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When David sang, "Let God arise, and let his enemies be scattered; yea, let all his enemies be scattered!" he, poor brain-mind, was thinking of his triumphs over Philistines and the like; with whom he had better have been finding a way to peace; but the Soul behind him was thinking of its victories over him and his passions and his treacheries.
But on the other hand that very absence of brain-mind rule may imply Buddhic influences at work in quiet places; and one cannot tell what unknown graciousnesses may be happening, that our manvantaric livelinesses and commercialism quite forbid. . . . Believe me, if we understood the laws of history, we should waste a deal less time and sanity in yelling condemnations.
I think Liehtse has much to show us as to the difference between the methods of the Chinese and Western minds: the latter that must bring most truths down through the brain-mind, and set them forth decked in the apparel of reason; the former that is, as it seems to me, often rather childlike as to the things of the brain-mind; but has a way of bringing the great truths down and past the brain-mind by some circuitous route; or it may be only by a route much more direct than ours.
To turn to England again: Tennyson was, generally speaking, most successful when most he was content to be merely the artist in words, and least so when he assumed the office of Teacher; because almost all he found to teach was brain-mind scientific stuff; which was what the age called for, and the desired diet of Mid-Victorian England.
Apply the same kind of reasoning to brain-mind, body-mind relationship which anatomists and physiologists apply to other functions, and one can no longer separate body and mind. Interesting as is the relationship between mind and character and the brain, it is at the present overshadowed by the fascinating relationship between these psychical activities and the bodily organs.
As well to remember this, now that we are proposing, upon a brain-mind scheme, to arrange for ourselves what formerly the Law saw to: the nations that are now to be great and proud manditaries, shall sometime themselves be mandataried; and those that are mandataried now, shall then arrange their fate for them; there is no help for it: you cannot catch Spring in a trap, or cage up Summer lest he go.
Oh, on brain-mind lines you can trace no connexion; but then the plane of causes lies deeper than the brain-mind. But to Bodhidharma again. H. P. Blavatsky affirmed that Buddhism had an esoteric as well as an exoteric side: an affirmation that was of course disputed. But here is this from a Chinese writer quoted by Edkins: "Tathagata taught great truths and the causes of things.
Or briefly, Aristotle took what he could of Plato's inspiration, and turned it from the direction of the Soul to that of the Brain-mind. The most famous of Plato's disciples, he did what he could, or what he could not help doing, to spoil Plato's message. But Plato's method had guarded that, so that for mystics it should always be there, Aristotle or no.
The Chinaman presents his illumination as if it were nothing at all, just the simplest childish-foolish thing; nothing in the world for the brain-mind to get excited about. You take very little notice at the time: more of their quaint punchinello chinoiserie, you say. Three weeks after, you find that it was a clear voice from the supermundane, a high revelation.
Though Milton and Shakespeare made their grand Soul-Symbols, by virtue of a cosmic force moving them as it has moved no others in the language, you cannot find in their works, or in any works of that age, such clear perceptions or statements of spiritual truth as in Swinburne's Songs before Sunrise; nor was the brain-mind of either of those giants of the Middle Period capable of such conscious mystic thought as Wordsworth's.
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