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UNIT 8

Questions 22 – 27

PASSAGE I

The function of the brain and nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative and
not productive. Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever
happened to him or herself and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the
universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being
overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by
shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and
leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful.

According to this theory, each one of us is potentially Mind at Large. But in so far as we

are animals, our business is at all costs to survive. To make biological survival possible, Mind
at Large has to be funnelled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system.
What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will
help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet.

To formulate and express the contents of this reduced awareness, humankind has invented

and endlessly elaborated those symbol-systems and implicit philosophies which we call
languages. Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic
tradition into which he or she has been born — the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives
access to the accumulated records of other people’s experience, the victim in so far as it
confirms him or her in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it
bedevils the sense of reality, so that he or she is all too apt to take the concepts for data, or
words for actual things. That which, in the language of religion, is called ‘this world’ is the
universe of reduced awareness, expressed and, as it were, petrified by language. The various
‘other worlds’ with which human beings erratically make contact are so many elements in the
totality of the awareness belonging to Mind at Large.

Most people, most of the time, know only what comes through the reducing valve and is

consecrated as genuinely real by the local language. Certain persons, however, seem to be
born with a kind of by-pass that circumvents the reducing valve. In others temporary
by-passes may be acquired either spontaneously, or as the result of deliberate ‘spiritual
exercises’, or through hypnosis, or by means of drugs. Through these permanent or
temporary by-passes there flows, not indeed the perception ‘of everything that is happening
everywhere in the universe’ (for the by-pass does not abolish the reducing valve, which still
excludes the total content of Mind at Large), but something more than, and above all
something different from, the carefully selected utilitarian material which our narrowed,
individual minds regard as a complete, or at least sufficient, picture of reality.

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