THIS and THAT
THIS and THAT
by Alvin Boyd Kuhn, Ph. D.
* Electronically typed and edited by Juan Schoch for educational research purposes from New Outlook, circa 1950s. This notice is not to be removed.
The title of this article could be misleading. Instead of dealing with minor or trivial matters, it treats of the two most important things in the realm of Being, to wit, the unmanifest invisible and the manifest visible worlds.
The two common demonstrative adjectives which we so constantly use to indicate what is near to us or more remote in place or time, stand in a most prominent position in the systems of profound ancient philosophy from which the notable movement of modern esoteric cultism has sprung. Their usage accentuates in the simplest possible way the ideas underlying the constitution of the universe and the cosmic procedure in its creation. When in the deep Hindu spiritual philosophy one encounters the recurring asseveration, “Thou art That,” one is face to face with a statement of one's own nature and being that challenges the profoundest efforts of the human mind for adequate realization. It is a declaration of man's identity with the universe that can hardly be less than startling when apprehended even in the slightest degree of its full realistic force. It seems to stand in flat contradiction of the invincible naive conviction that one is separate and distinct from the outer world. It amounts to the positive denial of one's separate individuality, asserting that this sense of separateness is illusory and that a conscious being like man is the same in essence as the objective world which he so sharply distinguishes from himself.
What it vividly clarifies for thought is the identity of the two basic elements, or one might say, ingredients that together make up the total of Real Being. As found so pointedly stated in ancient truth-systems, these two are consciousness and matter, or energy; the two latter now being found to be one. The further and surprising revelation that the two distinct poles of dual being, consciousness and energy, are likewise one, is the truth that arcane wisdom asks us to realize. It heads up in the affirmation that consciousness and matter are not two different things, but two aspects of the one Thing, that in fact the universe is the production of the energy that is consciousness. The conception dissolves the human idea that the material world is apart from consciousness. It makes the objective world a play of consciousness itself.
But since to the human sense the material world of things does not appear to be a conscious entity, or to manifest consciousness, philosophy has been led to designate man's apperception of his world as “illusion.” Man's thought insists on separating himself and his consciousness from the external universe, when in reality they are one and the same; and this is his illusion. The whole of Being is One, but man makes it two. Human mentality is apparently forced to erect a positive distinction between consciousness, the subjective phase of Being, and matter, its objective presentation. Philosophy asserts that this distinction is purely the product of man's limitation of view, and not true absolutely. If man was dowered with cosmic omniscience, the distinction would vanish from him, asserts philosophy. Man sees the world in its duality; Omniscience sees it in its unity, or comprehends it under both aspects at once and harmoniously. When philosophy speaks of the possibility of our viewing creation from that high level of Omniscience, they term it sub specie aeternitatis, that is, under the view of its eternality.
The acceptance of this philosophical determination can, however, breed confusion, and apparently has done so. It is quite important to realize in this context that while recondite philosophy has been practically unanimous in holding to this view of the illusory character of human thinking (the Hindus call it maya), nevertheless it is a mistake to conclude that therefore man's illusory experience here is a falsity or a deception. This conclusion has gone so far in popular cult systems that it has bred delusion where none was legitimately to be engendered. The loose mental identification of illusion with delusion has wrought great harm in the psychological life of modern “spiritual” cultists. Illusion has unwittingly been taken by uncritical devotees of occult philosophies in the sense and with all the implications of delusion. The persuasion has been fixed in group minds that the experience in this realm of life was deceiving man, claiming to be real when it was only a sham appearance of reality. Reality was to be found, not in this sensory life, but in a metaphysical, or transcendental reality behind the outer mask. To sum it up in the two words of our title, this was unreal, illusion; that was the truly real.
It is an essential for the enlightened thinking of any person wishing to be intelligent about basic truth to comprehend that there are indeed these two worlds, the one wholly subjective in cosmic thought, the other objective to the consciousness perceiving it. Also it is well to know that practically the whole, or certainly the chief, debate that has divided all philosophy over the centuries has centered on the question as to which of the two worlds is the world of reality. Materialist thought has uniformly maintained that this objective world is the real essence of Being; idealists contrarily have declared that other world and its ideas to be the only reality. An idea in cosmic mind, the latter assert, is more real than a material object in our world. Material universes will be dissolved and pass away; the divine idea is the eternal immutable substance of the real universe.
There are these two worlds of Being, and a good deal for any mortal in the way of happiness or its opposite depends on a sound grasp of their nature and relationship. The error that has blinded thought and brought confusion has been in attempting to attribute reality to either one while withholding it from the other. The obvious folly of this one-sided view is seen to lie in its denial of reality to anything that is. If a thing is, it must be real. It is real for what it is. One should not attempt to make it real for something it does not claim or pretend to be. A mirage of a distant city is real, but as a mirage, not as a city. A reflection is real, but not as the thing mirrored. A ghost may be real, but not as a living person.
That world of cosmic ideation is real as a noumenal, or thought energy creating idea-forms. It is hardly real as object palpable to perceiving creatures limited to sensory faculties. Likewise the objects of the physical world are real, being thought structures materialized in concrete substance. They started out as noumena, but became phenomena (from Greek phaino, “to appear”). Originating as invisible ideas in cosmic mind, they have now been clothed in matter and have appeared in our world, like a mass of invisible vapor in the sky that becomes condensed to visibility. From the point of view of creative mind the ideas are “This;” after being materialized they become “That.” They were first interior, as are our thoughts; when clothed in matter they became exteriorized. But it is man who is using the two terms; and so to him the perceptible world here is “This,” and the cosmic ideograms are “That.” It is in this reference that the two terms are employed in the Zohar, the Kabalistic work of the Jews, and other ancient writings.
The words for “this” in the Hebrew language are interesting enough to claim our attention here. The masculine form is zeh, the feminine is zoth. As the feminine always represents the matter aspect of creation, zoth is more generally used in reference to this objective world. Oddly enough it is made up of the last letters in each of three great alphabets: Z (English); O (Greek); and TH (Hebrew). It is most singular that the “This” which the word connotes is precisely the last stage in the act of creation. It is the final act in bringing an ideaform out to concrete manifestation in an objective world. “This” is “that” which creation has generated and set out in its final reality as a perceptible thing, to be sensibly viewed and delighted in. God is said to have looked upon his creation when he had finished it, and pronounced it good. (So many orthodox and cult ideologies have ventured to pronounce it evil in disagreement with him.)
On the other hand we find another term used by ancient and medieval occultists to designate the primordial force of creative mind which would be considered to be related to the realm of “That,” as the unmanifest or purely noumenal world, and not allocated to the world that we call “This.” The word is AZOTH, which apparently is the zoth of the Hebrew, prefixed with the alpha privative (A-), meaning “not.” In effect it says or reads: “not This,”—but “That.” It is “That” primal thought energy which eventuates in the creation of the visible objective “This.”
Ancient philosophy, particularly the Jewish occultism, spoke much of the upper world as the “undisclosed,” and the world here as the “disclosed.” Unmanifest and manifest are equivalent terms. Paul speaks of the things of the unseen world as being more wonderful than those seen here. How closely common thought reflects this division in our everyday references to “this world here” and “that over there!”
Philosophy and esoteric reflection are too generally regarded as abstruse and recondite matters for the studious alone. Life confronts every mind with its basic problems. In our commonest daydreaming we often probe deepest after truth and understanding. The most erudite philosopher only delves more deeply into the reflections of the most ordinary thinker.
If a curt moral might be attached to the essay, it would be that if the human mind is ever to know “That” noumenal world of God's ideas, it can learn most truly its form and nature by studying its reflection, or its manifestation in “This” world, where cosmic ideas have become visible. In the words of the Jewish Talmud, “If thou wilt know the invisible (world) open wide thine eyes on the visible.” If thou wouldst know “That,” observe and pry deeply into “This.”