72 overcoming the worldmathematics and logic as inquiries into a simplifi ed proxy for the one
real world, a proxy reduced to the most general features of reality and
therefore robbed of individual diff erence and of time.
Incitements to overcoming the world
Th e direction in the religious experience of humanity that I am calling
the overcoming of the world is, like the other two directions to which I
next turn, more than a long moment in the religious history of man-
kind. Viewed as a mode of consciousness rather than as systematic doc-
trine, it is not confi ned to par tic u lar philosophical or theological tradi-
tions. It presents itself under diff erent disguises as a way of thinking
and of feeling that will forever be persuasive. Two forces, each deeply
rooted in our experience, perennially renew its life.
Th e fi rst force is our experience of mind and of access to other
minds. Viewed from a certain perspective, all that we ever have direct
access to is a mental state now, in the augmented present allowing for
an experience of the passage of what has been to what is beginning to
be. Our past and future mind states, which we are accustomed to re-
gard as expressions of our embodied and continuous selves, are fabri-
cations or repre sen ta tions of the mind caught in that augmented
present.
In each such moment, our view of what came before and of what is
to come later changes. Whether our past and future mind states de-
serve to be regarded as the mental experience of the same self, like the
photographs that make up a moving fi lm, is a conventional belief that
may be supported by a wide range of theoretical justifi cations. It is not
an immediate and indubitable experience.
On the other hand, despite the hiddenness of other people, of their
fears and longings, impressions and perceptions, we regularly feel that
we do have some access to other minds: to the present mind states of
those around us and to the past mind states that are recorded or re-
membered. All our spoken or silent dealings with them presuppose
such an access. All our conduct is a perpetual testing of the rightness of
our conjectures about them.