overcoming the world 73No nation is so distant in historical time or in cultural remoteness
that we cannot hope to penetrate something of its sensibility and con-
sciousness. Our ability to imagine alien experience fi nds nourishment
in an understanding of ourselves, enlarged by an education that gives
us access to the subjective life of humanity in times and places distant
from our own. If the unity and the continuity of our own mental expe-
rience are in doubt, so may the otherness of the mental experience of
other people seem to be only relative.
Th e baffl ing character of our relation to our own as well to other
people’s conscious life has suggested to many, in the course of the his-
tory of thought and of feeling, that there is only one mind or that mind
is one. Th e unity of mind would be the true basis for our power to imag-
ine the alien. It would be the material that appears to us broken up in
the present moment— the simultaneous dying away of what has just
been and coming to be of what is to become— that is the only experi-
ence we ever have in the world. It is distributed in diff erent mind states
only as light is refracted in rays. It is nevertheless always the same
thing, like light itself.
Th is unifi ed being or mind is the ultimate reality; everything else is
either unreal or less real. Its site of revelation is the present, the now;
the past and future are mental constructions rather than mental expe-
riences. Th e exigencies of our embodiment are what lead us to them.
Once we begin to doubt the reliability of those constructions, we begin
to doubt as well that time is what we habitually take it to be. We start to
take as the cornerstone of our view of the world the present minded-
ness that is not only the most reliable form of experience but, strictly
speaking, the sole form.
Th e second force inspiring the eff ort to overcome the world is a para-
doxical feature of our experience. We must face the ineradicable defects
in our circumstance: the terror of death, the vertigo of groundlessness,
and the treadmill of desire and frustration, aggravated by our suscepti-
bility to the insult of belittlement. Of these defects, we many succeed
temporarily in suppressing our awareness of the fi rst two and of resign-
ing ourselves to the fourth by lowering our expectations of life. From
the third, however— the relative emptiness of our desires, our tendency
to fi ll them up under the pressure of the ideas of and behaviors of those