MIND OVER MATTER - An essay by William H. Eddy donated by Marvin

MIND OVER MATTER

I used to ask my students at the University of Vermont to list the resources that would be crucial to our future survival as a species. As most of us would, they responded by naming things such as water, soil, clean air, or oil. If they were questioned as to why they didn’t include such important resources as courge, commitment, or honesty, they would say that these were not “natural” resources. Even if they could understand that honesty might possibly be as crucial a part of environmental quality as clean air, they still remained skeptical about its being a natural resource. For them, as for most of us, the environment, along with all of nature and its resources, is “outside, over there”, separate from us.
So deeply ingrained is this habit of our thinking that it has become an unexamined belief – one that unconsciously shapes our entire perception of what we call nature. And when we discover that we share that habit of thinking in common with many other people in our culture, we describe it simply as “common sense”. And for us that’s the way the world really is. The underlying premesis remain unquestioned because we aren’t conscious of them.
Let’s look at another habit of thinking.
Imagine we were to take a walk in the woods. We might find ourselves crossing a narrow stream, and there we notice that ten or twelve stones have been removed from the stream and laid by the side of the path in the shape of an arrow. Clearly someone has done this, and so we feel no hesitation in arguing that the arrow of stones is a manifestation of the mind. It is not the individual stones themselves that reveal the presense of mind. We would say it was their pattern. But then if looked to either side of the stone arrow, we might see a tree. We would be able to identify it, too, by its pattern of bark, its leaf shape, and even its overall outline. But it would never occur to us to suggest that its pattern was a manifestation of mind. We would say it was an object.
For us, mind is assumed to be something contained in our heads. And while we would perhaps agree that our heads and our bodies are objects like the tree, we would insist there is something more inside us that is not just object. So strong is this conviction that we resent it when hospitals, airlines, and governments treat us as if we were only objects. We insist that we be treated as people – that unique combination of object and mind. But it never occurs to us to attribute this same dual nature to nature herself. For us nature is only object, whether the nature to which we refer is maple tree, atom or galaxy.
There are two unquestioned assumptions on which we base this belief. The first is that mind, our mind, evolved over millions of years out of mindless matter. And the second assumption is that mind is limited to humans and a few of the higher animals.
All around us everyday we see countless objects that are manifestations of mind: computers, screwdrivers, books, houses, cars, television sets, and scud missiles. And while our senses perceive them as separate and distinct from us, we can perhaps understand, when we stop to think about it, that they came into existence only through mind – our mind. But we find it almost impossible to entertain the idea that the maple tree by the path, or the frog in the stream, or even we ourselves are products of mind. These, we say, are the result of mindless evolution, shaped by a randomly operating process called natural selection. And when we say this we forget thet the concept of evolution itself is a product of mind – a way of thinking that must precede our capacity to see nature in that particular way. And to further confound our certainty about what is object and what is mind – of what is outside and what is inside – today we are told by particle physicists that the ultimate constituents of all matter appear not as objects but as energy fields – states of being which, in some instances we are told, have no mass and cannot be said even to occupy space.
I am reminded of a comment made earlier this century by Sir James Jean, the respescted physicist, astronomer, and mathematician. “Today,” he said “there is wide agreement…that the stream of knowledge is heading toward a non-mechanical reality; the universe,” he concluded, “begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine.”
Perhaps we could say this is just another illustration of the power of “mind over matter”.

- William H. Eddy,
Author of 'The other side of the world'