- RECONCILIATION -
"Idealism and materialism," writes Weber in his History of Philosophy, "are extremes that meet." Let us get this concept thoroughly into our heads. The original Source or Principle or World-Ground cannot be conceived as mind or matter, but only as mind-matter. We cannot think of it as matter or energy, but only as matter-energy.
Science, analyzing matter into molecules, atoms, electrons and other still smaller particles, reduces the so-called solid object, a brick, a leaf, a human body, into an electron pattern, a wide-spaced mesh of incessant motion. What are these incredibly small particles, or waves or units, in themselves? Not matter or energy, but both as one. What is their origin? A universal magnetic field, an unconscious principle, a cosmic energy, force-matter? Are they differentiations of space or of ether? Are space and ether the same thing? All these terms are simply names for the Source - out of which matter and mind eventually appear.
We repeat this elementary philosophy because the conflict between the mind-idea and the matter-idea will not down. This conflict is a fiction of our own making, but people are forever troubled by it. Spiritualism, for example, is often called a form of materialism - to the indignation of spiritualists. But the term can stand, in the sense that spiritualism knows nothing of individual consciousness apart from a body or 'vehicle.' No difference how fine, tenuous, rarefied the etheric astral, mental, or spiritual bodies may be, they are still material. But then, these matter-particles are energy-particles also, and they issue from the same source as the life and consciousness which is associated with them. In the Absolute they are one, if the Absolute is unity.
We do not know what Absolute and unity 'really' mean; they are counters of speech, but we cannot avoid using them. But philosophy, religion, and scientific speculation all come out at these same concepts. They do not recognize eternal matter as set over against eternal spirit. But matter is spirit, and spirit (life, mind, energy) takes the form of matter, or appears as matter. The human mind prefers one mystery to two. If we start with a mind-matter duality we ask about its cause and origin - that is, we can not start with it. So, we postulate a unity - that is, make a necessary assumption. In it, mind and matter are identified.
Enterprising experimenters who weigh the soul, or etheric or astral matter, or analyze it into its chemical constituents, still go about trumpeting the triumph of materialism. This, of course, is mere childishness. Individualized life is always associated with a material vehicle. In the last analysis, both are sparks of the Divine Outpouring - or so we must conceive. They are two things, but they are one inside and outside of the same cup.
This naive dualism, neither good science nor good philosophy, is the root of the illusion of separateness, which the esotericist holds to be the foundation error of all others.
We are not inventing here any doctrine of our own, nor speaking ex cathedra, from any seat of authority. We are only repeating old familiar thoughts - which nevertheless seem to be unheard-of by those still fighting the battles of a false antithesis, of mind versus matter, or matter versus spirit.