“We can measure exactly the speed with which the energies propagate
themselves, as, for example, the time required for light to reach us
from the moons of Jupiter.”
But this also is an erroneous conclusion.
Of course, the fact itself is beyond dispute. But the time here
mentioned does not represent the transmission-speed of the energies
themselves; it only informs us as to how much delay these have
encountered on their way; whether the halting-places have been very
numerous and the stay at each a long one. This time which the physicist
measures does not give the speed of transmission of the energies, but
only the time of their non-transmission.
In accord with this is the incorrectness of ordinary physical
terminology. The physicist calls light, heat, and so forth, energies
themselves. But light is not energy itself, but only a designation for
energies that lie for ever beyond our reach.
But once more I would call attention to the fact that this entire
manner of conceiving of things as “bodies,” and of movements as
energies themselves, is quite legitimate on the part of the physicist
so long as he remains a physicist. It only becomes illegitimate when,
reaching out beyond the field of reactions, it seeks to get itself
recognized as a world-theory--that is, when it would have actual
processes “read” in accordance with the like scheme. For now there
follows the claim one makes upon nature that all her action shall
manifest itself mediately, as possible of being followed up in time and
space.
The illegitimate feature about this conception arises from the fact
that it poses itself with an insoluble problem--the problem of
telekinesis.
If one regards things as “bodies” in the physical sense, and if upon
this conception one insists on erecting a world-theory, then one has
to solve the question: How can it ever be possible for action to take
place between separate bodies?--a question which involves the idea
that every effect produced by contact, even the very slightest, always
presents itself to thought as a form of telekinesis. In other words:
Everywhere effects are being produced, and yet one is unable to explain
how they can ever be brought about.
The insolubility of this problem is attributable not to things but
to thinking; that is to say, it is a problem of a purely dialectical
nature.
In starting out from the conception “body” as a thing complete
in itself, identical with itself, one cuts oneself off from the
possibility of ever being able to explain how one thing can act
upon another. In thought one has torn things out of their natural
connection, and holds them fast conceptually in this artificial
isolation. Once I make a thing a “body,” no power in the world can move
it so as to bring it into contact with some other thing; as little so
as any power in the world can impart movement to a reflected image,
taken by itself. Just as such movement can only be brought about
through movement of the object reflected, only from this can proceed,
so contact between things can only take place, proceeding forth from
the beholder, when he lets drop his false notions and comprehends
actuality unmodified as that which it is--namely, _perpetual coming
together into contact itself_. Actuality is verily nothing but the
passing over from thing to thing--that is to say, process. Actuality
is not, as science would fain have us believe, mere _possibility_--if
so, it would always be necessary first to have explained how these
possibilities could ever arrive at realization--but actuality is a
_potency_, and so, at every moment of existence, self-realization
itself.
If only actuality is rightly conceived of, the question as to how
action betwixt thing and thing can take place simply loses all meaning.
Actuality is seen to be nothing but this action itself. Where one is,
thither one cannot go; and what one is, that none can become.
When physics, and with it science as a whole, puts forward the claim
that all action must be capable of being tracked mediately in space and
time, it excludes itself from this requirement. For, without exception,
every case of action in its own domain is to be read as a special
instance of telekinesis. But be it well noted, the concepts, action by
contact and telekinesis, are not something existent in themselves; they
are merely intellectually-conceived functions of the purely artificial
concept “body.” Where this concept is absent, there is neither action
by contact nor yet telekinesis; there the whole universe, as a totality
of combustion-processes, is action itself, but tells us nothing
whatever as to how action can come about, or as to whether this action
is mediate or immediate.
_How_ action proceeds can never be comprehended from the observation
of reactions, though one should track these with never so much
perseverance and accuracy; that can only be ascertained where one is
acquainted with the energies themselves.
In all the world there is but _one single_ energy that is open to
approach--my own _in-force_ which _becomes_ perceptible to me in
consciousness. Thus the question as to how action itself proceeds
can never be answered on the lines of induction: it can only be
_experienced_.
When one asks the Theras of Ceylon for an illustration of how Kamma
passes over from one existence to the new location, the example of
teacher and pupil is that most frequently given. As instruction,
stimulation, pass over from teacher to pupil, with effects that last
throughout the latter’s entire lifetime, even so does Kamma pass over.
And just here we come upon something that lies too close at hand for
the ordinary person to give much heed to it. Nothing is more strange to
us than actuality--that is, than we ourselves!
As a matter of fact, life in its entirety, as it runs its course among
human beings, is such an instance of immediate effectuation. All
actuality is immediate: it is only _re-actuality_ that is mediate.
Wherever I actually am alive, I stand in the midst of such immediate
effectuations as mock at all scientific calculations.
When two pairs of eyes encounter one another and that springs up
which we call love or hate, as the case may be, this is an instance
of immediate passing over between two systems of energies. All forms
of mental excitement, all our numberless sympathies and antipathies;
the mutual understanding between man and man, between man and animal;
the unspoken self-revelation, self-discovery between man and wife;
the communion between mother and child;--all these are immediate
effectuations. Each possibility of one giving an order to another, of
one obeying another; all possibility of life in communities, animal
or human; every possibility of education, has its roots in such
immediate effectuations. But the very attempt to enumerate them tends
to beget the fallacious idea that they are the exceptions. It is not
so! All beings communicate with one another immediately. In immediate
effectuations we live, move, and have our being. But through the
re-actual apprehension of things inculcated by science our sense of
actuality has become so dwarfed and stunted that we no longer dare to
take actuality as itself; nay, we do not even know how to do so, but
are disposed to recognize it as such only when we can have it handed us
by some system of grains, feet, and seconds.
All unspoiled, natural thinking and feeling proceeds by way of
immediate effectuation. The never wholly-eradicable idea of magic, as
it still survives to-day--one last little remnant of it--in the form
of “_Sympathiekuren_,” is nothing else but the instinctive idea of the
necessity for such effectuation. How the nobleman of Capernaum would
have laughed if Professor X. had said to him, “When you say to your
servant, ‘Do this!’ and he does it, that seems to you quite a natural
thing. But in strict truth this fact simply bristles with insuperable
difficulties from the point of view of exact scientific explanation.”
It is the high privilege of our age to listen with becoming awe to
such-like profound absurdities just because the sense of actuality is
lost to us, because through the insistence and authority wherewith
science has been able to make her re-actual views prevail, we have
finally come to the point of believing in all seriousness that in the
actual, in things like eating and drinking, a proceeding indispensable
to their proper performance is carefully to count one, two, three!
Science dubs all immediate effectuations “mystical,” and refuses to
rest until she has extirpated all such-like ideas. But the mystical is
not that which science understands by the term; for to her the mystical
is nothing but the non-scientific. It is actuality itself that is
mystical. Apart from actuality there is nothing mystical whatever; for
it is only the actual, no matter where one lays hold of it, that rolls
back into the twilight of beginninglessness. Beginninglessness is what
is mystical, and my consciousness _the_ mystical itself. A miracle is
nothing mystical. For, if it happens, then it is law; and if it does
not happen--why, then it simply is not!
This immediate action of man upon man--this it is that reveals to me
how energies operate. When a glance from my eye produces a “stir” in
another human being, this energical impulse is not obliged to pass
through all the media lying between, but operates _immediately_. To
be sure, an attempt is made to read mechanically this fact also--to
interpret it in the form of psychic vibrations, subtlest etheric waves;
and science and theosophic, spiritistic, and all sorts of mysticism
here go hand in hand. But there is not the least necessity that it
should be a glance, a sound, or anything else of a positive nature
which moves another. A silence, a failure to look may ofttimes be that
which produces the most striking psychic convulsions. To interpret
this, however, as a case of transmigrating vibrations, were scarcely
possible even for the boldest of hypothesis-makers.
It is even so! That which is most natural is most strange to us. Here
too, as with “consciousness,” it is a case of _sapere aude!_ We simply
must learn again to dare to take actuality for that which it is--for
that which acts there where it can and must act.
When love springs up between two beings, this means that unique
attunement prevails. This, however, signifies that energy passes
over immediately. It has no need first to wrestle with air and ether
molecules: _it exists there only where it acts, and it acts there only
where it is uniquely attuned_.
This is the way in which actual energies operate. This way cannot be
proven inductively: it can only be experienced intuitively. And it is
this experience which supplies us with our parallel, our point of
support, in comprehending how Kamma works. And only because we have
lapsed out of this actual life into the re-actual life of science, has
the Kamma-teaching become strange and unnatural to us.
The value of an intuition to him who has not himself experienced it, is
only measurable by the extent to which it is of service as a working
hypothesis.
Of what service is the Buddha-thought here?
In the first place, it makes it possible to “read” both kinds of
motion, the inorganic as well as the organic, the falling as well as
the proceeding, from one common point of view.
Where the whole _actual_ play of world-events is a summation of
self-sustaining processes, existence is action itself; and the simple
existence of an energical, of a Kammic system, purports that it makes
itself felt with regard to other systems of energies--sustains itself
in opposition to them. Actuality is devouring: man in his very nature
an eater.
Where there are a number of energical systems, they act against one
another. Where there is action, the corresponding reactions are present
in the shape of motions perceptible to sense.
These latter, here also, signify nothing save that energies are
present, and as such are at work according to circumstances and
antecedent conditions.
When two men, in wrestling with each other, fall into a whirling
movement, this by no means implies that there resides in these men
an energy of this particular variety; it means nothing more than
that energies are present, even as the circular movement of two
electro-magnets intimates nothing more than that energies are present.
Here also motion is only a by-product, the equivalent of the shadow in
the case of light--nothing in and of itself. When the flower unfolds
itself to the sun, when the creeper draws itself up towards the light,
when the caterpillar crawls along the leaf, when the wild geese cleave
the air like a wedge, when the dog snaps at the tit-bit, when I lift
my arm, lie down, get up, do this or the other thing--in each case it
is the same. All this only intimates that energies are present, and
in the course of their action against other systems of energies yield
by-products. In this mode of apprehending the fact “motion” as the
_shadow of energy_ the entire play of world-events, organic as well as
inorganic nature, the dead as the living, the re-actual as the actual,
admits of one uniform reading.