THE DORE LECTURES ON MENTAL SCIENCE(脑科学讲座)

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THE DORE LECTURES ON MENTAL SCIENCE

THE DORE LECTURES

ON MENTAL SCIENCE

by Thomas Troward

THE DORE LECTURES ON MENTAL SCIENCE

ENTERING INTO THE SPIRIT OF IT INDIVIDUALITY THE

NEW THOUGHT AND THE NEW ORDER THE LIPS OF THE SPIRIT

ALPHA AND OMEGA THE CREATIVE POWER OF THOUGHT

THE GREAT AFFIRMATIVE CHRIST THE FULFILLING OF THE

LAW THE STORY OF EDEN THE WORSHIP OF ISHI THE

SHEPHERD AND THE STONE SALVATION IS OF THE JEWS

FOREWORD.

The addresses contained in this volume were delivered by me at the

Dore Gallery, Bond Street, London, on the Sundays of the first three

months of the present year, and are now published at the kind request of

many of my hearers, hence their title of "The Dore Lectures." A number of

separate discourses on a variety of subjects necessarily labours under the

disadvantage of want of continuity, and also under that of a liability to the

frequent repetition of similar ideas and expressions, and the reader will, I

trust, pardon these defects as inherent in the circumstances of the work. At

the same time it will be found that, although not specially so designed,

there is a certain progressive development of thought through the dozen

lectures which compose this volume, the reason for which is that they all

aim at expressing the same fundamental idea, namely that, though the laws

of the universe can never be broken, they can be made to work under

special conditions which will produce results that could not be produced

under the conditions spontaneously provided by nature. This is a simple

scientific principle and it shows us the place which is occupied by the

personal factor, that, namely, of an intelligence which sees beyond the

present limited manifestation of the Law into its real essence, and which

thus constitutes the instru-mentality by which the infinite possibilities of

the Law can be evoked into forms of power, usefulness, and beauty.

The more perfect, therefore, the working of the personal factor, the

greater will be the results developed from the Universal Law; and hence

our lines of study should be two-fold--on the one hand the theoretical

study of the action of Universal Law, and on the other the practical fitting

of ourselves to make use of it; and if the present volume should assist any

reader in this two-fold quest, it will have answered its purpose.

THE DORE LECTURES ON MENTAL SCIENCE

The different subjects have necessarily been treated very briefly, and

the addresses can only be considered as suggestions for lines of thought

which the reader will be able to work out for himself, and he must

therefore not expect that careful elabora-tion of detail which I would

gladly have bestowed had I been writing on one of these subjects

exclusively. This little book must be taken only for what it is, the record of

somewhat fragmentary talks with a very indulgent audience, to whom I

gratefully dedicate the volume.

JUNE 5, 1909.

T.T.

THE DORE LECTURES ON MENTAL SCIENCE

ENTERING INTO THE SPIRIT

OF IT.

We all know the meaning of this phrase in our everyday life. The Spirit

is that which gives life and movement to anything, in fact it is that which

causes it to exist at all. The thought of the author, the impression of the

painter, the feeling of the musician, is that without which their works

could never have come into being, and so it is only as we enter into the

IDEA which gives rise to the work, that we can derive all the enjoyment

and benefit from it which it is able to bestow. If we cannot enter into the

Spirit of it, the book, the picture, the music, are meaningless to us: to

appreciate them we must share the mental attitude of their creator. This is

a universal principle; if we do not enter into the Spirit of a thing, it is dead

so far as we are concerned; but if we do enter into it we reproduce in

ourselves the same quality of life which called that thing into existence.

Now if this is a general principle, why can we not carry it to a higher

range of things? Why not to the highest point of all? May we not enter into

the originating Spirit of Life itself, and so reproduce it in ourselves as a

perennial spring of livingness? This, surely, is a question worthy of our

careful consideration.

The spirit of a thing is that which is the source of its inherent

movement, and therefore the question before us is, what is the nature of

the primal moving power, which is at the back of the endless array of life

which we see around us, our own life included? Science gives us ample

ground for saying that it is not material, for science has now, at least

theoretically, reduced all material things to a primary ether, universally

distributed, whose innumerable particles are in absolute equilibrium;

whence it follows on mathematical grounds alone that the initial

movement which began to concentrate the world and all material

substances out of the particles of the dispersed ether, could not have

originated in the particles themselves. Thus by a necessary deduction from

THE DORE LECTURES ON MENTAL SCIENCE

the conclusions of physical science, we are compelled to realize the

presence of some immaterial power capable of separating off certain

specific areas for the display of cosmic activity, and then building up a

material universe with all its inhabitants by an orderly sequence of

evolution, in which each stage lays the foundation for the development of

the stage, which is to follow--in a word we find ourselves brought face to

face with a power which exhibits on a stupendous scale, the faculties of

selection and adaptation of means to ends, and thus distributes energy and

life in accordance with a recognizable scheme of cosmic progression. It is

therefore not only Life, but also Intelligence, and Life guided by

Intelligence becomes Volition. It is this primary originating power which

we mean when we speak of "The Spirit," and it is into this Spirit of the

whole universe that we must enter if we would reproduce it as a spring of

Original Life in ourselves.

Now in the case of the productions of artistic genius we know that we

must enter into the movement of the creative mind of the artist, before we

can realize the principle which gives rise to his work. We must learn to

partake of the feeling, to find expression for which is the motive of his

creative activity. May we not apply the same principle to the Greater

Creative Mind with which we are seeking to deal? There is something in

the work of the artist which is akin to that of original creation. His work,

literary, musical, or graphic is original creation on a miniature scale, and

in this it differs from that of the engineer, which is constructive, or that of

the scientist which is analytical; for the artist in a sense creates something

out of nothing, and therefore starts from the stand-point of simple feeling,

and not from that of a pre-existing necessity. This, by the hypothesis of the

case, is true also of the Parent Mind, for at the stage where the initial

movement of creation takes place, there are no existing conditions to

compel action in one direction more than another. Consequently the

direction taken by the creative impulse is not dictated by outward

circumstances, and the primary movement must therefore be entirely due

to the action of the Original Mind upon itself; it is the reaching out of this

Mind for realization of all that it feels itself to be. The creative process

thus in the first instance is purely a matter of feeling--exactly what we

THE DORE LECTURES ON MENTAL SCIENCE

speak of as "motif" in a work of art.

Now it is this original feeling that we need to enter into, because it is

the fons et origo of the whole chain of causation which subsequently

follows. What then can this original feeling of the Spirit be? Since the

Spirit is Life-in-itself, its feeling can only be for the fuller expression of

Life--any other sort of feeling would be self-destructive and is therefore

inconceivable. Then the full expression of Life implies Happiness, and

Happiness implies Harmony, and Harmony implies Order, and Order

implies Proportion, and Proportion implies Beauty; so that in recognizing

the inherent tendency of the Spirit towards the production of Life, we can

recognise a similar inherent tendency to the production of these other

qualities also; and since the desire to bestow the greater fulness of joyous

life can only be described as Love, we can sum up the whole of the feeling

which is the original moving impulse in the Spirit as Love and Beauty--the

Spirit finding expression through forms of beauty in centres of life, in

harmonious reciprocal relation to itself. This is a generalized statement of

the broad principle by which Spirit expands from the innermost to the

outermost, in accordance with a Law of tendency inherent in itself.

It sees itself, as it were, reflected in various centres of life and energy,

each with its appropriate form; but in the first instance these reflections

can have no existence except within the originating Mind. They have their

first beginning as mental images, so that in addition to the powers of

Intelligence and Selection, we must also realise that of Imagination as

belonging to the Divine Mind; and we must picture these powers as

working from the initial motive of Love and Beauty.

Now this is the Spirit that we need to enter into, and the method of

doing so is a perfectly logical one. It is the same method by which all

scientific advance is made. It consists in first observing how a certain law

works under the conditions spontaneously provided by nature, next in

carefully considering what principle this spontaneous working indicates,

and lastly deducing from this how the same principle would act under

specially selected conditions, not spontaneously provided by nature.

The progress of shipbuilding affords a good example of what I mean.

Formerly wood was employed instead of iron, because wood floats in

THE DORE LECTURES ON MENTAL SCIENCE

water and iron sinks; yet now the navies of the world are built of iron;

careful thought showed the law of floatation to be that anything could float

which, bulk for bulk, is lighter than the mass of liquid displaced by it; and

so we now make iron float by the very same law by which it sinks,

because by the introduction of the PERSONAL factor, we provide

conditions which do not occur spontaneously--according to the esoteric

maxim that "Nature unaided fails." Now we want to apply the same

process of specializing a generic Law to the first of all Laws, that of the

generic life-giving tendency of Spirit itself. Without the element of

INDIVIDUAL PERSONALITY the Spirit can only work cosmically by a

GENERIC Law; but this law admits of far higher specialization, and this

specialization can only be attained through the introduction of the personal

factor. But to introduce this factor the individual must be fully aware of

the PRINCIPLE which underlies the spontaneous or cosmic action of the

law. Where, then, will he find this principle of Life? Certainly not by

contemplating Death. In order to get a principle to work in the way we

require it to, we must observe its action when it is working spon"

taneously in this particular direction. We must ask why it goes in the right

direction as far as it does--and having learnt this we shall then be able to

make it go further. The law of floatation was not discovered by

contemplating the sinking of things, but by contemplating the floating of

things which floated naturally, and then intelligently asking why they did

so.

The knowledge of a principle is to be gained by the study of its

affirmative action; when we understand THAT we are in a position to

correct the negative conditions which tend to prevent that action.

Now Death is the absence of Life, and disease is the absence of health,

so to enter into the Spirit of Life we require to contemplate it, where it is

to be found, and not where it is not- -we are met with the old question,

"Why seek ye the living among the dead?" This is why we start our studies

by considering the cosmic creation, for it is there that we find the Life

Spirit working through untold ages, not merely as deathless energy, but

with a perpetual advance into higher degrees of Life. If we could only so

enter into the Spirit as to make it personally IN OURSELVES what it

THE DORE LECTURES ON MENTAL SCIENCE

evidently is in ITSELF, the magnum opus would be accomplished. This

means realizing our life as drawn direct from the Originating Spirit; and if

we now understand that the Thought or Imagination of the Spirit is the

great reality of Being, and that all material facts are only correspondences,

then it logically follows that what we have to do is to maintain our

individual place in the Thought of the Parent Mind.

We have seen that the action of the Originating Mind must needs be

GENERIC, that is according to types which include multitudes of

individuals. This type is the reflection of the Creative Mind at the level of

that particular GENIUS; and at the human level it is Man, not as

associated with particular circumstances, but as existing in the absolute

ideal.

In proportion then as we learn to dissociate our conception of

ourselves from particular circumstances, and to rest upon our ABSOLUTE

nature, as reflections of the Divine ideal, we, in our turn, reflect back into

the Divine Imagination its original conception of itself as expressed in

generic or typical Man, and so by a natural law of cause and effect, the

individual who realizes this mental attitude enters permanently into the

Spirit of Life, and it becomes a perennial fountain of Life springing up

spontaneously within him.

He then finds himself to be as the Bible says, "the image and likeness

of God." He has reached the level at which he affords a new starting point

for the creative process, and the Spirit, finding a personal centre in him,

begins its work de nova, having thus solved the great problem of how to

enable the Universal to act directly upon the plane of the Particular.

It is in this sense, as affording the requisite centre for a new departure

of the creative Spirit, that man is said to be a "microcosm," or universe in

miniature; and this is also what is meant by the esoteric doctrine of the

Octave, of which I may be able to speak more fully on some other

occasion.

If the principles here stated are carefully considered, they will be

found to throw light on much that would otherwise be obscure, and they

will also afford the key to the succeeding essays.

The reader is therefore asked to think them out carefully for himself,

THE DORE LECTURES ON MENTAL SCIENCE

and to note their connection with the subject of the next article.

THE DORE LECTURES ON MENTAL SCIENCE

INDIVIDUALITY.

Individuality is the necessary complement of the Universal Spirit,

which was the subject of our consideration last Sunday. The whole

problem of life consists in finding the true relation of the individual to the

Universal Originating Spirit; and the first step towards ascertaining this is

to realize what the Universal Spirit must be in itself. We have already done

this to some extent, and the conclusions we have arrived at are:--

That the essence of the Spirit is Life, Love, and Beauty.

That its Motive, or primary moving impulse, is to express the Life,

Love and Beauty which it feels itself to be.

That the Universal cannot act on the plane of the Particular except by

becoming the particular, that is by expression through the individual.

If these three axioms are clearly grasped, we have got a solid

foundation from which to start our consideration of the subject for to-day.

The first question that naturally presents itself is,

If these things be so, why does not every individual express the life,

love, and beauty of the Universal Spirit? The answer to this question is to

be found in the Law of Consciousness. We cannot be conscious of

anything except by realizing a certain relation between it and ourselves. It

must affect us in some way, otherwise we are not conscious of its

existence; and according to the way in which it affects us we recognize

ourselves as standing related to it. It is this self-recognition on our own

part carried out to the sum total of all our relations, whether spiritual,

intellectual, or physical, that constitutes our realization of life. On this

principle, then, for the REALIZATION of its own Livingness, the

production of centres of life, through its relation to which this conscious

realization can be attained, becomes a necessity for the Originating Mind.

Then it follows that this realization can only be complete where the

individual has perfect liberty to withhold it; for otherwise no true

realization could have taken place. For instance, let us consider the

working of Love. Love must be spontaneous, or it has no existence at all.

We cannot imagine such a thing as mechanically induced love. But

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