This is a further step toward overthrowing the tyranny of the “mind”: the psychic nature of emotion and mental measuring. This psychic self, the personality, claims to be absolute, asserting that life is for it and through it; it seeks to impose on the whole being of man its narrow, materialistic, faithless view of life and the universe; it would clip the wings of the soaring Soul. But the Soul dethrones the tyrant, by perceiving and steadily affirming that the psychic self is no true self at all, not self-luminous, but only an object of observation, watched by the serene eyes of the Spiritual Man.
20. Nor could the Mind at the same time know itself and things external to it.
The truth is that the “mind” knows neither external things nor itself. Its measuring and analyzing, its hoping and fearing, hating and desiring, never give it a true measure of life, nor any sense of real values. Ceaselessly active, it never really attains to knowledge; or, if we admit its knowledge, it ever falls short of wisdom, which comes only through intuition, the vision of the Spiritual Man.
Life cannot be known by the “mind,” its secrets cannot be learned through the “mind.” The proof is, the ceaseless strife and contradiction of opinion among those who trust in the mind. Much less can the “mind” know itself, the more so, because it is pervaded by the illusion that it truly knows, truly is.
True knowledge of the “mind” comes, first, when the Spiritual Man, arising, stands detached, regarding the “mind” from above, with quiet eyes, and seeing it for the tangled web of psychic forces that it truly is. But the truth is divined long before it is clearly seen, and then begins the long battle of the “mind,” against the Real, the “mind” fighting doggedly, craftily, for its supremacy.
21. If the Mind be thought of as seen by another more inward Mind, then there would be an endless series of perceiving Minds, and a confusion of memories.
One of the expedients by which the “mind” seeks to deny and thwart the Soul, when it feels that it is beginning to be circumvented and seen through, is to assert that this seeing is the work of a part of itself, one part observing the other, and thus leaving no need nor place for the Spiritual Man.
To this strategy the argument is opposed by our philosopher, that this would be no true solution, but only a postponement of the solution. For we should have to find yet another part of the mind to view the first observing part, and then another to observe this, and so on, endlessly.
The true solution is, that the Spiritual Man looks down upon the psychic nature, and observes it; when he views the psychic pictures gallery, this is “memory,” which would be a hopeless, inextricable confusion, if we thought of one part of the “mind,” with its memories, viewing another part, with memories of its own.
The solution of the mystery lies not in the “mind” but beyond it, in the luminous life of the risen Lord, the Spiritual Man.