6.2 The World of the Mind

The human body has been described as a vehicle for carrying a bag of tools. I sent for a California carpenter the other day. He arrived in an ancient Ford, from which he brought out a very modern kit-box containing at least a hundred tools. In the human body we find legs with which to carry the rest of the outfit about, arms to work with and alter the world, and senses to see what those things are. This carpenter operates in an immense world, but attends to a very small part of it - he sees only a small portion, and works only on a bit of that.

The world is full of a number of things - as somebody mildly expressed it. The senses at any moment present a quantity of these to me. I cannot grasp all these at once, but to have clarity and sanity I must confine my attention to only a very few of them. Here at my writing table, if I lean back, I see shelves bearing books in English and books in Sanskrit, iron document boxes, cardboard envelope boxes, bundles of papers - lecture notes, letters, bills (all paid, permit me to say) - spare office tools such as pencils and clips, a door with locks and handles, a window with all its glass and wood and hardware, and, through its glass, some trees outside, and just beyond them thousands of red and green and white lights of Hollywood, spread out below, and further away the light haze of the City of Los Angeles reflecting itself in the evening sky, where too, there are some moving lights of airplanes and swinging beams of searchlights turned up into the atmosphere. Within the window there are still other things; walls, ornaments, pictures. Immediately in front is my writing table with a litter (my wife says it is untidy, but I say it is only a contiguity!) of papers, books, letters, pens, pencils; inkstand, rubbers, scissors, stamps, glasses, and, pleasing to relate, some money, though not too much. I see also - I nearly forgot this - some part of the floor beneath and near the table, with carpets, waste basket and - I confess it - some papers to both right and left thrown into grocery cartons on the floor, awaiting my attention.

Oh, what a lot of things. And what varied and multitudinous stories each one of them could tell. I think I could write about them for a thousand years without rising from this chair - yet I have spoken only of what my eyes bring to me. There is hearing too - the ticking of the clock, the distant sounds of motor-cars, and a faint barking of dogs, sounds of someone moving and making culinary noises in the kitchen about fifty feet away, and some singing in my ears (now I think of it), I have not spoken of smell and touch, but in the latter field there is the feel of the pen in my hand, my forearms on the edge of the table, my behind on the seat of the chair, and, almost all over, various small sensations related to clothing - when I attend to them - from shoes to shirt. I feel my eyes blinking, my nose tickling, and verily, a faint creaking in my unmoving joints.

And I - poor little fellow - must miss most of this wealth of life and story, look at a sheet of paper, and allow my hand to trace signs thereon in obedience to a flow of ideas.

Ideas! Ah, there is another of those worlds. We call it an inner world of the mind. Is it a world? Who knows? I seem to pluck ideas and often even new knowledge from some inner world. It does not appear that I make them, but rather that I see them. I find it hard to credit to my own thinking or memory many of these ideas. Looking thus at what is taking place in what I call my life within my mind, I see that there is a great similarity to the world of the senses called the outer world. Here also I am looking and picking among a great quantity of objects. As I have traveled about in the material world and at every moment been confronted by a myriad of objects all spreading a table of riches before me, uprising from the minds and actions of all living beings, with all their uncharted riches, so also it seems. as if I have traveled in a world of ideas - as thick and numerous and as infinitely various as objects of the material world and that all the time I am only looking and picking, looking to pick and picking to look, and I am only the looker-on at all these things and thoughts.

It is as if there were a vast region of true ideas, some of which I now know through the instrumentality of my mind, but most of which remains for me the apparently unlimited unknown. In that world also I have a vehicle, albeit unmoving; by my will it ``travels about'' in the world of thought, pursues a course of mental life, just as my body lives and moves about in the outer world. That vehicle is the mind, the focus of my consciousness for mental things. Let us take another simile and say that this mental body, in which I am able to attend to ideas, is like a little fish swimming about in a vast ocean of ideas, and there seeing and informing me of what comes within the range of its limited faculties. It cannot see beyond a short range; it cannot leap through space; it must travel through intermediate points to pass from one place to another, from one idea to another.