The whole of the external world, as we see it, is the way it is only for us. To say that this world is really as we see it is to suggest that there cannot be beings whose external senses differ from ours.
The notion that everything material is only in our minds seems strange to people. “The table really does exist, and will continue to exist… If I leave the room it will still be there, and it’s the same for everyone else as it is for me,” they typically say. But if you cross two fingers and use them to roll a ball, you will feel two balls. And every time I do this I will feel two balls, and everyone else will also feel two balls, and meanwhile there is only one ball. And it is exactly the same with the table for the crossed fingers of my senses—I think it is a table, but maybe it is half a table, one hundredth of a table, and maybe it is not a table at all but something completely different.
I assemble the lines that I see into a form that lives within my imagination. I see something white on the horizon and I involuntarily give this white thing the form of a church. Is it not the case that everything we see in this world receives the form which already lives in our imagination, taken from a past life?
I think that the question of whether the objects external to us have an independent existence is truly devoid of rational meaning. Our nature forces us to say that the specific objects of our perception are outside of us; we cannot do otherwise. The question of whether the things that we consider real actually exist is as absurd as, for example, asking whether blue paint is actually blue. We cannot go outside of this question. I say that things are external to me because this is how I am forced to view them, but what is external to me can have any kind of arrangement; that is something we are not in a position to judge.
— Lichtenberg
It is the law of life that the invisible produces the visible. The cause is hidden, the consequences are visible. The cause is infinite, the consequences are finite. To believe in the invisible is to believe in the cause of every force; to acknowledge only the visible is to be useless, fruitless, transient and mortal.
— Lucy Mallory
We perceive that objects truly exist in two ways: either because we see them in their relation to a specific time and place, or because we think that they are contained in God and flow from the necessity of divine nature. The latter is how we view everything spiritual.
— After Spinoza
In reality, the external world is not as we perceive it. And therefore all the material things of this world are unimportant. So what is important? That which is certain to be same everywhere and always for all beings: the spiritual source of our life.
