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)