Individual mind vs. Unmanifested Mind

In, The Mind, Rose talks about a so-called, “unmanifested mind.”

We experience two minds: the individual mind and the unmanifested Mind-Stuff.

The individual mind is individual in appearance only, but we will call it that, when we refer to the mind of personal observation.

~ quotes from: https://selfdefinition.org/rose/writings/richard-rose-the-mind.htm

Right now, I experience personal, individual mind. That may even define me: my current self-definition is an individual consciousness with limited willpower over thinking. If my experience goes beyond an individual mind, however, this might change who I am.

The mind is like a two-way camera that takes pictures and projects the picture at the same time.

The mind is like a camera in that it has points of focus, similar to lenses. It has a big roll of film, or memory bank… The light seems to be coming from the external world.

Diagram 2: The mind-camera analogy (a.k.a. Ray of Projection/Creation)

However there is a Light, coming from behind, for the Unmanifested Mind, which is actually projecting a picture, which we are in reality only able to see when stimulated by percepts.

Any specific content of my individual consciousness seems to be coming from an external world. For example, when I see a pen, there is a pen in an external world. Our culture has worked hard to explain the contents of personal experience. Hard sciences explain objects, and social sciences explain psychological forces. Those “unmanifested” realities governing capillary action of ink on paper, for example, have a longer-lasting reality than any specific manifestation in a given pen.

So, in my first guess at unmanifested mind, I speculated science refers to this but takes a stance this “mind” is unconscious and non-reactive. So, the unmanifested reality behind personal observations is clockwork-like. Actually, reality behind objects is probabilistic sub-atomically, just that there are so many independent random events making up any observation, essentially the central limit theorem kicks in and unmanifested principles appear identical to clockwork.

Of course, you may know toward the end of Isaac Newton’s life he had more interest in Theology and Alchemy than Physics.

Source: Twitter

Here’s a category breakdown of the 1752 books found in Newton’s personal library after his death.

— Fermat’s Library (@fermatslibrary) September 27, 2019

Principles and laws aren’t very mind-like. A “mind” would react. When we pray for a manifestation in our favor, we probably temporarily adopt that outlook. A mind might also have some of its own memories that influence how it reacts, causing “miracle” discontinuities.

So, a scientific view is helpful, but it clearly backs away from unmanifested mind.

As a second avenue to get a sense of why Rose used these words, could my belief in solely an individual mind be false? Maybe, the observer could be non-individual if there is no information passed between individuals. Or, if this experience now is a dream, the contents are actually imagination and projection from some bigger mind that has not manifested. These both allow for a logical possibility I’m wrong, but a possibility is not really counterevidence.

If it’s true that my mind is not just an individual mind, shouldn’t there be evidence of it?

Perhaps there is. Sometimes it feels like information is passed from an individual mind to another individual mind without an obvious communication medium with sufficient “current” capability. So, a third avenue to find evidence of “unmanifested mind” is seemingly unlikely coincidences of communication among people. One example could be walking by someone and having a sudden shift in mood. Another could be a feeling of rapport – either positive or negative. Do these imply my mind is more than personal?

(There’re a few books by Rupert Sheldrake about this stuff I haven’t read yet)

On one hand, a feeling direct mind communication may have occurred is never convincing. If I have a feeling while being tailgated someone is in my head or while serving customers at a restaurant I’m in someone else’s head, those could be imagination. It’s never clear, but if they’re ever true intuition, that could mean my individual mind is somewhat connected to another mind. Or Mind.

On the other hand, even if apparently real, Rose seemingly dismisses these experiences as solid evidence of experience beyond the individual mind:

Telepathy received is still perception. Telepathy transmitted is projection. The Percepts are not limited to the five senses.

So far, these avenues look for observations to trace back to unmanifested mind. My fourth angle involves tracing back the observer of this individual experience.

The lights are on. It seems unlikely purely unconscious matter could become conscious; as I evidently am. When compared to the noise and picture of my observed individual experience, who is experiencing is completely quiet and unobserved. Being an individual experiencer seems it implies defining myself in terms of what I observe. Which may be like saying a submarine is a deep water viewer when that’s its current environment.

Am I, as the observer, limited to an individual because the experience is individual? What is the source of this light, this consciousness? Evidently, that is even more unmanifested than any laws of science.