My experience of a thing is received from the body's senses. Sight: the eyes tell me its shape and colour. Touch: the skin tells me its hardness or softness, solidity or liquidity. Smell and taste may give more information. These perceptions make up the thing for me. But they would be non-existent if they failed to reach consciousness as thoughts. It exists because my consciousness exists. If this consciousness did not exist by itself alone before the thought my experience would be impossible. It is primary. It will continue to exist even between two thoughts, and, even more important, between two sensorial thoughts--sight and touch--connected with the physical body. But the brain is part of the body. So mind is not the same thing but exists as an independent entity, however close their working connection may be. This mind has no shape or colour, whereas the brain has. It being formless, no one can see or take hold of it, yet it is there. Now drop the term mind, the term consciousness, and let the term spirit take their place. Here psychological analysis of experience seems to cross the border into religion. For mind is a real thing, not a no-thing. It exists in its own right. More, all experience is an uninterrupted spiritual experience, whatever man has done to degrade it.
Every man knows that he is aware of himself, others, the world. But that awareness exists also in an unlimited uninterrupted way he does not know. Yet to the extent that he has this limited kind of consciousness he derives from It, shares the spirit, is part of it.
-- Notebooks Category 21: Mentalism > Chapter 2 : The World As Mental > # 98
