The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible. ―Oscar Wilde

 

A Roman brick from Cherchell, Algeria with a 2000-year-old imprint of a human hand.

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The brain is not the mind, the mind inhabits the brain. Like a ghost in a machine, some say. Mind is the comforting mirage of the physical brain. An experience, not an entity. 

Another way to think of mind may be as St. Augustine thought of God, as an emanation that is not located in one place, or one form, but exists throughout the universe. An essence, not just a substance. 

And, of course, the mind is not located only in the brain. The mind reflects what the body senses and feels, it is influenced by a caravan of hormones and enzymes.


—Diane Ackerman
An Alchemy of Mind: The Marvel and Mystery of the Brain

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What is the ultimate truth about ourselves? 

Various answers suggest themselves. We are a bit of stellar matter gone wrong. We are physical machinery —puppets that strut and talk and laugh and die as the hand of time pulls the strings beneath. 

But there is one elementary inescapable answer. 

We are that which asks the question.


—Sir Arthur Eddington

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the world is an idea

 

Lorenzo Ranieri Tenti

Rising from the dust | Tenerife, Canary Islands

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It is in the brain that everything takes place.

It is in the brain that the poppy is red, that the apple is odorous, 

that the skylark sings.

—Oscar Wilde

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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.

The Theosophic doctrine that the physical world is an externalization of an astral plane or even the higher Platonic doctrine that it crystallizes a world of divine ideation is given to beginners as a help to give them a crude grasp, a first step towards the theory that the world is an idea, until they are mentally developed. 

When their mind is mature they are then told to discard the astral plane theory and told the pure truth that all existence is idea.


—Paul Brunton
Notebooks Category 21: Mentalism
Chapter 3: The Individual and World Mind

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The cosmos is a vast living body, of which we are still parts. The sun is a great heart whose tremors run through our smallest veins. The moon is a great nerve center from which we quiver forever. Who knows the power that Saturn has over us, or Venus? But it is a vital power, rippling exquisitely through us all the time.

Oh what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was made a personal, merely personal feeling, taken away from the rising and setting of the sun, and cut off from the magic connection of the solstice and equinox. 

This is what is the matter with us. We are bleeding at the roots, because we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars, and love is a grinning mockery, because, poor blossom, we plucked it from its stem on the tree of Life and expected it to keep on blooming in our civilized vase on the table.


—D. H. Lawrence

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