One Cosmic Mind

"Unenlightened man, being far from the Full Awakening, believes himself to be possessed of an individualized mind uniquely his own; and this illusion-based belief has given rise to the doctrine of soul. But the Tibetan Teachers declare that the One Cosmic Mind alone is unique; that, on each of the incalculable myriads of life-bearing orbs throughout space, the One Cosmic Mind is differentiated only illusorily, by means of a reflected, or subsidiary, mind appropriate to, and common to, all living things thereon, as on the planet Earth.[...]

 ...mankind are a unit of mental illusions. If men were not mentally one, there would be no collective hallucination of the world. If each microcosmic manifestation of mind in each apparently individualized being were a separate mind, it would have its own distinctive illusory world; no two men would see the world the same. It is because mankind’s minds, or consciousness, are collectively one that all mankind see the same world of phenomenal appearances, the same mountains, the same rivers and oceans, the same clouds and rainbows, the same colours, hear the same sounds, smell the same odours, taste the same tastes, and feel the same sensations.

 Thus, there is the illusory one mind, conscious and unconscious, common to all human beings, and in which all subhuman creatures of the Earth share. Upon this collectivity of mind, man’s sciences are based; it gives uniformity and continuity to all human knowledge.

 This illusory one mind, common to all mankind, in its conscious and unconscious aspects, directs mankind’s activities and shapes all mankind’s concepts. It is unconscious motivation; it controls the unitary instinct governing the life of a beehive, or of an ant colony, or flock of birds, or herd of wild animals. In its lower, or brutish, aspects, it manifests itself in the oneness of the irrational thinking and behavior of a rioting mob.

 Earth’s multitude of human and sub-human creatures, each of them like a single cell, collectively constitute the body of one multicellular organism, mentally illuminated by the One Cosmic Mind. We are, as St. Paul perceived, all members of One Body; or, as the Mahayana likewise teaches, other and self are identical. It is because of what the Buddha designates as Ignorance, or lack of right seeing into the facts of incarnate being, that mankind fail to practice the Golden Rule. Instead of mutual helpfulness, or co-operation, we behold man’s inhumanity to man, his wars amongst the members of his own body, against himself.

 It is only by transcending man’s collective hallucination, the hereditary and racial Ignorance which fetters man to the illusory, the transitory and the lowly, that the Seers behold the absolute at-one-ment not only of mankind and of every living thing here on the planet Earth, but of the Cosmos, as a whole. Behind all these illusory appearances, behind all personality, behind all mind and matter, man should seek the undifferentiated Thatness, the Unborn, the Unshaped, the Qualityless, the Non-Cognizable, the Unpredicable [sic], beyond what those fettered to Ignorance know as soul, or consciousness, or existence."*



*Evans-Wentz, Walter Yeeling (1954). The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation: The Method of Realizing Nirvana Through Knowing The Mind. New York: Oxford University Press.