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    The Evolution Of Thought: 9 Lessons
    The Evolution Of Thought: 9 Lessons
    The Evolution Of Thought: 9 Lessons
    Ebook100 pages1 hour

    The Evolution Of Thought: 9 Lessons

    By Thomas Parker Boyd

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    About this ebook

    Experience the life-changing power of Thomas Parker Boyd with this unforgettable book.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAndura Publishing
    Release dateOct 4, 2020
    ISBN9791220204163
    The Evolution Of Thought: 9 Lessons

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      Book preview

      The Evolution Of Thought - Thomas Parker Boyd

      The Evolution Of Thought (9 Lessons)

      Thomas Parker Boyd

      Contents

      Lecture One

      The Oriental Foundation of Thought

      A study of the work of the Indo-European mind reveals its tendency was toward the other side of life. The sources of all Philosophical Principles are found there. India has had hundreds of schools, all teaching the way of the One Idea, Brahm, or That, or God, and other terms for the Absolute Being. Most of these schools owe their existence to the various ways of explaining the phenomenal world in its relation to the noumenon or That.

      India, the fountainhead of philosophical thought, contains the whole history of philosophy in brief. The Vedas and Upanishads reference every philosophical conception that the Western mind has evolved.

      Spinoza reproduced almost exactly the conception of Hindu philosophy. They had worked out his ideas 2,000 years before him. They taught evolution more than 2,500 years before Darwin. Pythagoras, a father of philosophy, sojourned in India, and based his whole scheme of thought upon their system. Plato was full of Eastern thought, while Neo-Platonism and Christian Gnosticism owe much to India. The great thinkers of the past twenty-five centuries have gone over the same ground the Hindu thinkers canvassed more than thirty centuries ago.

      To understand Eastern philosophical thinking, one must remember that much of their thought exists only in oral teaching, and reading between the lines in printed books, which contain fundamental oppositions between the basic Hindu conceptions and those of the Christian Theologian.

      To the Eastern mind, Creation is unthinkable, since it involves the making of something out of nothing, and to them nothing comes from nothing. Everything that is, is either an eternal thing, or else it is a form, manifestation, appearance, emanation or phase of some eternal thing. Therefore they could see evolution as the only method of bringing the universe into appearance, because everything evolved was first involved.

      Again, a mortal thing can never become immortal by any means. An immortal thing must have always been immortal, or it can never become so. So that which begins must end. That which is born must die sometime, and everything that dies has been born sometime.

      Eternity must exist on both sides of the now, in fact now is but a point in eternity. So the Hindu concedes immortality to the soul only when they concede previous immortality.

      The Western tendency is to publish abroad every detail of its thought, even before leading minds accept them. The Eastern tendency is exactly opposite, and the sage or wise man reserved for himself and his close circle of students and followers the cream of the idea, deeming it too important to broadcast to an unthinking, unappreciative public. Their great body of inner teachings has grown in this way. The Western mind tends to take philosophy as a matter of intellectual diversion, which he does not bother to live up to, while the Easterner takes philosophy in the sense of religion itself, which he must live out in everyday life.

      The Hindu confines his speculation to the other side of Life, deeming it the only real one, while the physical and material world is essentially illusion, a thing of a moment, which begins to pass away while it is being formed. The Western mind tends to emphasize the material side of life, to promote material advancement and prosperity. In other words, the tendency of each is to be one-sided. The East leans to the I AM side, ignoring the I DO side. The West depends on the I DO side, almost entirely ignoring the I AM phase. The one regards the side of Being and ignores the side of Action. The other regards Action as the essential thing, ignoring the vital importance of Being.

      In India, the veil between the Visible and the Invisible is much thinner than in Western lands. The consequent mental and psychic atmosphere produces all sorts of growth, good and bad. The best philosophy and spiritual unfoldment dwells side by side with superstition, credulity, devil worship and frightful debasement of thought and practice. The noxious weeds grow in a tropical climate with fruits and flowers.

      Surprise and wonder fills us at the speculative achievement of those people, running back 100 centuries. Unquestionably they are the progenitors of the Aryan or Indo-European race, but legend shrouds their origin. One is that they are remnants of a high civilization in the region of the North pole, from where a cataclysm drove them, which changed it from a tropical to a polar climate.

      Another legend is that they are remnants of a high civilization in the great continent of Lemuria, now sunk in the Pacific Ocean. The legend states that many of them, under prophetic direction, took refuge in the higher altitudes, which in the cataclysm became islands, where they lived for centuries before finally migrating to the mainland. They found India inhabited by another people, also driven there by earth’s upheaval.

      Through all the centuries these people have survived. In this new world, like all pioneers, they lost much of the veneer of the old civilization. The old truths and knowledge were largely lost, and in its place tradition, legends, they handed down, as vague memories of the old teachings from one generation to another.

      They had gods and demigods, etc., but they never entirely lost the main idea of their philosophy: A great Universal One Absolute Being from whom all else emanated, and from whom the individual souls proceeded as sparks rising from the blazing fire. They taught the immortality of the soul, which was never born, which could never die, which was subject to rebirth, under a Universal Law of Cause and Effect.

      Even the idea of the One was at times dimmed under the conception of a great Nature Spirit, of which they were a part in some mysterious way. In spite of the variations, we are indebted to them for the Master Key to all philosophy, namely: The Reality and Being of One Universal Spirit Principle, from which all other life, being and principles were manifested by emanation, reflection or otherwise, which manifestations had their only Real Being in the One Source.

      Some 5,000 years before the Christian era, philosophical thought in India underwent a great revival of interest, under the leadership of really great thinkers of the time, called sages, or wise men. The Hindus claim that these were the reincarnations of ancient Masters. They laid the foundation for a philosophy of pure Reason, doing their work so well that while many philosophies have come and gone, the foundation of the sages remains, sound and unhurt, and is still the base upon which we build all philosophy, ancient or modern.

      The outline of their work follows:

      First, the sages bade their students to observe that nothing is constant, abiding, fixed and imperishable in the phenomenal aspect of nature and the universe. That is, it was not real in the sense we use the word, as in real estate, real property or realty. The phenomenal universe was not real in the philosophical sense of the word.

      Second, they bid the students recognize that something Real and substantial must lie underneath all the changing manifestations of the phenomenal universe, below the face or surface of that which occurred – the constant play of nature, force, and life, as the clouds passed before the blue sky

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