The World As Mental > Mind, the image-maker

#26358 – 13.21.2.113

BA11 – ZZ – DK

What is Mind? It is that in us which thinks, which is aware, and which knows.

Mentalism > The World As Mental > Mind, the knower

#26373 – 13.21.2.128

BN – X – K1

There is one natural capacity which is common to every human being and to every animal being—a capacity which is the very essence of its selfhood. It is consciousness. The most important of all states of consciousness is knowledge.

Mentalism > The World As Mental > Mind, the knower

#26374 – 13.21.2.129

BN – X – D

It is not that there are different minds in man, but different qualities of one and the same mind in each.

Mentalism > The World As Mental > Mind, the knower

#26379 – 13.21.2.134

BN – Z – D

Why is it that so many people are so unaware of their own higher existence? The answer is that their faculty of awareness itself is that spiritual existence. Whatever they know, people know through the consciousness within them. That in them which knows anything is their divine element. The power of knowing—whether it be a thought that is known, a complex of thoughts such as memories, a thing such as a landscape—is a divine power for it derives from the higher self which they possess.

Mentalism > The World As Mental > Mind, the knower

#26381 – 13.21.2.136

BN – Z – DEK

The mind interprets its own experience in a particular way because, owing to its structure, it could not do so in another way. But these limitations are not eternal and absolute. When, as in dream, yoga, death, or hallucination, they are abruptly loosened, then experience is interpreted in a new and different way.

Mentalism > The World As Mental > Mind, the knower

#26382 – 13.21.2.137

BN – X – DK1

The writer George Moore was not particularly interested in metaphysics and usually left the subject alone. Yet half of a sentence he wrote upon writing itself contained the most important and significant metaphysical principle. It was: "My own mind alone is known to me."

Mentalism > The World As Mental > Mind, the knower

#26387 – 13.21.2.142

BN – X – D

The human mind can enter into relation with—that is, become aware of—that which is of the same nature as itself, that which is correlated to it, that which is also mental. It is impossible for material things to enter directly into the immaterial consciousness of man.

Mentalism > The World As Mental > Mind, the knower

#26408 – 13.21.2.163

BN – Z – D

The object seen, the eye which sees it, and the act of seeing are all part of a mentally created scene; all are idea.

Mentalism > The World As Mental > Mind, the knower

#26417 – 13.21.2.172

BA11 – ZZ – DK

The philosophical meaning of Einstein's discoveries—that the nature of the world depends on the nature of its relation to the one who sees it, that we cannot truly speak about any object independently of the observer, and that time is the hallmark of this relativity—is in perfect accordance with our own doctrine. Whatever is seen, is seen by the mind. Apart from the mind we know nothing of its existence and apart from the mind the thought of time could not arise for us. In short, every existent object is wholly relative to the subject—Mind.

Mentalism > The World As Mental > Mind, the knower

#26418 – 13.21.2.173

A231003 – Z – K

Because I am a conscious being I am aware of physical sensations and mental thoughts; but the consciousness which enables such awareness to exist itself existed before sensation and before thought, and this is as true of newborn babies as it is of dying men. This is what the materialistic anatomist dissecting the body fails to perceive. This is the forgotten self of the fabled ten persons crossing a river in Indian mythology, and this is the great secret which mentalism unveils for us.

Mentalism > The World As Mental > Mind, the knower

#26420 – 13.21.2.175

BN – Z – DEK

The object which the senses directly establish contact with is regarded as one thing; the mental impression they have when thinking of that object is regarded as another and totally different thing. This is a very simple and apparently very obvious view of the matter. To the ordinary mind, by which I mean the metaphysically unreflective mind, the statement is unarguable and its implied division of Nature into mental and material, uncontestable. But if you analyse the way you perceive objects you will find that both the perceiver and the perceived are inseparable in the act of perception. You cannot show a duality of idea and thing but only a unity of them.

Mentalism > The World As Mental > Mind, the knower

#26422 – 13.21.2.177

BN – Z – DEK1

He is quite right in questioning the usefulness of getting involved in an endless study of the intricate classifications of his surroundings if they are illusory. From the standpoint of the Ultimate Path such a study is a waste of time and therefore is not indulged in. The aim of this path is to know the Ultimate Reality—knowing which, all its illusory reflections are naturally understood. However, he must be careful in the use of the word "illusory." The world is not illusory but the apprehension of it through the senses is. Each object regarded separately as an independent entity is illusory but regarded as what it is in its formless essence it is real. To put this in plainer language: everything seen is merely an idea in the mind. Ideas come and go and in this sense only are unreal; but the stuff out of which they are formed—that is, Mind—does not come and go and constitutes the ultimate basis of all ideas and therefore of their ultimate reality. He seeks to understand what this Mind is.

Mentalism > The Individual and World Mind > The Individual and World Mind

#26425E – 13.21.3.3

UR_2.3 – ZEL1/2 – K

He may now begin to realize that all the theosophical teachings about the seven principles of man, the five tattvas (cosmic forces), and prakriti (root matter) are teachings given to beginners who are unable to grasp the great truth that all these are merely ideas and that Mind alone is what he should seek to know. H.P. Blavatsky gave these teachings because she knew that the nineteenth-century West was not metaphysically minded but rather scientifically inclined and science in those days was horribly materialistic. What else could she do but give out these lower grade teachings? She herself writes in one of her books that she has given only three or four turns of the key in the lock of universal mystery. The time has come in the mid-twentieth century to give the remaining turns which will make known the higher philosophical truth for which mankind is now better prepared.

Mentalism > The Individual and World Mind > The Individual and World Mind

#26425E – 13.21.3.3

UR_2.3 – ZEL2/2 – K

To say that the world does not exist helps neither the cause of truth nor the seeker after truth. To admit that it does exist but to qualify the admission by adding "but not materially, only mentally" is to describe experience accurately. The dream exists in the dreaming mind as a series of thoughts, even though its world is not physical.

Mentalism > The Individual and World Mind > The Individual and World Mind

#26426 – 13.21.3.4

A231220 – ZZ – DK

The nature of world experience, such as moving, talking, or reading, must eventually be understood as mental or mind-made; but your 'experience' of its activity or forms does not change, 'only' your understanding of it: that is, that it is basically 'mental' activity and these are 'mental' forms. For whatever they do and however they behave or seem to behave, whatever you can know of them can be grasped only with the mind. They obviously have their own mental existence and activity even when you are not present to observe it. We must keep our common sense even when learning to reason philosophically.

Mentalism > The Individual and World Mind > The Individual and World Mind

#26428 – 13.21.3.6

A251217 – Z – K

But all this does not mean that philosophy asks us to mistrust the witness of our senses. That is correct enough for all ordinary, practical uses. But it does ask us to search more deeply into the significance of all sense-experience.

Mentalism > The Individual and World Mind > The Individual and World Mind

#26429 – 13.21.3.7

BN – Z – K1

Mentalism does not reduce our experience of the world to a shadow. It lets us keep the reality we feel but points to an ultimate reality from which that feeling derives.

Mentalism > The Individual and World Mind > The Individual and World Mind

#26437 – 13.21.3.15

BA11 – ZZZ – K

That life is a kind of dream is the hint given by religion, the experience felt in meditation, the knowledge correctly understood by philosophy.

Mentalism > The Individual and World Mind > The dream analogy

#26444 – 13.21.3.22

BN – X – D

The world is neither an illusion nor a dream but is analogically 'like' both. It is true that the mystics or yogis do experience it as such. This is a step forward but not liberation itself. When they pass upward to the higher or philosophic stage they will discover that all is Mind, whether the latter be creatively active or latently passive; that the world is, in its essential stuff, this Mind although its particular forms are transient and mortal; and that therefore there is no real difference between earthly experience and divine experience. Those who are wedded to forms, that is, appearances, set up such a difference and posit spirit and matter, nirvana and samsara, Brahman and Maya, and so forth, as antithetic opposites, but those who have developed insight perceive the essential stuff of everything even while they perceive its forms; hence they see all as One. It is as if a dreamer were to know that he was dreaming and thus understand that all the dream scenes and figures were nothing but one and the same stuff—his mind—while not losing his dream experience.

Mentalism > The Individual and World Mind > The dream analogy

#26446 – 13.21.3.24

A251217 – Z – DEK

Just as it is the dreamer himself who unknowingly makes the figures and creates the things which appear to him, so the waking man experiences only his own thoughts of the world. When those thoughts are not there, he is not there. And his world is not there: he and his experiences are contents of the mind. It is not, as commonly fancied, that he has a mind but that he—the ego-thought—is in the mind and never apart from it. The world comes before the waking dreamer just as it comes before the sleeping dreamer, only it comes more coherently and consistently and logically. The mystery of the universe is in the end the mystery of mind. The reasonable question to which scientists should address themselves, and will in the end have to, is "What is Mind?" To call it brain, flesh, is a misleading answer.

Mentalism > The Individual and World Mind > The dream analogy

#26451 – 13.21.3.29

BN – Z – DEMK

Like a dreamer, we see a world around us and act in it but are mesmerized into accepting the reality of our experience so long as the dream itself persists. And, like a dreamer, we remain basically unaffected by all this illusory experience, for we are still the Overself, not the mesmerized ego.

Mentalism > The Individual and World Mind > The dream analogy

#26462 – 13.21.3.40

BN – Z – D

There is only one mind and all such names as cosmic mind, over-mind, and so forth are merely imperfect and partial concepts of that ultimate single mind which philosophy puts forth in order to help students advance to a higher stage. These concepts are not false, however. They represent aspects of the same ultimate mind as seen from different standpoints. As these standpoints are not the highest they do not yield the final truth. It will be well therefore for him to accustom himself to the highest standpoint and to remember always that there is but one mind, one reality, one principle, one substance, one being only. All things are forms or shapes which it appears to take temporarily. The key to the understanding of these admittedly difficult points is to think of the universe seen during dream and then to remember that that universe itself, its seas and continents, its peoples and animals, its happenings in time, its distances in space, do not exist apart from the mind of the dreaming person.

Mentalism > The Individual and World Mind > The dream analogy

#26466E – 13.21.3.44

BA11 – ZEL1/2 – DEK

There is only one mind and all such names as cosmic mind, over-mind, and so forth are merely imperfect and partial concepts of that ultimate single mind. All things are forms or shapes which it appears to take temporarily; that even if millions of people exist within that universe they are nothing else than ideas passing through the mind of the dreamer; and that their ultimate stuff or reality is mind although to the dreamer they appear real, as do also water, fire, gas, and even the ninety-odd chemical elements. Now he must try to regard the waking universe in the same way, with this difference: that because the ego is one of the dreamed-of figures in the waking dreams it must be eliminated if one is to break through the dream and ascertain that it is a dream in the universal mind.

Mentalism > The Individual and World Mind > The dream analogy

#26466E – 13.21.3.44

BA11 – ZEL2/2 – DEK

When we realize how the mind weaves a whole host of creatures during sleep out of its own self, we comprehend a little of the meaning of the statement that the entire world is but a mental creation.

Mentalism > The Individual and World Mind > The dream analogy

#26467 – 13.21.3.45

BN – ZZ – DK

The thought of the external world comes from the Universal Mind (God) originally, while thoughts which pertain to personal characteristics come out of the subconscious tendencies developed in previous incarnations. In both cases the power which initiates thoughts is outside the conscious self but for that very reason is irresistible. The work of the Spiritual Quest is to enter into co-operative activity with God, on the one hand, and to conquer those subconscious tendencies, on the other.

Mentalism > The Individual and World Mind > Individual mind and the world image

#26478 – 13.21.3.56

A251217 – Z – K

All these little minds which people the Universe and are active in Nature's kingdoms could not have come into being unless there were a universal originating Mind. They point to its existence, silently speak of their divine Source. The materialistic notion that individual centres of intelligent life could have been produced by non-intelligent "matter" is an utter absurdity.

Mentalism > The Individual and World Mind > Individual mind and the world image

#26484 – 13.21.3.62

BSG_5 – P – D

A popular misconception of mentalism must be cleared. When we say that the world does not exist 'for man' apart from his own mind, this is not to say that man is the sole world-creator. If that were so he could easily play the magician and reshape a hampering environment in a day. No!—what mentalism really teaches is that man's mind perceives, by participating in it, the world-image which the World-Mind creates and holds. Man alone is not responsible for this image, which could not possibly exist if it did not exist also in the World-Mind's consciousness.

Mentalism > The Individual and World Mind > Individual mind and the world image

#26488 – 13.21.3.66

BN – ZZ – K1

The precise shape which the idea will take when it reaches consciousness will depend on the general tendencies of the person.

Mentalism > The Individual and World Mind > Individual mind and the world image

#26489 – 13.21.3.67

BN – Z – K1

Since the world is never found to be apart from our own minds, we are forced to relate it to them. And since it is equally obvious that the surface part of them does not deliberately bring it into existence we are further forced to deduce, first, that the deeper and unconscious part must do so and, second, that this second part must be cosmic in nature and hold all other individual minds rooted in its depths. This deduction, arrived at by reason, is confirmed by experience but not by ordinary experience. It is confirmed by sinking a shaft down through the mind in mystical meditation and arriving at our secondary cosmic self.

Mentalism > The Individual and World Mind > Individual mind and the world image

#26490 – 13.21.3.68

BN – Z – K1

The World-Mind is not a magnified man and the world-image is not "pushed" into our consciousness by its personal and persistent effort. The mere presence of this image in it is sufficient to produce a reflected image in all other minds although they will absorb only so much as their particular plane of space-time perception can absorb.

Mentalism > The Individual and World Mind > Individual mind and the world image

#26491 – 13.21.3.69

BN – X – K1

The individual mind presents the world-image to itself through and in its own consciousness. If this were all the truth then it would be quite proper to call the experience a private one. But because the individual mind is rooted in and inseparable from the universal mind, it is only a part of the truth. Man's world-thought is held within and enclosed by God's thought.

Mentalism > The Individual and World Mind > Individual mind and the world image

#26492 – 13.21.3.70

BN – Z – DK1

Consciousness, with all its wonderful attributes and capacities, is a faculty shared with the World-Mind, however shrunken it may be in man.

Mentalism > The Individual and World Mind > Individual mind and the world image

#26500 – 13.21.3.78

BN – X – D

When the mind is not active one is unaware of its existence—for instance, when attention is wandering or in deep sleep. A study of physiology shows that eye, nerve, and brain must combine to tell a person that he sees something and even then he does not see it until the mind pays attention to it. The truth is that the mind creates its own objects—but not the individual, finite mind; only the Mind which is back of it and which is infinite and common to all individuals. This is difficult to understand, so to make it easier one has to think of dream. In that state he can see cities, men, women, and children, mountains and flowers, hear voices, feel pain, and so forth. What is more, everything is so real then that at the time it is the waking state to him, not dream. Now who created all these scenes and things? Not his finite mind, for he is not conscious of having done so. Hence there is a larger mind within him which has this power of manufacturing scenes, objects, and events so vividly that he takes them to be real. This reality is a myth or, as the Indians call it, Maya.

Mentalism > The Individual and World Mind > Individual mind and the world image

#26510E – 13.21.3.88

BN – ZEL1/4 – DEK

Mrs. Eddy came extremely close to grasping this point [that there is a larger Mind which is back of the individual mind] and indeed of all the Western cults Christian Science stands closest to the ultimate teaching. Unfortunately it has mixed much error with truth and is ignorant of other vital teachings which are needed to complete the circle of knowledge. This impurity is due to the ego—the selfish, grasping personality which Mrs. Eddy possessed and which prevented her full initiation. The ego must be utterly yielded if one wants truth.

Mentalism > The Individual and World Mind > Individual mind and the world image

#26510E – 13.21.3.88

BN – ZEL2/4 – DEK

All this [the subject of the power of the Mind] implies that matter is also a myth, unreal. Still more it implies that the ego is a myth, illusory. Here, then, is the first practice of the ultimate path: think constantly of that Mind which is producing the ego, all the other egos around, and all the world, in fact. Keep this up until it becomes habitual. The consequence is that one tends in time to regard his own ego with complete detachment, as though he were regarding somebody else. Furthermore, it forces him to take the standpoint of the 'all', and to see unity as fundamental being.

Mentalism > The Individual and World Mind > Individual mind and the world image

#26510E – 13.21.3.88

BN – ZEL3/4 – DEK

Those who have shown the worst features of hate, selfishness brutality, and separateness, are as much productions of this infinite Mind as others—only they have concentrated their full attention on the ego, and they have clouded reason by passion, while submitting to the stronger mental forces which propaganda has hypnotically let loose upon them.

Mentalism > The Individual and World Mind > Individual mind and the world image

#26510E – 13.21.3.88

BN – ZEL4/4 – DEK

So long as men fail to understand that they are able to know they are experiencing the world only because there is an infinite Consciousness which is behind and which makes possible their own little consciousnesses, so long will they spurn truth and sneer at truth-revealers.

Mentalism > The Individual and World Mind > Individual mind and the world image

#26515E – 13.21.3.93

BN – ZZZ – K

If he wants to ferret out what is real in existence he must put himself to some trouble. He must persevere, read and re-read these pages until the meaning of it all dawns suddenly upon him, as it will if he does. The reflective study of these high-grade writings forces the mental growth of the student. The absorption of their spirit elevates him for a while to the spiritual plane of the author.

Mentalism > The Challenge of Mentalism > The Challenge of Mentalism

#26525EM – 13.21.4.7

BA12 – ZZZ – DXK

We do not intend to deal here with some supernatural "spirit" which does not explain the world but only mystifies us, which is beyond all ordinary experience and whose existence cannot be irrefutably proved. We do not need to go beyond Mind—which explains the world as a form of consciousness, which is everyone's familiar experience at every moment of the day or night, and whose existence is unquestionably self-evident, for it makes us aware of every other kind of existence.

Mentalism > The Challenge of Mentalism > The Challenge of Mentalism

#26527 – 13.21.4.9

BN – Z – K1

It is because men are deceived by their senses into accepting materialism that they are deceived by their ego into committing sin. Mentalism is not only an intellectual doctrine but also an ethical one.

Mentalism > The Challenge of Mentalism > The Challenge of Mentalism

#26528 – 13.21.4.10

BN – Z – K1

To be initiated into "The Mysteries" is to be introduced to the revelation of Mentalism, to what it means and to what startling consequences it leads; it is to discover that life, after all, no matter how thrilling, is like a dream passing in the night. But even the uninitiated are not allowed to stay in perpetual ignorance. For the tremendous event of leaving the body at death is attended by the enforced learning of this lesson, however much a man clings to his memories of this world.

Mentalism > The Challenge of Mentalism > The Challenge of Mentalism

#26542 – 13.21.4.24

BN – X – D

When we ask what is the purpose of the individual's existence, we shall find that the physical world can give us neither a complete nor a satisfying answer.

Mentalism > The Challenge of Mentalism > The Challenge of Mentalism

#26551 – 13.21.4.33

UR_4map – ZZZ – DK

From this single idea of mentalism, several others take their birth.

Mentalism > The Challenge of Mentalism > The Challenge of Mentalism

#26554 – 13.21.4.36

BN – Z – K

Mentalism, the teaching that this is a mental universe, is too hard to believe for the ordinary man yet too hard to disbelieve for the illumined man. This is because to the first it is only a theory, but to the second it is a personal experience. The ordinary man's consciousness is kept captive by his senses, each of which reports a world of matter outside him. The illumined man's consciousness is free to be itself, to report its own reality and to reveal the senses and their world to be mere ideation.

Mentalism > The Challenge of Mentalism > The effort required

#26563 – 13.21.4.45

BA11 – ZZ – DEK1

The spirit of true Science must be ours, too. We can accept nothing as true which is dubious as undemonstrable. The modern world, and especially the Western world, can sympathize with a teaching only if it will stand the double test of reason and experience.

Mentalism > The Challenge of Mentalism > The effort required

#26564 – 13.21.4.46

BN – Z – K1

Only a highly educated mind can appreciate 'intellectually' the truth which lies in mentalism, as only a highly intuitive one can 'feel' its truth.

Mentalism > The Challenge of Mentalism > The effort required

#26565 – 13.21.4.47

BN – Z – K1

Mentalism is not to the taste of most people. It does violence to their common sense. It is too little known, hence has few followers. There are two kinds of truth: one is the truth of appearances, and the other is hidden deep down. The first is easy to understand; the other requires much work on one's own mind to get it sharp enough to recognize what is so elusive.

Mentalism > The Challenge of Mentalism > The effort required

#26597 – 13.21.4.79

BA11 – ZZ – K

It is not easy to perceive the truth of mentalism: if it were, religion would not have been needed nor mysticism practised. Thought and feeling must struggle with themselves, and suffer, before illusion is shifted out of the way.

Mentalism > The Challenge of Mentalism > The effort required

#26600 – 13.21.4.82

A251217 – ZZ – K

Mentalism leads neither to solipsism (one's own existence is the only existence) nor to Hindu Advaita's denial of the World's existence. The first is a misreading and consequent misunderstanding of it caused by a failing to see that the individual ego is itself a projection of Mind. The second fails to see that as an experience in the field of awareness of that ego, as a given and fundamental idea in that consciousness, it is a coexistent and not to be denied without impairing sanity.

Mentalism > The Challenge of Mentalism > The effort required

#26630 – 13.21.4.112

BA11 – Z – K

The deceptions bred by an unreflective attitude towards the reports of sense and an unintuitive one towards the feeling of personality, enter so deeply into his mental principle because of their growing prevalence during a large number of births that they become almost an integral part of it. The melancholy consequences of this disposition are an inability to believe in mentalism and an incapacity to progress in mysticism.

Mentalism > The Challenge of Mentalism > Accepting the Truth

#26644 – 13.21.4.126

BN – X – K1

Half of our puzzling problems follow in the train of our naïve but erroneous belief that matter is itself an ultimate reality.

Mentalism > The Challenge of Mentalism > Accepting the Truth

#26669 – 13.21.4.151

UR_2.2 – ZZ – K

The time will come, and cannot be avoided, when both the new and the accumulated facts will force scientists to regard Mind as the real thing they have to deal with, and matter as a group of states of mind. But by that time they will be something more than mere scientists alone; they will be somewhat on the way to becoming philosophical scientists.

Mentalism > The Challenge of Mentalism > The position of modern science

#26682 – 13.21.4.164

BA11 – ZZ – DK

When a mystical seer proclaimed on the basis of his own insight that the reality of the universe was not matter but mind, educated people could afford to disregard his proclamations. But when leading scientists themselves proclaimed it on the basis of verifiable facts and rational reflections, they could not help giving their confidence to it. Consequently, those who have seriously absorbed the latest knowledge have been falling away from intellectual materialism. It is indeed only the uneducated, the half-educated, the pseudo-educated, and the word-educated who today believe in this miserable doctrine.

Mentalism > The Challenge of Mentalism > The position of modern science

#26685 – 13.21.4.167

BN – ZZ – K1

Shankara's Snake-Rope illusion is out of date. Science provides better illustration based on facts of continuous experience instead of exceptional or occasional ones. Indians ignore the fact that a thousand years have travelled on and away since Shankara's time. Human intelligence has probed and discovered much. Modern evidence for mentalism is more solid today. The tremendous advance of knowledge since his time has shown that the substance of which this universe is made turns out to be no substance at all.

Mentalism > The Challenge of Mentalism > The position of modern science

#26687 – 13.21.4.169

BN – ZZ – K1

Science changes, its doctrines change, and its earlier approximations are replaced from time to time by more accurate points. We cannot hope to find an ultimate truth nowadays, when science itself is so rapidly on the march. There remains, however, one unfailing all-embracing fact which will forever remain true and which cannot possibly change. Indeed, every advance in experiment and theory made by enterprising scientists will only help to verify this grand discovery. What is it? It is that the whole world which every department of science is busily engaged in examining is nothing but an idea in the human mind. Physics, chemistry, geology, astronomy, biology, and all the other sciences without a single exception are concerned solely with what is ultimately a thought or series of thoughts passing through human consciousness. Here, therefore, we possess a universal law which embraces the entire field in which science is operating. This is an ultimate truth which will stand immortal, when every other hypothesis formulated by science has perished through advancing knowledge.

Mentalism > The Challenge of Mentalism > The position of modern science

#26688E – 13.21.4.170

BN – ZEL1/1 – K1

In reducing matter to a mere formula of mathematics, Einstein destroyed materialism through the appeal to intellect. Thus he really brought a spiritual message, even though it was couched in the modern idiom of his time—as another Jew, Jesus, brought a message that destroyed materialism through the appeal to faith nearly two thousand years ago.

Mentalism > The Challenge of Mentalism > The position of modern science

#26692 – 13.21.4.174

A231003 – Z – K

The tremendous implications of mentalism for science and metaphysics, its enormous significance for mysticism and religion will quietly come into prominence before this [20th] century closes.

Mentalism > The Challenge of Mentalism > The position of modern science

#26695 – 13.21.4.177

BN – X – K

The European thinkers who worked out the mentalistic basis of life with intellectual thoroughness—although not always with correctness—were German; Kant, Schopenhauer, Hartmann, Hegel, Schiller, and Fichte saw and taught that Mind was the primal reality and that the world was an idea in Mind.

Mentalism > The Challenge of Mentalism > Mentalism and related doctrines

#26755 – 13.21.4.237

UR_3.2 – ZZ – K

Many complained about my presentation of mentalism as being repetitious. Yet without such detailed reasoning and elaborate argument it would have been harder for the Western reader to understand, much more to accept, so unfamiliar a teaching.

Mentalism > The Challenge of Mentalism > Mentalism and related doctrines

#26792 – 13.21.4.274

UR_2.9.1 – ZZ – K

The doctrine will be his when feeling confirms what reason inculcates, when the figure and history of this world seem no more than a vivid thought in his mind.

Mentalism > The Key To the Spiritual World > The living practice

#26803 – 13.21.5.5

A251217 – Z – K

Through the disappearance of the world during mystical meditation he finds out its non-materiality. This is the Glimpse. But with his return to the world his glimpse changes into a memory only. How to establish it permanently, this harmony between inner vision and outer world, is discoverable only when living and active in the world yet thoroughly understanding the mentalistic nature of the world.

Mentalism > The Key To the Spiritual World > The living practice

#26810 – 13.21.5.12

A251217 – Z – K

Such development comes only after many births. And since this truth has to be lived, it must be in practice and not only in theory. Before a man comes to this truth, this mentalism, much time is needed to enable his mind to develop and receive it.

Mentalism > The Key To the Spiritual World > The living practice

#26811 – 13.21.5.13

A251217 – Z – K

The practical message of mentalism is not only to warn us of the creative value of our thought but also to bid us seek out the source of thought. For there lies our real home, and there we must learn to dwell habitually.

Mentalism > The Key To the Spiritual World > The living practice

#26812 – 13.21.5.14

BSG_4 – Z – DK1

The mental character of the world of our experience, once accepted, changes our religious, metaphysical, scientific, moral, and practical attitudes. Much in it does not need much thought for us to realize how grave is the importance of this fact, how momentous the results to which it leads!

Mentalism > The Key To the Spiritual World > The living practice

#26813 – 13.21.5.15

BN – ZZ – K1

Inwardly and daily he returns to this idea that all is Idea, that the familiar world—its places and people, its city life seething with activity, its vaunted civilization and polished culture—has no other existence than in his consciousness and takes its reality from that. So to become conscious of Consciousness detached from its productions—thoughts—is his task, draws his strength and devotion.

Mentalism > The Key To the Spiritual World > The living practice

#26814 – 13.21.5.16

BA11 – Z – DEK

The way out is constantly to remember to think and to affirm that the world and all one sees and experiences in it has no other substance than Mind and gets its brief appearance of reality from Mind. When this is thoroughly understood and applied, its truth will one day stay permanently with him.

Mentalism > The Key To the Spiritual World > The living practice

#26816 – 13.21.5.18

BN – Z – DK1

Even though he knows it is like a dream, he must live, work and act, love, strive and suffer as if the dream were true.

Mentalism > The Key To the Spiritual World > The living practice

#26817 – 13.21.5.19

A231220 – ZZZ – DK

The effect of a full and proper absorption of these ideas is to strengthen a man and invigorate his purpose, to make him feel that what is behind the universe is behind him too.

Mentalism > The Key To the Spiritual World > The living practice

#26819 – 13.21.5.21

UR_5 – ZZZ – DK

Our pleasures and pains are not different when we realize them to be mentalistic, but our attitude toward them is different.

Mentalism > The Key To the Spiritual World > The living practice

#26823 – 13.21.5.25

BN – Z – K

The constant practice of identifying himself with the mind rather than with the body-idea which inheres in it, leads in time to a certain freeing of himself from himself.

Mentalism > The Key To the Spiritual World > The living practice

#26824 – 13.21.5.26

ME_01 – P – K

What is the hidden meaning of Saint Paul's words which are so often quoted but so little understood: "For to be carnally minded is death, but to be spiritually minded is life and peace"? Do they refer only to sexual morality? Do they refer to pious feelings? For those who are children in the quest of truth, the answer is obviously in the affirmative. But for the mentally mature and philosophically enlightened, there is a totally different meaning in this statement. To be carnally minded means to apprehend the flesh, that is, matter, as reality. To be spiritually minded means to take nothing else than the egoless Mind as reality. Whoever does this and seeks beyond both matter and ego, obtains the result which Paul indicates—that is, true life and unbroken peace.

Mentalism > The Key To the Spiritual World > The living practice

#26834 – 13.21.5.36

BN – X – DEK

He now sees what he did not see earlier, that the outer happenings of his life are often connected with the inner trends of his thought and that a change in the latter will often produce a change in the former.

Mentalism > The Key To the Spiritual World > The living practice

#26839 – 13.21.5.41

BN – X – D

Power, whether it be worldly or spiritual, always brings responsibility with it.

Mentalism > The Key To the Spiritual World > The powerful knowledge

#26842 – 13.21.5.44

BN – X – D

Our existence as human beings is conditioned, and at times even dominated, by circumstances. Often we should like to remold these, but to do so requires control, and control indicates the need for power, and power depends upon knowledge. This is the justification of philosophy. When we understand its doctrines aright, that mind constructs its experience, its environment, its world, we understand the implication that an amendment in our environment can come only through amendment in our thinking. Thought is creative, and we are continually building both ourselves and our environment by the characteristics and qualities of our thoughts.

Mentalism > The Key To the Spiritual World > The powerful knowledge

#26843 – 13.21.5.45

BN – X – DEK

It was not Jesus' thorn-crowned corpse that was resurrected but the man himself, not his transient body but his immortal consciousness. For mentalism teaches us that a mental form can be seen by others so vividly, so objectively, that it can easily be taken—or mistaken—for a physical one.

Mentalism > The Key To the Spiritual World > The powerful knowledge

#26848 – 13.21.5.50

B_12 – Z – K

Whoever can understand that substance is inseparable from life and that life is inseparable from mind, whoever can intellectually perceive that the whole universe itself is nothing less than Mind in its different phases, has found the theoretical basis for an appreciation of the wonderful possibilites which dwell behind human experience. The mind's powers can indeed be extended far beyond their present puny evolutionary range. He who reflects constantly upon the true and immaterial nature of Mind and upon its magically creative powers tends to develop these powers. When he becomes capable of successful and ego-free concentration, these powers of mind and will come to him spontaneously. It is natural that when his will becomes self-abnegated, his emotion purified, his thought concentrated, and his knowledge perfected higher mental or so-called occult powers arise of their own accord. It is equally natural that he should remain silent about them, even if only because they do not really belong to the named personality which others see. They belong to the Overself.

Mentalism > The Key To the Spiritual World > The powerful knowledge

#26851 – 13.21.5.53

ME_01 – Z – K1

Telepathy is possible not because thought can travel in space but because space is actually in thought.

Mentalism > The Key To the Spiritual World > The powerful knowledge

#26852 – 13.21.5.54

BN – ZZ – K1