We hear from the East that the world is unreal and that the ego is unreal, or that the world does not exist and that the ego does not exist. It is here that semantics as developed by Western minds may perhaps be of some service in clarifying confused thinking leading to confused statements. The body is a part of the world. Do we or do we not dwell in a body? If we do not then we should stop feeding it and stop taking it to the physician when it gets sick. Yet even those people who make such extraordinary statements do continue to eat, to fall sick, and to visit a doctor. Surely that disposes immediately of the question whether or not the body exists. In the same way and by the same pattern of reasoning we can discover that the world also exists. What then has led these Indian teachers to proclaim otherwise? Here we begin to intrude upon the field of mentalism and as a necessary part of the key to mentalism we must turn to the dream state. If we dream of a world around us and of a body in which we live in this dream world and of other bodies of other persons moving in it, the Indians say that these dream persons and this dream world is seen to be non-existent when we wake up and hence they deny its reality. But the experience did happen, so let us scrutinize it. There was no such thing as this world, true, but something was there; what was there? Thoughts. All this world and all these persons about whom we dream pass through consciousness as thoughts, so the thoughts were there. Whether we consider dream or hallucination, the pictures are there in the person's mind; they exist there, but they exist there only as mental creations. But when we say they are merely mental creations, we are bringing in an attempt to judge them, to judge their nature, what they really are. The statement that they are unreal is therefore a judgement and is acceptable only on the basis of a particular standpoint, the standpoint of the observer who is outside the dream, outside the hallucination. It is not acceptable on the basis of the person who is having the experience at that moment. Thus we see that the existence of the ego, the body, and the world need not be denied; it is there, it is part of our experience, but what we have to do is to examine it more closely and attempt a judgement of its nature. And this judgement does not alter the fact that they are being experienced. This is a fact of our own, of everyone's experience, including the highest sage, only the sage and the common man each has his own judgement from his point of view, from his knowledge. In all these topics we can see how much easier it is to pick our way if we adopt the attitude which was proclaimed in The Hidden Teaching Beyond Yoga that there is a double viewpoint and a double standard in this teaching in order that we may be clear about our experiences and about our ideas and not get them mixed up. These two standpoints, the immediate and the ultimate, the common and the philosophic, are absolutely necessary in all talk and study about such metaphysical topics. Otherwise we get lost in mere verbiage, words, words, words.
-- Notebooks Category 19: The Reign of Relativity > Chapter 2 : The Double Standpoint > # 58
