Reference: Book III: What is the Mind Really?
The mind is often described as something that exists “inside” a person, looking out upon an “external” world. This ordinary picture divides reality into two regions: an inner world of thoughts, feelings, and perceptions, and an outer world of objects, bodies, and events. But this division may be more a habit of interpretation than a fact of experience. A more unified view begins with the idea that there are not two worlds—internal and external—but one universe appearing within consciousness.
From this perspective, the mind is not a private container sealed off from reality. It is a function of awareness through which the universe becomes intelligible, coherent, and whole.
One Universe of Substance
There are no separate external and internal worlds. When a person sees a tree, for example, the tree is called “external,” while the visual impression, the memory of trees, and the thought “that tree is beautiful” are called “internal.” Yet all of these are present in one field of experience. The tree, the light reflected from its leaves, the physical eyes, the neural activity, the image, and the thought are all aspects of one substantial universe.
Likewise, there are no separate physical and spiritual universes. The physical universe is usually understood as matter and energy: rocks, bodies, stars, electricity, heat, and motion. The spiritual universe is often imagined as a different realm containing souls, meanings, gods, or invisible essences. But thought itself need not be placed in a separate supernatural realm. Thought is also part of the universe, even though it is not solid like a stone or measurable in quite the same way as heat.
The universe, then, may be understood as made of three inseparable kinds of substance:
- Matter, such as bodies, soil, water, planets, and cells.
- Energy, such as light, heat, movement, radiation, and electrical activity.
- Thought, such as ideas, memories, emotions, intentions, meanings, and plans.
A city illustrates this unity. Its buildings, roads, wires, and vehicles are matter. The electricity moving through its systems, the fuel powering vehicles, and the sunlight falling on its streets are energy. Its laws, maps, financial systems, designs, languages, and shared purposes are thought. The city cannot be adequately understood by looking at matter alone. Nor can it be explained as merely an invisible spiritual object. It is a living organization of matter, energy, and thought.
Awareness and the Mind
Although matter, energy, and thought are substantial in their own ways, awareness itself is not a substance. Awareness has no weight, color, shape, chemical composition, or location. It is not one more object among objects. It is the capacity by which objects, energies, and thoughts are known.
Consider a movie screen. The screen can display a desert, a storm, a crowded city, or a dark night. The images change continuously, but the screen itself is not any one of those images. In a similar way, awareness can contain sensations, memories, fears, desires, and ideas without becoming identical to them. A person may be aware of anger, but awareness is not anger. A person may notice a pain in the body, but awareness is not the pain. A person may hold a belief, but awareness is not the belief.
The mind becomes confused when it forgets this distinction. It may identify itself with a body, a role, a belief, an emotion, or a memory:
- “I am my success.”
- “I am my trauma.”
- “I am my religion.”
- “I am my political position.”
- “I am my body.”
- “I am my fear.”
Each statement contains something real: there may indeed be a body, a history, a belief, or an emotion. The difficulty begins when awareness is reduced to that one item. The mind then loses its freedom to observe, examine, and reorganize what it has identified with.
For example, a scientist who becomes personally attached to a theory may stop seeing evidence that contradicts it. The theory has become part of the scientist’s identity. Instead of asking, “Is this theory adequate?” the person unconsciously asks, “How can I protect myself?” The awareness that could examine the theory has become entangled with the theory itself.
Harmony, Anomalies, and Resolution
The central goal of mind is to bring harmony, or oneness, to all substance. Harmony does not mean making everything identical. A symphony is harmonious not because every instrument produces the same note, but because diverse notes fit together in an intelligible pattern. In the same way, harmony in the universe means that matter, energy, and thought fit together without contradiction, confusion, or unresolved disorder.
Whenever something does not fit, does not make sense, or conflicts with what is otherwise known, the mind encounters an anomaly. An anomaly is a mismatch between parts of experience.
A simple everyday example is hearing a strange sound in a car engine. The driver expects the car to run smoothly, but the new sound does not fit that expectation. The sound is an anomaly. If the driver ignores it, the problem may grow worse. If the driver investigates it, they may discover a loose belt, low oil, or a failing component. The anomaly is resolved when the new information is integrated into a coherent understanding and appropriate action is taken.
Scientific discovery often begins in exactly this way. A theory explains many observations, but one observation refuses to fit. Rather than treating the anomaly as meaningless, the mind studies it.
The orbit of Mercury, for instance, did not fully match predictions based on Newtonian gravity. This discrepancy was not merely an inconvenience; it was an anomaly. Einstein’s general theory of relativity provided a broader framework in which Mercury’s motion could be understood. The resolution did not destroy the earlier understanding of gravity. It placed it within a more comprehensive and harmonious account of nature.
In this sense, the function of the mind is not merely to collect information. It is to notice anomalies and resolve them. The mind seeks relationships, explanations, patterns, and principles that bring apparently separate facts into one coherent whole.
Laws of Nature and Living Blueprints
When anomalies are successfully resolved, the resolution can become a law of nature or a blueprint for living organization.
A law of nature is not simply a command imposed upon the universe from outside. It is a discovered regularity—a stable pattern through which matter and energy behave in an orderly manner. The law of gravity, for example, expresses a regular relation among mass, motion, and space. The laws of thermodynamics express regularities in the transformation of energy. Such laws make the universe intelligible because they reveal harmony beneath changing appearances.
In living organisms, harmony appears as a blueprint of organization. A seed contains an ordered potential for becoming a plant. Under suitable conditions, roots grow downward, stems grow upward, leaves form, and flowers or fruit may emerge. The plant is not assembled randomly. Its cells cooperate according to an integrated pattern.
The human body offers another example. The heart pumps blood, the lungs exchange gases, the immune system responds to threats, the nervous system coordinates sensation and movement, and cells repair damaged tissue. Each part has a distinct function, yet the parts work toward the continuity of the whole organism. If one system fails to coordinate with another, illness can result. Healing involves restoring a more harmonious pattern of functioning.
Thus, both physical laws and biological blueprints may be seen as resolutions that make order possible. They reveal that the universe is not merely a collection of disconnected things. It is a network of interdependent patterns seeking coherence.
Eden, the Fall, and God
The biblical image of the Garden of Eden can be understood psychologically and philosophically as the state of pure mental awareness. In Eden, awareness is open, immediate, and unconflicted. There is no fundamental separation between observer and observed, self and world, or awareness and experience. Substance is present, but awareness is not trapped by it.
A child absorbed in simple wonder can offer a partial example. Before social labels and self-judgments become dominant, the child may experience a flower, a sound, or a moment of play directly. The experience is not immediately filtered through thoughts such as “What does this say about me?” or “How can I use this?” There is simply awareness.
The Fall of Man occurs when awareness identifies itself with substance. Awareness becomes attached to a thought, a sensation, a possession, a role, or a separate personal identity. Instead of recognizing anger as an event appearing in awareness, a person says, “I am anger.” Instead of seeing a belief as a provisional attempt to understand reality, a person says, “Without this belief, I am nothing.”
At that point, the mind becomes unaware of the very thing with which it is identifying. It does not merely have an opinion; it becomes possessed by the opinion. It does not merely experience fear; it lives from fear without recognizing it. It does not merely use a social identity; it mistakes that identity for its entire being.
This loss of awareness produces division. People begin to experience themselves as isolated fragments competing against one another. Nature appears as something external to exploit or fear. Other people become enemies, tools, or threats. Thought becomes rigid because it is no longer free to examine itself.
In this framework, God represents pure awareness: that which restores awareness to the mind. God is not necessarily conceived as an object somewhere in the universe, because pure awareness is not an object. Rather, God represents the principle by which the mind remembers its own capacity to observe without becoming trapped in what it observes.
A moment of honest self-recognition can illustrate this restoration. A person may suddenly realize, “I have been acting from resentment for years.” That realization does not immediately erase the resentment, but it creates distance between awareness and the emotion. The person can now examine it, understand its causes, and decide how to respond. Awareness has returned to the mind.
The Ideal State of Mind
The ideal state of mind is not the absence of matter, energy, thought, emotion, or individuality. It is the presence of awareness within all of them. A mature mind can participate fully in life while remaining capable of observing its own attachments, assumptions, and reactions.
Such a mind does not deny the body, but does not reduce itself to the body. It does not reject thought, but does not become imprisoned by thought. It does not abandon the world, but works to bring greater coherence to it.
This ideal mind continues its fundamental task: bringing oneness to the universe by spotting and resolving anomalies. It asks:
- What does not fit here?
- What contradiction is being ignored?
- What assumption has become invisible?
- What part of the whole has been left out?
- What larger understanding could reconcile these conflicting elements?
In personal life, this may mean noticing that one’s values and actions do not match. A person may claim to value compassion while repeatedly speaking harshly to others. The mismatch is an anomaly. Resolving it requires awareness, honesty, and a new pattern of action.
In society, it may mean noticing that a community praises human dignity while tolerating needless suffering. In science, it may mean investigating a result that contradicts an established theory. In philosophy, it may mean questioning a division—such as mind versus matter, spirit versus body, or self versus world—that no longer adequately explains experience.
The mind is therefore not merely a machine for thinking. It is the active principle of integration. Its deepest purpose is to restore wholeness wherever division, contradiction, and confusion have appeared. Pure awareness makes this work possible because it allows the mind to see substance without becoming lost in substance.
When awareness remains awake, matter, energy, and thought can be understood as expressions of one substantial universe. The mind can then fulfill its highest purpose: not escaping the universe, but bringing its diverse forms into greater harmony, intelligibility, and oneness.
The Main Ideas
- There are no external and internal worlds.
- There are no physical and spiritual universes.
- There is only the consciousness of a substantial universe made of matter, energy, and thought.
- The awareness of mind itself is empty of substance (matter, energy, thought).
- The goal of mind is to bring harmony of oneness to all substance.
- Deviations from harmony (that do not fit or make sense) are seen as anomalies.
- The function of the mind is to spot and resolve anomalies.
- Resolutions lead to laws of nature, and blueprints of life organisms.
- The Garden of Eden represents the state of pure mental awareness.
- The Fall of Man occurs when the awareness in mind gets identified with substance.
- The mind then becomes unaware of that, which it is identifying with.
- God represents pure awareness that restores awareness to the mind.
- The mind then continues on its goal to bring oneness to the universe.
- This is the ideal state of mind.
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Comments
This is a revision of an earlier post.
Nicely laid out, and full of tenants to consider how true or not they are. Looking it over there is a lot of truth in this book. PK
According to the Tech Dictionary:
“THETAN, 1. the living unit we call, in Scn, a thetan, that being taken from the Greek letter theta, the mathematic symbol used in Scn to indicate the source of life and life itself.”
“THETA, 1. theta is thought, life force, elan vital, the spirit, the soul, or any other of the numerous definitions it has had for some thousands of years.”
It is obvious from the above two definitions by Hubbard that the basis of thetan is thought.
What is missing in Western science and philosophy is that thought is also a substance because SUBSTANCE IS ANYTHING SUBSTANTIAL ENOUGH TO BE SENSED.
We have a sense of “I”. Whatever we are sensing at this level may be characterized as thought.
Consciousness is awareness of substance. As the substance changes, consciousness also changes.
One may say change is the “constant” of this universe because the universe is dynamic in nature.
I regard myself as pure awareness that acquires identity, such as thetan, by identifying with substance (matter, energy, thought).
THETAN = a sense of individuality.
Any consideration of individuality is basically an identity.