Life's response to consciousness

Preface

The object of the following pages is to give a reasonable explanation of some of the problems of life, and to explain how, by an understanding of the law that underlies response to both vibration and to consciousness, we may more intelligently cope with conditions.

Philosophy and religion have revealed to both Occident and Orient the omnipresent life and knowledge, with the power to express itself in a material universe, but it has been left to science to explain how a mental attitude can produce a material phenomenon.

If we are to use thought power to any permanent advantage we must understand the interpenetration of mind and what is called matter, and we must understand that matter is life in a less evolved

Preface

form, but a life that can and does respond to a dominant vibration.

The Law of Continuity is a valuable help in studying the universe, and as man is a part of the universe, he may study himself as scientifically as he would any other expression of the universal life. He can learn to know himself in relation to the universal Mind, and he may continue the workings of that same law into the study of the cells that make his body, and learn their relation to his individual mind.

If an understanding of these added responsibilities should give a new impetus to life, and make its possibilities a joy, the purpose of this message will have been fulfilled.

Miriam Isbel Wylie.

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Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. The Universal Life and Mind i II. The Individual Life and Mind 25

III. The Mental Realm

Chapter I The Universal Life And Mind

Since the dawn of history men have fought and died for truth, and yet, in the twentieth century, we are in doubt of what truth is. The principal reason for so much confusion is the lack of discrimination between Absolute truth and relative truth.

Absolute truth belongs to the realm of the Infinite, and not to the mind of man. The Infinite and all that it expresses is not under the law of causation; it is the Cause itself, and not the effect of a cause. The effort to understand is an effort of the mind, and the mind works in sequences, recogniz-

I ing always an interdependence between the present and the past, and between the present and the future. It is this endless chain of cause and effect that is the material the mind works with, and the conclusions arrived at by reason are what we call knowledge.

As Absolute truth is beyond knowledge, it is relative truth humanity has to deal with, and here, again, is confusion. Truth has been so long objectified that it is thought of as something tangible, and man seeks it as a treasure outside himself.

Relative " truth is not an entity inclosed in nature, to be drawn from its concealment by the wise, the privileged, or the cunning. Man's apprehension of truth is not constant; it ever changes with man's advance in knowledge. Hence, truth is not something that exists outside of man, an objective entity which he may somewhere seek, but its apprehension is an inward experience, dependent on his relation to the world. Truth is not a thing in nature, but merely an experience in man. Therefore, one man's truth is not necessarily another's also." *

This is the twentieth-century idea of truth, the idea of the pragmatist, who separates facts from truth, and says : " Truth happens to an idea. Ideas that tell us what to expect are true ideas. Facts themselves are not true; they simply ARE. Truth is what we say about them. Our obligation to seek truth is part of our general obligation to do what pays. Truth makes no other kind of claim, and imposes no other kind of ought than health and wealth do. The concrete benefits we gain are what we mean by calling the pursuit a duty." 2

If there are any concrete benefits to be derived from the pursuit of truth, then man were wise to seek until he finds. The progress of the race depends on the individual. First, there are the few who are foremost in every new movement, men and women who, because of special education in certain directions, are fitted to call atten-

2 William James, "Pragmatism."

tion to new methods and to better results; and, second, those who are open to new views. The few who refuse to learn are left behind in the advancing civilization. They go to sleep, as did Rip Van Winkle, and wake to find that the facts of life have not changed, but that man has a new viewpoint, and is adapting himself to the larger prospectus.

Truths come to man in two ways, through experience and through revelation.

Facts are everywhere. When man comes into touch with a fact he has an experience, and that experience gives him a little knowledge. He now has something to say about the fact, but it is only in relation to his meager acquaintance with it. As he investigates further, however, his views enlarge, and he has more and more to say. The relation has grown more intimate, not through any variation in the fact, but because of an added experience in the man. This experience is knowledge, because it is something limited by the mind.

Truth that comes through revelation is not knowledge until it has been experienced. No man can say he knows that which is outside himself; he may say he believes, and that belief may become knowledge in time through an experience, but so long as he believes because someone has said so, he is ignorant.

Belief bears a very important part in the evolution of knowledge, nevertheless.

Every race and civilization has had inspired teachers, who revealed truths that were far in advance of the people. These truths have been accepted and believed, and the belief has induced investigation, with the result that science has often been able, through experiments, to make the inspired truth a matter very close to experience.

There are many Scriptures, each important in its ethical and spiritual teachings. The inspired truths of these different revelations do not contradict each other on vital points. Necessarily each presents the truth in the way best suited to the race to whom it is given, for revealed truth, to be practical, must not be too far in advance of man's experience, but such truths as are common to humanity at large are emphasized byeach.

The Bible is a revelation to the Christian. The prophets and seers were men of an advanced type, and their knowledge of facts was revealed to the race and became ideals. That this ideal did not antagonize the ideals of the other great religions is evidenced by the record that the first to bow the knee to the Christ were the wise men of the East, men of a foreign civilization and of another religion.

The Bible tells us of God, who is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent. This in no way contradicts Brahmanism, whose word for God is " OM," meaning the manifested and the unmanifested. It does not contradict Zoroastrianism, for the inspired teacher of that race taught that everywhere were knowledge, and presence, and power; that, in all parts of the universe, living intelligences were working in the great world process. Buddhism also recognizes the " world below with its spirits, the world 6 above," and all creatures, from God to men, living and acting always and everywhere.

This teaching is the teaching that God is the ever-present life, and that there is no place where He is not. It is a revelation to all races, and to all civilizations. The belief with which it is subscribed to varies from the blind acceptance, which does not question, but lays it aside as one of the impenetrable mysteries, to that quality of belief which investigates, or if unable to investigate, carefully studies the experiments of men of science and learns how much of the teaching can be verified.

Greek philosophers not only believed in the ever-present life, but did not hesitate to take the consequence of such an inclusive idea. Paracelsus stated, without reservation, that everything in the universe is living and " therefore the whole world is a living organism." Here was a wonderful effort of the mind to put an Abstract idea into concrete form, but the teaching has been severely dealt with by the Christian church, and now is little known. The reason of this disapproval is mainly that Pantheism is thought to teach the degeneration of the Absolute into a material universe, when, on the contrary, it was rooting the universe in the Absolute, which is a very different thing.

Preceding Paracelsus were the Hindoo sages, whose depth of thought we are only beginning to appreciate. Their philosophy goes back and back, into a past so remote that there are no reliable dates, and the authors were personalities whose names have long been forgotten.

Gems from these old works have been gathered in late years, and translated by European authorities, such as Dr. L. H. Mills, Dr. Haug, Max Miiller, and others. The teachings of the Theosophical Society and of Vedanta have simplified and made popular the universal truth until our own Scriptures have grown in meaning and beauty, as they are seen to be a part of the revelation given to the whole world of God's presence, power, and knowledge.

A quotation from the " Secret Doctrine " 8 will best express what it means to say, God is life, and to what it commits us if we believe in the omnipresence : " A fundamental law of Eastern Philosophy is, There is no miracle. Everything is the result of law. . . . The expression, inorganic substance, means only that the latent life slumbering in the molecules of so-called inert matter is incognizable. All is life, and every atom of even mineral dust is a life, though beyond our comprehension. . . . Like produces like. Absolute life cannot produce a lifeless atom, whether simple or complex, and there is a life in the neutral state, just as a man in a cataleptic state, to all appearances dead, is still a living being. . . . Esoteric philosophy teaches that everything lives and is conscious, but not that all life and consciousness are the same, even in human beings and animals. Life we look upon as the one form of existence manifesting in what is called matter. . . . The atom is not a particle of something, animated by a psychic something, destined after aeons to blossom as a man, but it is a concrete manifestation of the Universal energy which itself has not been individualized. " *

This is the belief of a vast proportion of the world's people to-day, the belief that God is really everywhere. That the life principle is expressed even in the atom of mineral dust, and the Universal law is seen at work which forbids Absolute Life from producing the lifeless atom.

Living atoms and a living Universe! If the one is true, the other must be, also. A live organism cannot be composed of dead units, neither could live units compose a dead organism. If the Universe is alive, it must also be conscious, and act with intelligence.

One more quotation, to understand how the Universe can act, and its relation to the Absolute: "The Universe is worked and guided from within outward. Man is the living witness of this Universal law, and the mode of its action. We see that every external motion, act, gesture, whether volun-

*H. P. Blavatsky, " The Secret Doctrine." IO tary or mechanical, organic or mental, is produced or preceded by internal feeling or emotion, will or volition, and thought or mind. As no outward motion or change, when normal in man's external body, can take place unless provoked by an inward impulse, given through one of the three functions named — emotion, volition, thought — so with the external or manifested Universe." *

This reasoning, dependent on man being the living witness to an Universal law, is not peculiar to Eastern teaching. Our own scientists recognize the Universe as harmony, and illustrate one part by another. The studying of grouped manifestations and placing them in special sciences is simply for convenience. The laws of biology and the laws of chemistry are not peculiar to biology and to chemistry; they are the same laws appropriated to different lines of investigation, and are arbitrary methods for the better study of evolution. Having

a H. P. Blavatsky, " The Secret Doctrine." II found evolution resulting from a mode of energy in so many of the grouped sciences, it is inferred that it is an Universal manifestation of energy, and to study the little universe of which we are a part, these laws must be converged, else each would be a separate manifestation. This converging of laws resulted in the grouping of the many into one law, which the Egyptians call the " Hermetic law," and the scientist of to-day, more often, the Law of Continuity.

Newman Smith, seeing the vast importance of this law, says : " Continuity is the expression of the Divine Veracity in Nature," so, when man is called " the living witness of the Universal law," it is a method of observation and of thought that is being used by thinkers everywhere.

While philosophers were studying the truth about life, physiologists and biologists were busy investigating the facts of life.

From the time of Plato to 1833, when the microscope was brought into use, there was little of what we to-day would call science, 12 most of the conclusions arrived at being speculative, but when the microscope revealed the cells as the material from which the body was built, then physiology, biology, and microscopy became sciences, and investigations were made that added greatly to our belief in the revealed teachings.

In the last century many of the observers, studying life from either the standpoint of spirit or matter, agreed on the lack of a definite separation between the animate and the inanimate. To Herbert Spencer the manifestation was one of degree, to Haeckel there was no difference. Either view links Eastern thought to Western, in the mutual effort to learn more of life, and what it means to live.

Psychologists have become interested in the dual aspect of life; life the outward expression, and consciousness the inward awareness. Professor James Mark Baldwin of this country has been a close student of the mental development in the child, and he argues with great force that consciousness is inseparable from life, and that the lowest manifestation of life has its correspondent of consciousness. Professor Jargadish Chandra Bose of Calcutta has studied lower forms of life, and, as the result of many interesting experiments, has reached a similar conclusion of an ever-present life and consciousness.

These two men, one of America and the other of India, do not stand alone; they are recognized authority by the world, and biologists generally agree with them that the pleasure-pain consciousness, with its physical basis, originates in the primitive organism, and is not a psychic condition acquired by the more evolved life.

Turning now from generalities to a more systematized investigation of life itself, it is necessary to have an accredited definition of life, and I know of none more commonly accepted than Herbert Spencer's famous " Perfect correspondence would be perfect life. ,, There is perfect harmony between this conception and that of the East, which defines life as the " internal response to an external stimulus,' ' or, less briefly, as, 14 the " ability of the organism to respond to external stimuli. " 1

The ability of an organism to correspond to its environment depends entirely on its awareness of the changes that must be met, and awareness is only another name for consciousness. If life is to adapt itself to an environment, there must be consciousness inherent in the life, and consciousness and life must be embodied by form to make an organism that can correspond, so life is an inseparable duality incased in form for manifestation. The evolution of the form is entirely dependent on the unfoldment of the consciousness, and the quick response of the self-conscious man to stimuli has evolved a form that can adapt itself to changing conditions, while the consciousness that lies dormant in the rock is comparatively passive to the slow changes of the universal environment.

Life, consciousness, and form are self-evident in the two higher kingdoms of Na-

1 J. C. Bose, " Response in the Living and Non- Li ving."

is ture, the human and the animal. Life and form are self-evident in the vegetable kingdom also, but many experiments were made before consciousness was determined.

Professor Bose first discovered the nervous organism of plants. Physiologists had long recognized the evidence of sensation in plants, but had attributed it to a lack of balance of water in their tissue. Dr. Bose does not think this lack of balance sufficiently accounts for the phenomena. He regards plants as capable of a delicate response to external stimuli, and with the power of holding back part of the energy resulting from the stimuli. He explains that the external stimulus induces contraction, and the internal energy expansion, and that it is the interaction of the expansion and the contraction that accounts for the phenomena characteristic of life.

In the scientific notes of the Pall Mall Gazette (January, 1908), the writer says: "The phrase (vegetable nerves) will not seem so preposterous to those who are aware of the recent trend of physiological botany, 16 the discovery even of certain special sense organs, such as the photo-sensitive structures which are now called ocelli, or little eyes." Disease has attacked these " little eyes " to such an extent that the Forest Department of Russia is experimenting in the giving of medicine to trees. As Dr. Bose has demonstrated the responsive action of plants to stimulus, and calls attention to the similar response in animal and man, as shown by the pneumographic tracings, 1 there is hope that some remedy may be found for the ills of plant life.

That same year Professor George Howard Darwin, Professor of Astronomy at Cambridge, asserted, in an address at Dublin, that plants have consciousness, have memory, and develop habits. A few days later the Associated Press tells us that Professor Darwin has been elected President of the British Association and that, in a recent speech, he defended his belief that plants have minds and are intelligent. Professor

1 J, C. Bose, " Comparative Electro-Physiology."

Wager, one of the most famous botanists of Great Britain, agrees with Darwin, and proves that plants can see as well as think, for he exhibited photographs, taken through a lens formed by the eyes of plants. " He showed that the outer skins of many leaves are lenses, much like the eyes of many insects, and capable of forming clear images of surrounding objects," and he exhibited photographs of Darwin and Huxley, and even colored pictures, taken by means of these lenses. Not only do these plant eyes see, but, according to Professor Wager, " the rays of light which by means of them are focused on the interior of the leaf, are carried to the brain of the plant, and affect its subsequent movements." Thousands of these little eyes can be seen under the microscope, and it is because of them that the leaf is able to distinguish between darkness and light, and to turn toward the light.

If the ocelli, or little eyes, of the plant see, and if there are other sense organs, and a system of vegetable nerves, as affirmed by 18 the physiological botanist, there is present the mechanism of consciousness, and as the external stimuli of light carried by these sense organs to the brain are found to affect its subsequent movements, there can be no question of an internal response to an external stimulus.

In the mineral kingdom, science is confronted with the necessity of proving both life and consciousness, if revelation is to pass from belief to knowledge. This has been most ably done by the eminent Hindoo physiologist before mentioned, Professor Bose of the Presidency College of Calcutta.

In 1 90 1, in a paper read at the Royal Institute, he proves that so-called inorganic matter answers to the definition of life, in that it responds to the electric current in exactly the same curves as do vegetables, animals, and man. In his experiments he used an instrument especially adapted to measure the stimuli applied, and to show in curves the response from metal. These tracings show that metals are not different from organic tissue, that they respond, not only to the stimulation, but that continued stimulation induces fatigue; that poisons affect the response, and that recovery is possible if an antidote is given in time. He says : " Just as the response of animal tissue is exalted by stimulants, lowered by depressants, and abolished by poisons, so, also, we have found the response in plants and metals undergoing similar exaltation, depression, or abolition, . . . Just as animal tissue passes from a state of responsiveness while living, to a state of ir responsiveness when killed by poisons, so, also, we find metals transformed from a responsive to an irresponsive condition by the action of similar poisonous reagents. The parallel is the more striking, since it has long been known with regard to animal tissue that the same drug administered in large or small doses might have opposite effects, and in preceding chapters we have seen that the same statements hold good of plants and metals also." *

1 J. C. Bose, li Response in the Living and Non- Living. "

A writer in the Lancet (London) calls attention to the spontaneous change that appears in inorganic material, as well as that in organized entities. If tin is exposed to a temperature of i6°-45° C. for two years, the smooth surface becomes brittle and crystalline. Healthy masses of tin, when inocuulated with small portions of the crystalline metal, are infected, and the disease spreads, " the area affected increasing in diameter from three to five millimeters daily." Iron and steel rails snap when attacked by this " crystallizing disease. ... It would even appear that certain metals have their illnesses, as though their activities were interfered with by a toxic process which may be pushed in many cases to such an extent that the metal ' dies/ Platinum, for example, in its colloidal form, in which it is remarkably active, is positively ' poisoned ' by prussic acid or corrosive sublimate, and its great energies cease to act; it is killed."

In no kingdom does death mean annihilation. Disease is a loss of activity. It is the weakening of attraction that holds cell to cell, and death is the final break. This separation of the units that we call death, is the death of the organism, the form. Evading attraction, they come under the other aspect of the same law, and repel each other. The units are still alive in all their spontaneity, and, when liberated from their temporary association, they combine in new ways and form new organisms.

Reason tells us that life and consciousness must be embodied in every case for manifestation, and that the greater the unfoldment of consciousness, the higher the form; therefore, we may think of consciousness as progressive, and classify it as: incipient in the mineral, semi-conscious in the plant, conscious in the animal, and self-conscious in man.

Beyond the limits of mind and its reasoning faculties, man, in his present consciousness, cannot go. In a dim way he can understand life as antedating mind, for he knows that wherever his thought is, he is present as thinker, and he cannot doubt that his mental activity is dependent on his own life and consciousness, so, while there is no physical manifestation that has not proceeded from mind, still, mind cannot be the first cause, for mind and thought, even in the human evolution, is under the control of the Self to a greater or less degree. Man, created in the image of God, bears no different relation to his mind than God does to the Universal Mind.

Thus we are forced to conclude that God is greater than mind, just as we are positive that man is greater than mind. The Unmanifested First Cause is an Absolute ideal that is beyond the comprehension of human intelligence, but the manifestation of that First Cause on a plane of matter where the Substance can become manifest, is an act we can dimly apprehend through the acceptance of the Law of Continuity. Remember how man expresses an idea through the power of action, and because of the power of knowledge. We have no power to create other than the Universal power, no method other than the Universal method projected from above. " As above, so below," is the Law of Laws; so we may reason that, as man projects his thoughts from the mental realm and expresses them in the physical, so does the First Cause, as Universal Life, project His thoughts from the Mental Realm, and express them as a physical universe.

If this argument is true, God is not Mind any more than man is mind; neither is all Mind, for Mind, Divine Mind, Universal Mind, call it what you may, is only one of the many planes where the Universal Life is consciously active.

Chapter II The Individual Life And Mind

Man sees the universe only as he is personally related to it. It is a relative universe to each of us, because it is the interpretation of the individual mind. To each of us it is different. To one it is a mass of insensate matter, without life or intelligence; to another it is matter, but matter energized from without by the Omnipotent to which it automatically responds, and to still another it is a living substance, " worked and guided from within outward."

What the ultimate truth is, lies outside the realm of the individual mind, and, therefore, is not a matter of knowledge. That truth which each man thinks will bring him the most concrete benefits is the natural and wise truth for him to accept, for experience is a teacher that can be trusted to bring him by the only road to the ultimate Truth.

We are a part of this universe, and what it is, we are. The law that holds it in poise, holds us. If the universe is without life and intelligence, then man, made of the same substance, is no greater. He is not alive now and never can be. If the universe be matter energized by some external power, then man is also an automaton, moving when the power is applied, and moving as the power directs, with no internal response, and with no results except that of deterioration. If the universe is the living substance of the Infinite, then is man alive and conscious, and the power of the Omnipotent is within him, unfolding, in its beauty, as he passes from stage to stage of the long journey from ignorance to Truth.

When the Universal Life becomes manifest the Life, with its inward awareness, is limited in myriads of forms, each a unit of the All sent through planes of varied density. There is always individual consciousness where there is individual life, for consciousness is a part of life. It is the 26 part which feels life and knows life, and feeling and knowing, it responds to all that affects life. Consciousness is the inner side of life, for it is the awareness of itself. Consciousness and life cannot be separated in any of its phenomena.

As the individual is a part of the Universal, and consequently under the same laws of cause and effect as the relative universe, it will be necessary to understand just what we mean by law.

That which we call law is not an actor somewhere in the Kosmos that arbitrarily does things. Law is the name we give to the orderly sequence of cause and effect. There is no chance, for effect always follows cause, and, in turn, becomes a cause. There is no luck, for whatever is, is because of what was. The individual life is the manifested effect. The cause lies in the Will, and Power, and Intelligence of the Unmanifested Universal Life to express itself, therefore the Universal Will, Power, and Intelligence are in the individual, because it is part of the whole. 27

If we could see God omnipresent in our universe, and think of religion as the binding back the manifest to the Unmanifest, then we would see science as the manifestation of religion, as does our Eastern brother. To us science has one language and religion another, and we fail to translate the one into the other. Evolution, to us, is strictly scientific; the Hindoo translates it into religion and learns a valuable truth. He tells us that " The European says it is competition, natural and sexual selection, that forces one body to take the form of another. We (Hindoos) admit that the amoeba goes higher and higher, until it becomes a Buddha, but we are at the same time equally certain you cannot get any amount of work out of a machine until you put it on the other side. If you want a mass of energy at one end, you have got to put it in at the other end; it may be in another form, but the amount must be the same. Therefore, if a Buddha is at one end of the change, the very amoeba must have been the Buddha also. If the Buddha is the evolved amoeba, the amoeba was the involved Buddha." x