MURYOKO
'Infinite Light'
Journal of Shin Buddhism
Harold Stewart
Materialism
Our secular and sciential education has for so long instilled into us the materialist fallacy that we now take as axiomatic the metaphysically false premise that this world of matter is alone real and that this life is the only state of existence that we shall ever know. On the contrary, the physical world is not a closed system as the scientists assume but open to the psychic and spiritual worlds both above and below it; for the entire Universe throughout all its 'thirty-three' planes is supported and permeated by transcendent Consciousness. Even the supposedly self-sufficient 'material' world is itself a projection of the Buddha's Omni-consciousness, of which our limited ego-consciousnesses are only so many finite viewpoints and so obviously incapable of comprehending the whole. But from our first awareness of pain on being born into this world until we resign our waking consciousness at death, the basic and incontrovertible fact, known before all else, is our human consciousness.
We are aware of our being immediately and with absolute certainty, whereas matter is a mental abstraction only inferred much later from our direct concrete experience of becoming and after we have spent our infancy and early childhood learning to construct the socially conditioned and acceptable picture of the 'outside' world that the culture into which we are born imposes. It is Consciousness that precedes and produces individual bodies and brains as its vehicles on the physical plane. One must first be in possession of a human consciousness before one is able to perceive one's own body (though not one's own brain) or the bodies and brains of others. Yet we falsely infer that consciousness has arisen as a result of the functioning of these. The materialist is welcome to refute this without fear of self-contradiction - provided that he does so while in a state of unconsciousness! The primacy of Consciousness in all human experience is the basis of the Vijnanavada or Yogacara school of Mahayana Buddhist Metaphysics.