More and more man fell into illusion and ignorance as he fell more and more into identification with the body and with the ego. Mentalism tells us that they are really thought-complexes. All thought is derived from the mind. He can begin to undo these identifications if he will bring back his thoughts to their truth and reality and constantly let them stay there. By the activity of the Quest and by the non-activity of allowing truth to work upon him, the illusion will vanish and the real will take over.    (#3063)

The subtler mental equipment must be energized and developed before he can use the subtler ideas of philosophy in the higher stages of this quest. First comes the idea of mentalism. Beyond that comes the idea of simultaneity--that he both is and is not a twofold being.    (#3101)

Some denigrate their own power by accepting the truth of mentalism but denying the possibility of realizing it in experience. For them the sages prescribed the study of texts, the thinking out for themselves of their deep meaning, and deep meditation. This done, the obstacles are removed and the way is opened for intuition to transcend intellect and lead the aspirants into Overself. It presupposes that they have earlier purified character and strengthened concentration.    (#3389)

Prince Rama wanted to withdraw from his position, title, duties, and family in pursuit of God. But the wise Vashistha, the great teacher of Mentalism, asked him: "Is He apart from the world that you wish to renounce it?"    (#3448)

How is he to achieve this inner freedom? Should the method include outer acts? Should he make the Herculean gesture of parting with all his possessions? Should he embrace voluntary poverty like a monk and henceforth live without receiving any regular income and consequently without paying any further income tax? This ascetic idea of not being fettered by any external thing is good as far as it goes. But it fails to take note of the fact that one may be just as fettered by an internal thought. The ascetic gives up the vices and allurements of the world in order to become free, renounces earthly desires and futilities in order to become happy, shuns pleasures because he associates them with guilt. But if he has not grasped the truth of mentalism, if he does not comprehend that thought is the next battlefield, he remains as tied as before, albeit by new chains.    (#3476)

Because your world is contained in your consciousness, as mentalism teaches, you can best help that world by improving and correcting your consciousness. In attending to your own inner development, you are putting yourself in the most effectual position to promote the development of other persons. Philosophy is fully aware of, and concerned with, the misery and the suffering which are rampant everywhere. It does not approve of selfishness, or indifference to the welfare of others. Yet, at the same time, it does not permit itself to be swept away by blind emotionalism and unreasoned impulsiveness into doing what is least effective for humanity. It calls wisdom in to guide its desire to serve, with the result that the service it does render is the most effective possible.    (#3718)

Again and again one hears from aspirants that in the heat of the day's activity, in the turmoil of the day's business, and under the pressure of the day's work they tend to forget the Quest. At the beginner's stage this is inevitable; he has to attend to these other matters, and if he is to attend to them properly, effectively, and efficiently they need his whole mind. This is why the practice of having withdrawal periods each day for meditation, for study, or for relaxation is so well advised. It is only when a more advanced stage of the quest is brought under consideration that the matter becomes really serious. The aspirant is then trying to practise thought-control as often as he can. He is trying to practise self-awareness and he is trying to practise spiritual remembrance. But still he finds that what he's doing tends to carry his mind away from all these practices so that he forgets the quest. What he has been practising has not been wasted: it will bring its fruit in due course, but it is not enough to give him the success he seeks. The reason is that all this inner activity has been taking place in the realm of thought; he substitutes aspirational thoughts for the worldly ones from time to time. The way out is to deepen both his knowledge of mentalism and his practice of meditation. If he does not do this, he may split his personality and become a mere dreamer.    (#3818)

We are so tied to the foolish idea which regards body and mind as two wholly separate and different entities, that all too many regard it as undignified to practise physical exercises in order to influence the mind. The discoveries of mentalism show how foolish is such an attitude, how much we miss in outer helps to inner attainment.    (#7129)

The idea that ordinary people can love one another, including those they have never met as well as those they meet day after day, is a pleasant piece of sentimentalism. It sounds well when solemnly uttered by ministers of religion before their respectful congregations or when published as advice by professional psychologists. But where are the individuals who succeed in following it? If we look at history or at the cities and villages we already know, we find that the only form where something like it is discovered is that of organized philanthropy. This is excellent, this is commendable, but still it is not strictly love. Most ordinary people cannot get closer than this to the full sympathetic identification with another person which love really is. Only saints can achieve complete empathy; only they are capable of washing the leper's sores. For all others the idea is vague and unreal, although convenient to use in talk at Christmas time.

Karamazov, a character in one of Dostoevski's Russian novels, drily said, "One can love one's neighbour in an abstract way occasionally perhaps, even from afar, but in close contact, almost never. . . . It is precisely the neighbour, the one who is physically close to us, whom one cannot possibly love. At best one can love those who are far away."

Now this may be a little exaggerated but it does speak openly of the difficulty many people experience in their attitude towards those with whom they are in daily contact. It is still more difficult if they are forced to live with unscrupulous or unliked people. Then it will be all they can do to numb their revulsions.

But ordinary people have to come to terms with their associates or have at least to take care not to show their dislike. They must particularly learn to endure others who are different from themselves in habits, leaving aside the case of those who are thoroughly repulsive to them. Unless they do achieve this capacity, there is no hope for the human race, which must otherwise go on fighting and warring until, with the frightful weapons now coming into its hands, it destroys itself.

Such tolerance is still only the first station on the route to that active goodwill which the more idealistic persons who take the Quest seriously must try to achieve eventually. Many of them find it hard to reach even this first halt. They are sensitive, they are often heterodox, and they cannot warm up to those whose ideas, habits, mannerisms, or orthodoxies irritate them. The Quester who does not eat meat, for instance, may not enjoy sitting down at table with those who delight in it. If he has the fortunate circumstances to do as he likes, he need not do so. But most are not so free. He may put up with the meat-laden table and its diners with bad grace or good grace, but put up with them he must. Or take another case, that of having perforce to associate with someone who indulges in frequent sniffles when such a personal habit is felt to be most repulsive. Again if he is a Quester and if he is free to do as he likes and to avoid the other person, he is entitled to do so. But suppose he is not free? Instead of straining himself in the futile task of trying to love unlovable people, it is better to learn how to give them enough goodwill to tolerate them. This is within his capacity. If he has to live with them, or associate with them, he must try to put up with them, which means trying to put himself in their place. And that is a most desirable spiritual exercise, an advanced stepping-stone toward love itself. The practice of goodwill helps the practiser by creating good karma and shaping a good character. The thought of it, habitual and sustained, helps those who touch, or move within, his orbit. The profound meditation upon it repays him with blissful feelings and mystical harmony. If a man can be nothing else, let him be kind to others. Each time he does this he goes out of his own little ego. He comes a little closer to expressing the spiritual self dwelling hidden in his heart.    (#8203)

One sees their anxiety to understand a doctrine which is on too abstract a level for them and pities the bewilderment with which they end. Yet for such there is an easier way, bringing a more successful result. It is to take up the study of mentalism first, and only after that proceed to the study of Advaita.    (#9722)

René Guènon's books take a standpoint which attracts an increasing number of Europeans. It needs to be understood thoroughly. It represents the latest of several of his own personal phases--including Catholic, Sceptical, Hindu, and lastly Muhammedan-Sufi. Guènon makes two important contributions to thought. First, he rightly perceives that science can add metaphysics not to displace itself but to complete itself. But what sort of metaphysics shall it be? If merely a speculation or a dogmatism, then that may lead only to further error. It must be a metaphysics based primarily on the mystical intuition and secondarily on the metaphysics of Truth, whose principle tenet, mentalism, is raised both out of observed facts, out of man's sense relations of the external world and his experience of it, and out of mystical seership. Is Guènon's system of this kind? Unfortunately, it is only partially so. Therefore, its grand truths suffer from certain insufficiencies and some errors. Second, Guènon rightly sees the existence of a universal crisis, but he misses one chief purpose and result of this crisis and that is its tremendous destructiveness. It is breaking adherence to past tendencies and shattering old forms. He fails to see that any return to vanished tradition could never be an internal but only an external one. It would lack reality, naturalness, and vitality. Yet his work possesses special importance not only, as he believes, for Western seekers who have thrown off conventional religious fetters but especially for the more intellectual.    (#10486)

Why I chose "What Am I": (1) Because I wanted to start with the idea of a non-"I" consciousness instead of their own "I" with which they are continuously occupied; (2) Because the word Brahman is of neuter gender, neither masculine nor feminine. Brahman in us is Atman, the Self--but utterly impersonal. "What" lends itself more easily to this impersonality than "Who"; (3) The answer to "What Am I?" is multiple but it begins with "a part of the world!" and is followed by another question, "What is my relation to this world?" The answer requires the discovery of Mentalism, leading back through the thought of the world, thinker, and consciousness, to Brahman.    (#10603)

When the consciousness of true and real primary being is finally discovered, thought out, and felt as himself, the secondary being need not be disowned, denied existence and suppressed, as so often taught. But because of its tyranny, its usurpation certainly must be stopped and its proper secondary place imposed upon it; and because of its ignorance a re-education into mentalism must also be imposed upon it.    (#10745)

The practice of the impersonal point of view under the guidance of mentalism leads in time to the discovery that the ego is an image formed in the mind, mind-made, an image with which we have got inextricably intertwined. But this practice begins to untie us and set us free.    (#10840)

That men are at varying stages of mental capacity, different degrees of spiritual response, and unequal in character, manners, self-control, or reactions, is a matter of everyday observation. The theory of reincarnation in mentalism offers a logical explanation of these differences, and a deeper one than materialism's.    (#11815)

Another result of a full comprehension of mentalism is that it makes possible a change of attitude towards the doctrine of reincarnation. Those who reject this doctrine because they are not interested in any past or future person who is not completely identical with their present person, do not perceive that this lack of interest arises out of their total self-identification with the physical body. They regard it to be the real "I." But this is utter materialism. For they do not see that the mental "I" is more really their self than the fleshly one. Mentalism can help greatly to rectify their error.    (#11911)

Has the celebrated thinker, the Very Rev. Dr. W. R. Inge, become an adherent of the Hindu doctrine of the reincarnation? This is the question asked following his confession in a London newspaper article in March, 1944, that he believes there is an "element of truth" in this theory of personality common to the Indian masses and mystics of all countries.

Declaring that the error of Western civilization in crisis lies in a wrong idea of the human personality, he says that the truth is expressed in the "most famous Indian poem" which says, "Never the spirit was born; the spirit shall never cease to be; birthless and changeless and deathless, the spirit abideth for ever; death cannot touch it at all, death though the house of it seems."

This means, he says, that immortality is not a string with only one end, which is difficult to believe. Within the time series, that which has no end can have had no beginning. "The Indians and Greeks, both convinced of survival and pre-existence, stand or fall together."

Dr. Inge considers the absence of memory no fatal objection for there may be unconscious memory. "Who taught the chicken to get out of its egg? I cannot tell, but there is no mystery about all this."

Defending himself against the criticism that a dignitary of the Anglican Church has no business to dabble in such "heathen beliefs," Dr. Inge declares that rebirth is not alien to Christian thought and asserts that it is implied in many texts.

Coming from one of the intellectual leaders of the English Church and a former Dean of Saint Paul's Cathedral, the foregoing admission is of outstanding historical importance. The doctrine must now be considered worth serious discussion by all Western educated persons and no longer left to a few queer dreamers as something bizarre and exotic. Its increasing acceptance will also be a triumph over materialism. Rebirth identifies a man more with his mind than with his body. It thus accords perfectly with mentalism.    (#11934)

It is the ego that lives in time and experiences these different abstractions of past, present, and future; but the real being behind the ego is on a different plane altogether. Now if mentalism throws light on the problems of time, of the real and the illusory, it also throws light on the question of free will and determinism. Since all is within the mind, to the extent that we learn to control mind we are able to exercise free will. But there it stops.    (#12637)

Here again mentalism makes it possible for us to understand the basic principle which is at work. The entire body being a mental construct, it is occasionally possible to apply mental forces so as to repair wastage, heal disease, and restore healthy functioning. We say "occasionally" advisedly, for reasons which will shortly be given.    (#12740)

Mentalism affirms the true nature of the body, and hence of the nerves in the body. Pain is a condition of those nerves and hence must ultimately be what the body is--an idea in the mind.    (#12742)

Mentalism says that most of one's misery is inflicted on oneself by accepting and holding negative thoughts. They cover and hide the still centre of one's being, which is infinite happiness.    (#13953)