Let us not be bewitched by Oriental futility and deny what is palpably factual. It does not benefit truth, reason, or experience to deny the world's existence. It does not help the spiritual life to do so. It is a waste of time and an unnecessary cause of bewilderment or confusion to Western students, setting vain problems for them which they need never have had. This does not mean that they should desert the idea of nonduality and fall back into dualism. It means only that they should not repeat, like parrots, what others teach them without having first got a satisfactory understanding of the teaching and tested its truth or falsity. To say that the world does not exist is either a clumsy semantic error or one of those incomplete truths which, unless fitted to its other half, misleads others and leads him into a labyrinthine maze from which he either never gets out or takes years in the process. By deep enough meditation he may get into a half trance which tricks consciousness, so that he wriggles out of his five senses and loses his awareness of what they normally tell him. The world is gone. But is it really lost? For after his meditation he must come back to his senses when the world reappears like a faithful dog. Instead of rejecting its claim to exist, the honest thing is to accept it and make a proper appraisal of it. For the world is a phenomenon: as an appearance it certainly does exist. But it appears in the mind, not in matter. In the decade after the First World War great scientific research was made. Einstein's formulations on relativity are justly praised. Heisenberg's work on the structure of the atom with its ions, electrons, and quantums brought him the Nobel Prize. The most advanced workers in nuclear physics know the mentalist position if they have the willingness to reflect deeply enough upon their observed facts and the mathematical capacity to support this reflection. Few possess both. Most refuse to go so far because they dare not abandon the last remnants of materialism which got so intertwined with science during the past two hundred years that getting rid of them now actually seems unscientific: Einstein deliberately refused even though he had the capacity. Heisenberg accepted but would not publish his acceptance of the truth until now. I believe he will do so before passing away. Professor Carl von Weizsäcker, who worked in both fields--atomic physics and academic philosophy--also perceives the truth about reality but must leave the immense labour of presenting publicly the mathematical formulas involved, to a younger man. The point of all this is that we do not have to swallow the incredible doctrine of the world's non-existence in order to deny its materiality. Science properly demands an explanation of the world. If it pushes this demand to the fullest possible extent, it comes to the same truth as philosophy, even though it be by a different way. The world is what it is, an appearance in the little mind; but behind both is Mind, the great unchangeable reality which transcends all human thought and touch and which alone is, was, and will be.
-- Notebooks Category 21: Mentalism > Chapter 4 : The Challenge of Mentalism > # 171
