Plato, on Mentalism: "What a superior being would have as subjective thought, the inferior perceives as objective things."    (#26730)

We must expect that Roman Catholic metaphysics, following Saint Thomas Aquinas and, through him, Aristotle, accepting the material world's reality, will vigorously oppose mentalism.    (#26752)

Dr. Samuel Johnson's erudition was admirably shown in the original dictionary he compiled, as was his talent for expressing common sense in pithy statements. But his metaphysical naïveté was equally shown when he stamped a foot on the ground in refutation of Berkeley's discovery. The foot's touch gave Johnson a physical sensation. He stopped there, not grasping that the sensation had given him an idea--solidity--and that without this idea his foot would not have felt the ground. He took it for granted that his experience testified to material reality. Science knows now that it was testimony to his sensations only, and the rest was theory and assumption: Berkeley took it as testimony to Idea-lism. But that is only a halfway house to adequate explanation, to Mentalism.    (#26762)

That the last play written by Shakespeare was The Tempest is a historic fact which helps to explain why it holds the most mysterious truth--Mentalism.    (#26767)

Denis Diderot, although himself a staunch materialist, had to confess that Idealism "is the most difficult to oppose" [because] "we never get outside ourselves." There was an English lawyer who offered a large financial prize to anyone who could successfully refute the tenets of Idealism. But the prize was never won, because no one was able to provide a satisfactory refutation. Mentalism includes most of Idealism but goes farther and explains more.    (#26770)

It would be incorrect to state that the drift of science is away from Berkeley. It is true that Berkeley's view of mentalism was a limited and imperfect one, merely a beginning, in fact. But it was a beginning in the right direction.    (#26774)

In his play The Tempest Shakespeare has given clear expression to mentalism in the context of that famous line, "We are such stuff as dreams are made of."    (#26782)

The twentieth-century metaphysical movement Neorealism, whose most brilliant exponents have been Bertrand Russell, A.N. Whitehead, and Samuel Alexander, took from materialism the postulate that the universe of our experience is independent of, and is unaffected by, our conscious experience of it. Nevertheless it also took from mentalism some of its epistemological and psychological features. It started out to demolish the mentalist position but in the end it came so perilously near demolishing its own that it has become almost bankrupt.    (#26788)

I did not work out the theory of mentalism intellectually until it had first been revealed to me mystically.    (#26791)

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.    (#26792)

A teaching like mentalism which does not agree with commonly accepted ideas must be carefully presented, for its very surprise may cause it to be deemed beyond, or not worth, discussion.    (#26793)

The fundamental truth of the principle of mentalism is as clear to me as is the fundamental falsity of materialism.    (#26795)

The deep mystical background of mentalism is mostly a feeling whereas the form in which it has to be expressed is mostly an intellectual one.    (#26796)

The tenets expounded in my book The Hidden Teaching Beyond Yoga are of a kind which become more understandable as they become more familiar. It is really their intellectual strangeness which accounts largely for their apparent absurdity. And this strangeness itself arises because mentalism was originally discovered through mystical experience and has had to be translated into non-mystical intellectual terms.    (#26797)

To reach the masses with a doctrine as deep as mentalism is no little task, but this I have tried to do.    (#26798)

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.    (#26811)

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.    (#26812)

Because mentalism is to become a vivid fact for him and not remain a mere theory, the advanced disciple will have to convert his joys and agonies into real-seeming dream-stuff. And he will have to achieve this conversion by the power of his own hard will and his own keen understanding. The higher self may help him do this, for he may find that some of the deepest sorrows which befall him are of a special kind. They may be extremely subtle or strikingly paradoxical or tremendous in vicissitudes. For instance, he may be estranged in the most poignant way from those dearest to him, from the master he reveres, the friends he needs, the woman he loves. He may be permitted to meet them in the flesh only briefly and only rarely, so that he will seek compensation by learning the art of meeting them often and long in thought. If these inner experiences can utterly absorb his imaginative attention, they will come to seem as actual as outer ones. If the capacity to introspect be united with the capacity to visualize in this intense way, the result will be astonishingly effectual. Thus he comes in time to see the Mental as Real. Thus he lifts himself from a lower point of view to a higher one. Thus he thoroughly overcomes the extroverted materialism of ordinary human perception.    (#26815)

The illusion of materialism, of a world external to consciousness, could not be preserved if this practice of referring all objects to their source were faithfully and perseveringly followed. The truth of mentalism then becomes solidly implanted.    (#26820)

Confronted by the full meaning of mentalism, we are startled into discoveries of the highest importance. The world becomes a deception of the mind, its reality no longer a certainty. But the corollary is that the deception can be stopped, the truth revealed, the authentic reality recovered. This requires the corrective work first of the Quest and finally of the mentalistic techniques.    (#26821)