Mind

What is it?

WELL is it anything at all? Of course, you say, since I obviously have a mind and I believe you have a mind too. While that's true my point is more like: is Mind like anything else that we experience? Is it a thing? Or are we confusing ourselves with an unrealised and unacknowledged analogy, that Mind is like a rock or a nuclear particle? Firstly I'd like to say 'yes' we are confusing ourselves about Mind, and second I believe that Mind is a lot more than we imagine.

SOULS

When Mind gets mentioned people immediately think about the rather messy concept of the soul, the detachable bit that leaves behind the physical for the Other World. I don't want to deny this concept but let me just exclude it from consideration, for now. Why? Because I'm trying to focus on this World and Mind's manifestation in it, rather than speculating on the nature of the Other. We have more experience of this World and more opportunity to experiment in this World, hence we can use science to study it. In the occult tradition the Other World is said to be very directly shaped by our expectations of it, but this World resists very firmly such manipulation. It's a good place to start.

MIND

What is Mind to me? Mind for the Greek Philosophers was not just the soul - it was the rational bit that orders the motion of the soul. That seems odd to us - a moving Soul. What most people don't realise is the original Soul concept is of the principle of motion, of what makes living things 'go'. Plato filled the World with Soul in order to produce the motions of the atoms that he believed to constitute matter. Most other philosophers of the day had similar concepts, including Aristotle. To them Soul produced motion, and that motion was ordered by Mind.

MIND was supremely seen in the orderly motions of the Heavens which were the easiest things in the Natural World that could be analysed by humans. The Ancients perceived a strong connection between things of the intellect - maths, geometry, topology - and the nature of Mind in the wider world. To Aristotle God, as Ultimate Mind, was a logical deduction from the way he [Aristotle] constructed the World. To Plato, Salvation was to be achieved by making the motion of one's soul like the ordered, Mindful motion of the Heavens

(more to come)