Thought Power

Look at a cup on the table and think about it. Ask most people where that thought is, and they will tap their forehead: a private event, sealed inside the skull.

Besant starts somewhere else. For her, three things are always in play: the Knower who thinks, the Known that is thought about, and the Knowing that passes between them. Western philosophy calls them subject, object and relation. Her summary is blunt: knowing is a relation, and a relation needs two ends.

Take away the cup and there is no thought of the cup. Take away the one who looks and there is only a cup, with nobody knowing it. The thought lives in the link between them.

So which end are you? Besant's answer is more demanding than it sounds.

The Self, she says, keeps meeting forms it cannot move from the inside. It thinks, and they do not think with it; it wills, and they show no desire. Everything of that kind it gathers under one name, the Not-Self: whatever I cannot know, will and act in the way I do in myself.

Then comes the turn. Look closely, and your own vehicles slide over to the other side, one after another. Your body is something you know. So, in her scheme, is your mind. They are the Known, not the Knower, however intimately you wear them. Only the knowing centre itself never quite becomes one more object on the list.

In Besant's account, what is knowing?

• A store of facts the brain has collected over time
• A relation set up between the Knower and the Known✓Correct answer
• A feeling of certainty that rises from the Self alone
• A quality that objects give off to anyone nearby

Besant insists that knowing needs two things set over against each other, a Self and a Not-Self, with a relation between them. A store of facts or an inner certainty leaves out one of the two ends, and without both there is no knowledge at all.

Before explaining how the link works, Besant shuts two exits that philosophers love.

One school says everything is consciousness, and forms are only its dream. The other says everything is form, matter in motion, and consciousness is a by-product. She thinks each is half-blind. Ignore the life and you meet problems you can never solve; ignore the form and you walk into dead walls you cannot climb.

So thought has to be studied from both sides at once. From the side of consciousness, which does the knowing. And from the side of the material the mind is made of, which can be shaped, and whose shaping is what makes knowing possible. Life and form come as a pair, and nothing else in the chapter works unless you keep both in view.

The first picture Besant offers is an old one: the mind as a mirror.

Set an object in front of a mirror and it seems to be inside the glass. It is not. What is there is an image made by light. In the same way, she says, at our present stage we do not know things in themselves. We know the effects they produce in us, photographs of the external world taken on a sensitive surface.

That sounds like a seminar puzzle until you try it on an ordinary afternoon. The colleague you are irritated with, the city you think you know, the news you are sure about: what you are actually holding is the picture. And the picture is not the thing.

Then she corrects herself, and it is the most interesting move in the chapter. The mirror, she admits, is "a little misleading", because the mental image is "a reproduction not a reflection" of its object.

A mirror stays exactly as it was; the image merely lands on it. The mind does not stay as it was. Its material is actually shaped into a likeness of the thing, the way a photographic plate is chemically changed by the light that falls on it. Then the Knower, in turn, reproduces that likeness in himself.

That second step is what she calls knowing. To know the cup, something in you briefly takes the shape of the cup. Knowledge, on this account, is not inspecting a thing from a safe distance. It is being altered by it.