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From Intellect to Intuition - Chapter One - Introductory Thoughts
It is in the training of the mind that the crux of the situation lies. The human mind is apparently an instrument which we are able to use in two directions. One direction is outward. The mind, in this mode of functioning, registers our contacts with the physical and mental worlds in which we live, and recognizes emotional and sensory conditions. It is the recorder and correlator of our sensations, of our reactions, and of all that is conveyed to it via the five senses and the brain. This is a field of knowledge [8] that has been extensively studied, and much headway has been made by psychologists in understanding the processes of mentation. "Thinking," Dr. Jung tells us, "is one of the four basic psychological functions. It is that psychological function which, in accordance with its own laws, brings given presentations into conceptual connection. It is an apperceptive activity - both active and passive. Active thinking is an act of the will; passive thinking is an occurrence." - Dibblee, George Binney, Instinct and Intuition, page 85. As we shall see later, it is the thought apparatus which is involved in Meditation and which must be trained to add to this first function of the mind an ability to turn in another direction, and to register with equal facility the inner or intangible world. This ability to reorient itself will enable the mind to register the world of subjective realities, of intuitive perception and of abstract ideas. This is the high heritage of the mystic, but seems as yet not to be within the grasp of the average man. The problem facing the human family today in the realms both of science and of religion results from the fact that the follower of both schools finds he is standing at the portal of a metaphysical world. A cycle of development has come to an end. Man, as a thinking, feeling entity, seems now to have arrived at a fair measure of understanding the instrument with which he has to work. He is asking himself: What use is he to make of it? Where is the mind, [9] which he is slowly learning to master, going to lead him? What does the future hold for man? Something, we feel, of greater beauty and certainty than anything we have hitherto known. Perhaps it will be a universal arrival at that knowledge which the individual mystic has had. Our ears are deafened by the din of our modern civilization and yet at times we catch those overtones which testify to a world which is immaterial. Our eyes are blinded by the fog and the smoke of our immediate foreground, yet there do come flashes of clear vision which reveal a subtler state of being, and which lift the fog, letting in "the glory which never was on sea or land." Dr. Bennett of Yale expresses these ideas in very beautiful terms. He says: "A film falls from the eyes and the world appears in a new light. Things are no longer ordinary. There comes the certainty that this is the real world whose true character human blindness has until now concealed. Not where the wheeling systems darken And our benumbed conceiving soars; - The drift of pinions, would we harken, Beats at our own clay-shuttered doors. The angels keep their ancient places; Turn but a stone and start a wing! 'Tis ye, 'tis your estranged faces That miss the many-splendoured thing. "The experience is at first tantalizing, alluring. There is a rumor of a new world and the spirit is eager for the voyage upon strange seas. The familiar world must be left behind. The great adventure of religion begins... [10] "There must somewhere be a point of certainty. A growing universe may provide for open futures, but whoso declares that the universe is growing states an unalterable fact about its structure, which fact is the eternal guarantee of the possibility and validity of experiment... "Man is a bridge. Even the superman, once we perceive that he is only the symbol of the strenuous ideal, turns out to be a bridge too. Our only assurance is that the gates of the future are always open." - Bennett, Charles A., A Philosophical Study of Mysticism, pages 23, 117, 130.
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