Thinking being

“ Hold to the idea, "I am not the mind, I see that I am thinking, I am watching my mind act", and each day the identification of yourself with thought and feeling will grow less, until at last you can entirely separate yourself from the mind and actually know it to be apart from yourself. ”

“ You may derive thoughts from others; your way of thinking, the mould in which your thoughts are cast, must be your own. ”

“ And why, some day, walking in the street with our attention miles away from that quest, does the answer saunter into our minds as carelessly as if it had never been called for—suggested, possibly, by the flowers on the bonnet of the lady in front of us, or possibly by nothing that we can discover?
The truth must be admitted that thought works under strange conditions. Pure 'reason' is only one out of a{255} thousand possibilities in the thinking of each of us. ”

“ It is much confused in modern discussions, and the word "mind," which formerly always meant the operations of the intellect only, has come in recent times to be used in the sense of feeling only, the thinking process itself being described as a form of feeling. ”

“ And now to explain this principle somewhat further, so that I may at least make it historically clear to you, although I cannot prove it in this place:—it is the greatest error, and the true ground of all the other errors which make this Age their sport, that each individual imagines that he can exist, live, think, and act for himself, and believes that he himself is the thinking principle of his thoughts; ”

“ But his thought required proof as much as his being; yes, logically more, for being is the ground of thinking, not thinking of being. At this day there are sound men who deny the existence of this outward world, declaring it only a dreamworld. ”

“ Thinking is learning all over again how to see, directing one’s consciousness, making of every image a privileged place. ”

“ Or do you want what's inside me—my mind—my brain—my mind—"
He faltered to a stop, shocked by truth. He put a hand to his brow. "My mind. That's it. You want it, don't you?"
"You don't care for the husk that cradles the mind, but you want the intellect. You covet my thought, my life power, my ego. The psychic force, the power of thought and existence—you want all those because that is what you are, aren't you?" ”

“ The preceding merely defines a way of thinking. But the point is to live. ”

“ And if, when a glowing thought comes into your brain, quick and sudden, you could tell it over as to a second self, to that sweet creature, who is not away, because she loves to be there; and if you could watch the thought catching that girlish mind, illuming that fair brow, sparkling in those pleasantest of eyes—how far better than to feel it slumbering, and going out, heavy, lifeless, and dead, in your own selfish fancy. ”

“ Our whole argument in our transition to the Fourth Conception of Being illustrated how it is of the very nature of our human experience of our Internal Meaning to point beyond what is presented, for the sake of defining the very fulfilment which our presented meanings demand, and without which they have neither truth nor Being. ”

“ Is it this strange, unfathomable self we think to know, and awaken to, by what is written, or by study of it as so many planes of consciousness? But in vain we store the upper chambers of the mind with such quaint furniture of thought. ”

“ But thought enables me, indeed thought compels me, to do it. Thought clears the bounds of mere feeling: thought, in the very act of being what it is, necessarily overleaps the limitations of feeling. Hence thought, the thought of oneself and of one's sensation, is the ground and the condition of sympathy. ”

“ Leave me thought, will, sentiment, all that is internally present to my consciousness, to find myself; I ask no more. Give me communication with other beings, which affect me or are affected by me, which transmit to me thoughts and wills, which cause me pleasure or pain; I need nothing more in order to have a world which I can very well conceive. I am ignorant of the quality of the things, not of their possibility: the soul changes its state, not its nature. ”

“ But when such observation is ended or at fault, and the man retreats, as it were, into his inner self, then in the quiet all the senses merge and harmonize into a single perfect instrument of perception. ”

“ Is not my essence thought?' 'You ought to know your own essence best,' all creation will reply. 'I am confident,' says one, 'that I never do cease to think,—not even in the soundest sleep.' 'You do, for a long time, every night of your life,' exclaims another, equally confident and equally ignorant. ”

“ At best more watchful this, but that more strong.
The action of the stronger to suspend,
Reason still use, to reason still attend.
Attention, habit and experience gains;
Each strengthens reason, and self-love restrains. ”

“ For then we learn that our present will demands for its full expression, not merely contents or facts that are yet to be discriminated, but other wills than this present conscious will of ours, other purposes than we as yet observe within the limits of this instant’s consciousness. ”

“ We know, they say, that the world is real; but how should we know that its inner Being, so foreign to ours, resembles our own will? But our own Fourth Conception of Being is not in the older sense animistic. ”

“ What we wish to contemplate here are the plain facts, the knowledge of which enlivens and enriches one’s mind and nature. If the contemplation of them kindles one’s fancy or excites one’s emotions, these results at least will not be second-hand. ”

“ By the side of the intellectual element, by which we estimate our thoughts and actions, there is feeling; that is, the sensibility which modifies the judgment and enlightens the deep thought determining our responsibility. ”

“ They are contents of thought as well as masses of feeling; and the peculiar way in which they are more than immediate is what makes them worthy to be called ideas. And as contents of thought, as ideas, they already present to us, however incompletely, that relative fulfilment of purpose, that partial embodiment of meaning, which sets them in contrast to those brute facts of the lower forms of immediacy, those meaningless accidents of sensation, which, in our case, always accompany them. ”

“ Thought is the force underlying all. And what do we mean by this? Simply this: Your every act—every conscious act—is preceded by a thought. Your dominating thoughts determine your dominating actions. The acts repeated crystallize themselves into the habit. The aggregate of your habits is your character. Whatever, then, you would have your acts, you must look well to the character of the thought you entertain. Whatever act you would not do,—habit you would not acquire,—you must look well to it that you do not entertain the type of thought that will give birth to this act, this habit. ”

“ Leaving out of view the Will, which is a simple homogeneous mental state, forming the link between feeling and action, and not admitting of subdivisions; our states of consciousness fall into two great classes—Cognitions and Feelings. ”

“ But when the mind opens, and reveals the laws which traverse the universe, and make things what they are, then shrinks the great world at once into a mere illustration and fable of this mind. What am I? and What is? asks the human spirit with a curiosity new-kindled, but never to be quenched. ”

“ Now indeed you know yourself as one Self, as a person. For, first, you know your empirical self as the Seeker, meaning, intending, aiming at, that life-ideal; and here you have a contrast of real and ideal self. And, secondly, since your ideal is this ideal, the expression of the meaning of your unique experience, you can rightly contrast yourself with all the rest of the world’s life. ”

“ Let us first try to understand what we know concerning ourselves. The longer one lives and the more one studies the mystery of "Being," the more one is forced to the conclusion that in every Human Being there are two Personalities, call them what you like—"the Real and its Image," "the Spiritual and its Material Shadow," or "the Transcendental and its Physical Ego." ”

“ What he has thought and what he has done become objective: thought-forms, having been consciously visualized and allowed to take root and grow and blossom and produce, now pass in a solemn and mighty panorama, as the consciousness-content of his personality. ”

“ To recognize this, therefore,--as we have elsewhere endeavoured to show,--supposes in the recipient something akin to it. And, though it be in reality but a sign of life, it is still a sign of which we no sooner receive the impress, than, by a law of our mind, we feel it to be acting upon our thoughts and sympathies, without our knowing how or wherefore. Admitting, therefore, the corresponding instinct, or whatever else it may be called, to vary in men,--which there is no reason to doubt,--the solution of their unequal impression appears at once. ”

“ Your bundle of intellections and emotions,—your intelligence, your highly developed mind,—your passion for truth and justice,—these are cold and chilling and unfructifying, if they are not illumined and warmed by that innate, inherent flame, which is as evident at times in primitive man as well as in you and me. ”

“ Is it not indeed plain that, as we ourselves have often heretofore said, when we talk of Being, we are indeed seeking for what, if present, would satisfy or tend to satisfy our conscious needs and meanings? Let us take this very character as the sole basis of our definition of what it is to be. Let us first say that whenever we talk of Being we mean a definitely Possible Fact of experience, viewed just as something possible for us. ”

“ If it were possible for a human being to be suddenly, and for the first time, awakened to consciousness, with the full possession of all its reasoning faculties, the natural inquiry of such a being would be, "What am I?—how am I to act?—and, what are my capabilities for action?" ”

“ I am formed, if for anything not in common with the herd of mankind, to apprehend minute and remote distinctions of feeling, whether relative to external nature or the living beings which surround us, and to communicate the conceptions which result from considering either the moral or the material universe as a whole. Of course, I believe these faculties, which perhaps comprehend all that is sublime in man, to exist very imperfectly in my own mind. ”

“ In observing these connections, so far as they fall within our own range of experience, we there find somehow our own rational Will better expressed, or embodied, than it would be without this idea, and thereby we better win our own inner clearness. ”

“ Essentially this—FEELING KNOWN—that is, affections of the heart and imagination become understood subject-matter to the self-conscious intelligence. Must feeling perish because intelligence sounds its depths? ”

“ We have none of that tiresome business of establishing the relation between the mind and its own ideal object, or the discriminating between the ideal thing-in-itself and the mind of which it is the content. ”

“ Life is complex in its expression, involving more than percipience, namely desire, emotion, will, and feeling. ”

“ I was conscious, too, of a peculiar dual action of brain and senses, for, though keenly alive to every unimportant detail of the life about me, I was yet able to follow a process by which delicate inner threads were being spun into a fanciful web that had nothing to do with my outer self. ”

“ In the first place, by consciousness we mean the notion of self—that notion of self, and that self-reference, which in man generally, though by no means invariably, accompanies his sensations, passions, emotions, play of reason, or states of mind whatsoever. ”

“ But a last cry of non possumus will probably go up from many readers. “All very pretty as a piece of ingenuity,” they will say, “but our consciousness itself intuitively contradicts you. We, for our part, know that we are conscious. We feel our thought, flowing as a life within us, in absolute contrast with the objects which it so unremittingly escorts. ”

“ Further, as is shown by the fact of my imperfect understanding of my own feelings and purposes, something may actually be an integral part of my own life as an experiencing subject without my clearly and consciously recognising it as such when I reflect on the contents of my experience. ”

“ In conduct itself I believe every one will acknowledge that his moments of consciousness are like vivid peaks, while the great mass of his acts—even those with which he is most familiar—occur unconsciously. ”

“ That is what we mean here by the object’s being ‘in mind.’ Of any deeper more real way of being in mind we have no positive conception, and we have no right to discredit our actual experience by talking of such a way at all. ”

“ They were meant to know, to act, and to feel—to know everything which the mind is able to contemplate, to name, and to classify; to do everything which the will, prompted by the passions and guided by the conscience, can undertake; and, subject to the same guidance, to feel in its utmost vigor every emotion which the contemplation of the various persons and objects which surround us can excite. ”

“ Whoever denies this conception covertly, so we affirm, asserts it whenever, expressly or by implication, he talks of Being at all. For to talk of Being is to speak of fact that is either present to a consciousness or else is nothing. And from that one aspect of our definition which is involved in the thesis that whatever is, is consciously known, all the foregoing view of the unity of Being inevitably follows. ”

“ Reality or vision, he had caught a glimpse of something so entirely different from anything his imagination or experience had ever suggested to him, that at first he could do no more than permit passively its influences to adjust themselves to his being. ”

“ This view, as I hold, is indeed sound in laying stress upon a deep connection between our observation of the significant inner life of our own will, and our assurance that the universe in which we live has true Being. ”