The Arithmetical Paradox: The Oneness of Mind
Table of Contents
Our sentient, percipient and thinking ego is nowhere within our scientific world is because it is itself that world picture.
It is identical with the whole and therefore cannot be contained in it as a part of it.
But, of course, here we knock against the arithmetical paradox; there appears to be a great multitude of these conscious egos, the world however is only one. This comes from the fashion in which the world-concept produces itself.
The several domains of ‘private’ consciousnesses partly overlap. The region common to all where they all overlap is the construct of the ‘real world around us’. With all that an uncomfortable feeling remains, prompting such questions as: Is my world really the same as yours?
Is there one real world to be distinguished from its pictures introjected by way of perception into everyone of us? And if so, are these pictures like unto the real world or is the latter, the world ‘in itself, perhaps very different from the one we perceive?
Such questions are ingenious, but in my opinion very apt to confuse the issue. They have no adequate answers. They all are, or lead to, antinomies springing from the one source, which I called the arithmetical paradox; the many conscious egos from whose mental experiences the one world is concocted.
The solution of this paradox of numbers would do away with all the questions of the aforesaid kind and reveal them, I dare say, as sham questions.
There are 2 ways out of the number paradox (based on ancient Greek thought and thus thoroughly ‘Western’):
- The multiplication of the world in Leibniz’s fearful doctrine of monads.
In it, every monad to be a world by itself, no communication between them.
The monad ‘has no windows’, it is ‘incommunicado’.
They all agree with each other as ‘pre-established harmony’.
This appeals to few people.
- The unification of minds or consciousnesses.
Their multiplicity is only apparent, in truth there is only one mind.
This is the doctrine of the Upanishads and of the mystical union with God that goes against strong existing prejudices.
This is less easily accepted in the West than in the East.
An 13th century Islamic Persian mystic Aziz Nasafi:
On the death of any living creature:
- the spirit returns to the spiritual world
- the body returns to the bodily world
In this however, only the bodies are subject to change.
The spiritual world is one single spirit who stands like unto a light behind the bodily world and who, when any single creature comes into being, shines through it as through a window.
According to the kind and size of the window less or more light enters the world. The light itself however remains unchanged. Ten years ago Aldous Huxley published a precious volume which he called The Perennial Philosophy2 and which is an anthology from the mystics of the most various periods and the most various peoples.
Open it where you will and you find many beautiful utterances of a similar kind.
I am struck by the miraculous agreement between humans of different race, religion, knowing nothing about each other’s existence, separated by centuries and millennia, and by the greatest distances that there are on our globe.
Still, to Western thought, this doctrine has little appeal. It is unpalatable, fantastic, unscientific.
This is because our Greek science is based on objectivation. It has cut itself off from an understanding of Cognizance, of the mind.
I believe this is precisely where our present way of thinking needs to be amended, perhaps by a bit of blood-transfusion from Eastern thought.
That will not be easy as there are blunders.
Blood-transfusion always needs great precaution to prevent clotting.
We do “not wish to lose the logical precision that our scientific thought has reached, and that is unparalleled anywhere at any epoch.
Still, one thing can be claimed in favour of the mystical teaching of the ‘identity’ of all minds with each other and with the supreme mind - as against the fearful monadology of Leibniz.
The doctrine of identity can claim that it is clinched by the empirical fact that consciousness is never experienced in the plural, only in the singular.
Not only has none of us ever experienced more than one consciousness, but there is also no trace of circumstantial evidence of this ever happening any- where in the world. If I say that there cannot be more than one consciousness in the same mind, this seems a blunt tautology - we are quite unable to imagine the contrary.
Yet there are cases or situations where we would expect and nearly require this unimaginable thing to happen, if it can happen at all. This is the point that I should like to discuss now in some detail, and to clinch it by quotations from Sir Charles Sherrington, who was at the same time (rare event!) a man of highest genius and a sober scientist.
For all I know he had no bias towards the philosophy of the Upanishads. My purpose in this discussion is to contribute perhaps to clearing the way for a future assimilation of the doctrine of identity with our own scientific world view, without having to pay for it by a loss of soberness and logical precision.
I said just now that we are not able even to imagine a plurality of consciousnesses in one mind. We can pronounce these words all right, but they are not the description of any thinkable experience. Even in the pathological cases of a ‘split personality’ the two persons alternate, they never hold the field jointly; nay this is just the characteristic feature, that they know nothing about each other.
When in the puppet-show of dream we hold in hand the strings of quite a number of actors, controlling their actions and their speech, we are not aware of this being so. Only one of them is myself, the dreamer. In him I act and speak immediately, while I may be awaiting eagerly and anxiously what another one will reply, whether he is going to fulfil my urgent request. That I could really let him do and say whatever I please does not occur to me - in fact it is not quite the case.
For in a dream of this kind the ‘other one’ is, I dare say, mostly the impersonation of some serious obstacle that opposes me in waking life and of which I have actually no control.
The strange state of affairs, described here, is quite obviously the reason why most people of old firmly believed that they were truly in communication with the persons, alive or deceased, or, maybe, gods or heroes, whom they met in their dreams.
It is a superstition that dies hard. On the verge of the sixth century B.C. Heraclitus of Ephesus definitely pronounced against it, with a clarity not often met with in his sometimes very obscure fragments.
But Lucretius Carus, who believed himself to be the protagonist of enlightened thought, still holds on to this superstition in the first century B.C. In our days it is probably rare, but I doubt that it is entirely extinct. Let me turn to something quite different.