Approach to the Preconscious

I think we all realise that the study of any subject by means of that instrument which is itself the subject of the study presents certain very definite difficulties. The mind of man is able to distinguish many things. It has never been able to distinguish adequately the nature of its own essence. Man has greater trouble understanding himself than he has in seeking out the answers to other questions. Always therefore when the individual turns upon the source of his own faculties in an effort to discover their meaning or substance we must use these faculties to explain themselves. And this mostly cannot be for the reason that faculties have a kind of motion and that motion is from themselves toward other things. To reverse this motion and turn the faculty towards itself represents a very difficult and for the most part, unsuccessful venture.

Therefore when we come to the problem of consciousness we are seeking to understand a power or energy that we can commonly use, that is available to all of us that has become a familiar part of our own existence. If there be a consciousness separate from this kind of consciousness, and we assume that there may be, then this also is difficult for us to understand., for we are conscious of consciousness only as we experience it. And by this experience we discover it as an energy or power by which we may know certain things. By which we may motivate certain actions. By which we may comprehend or conceive on the level of idea. Consciousness has something to do with memory. With thought, a great deal to do with understanding. Yet although we have terms for all these functions, of a luminous energy within ourselves, we have no adequate means of energy within ourselves, we have no adequate means of discovering the substance and nature of that energy.

We assume that at death the individual is separated from his body or that consciousness ceases to function, and that therefore the state of in-animation which we call death would represent the suspension or separation of consciousness from the body. We are not even certain that this is true, bur we assume therefore that consciousness has to do with animation, and from the word itself we expect a relation to the soul, or the psychic life of the individual. We like to assume, furthermore, that consciousness is that part of our nature which is most true to ourselves, which most appears to be our real existence. And by extension because of its luminous and wonderful power, we further like to assume that consciousness is like God or that God is manifested as consciousness, and that the consciousness in man is a God part, a divine element or energy available to man in part, available to the universe in its total existence.

Thus consciousness, we conceive or sense as being a vast area of self-knowing. A vast area of energy by which things become aware, of themselves and of each other, by the means of which the knower, or the conscious being, becomes aware of nature, and of the universe, and of the infinite diversity of manifestation going on all around us. Studying this term of consciousness, however, we come upon a number of other elements or factors which have to be considered. Assume for example that consciousness is universally diffused through all things. Yet in this universal diffusion through all parts all things are not equal. Therefore the consciousness of a plant is in some way different from the consciousness in man. The consciousness in the atom is different fro the consciousness in the animal. Thus consciousness, though infinitely diffused is not, in some way, infinitely equal in manifestation. If consciousness is a reality, is a life principle, if all things participate in it, then we should wonder why all things are not the the same, and how it happens that the consciousness of one individual comes to different conclusions about many problems, or faces life in a different way than the consciousness in another individual. We must come to the conclusion, therefore, that there is not only something universal about consciousness but also something particular. That this term as we use it is perhaps unwisely or unskillfully applied. It may be that the word consciousness has come to have a meaning that is not inherent in the energy that we are seeking to describe. For certain, consciousness in certain persons leads to different acceptances and rejection. Even if we wish to regard all these as equal, we must still face the problem of infinite diversity or difference. Therefore consciousness is composed of an infinite number of different aspects of itself. This presents a very different situation again.

We might assume that consciousness, if it is a divine light within man, that as man unfolds it will come to certain common agreements, that he will have certain common consciousness experiences. To a measure, he has but not to a sufficient degree to fully justify our own acceptance of our own definition. We may assume, or should be able to assume, that a number of persons, all around the same degree of social, racial, cultural background should have comparatively identical points of view. This they do not. We might also assume that genius, or the development of hyper-individuality would lead to some penetration into common consciousness. This is not true in most cases. In fact we begin to recognise the importance of the individual, the individual being a separate point of view, and that we meet individuals perhaps more than we have expected. And what we call conformity, in which we all come to common conclusions, may not be as desirable or as much a symbol of advancement as we have generally supposed.

Thus we have this one life in us. This thing which we call consciousness producing an infinite diversity of personal equations, each one distinctly separate. Each one in some mysterious way, an individual. And we discover that if consciousness is universal in one aspect, it is utterly individual in another. And that consciousness is a universality of individuals or individualities, and that wherever we turn we find forms of life unfolding consciousness according to need, according to attribute. The Greeks took up this problem and came to the conclusion that difference was not a matter of consciousness but a matter of psychic emphasis. According to them, man's consciousness differed because of the vessel that contained it. The individual's body, his personality, his emotions, his lower mental equipment, these were the differentiating factors, and one consciousness moving into an infinite variety of personalities, became interpreted or defined according to these individualities rather than according to its own nature. Therefore it was the mind that made the individual, not his consciousness. And the concept of the Greeks was what we call consciousness was universal and ind was individual.

Thus as man's body is personal, separate from all other bodies, his mind is individual, separate from all other minds. But his life is not individual - his life is universal, utterly dependent upon one source of life. And to the ancients, this life source was the fountain of consciousness - consciousness was life itself.

Assuming this as a tenable idea, we must however face certain confusion. Because actually life or consciousness is a power superior to mind. It seems strange, therefore that mind can limit consciousness, restrict it or its proper expression, or can cause it to come to error, whereas it might be more reasonable to assume that consciousness would be ever modifying mind, and that consciousness itself, being stronger and more universal than mind, would therefore achieve a conquest of consciousness over intellect, and that therefore man would be constantly under dominion of his consciousness, not his thought.Yet consciousness and thought are in conflict in many different instances, and up to this stage in our evolution thought has more frequently won than lost, and consciousness nearly always remained the victim of the intellectual and emotional pressures of the human being. Psychology may therefore say that consciousness is mind and pressure - it is mental, it is emotional, it is all these things. Consciousness is therefore simply an animating principle capable of being involved in innumerable complexities and not capable actually of dominating any of them in as much as consciousness as we please to call it is the education of consciousness is therefore essentially the reason for existence.

Now this viewpoint is contrary to your classical thinking. In your classical system man as a spiritual or enlightened being had an existence prior to man as a lapsed or benighted creature. Man falling into generation fell from a divine state into a mortal state by means of which his inner consciousness was obscured. And he became the victim of appetites, pressures and desires. Liberation therefore was the release of consciousness from involvement in desire. Its restoration by discipline, by renunciation, by the gradual separation of man's integrity from the restraints placed upon it by his environmental life was nearly always a series of ethical compromises.

Here again consciousness assumed a rather interesting but confused position. Man attempting to restore consciousness finds himself for example in the Greek philosophy in the place of a saviour of his own consciousness. Instead of consciousness, which is his divine nature rescuing him, he must rescue consciousness. He must make a voluntary restoration of it. This would seem to imply that whatever consciousness is, it is not capable of an immediate and instantaneous transformation of anything dissimilar to itself. Man is not thereby directly rescued by consciousness, but must preserve his own integrity and earn the right to possess divine consciousness. Consciousness is therefore recondite - it is hidden. It is something that must be earned. It is a reward. It is something which will not achieve its own immediate freedom, but must be freed by something else.

This again is quite contrary to the attitude which we quite commonly have that is it omniscient, that it is absolutely an ultimate truth. If consciousness in the state of man existed in the state of absolute and eternal truth, how could any lesser part of man exist in a state of delusion or error? If it isn't that man has to rescue himself, if consciousness is the total of himself, if it is the mainspring and energy of himself, if it is his over-self, his all-self, and it is true and it knows and it is perfection in itself, how can man linger in any other state? Why is he not immediately absorbed into this beingness which is the root and light of himself? If consciousness is deity, and deity abides in man, why does not this deity fulfil man, bring man into a state of identity with itself by the very virtue of itself being in man, and forever operating there?

The medieval scholastics attempted to create an explanation for this which the formulated under the doctrine of original sin. They conceived that in some way man had set up an interval between himself and deity, or consciousness. That man had been disobedient, by disobedience he had broken away and destroyed the harmony between himself as a creature and the creator whose energy reposed within him. Thus man had to mend this wickedness, before he could be restored to the grace of God. This mending was repentance. This mending was a restatement of individual integrity. This mending was the voluntary acceptance of the will of God, and a voluntary relinquishment of human will. The circumstances of this original sin differ in many religions but it is present in several of them. In one of the more philosophical systems, the idea of original sin gives way to the process of evolution, in which life absorbing itself into matter, entered into a state of conflict with its environment, and this conflict must continue until the victory of life over matter. That life and matter are therefore in conflict. But even this is difficult to understand, for if consciousness is all there is and is eternal, inevitable and all-knowing, with what can it be in conflict? How can there be a conflict between complete consciousness in any other state, presuming there can be any other state? For consciousness, being total, would be perfectly capable of understanding, and how can we be in conflict with anything that we totally understand? And philosophy is inclined to question, assuming that all conflict we can recognise arises from lack of understanding. Also, can we be in conflict with that which is no secret or no mystery? Most of our difficulties arise because we do not have knowledge of the internal lives of other things. We do not experience their true motives. We do not understand the burdens or responsibilities which influence their actions. If we had such understanding in total, would it not be more likely that we be sympathetic rather than critical? Therefore again the conflict would be less and less probable. Also where consciousness existed there could be no ignorance because there could be nothing unknown. And if there is no ignorance, no superstition, no doubt and fear, we would be living in a very different world than the one which we now inhabit.

Yet consciousness remains as having an existence of some kind, and it has always been assumed that at the root of a life there was an all-pervasive omniscience, an all-knowing, an all-being, and that this consciousness was the diviner part, the inner part, the nobler part of creatures.

This brings us to our particular problem of the evening, which is to try to estimate a term which has come into some usage - the term "the preconscious". Here again we are in a very rarefied atmosphere, but let us try and see what we can do with it. A condition, an energy or a state must either be always and forever the same, or it must be in a state of eternal flux. Things are forever alike, or they are forever moving from one likeness to another. We go back to our Greeks again. If consciousness is eternal it is forever the same. If consciousness is not eternal it is forever different. Those are the rules by which it has to function. For a thing which has no eternal consciousness within its nature must move from a previous to a subsequent condition, forever, moving forever from what it has been to what it is, toward what it will be. And if a thing is not always alike, or always the same, then what it has been, what it is and what it will be must always differ. Also, in a universe of orderly procedures such as the one which we envisage to be our own, a motion from a previous to a present to a future condition must always be a progressive motion. Therefore unless consciousness is omnisciently and omniactively always the same, it is forever moving from that which is a lesser condition of itself towards a greater one. In other words, it is growing. It is either eternal, or it is growing.

Now if it is growing, it is in an infinite state of becoming. A becoming-ness that goes on beyond our ability to conceive or understand. It is difficult for us assume that a becoming-ness goes on forever without an achievement of becoming. This is another thing for us very difficult for us to understand. But our philosophers point out that this state of forever becoming in which the fullness or completeness has not yet been achieved (and theoretically may never be achieved), being always a state of becoming, that now, in each moment of consideration is a total state of becoming, so that the individual who lives now has very little sense of his own shortcomings. He can conceive of how much less he once was by looking backward, but he cannot look forward. Therefore he cannot know how much more he will be. That every moment man feels therefore intuitively that he is the master of the ages. He is the greatest thing that ever has, been, throughout every moment of his destiny. But tomorrow he discovers he can be greater. This situation leaves him comparatively comfortable, without the need of a finality upon his own growth.

Assuming that consciousness can be a condition of becoming, that it is a state of perpetual and eternal unfoldment of potential, that it is like a stream flowing from an ancient fountain and flowing down through time and eternity until it fulfils its incredible, immeasurable destiny. If such is the situation then we must assume that at any time consciousness is the consequence of something, and is in turn causing something else as a consequence of itself. Thus the term preconscious is man's effort to discover the nature of the consciousness of yesterday. The consciousness before it is now. The individual trying to work with this experience of the consciousness before it is now runs into an immediate problem which perhaps helps to clarify the whole issue.

The moment he tries to think back as to his consciousness yesterday, he must do it with his consciousness of today. Therefore he runs into a peculiar dilemma. He cannot be what he was yesterday. He can only contemplate it in the best light of what he is today. He can never fit himself into the consciousness of his own past. Once it is gone it can be restored by memory, revitalised, but not re-experienced. It is like pain - once it stops you cannot feel that particular pain again. But you can certainly remember how much it hurt. You cannot revitalise the experience of that pain. Even the neurotic person cannot quite make it, although some of us do stupendously well in our effort to recapture it. If then, we are to re-experience the state, we shall say, of ourselves ten, fifteen, twenty years ago, something has to happen first. And the thing that has to happen first is that the consciousness of ourselves now must be blocked, or we cannot do it. If therefore we approach it on the basis of hypnotic regression, putting the "now" to sleep, refocusing the individual upon a time gone by, and getting him to re-live that pattern we may cause that individual to re-activate a pattern of consciousness that is dead, that is gone as far as objective awareness is concerned.

When we do this, we cause this person who is now the adult to revitalise and completely re-energise the state of their own childhood at a given time, one of the most common being birthday parties of twenty or thirty years earlier. The child can be caused to again be rescued out of the adult, proving that this previous consciousness did not actually die but was in fact submerged, and is no longer available as itself in the conscious state of the individual. Only when the new consciousness, the consciousness of today is blocked can this old consciousness be vitalised. Observance has been made of this subject, and an interesting point has emerged. When you regress an adult say, to the seventh year and give them careful psychological testing during the regression, you discover that you cannot regress the child, we shall say, to the seventh year you can revitalise the incidents of the seventh year, causing the child to live them, but the child will live even in these incidents with an increased level of maturity than the original seven years would justify. When you regress the child to its seventh year it will interpret its seventh year experiences with the mind of an eight year old child. There will be one more year of additional growth which we cannot block. This was an interesting point because it means that even through a regression, and even thought the conscious mind of today is asleep there is a certain subconscious growth that cannot be prevented, and which continues to accumulate gradually, in the course of twenty or thirty years, the difference of approximately one year in the pattern will be noticed.

It comes around however that the reason why the past is to be no longer re-experienced is because the point of awareness has moved away from it, and the point of awareness is normally always contemporary. It is always focused on the now. Because it is the association mechanism moving from within the individual, that binds him to the present environment, the present sensory reflexes. By action, man is bound to now. And it is only when in some way he is artificially prevented from continuing his present focus that he enters into a state of pre-focus, or pre-consciousness.

Now we can say, supposing that we did block this individual. Supposing that we did block this present consciousness entirely, so he is not aware that he has any existence whatsoever, and we give him no directive. We don't tell him anything. We simply give him a non-directive for objective function. Things heard, seen, known in his daily life are separated from him by a suspension of his external sensory faculty, the suspension of his ego function.If we do not do this and leave him alone, we will have no report on him whatever. We will not register anything. He will remain in the state of a dreamless sleep. And he will remain in that state until he is awakened. If, therefore we simply block the "now", the individual does not automatically fall into any other trained pattern. He doesn't fall into yesterday or tomorrow. We simply block "now" and he falls asleep and stays there. If however you block "now" and regress him you can recapture any part of his life up to the moment. If you block "now" and attempt to regress him however into a future state, you are again blocked. He has not the capacity to achieve a condition not experienced. So one of two things will happen. Either he will still remain asleep, or you must create for him a future. Then you may cause him to visualise it or enter into it. If you wish to define for him some Utopian dream you expect will occur in the future, and you tell him that he is living in a city of gold, and that everybody is happy, and give him sufficient directive, he will see and report what you have created for him. But he has no normal instinct to create such a place for himself. Because for the moment you have suspended also his regrets about the way things are, and his wish to change them.

These are very tricky equations, but they do tell us something if we really want to study them. If, then, we take away from man his objective awareness we do not immediately give him a subjective awareness. If we block out the consciousness of Earth he is not immediately awakened in Heaven. If we take away from him that which is familiar, we simply put him to sleep, proving apparently that he is bound only to the familiar, and that the moment we depart from that which is experienced by him, or can be experienced by his sensory perceptions, he ceases to function.

This brings another interesting equation into the problem. What happens, or what conceivably could happen if a person under hypnosis could be induced to dream? Now here would be an interesting problem. Now he can be induced to dream, because the operator can cause him to internally visualise or experience whatever the operator desires, or gives as the form of a suggestion. The person will experience these things an report upon them. But of his own accord he seems less likely to dream than he does in normal sleep. Something has happened in connection with his psychic pressure load, and the psychic pressure load which causes dreaming seems to be suspended by the hypnotic procedure. It is therefore necessary to direct the hypnotised person into self-reflections or into some channel of objective action if you wish him to experience it. Also when the time comes for this person to reawaken into objectivity it is possible either to block the side of life which has been under the hypnotic somnambulum, so that the patient has no memory of it, or it is possible to leave this gate of memory open, so that the individual will remember. This becomes a matter of decision and presents another interesting phase, namely that where in ordinary dreams the natural tendency is for the dream to fade away in the objective state of awakening (except in a very few extreme cases), in the case of hypnosis this can be controlled in such a way that the individual awareness can be directed by the operator into memory or lack of memory, as seems to be most desirable. In analytical work sometimes lack of memory is very important, because otherwise the patient is too rapidly burdened with too much of an unburdening of his own psychic nature. This has to be carefully avoided.

"What has all this to do with the problem of consciousness?", we wonder. it has this to do with it - namely that the sleep centre when it is controlled, or the individual is caused to enter into a voluntary state of unconsciousness actually is no longer aware of any objective circumstances going on around him. Nor is he aware of the operator. He can be caused to remember or not. Therefore actually we have this situation - supposing a person under hypnosis is told not to remember. Five years later the person is placed again under hypnosis and under the hypnotic condition is permitted to remember. He will remember. This can again be blocked before awakening, so that the individual can prove that they have two systems of memory operating simultaneously and completely separate from each other, so that a continuity can be set up either inside of the state of hypnosis or outside of the state of hypnosis and these two memories will carry on and never meet unless the operator wishes them to meet. Yet he can bring them together any time he wishes. Under such conditions it is evident that in hypnosis there is a kind of consciousness that will carry on from one experience to another. Therefore that man has more than one memory system - a subconscious or subjective memory system and a conscious memory system. And both of these systems are operating not only under hypnotic problems, but are constantly operating in the so-called normal range of experiences of life and still do not meet. That man therefore has both sleep memory and waking memory. He has a kind of memory that records psychic pressure night after night through dreaming without that pressure ever being faithfully recorded objectively. So that this psychic pressure can be therefore a pause of reflection, thoughtfulness, fear, doubt, worry for a lifetime without it ever coming through into an individual's conscious memory. It means of course under such conditions, ventilation of psychic pressure is usually during sleep, in the form of dreams. And these dreams can be consistent for a lifetime without the waking person being aware of the continuity of their meaning, of the pressures which they are seeking a release. Yet these dreams themselves indicate a stream of subjective self-continuity, and a deeply laid plan that is going to fulfil itself in some way.

Preconscious therefore implies several things. It implies the problem of the emerging of the conscious life of man at birth. It implies the re-emergence of a conscious life of man from sleep, daily. It has a larger, universal implication in the emergence of the consciousness which we call man from a preconscious state in nature. Furthermore, it challenges us with the fact that man is a manifestation of certain kind of an energy that is resident everywhere in space, and therefore that the preconscious state of man probably must correspond with a preconscious universal state which still surrounds man and affects the numerous creatures around him in nature. All of these points lead, then, to this consideration that consciousness as we know it is a condition, a state, a degree in the unfolding of something. And that this thing which is unfolding, emerged from a previous state which was the seed or root of itself, and that this previous state may or may not clearly resemble, or be recognisable in the terms and the conditions which emerged from it. Thus for example if man saw only an oak tree and was never aware of where the oak tree came from, and never saw the growth of an oak tree, there would be no rational procedure in the world that would convince him that it began with an acorn. It simply would be impossible if man himself did not know through experience and obligation that such is the case. Because the acorn is not, in a way, understandable or acceptable as the source of a great tree many thousands of times the size of itself. Also, therefore, in terms of consciousness, that which is preconscious may in no way resemble consciousness as we know it, and yet may be capable of containing it, engendering it, causing it to emerge from itself. Also is consciousness itself truthful? Does it in turn bear a kind of fruit by means of which other forms of knowing, or being, or existing may be engendered or caused to come into manifestation?

Some of your eastern philosophies assume that the entire universe is composed of nothing except conditions of consciousness. That there is no such thing as consciousness and something else. That there is only consciousness. That matter is a kind of consciousness. That mind is a kind of consciousness. That stars and elements are different kinds of consciousness, and that actually this one energy in its infinite manifestation, is all that exists, and all things are modes of it in varying degrees of the unfoldment of one eternal essence. These Indians then also take the ground that space itself is a great field of consciousness potential, consciousness in its most abstract form. Has within it an infinite seed life of its own nature, and that these seeds are forever growing, bursting into life, germinating so that there is an eternal harvest of creatures existing forever, rising from the substance of the uncreate itself. That everywhere in nature consciousness is blooming from its own root, blossoming forth and bearing its fruit, and as Plotinus pointed out, it was a kind of mysterious flower with its roots in Heaven and its branches downward and its blossoms within the experiences of man.

This type of thinking perhaps supports the idea also that consciousness is a type of mystery that must forever be the quest of man until it is explained. That final existence has a primary objective the solving of the mystery of consciousness. That all things that happen are some way indicative of the great riddle or its solution. That man's completeness, man's journey ends only with the solution to the mystery of consciousness. If such may be considered a possibility, and we are now dealing with a valid school of thought in the Far East, what then is the ethical implication? What is the discipline involved in this thinking?

The discipline involved is the effort of the individual to have the experience of pure consciousness, whatever it may be. That it exists. That the only possible way in which man can solve the mystery of his own existence is to solve it with pure consciousness. And that the only answer to all things rests in the consciousness which causes these things. Unfortunately however this is not quite as easy or obvious as first might appear. As far as we are able to observe in nature, most things that happen occur without the causes of themselves being obvious. Man is not aware of the reason for himself even as he causes his own kind to exist. And we are not so positive, not so certain that any creature by the whim of mere desire can solve the mystery of its own causation. Nor can we be certain that any creature is fully and completely aware of the reason for itself. The Greeks again were of the thinking that the reason for creatures must always be deposited in superior creatures. That it is only in the divine nature that the reason for man exists. And therefore that man cannot solve his own mystery. That all he can do is seek a reunion with the divine nature, in which all mysteries are solved.

Other systems of thought such as the Vedanta system approach the subject of total consciousness with another kind of attitude. And in this we can also find some kind of a justification for the Buddhist idea of nirvana. At first thought the individual attempting to establish pure consciousness or unite himself with pure consciousness is simply casting himself into oblivion. In the eastern concept the individual must completely cease to be in order for the universal consciousness to be restored to its eternal rulership over things. There was a conflict between mortal mind and divine mind, and in this conflict mortal mind must voluntarily surrender itself. And in the voluntary surrender of itself must sacrifice all of its own objectives including its own sense of self-awareness Thus western writers trying o make commentaries on these eastern religious classics have scratched their heads a bit and have come to the conclusion that these systems are Asiatic nihilism, that they are simply the complete extinction of the individual, and the only peace that man can know is by ceasing to exist totally. This is not actually the concept of the eastern thinker. To western man it probably would be the likely explanation. Westerners presume that motion and action are extremely dear, and cannot conceive that the suspension of his personal actions and desires and attitudes leaves anything remaining. The east however is an entirely different perspective.

In the east the idea pertains that it is possible for the individual to completely overcome that interval of not-likeness by means of which things are separated from other things. That man, dropping into the abyss of his own internal, rejecting by degree every testimony and function of his sensory perceptions, detaching himself from every part of his object, or mental-emotional life may finally fall into a complete suspension of the element of illusion in his own nature. Having reached the point, therefore that everything that is not so has ceased, he stands presumably upon the threshold of that which is so, and makes another interesting discovery. That there is nothing in his vocabulary, in his thinking, in his mentation there is no means by which to devise a communication of that which is so. He has wonderful ways of explaining what is not so. We can share our ignorance with gallantry and ease - in fact, we preach it continuously to each other. We can also have the most learned discourse upon trivia at any moment. We can go on and on, elaborating upon our mistakes, our shortcomings and our weaknesses. We can spend a great deal of time deciding what is right and not true. But when it comes to a positive statement of that which is unconditionally true, we have no idea by which we can grasp it. We have lived always in a kind of dream, a kind of nightmare. In the course of ages this dream-world of our objective senses has become the reality. We have come to grow so accustomed to war that the one thing we can't define is peace. We can't really experience it because we do not know what it is. We have great difficulty even grasping personal peace. It is very hard. To us peace is merely the least degree of stress. But the total absence of stress, the total positivity of complete peace is beyond us. And when most people think of it they only think of inertia, and of total boredom. We have no positive contact with the experience.

So if the Buddhist thinking we come finally to the total suspension of everything that is not real, including that part of ourselves which is not real, which Buddha says is the sense of self-hood, what remains? How shall we define what is left? How shall we explain immortality? How shall we explain or assume the state of man after death? In what way shall we explain anything? The Egyptians pointed out that the state of man after death is due largely to the intensities of his conditions during life here. The Tibetan in his ritual of death seeks to help the deceased person to orient himself in another world which is startlingly like this one. Or to help him find an immediate and fortunate re-embodiment, back again into this objective world of conditions that we know.

What will we do with the problem of trying to find a kind of world, a paradise, a Heaven or and inferno in which a group of absolute desireless beings continued forever? We just cannot imagine. We have already populated the underworld with all sorts of incidents and personalities and conditions and circumstances derived from here. Apart from what we objectively and subjectively experience we have no answer. Philosophy has pointed out that this total suspension was not extinction. That it was not the end, was not materialism, that it was not nihilism, but it was the invitation to the first experience of what we call consciousness and know nothing about. In other words we have a polarised state, a state of consciousness and unconsciousness and we have reversed them. What we call consciousness, the ancient explained, was unconsciousness. What we call waking he called sleeping. What we call our daily objectivity was his nightmare. Plato pointed out that Hell is not a place you go when you die but when you are born. Everything is reversed. That what we call consciousness today is really the conflict, the pressure, the stress, the irritation of factors uncontrolled, un-directed, un-mastered and therefore out of conscious direction. That instead of being conscious today, we are the victim of a series of sensory cycles, mistaking reflexes for consciousness. Mistaking notions for consciousness. And depending entirely upon opinion to supply the substance of what we call "knowing". As a result of that, what we call knowing is unknowing. What we call progress may be motion or commotion in any direction whatever, because we have no vision or vital concept of what direction progress should take. Thus we assume that all motion is the sign of life, that the individual who is in a commotion is really alive.

On the basis that commotion is the root of animation, we are going along very well. But if we are to assume that there is purpose in anything, then are we doing so well? And if we have no awareness of purpose, and have no strength of character by means of which we choose to protect value at all costs, if we lack these strengths within ourselves, are we conscious? Or are we merely responding to the pressure and stimulation of sensation? Are we really conscious beings or merely sensory beings, because if you block out the five senses completely they would have very little record to tell, or very few experiences to report, and not very many opinions to circulate. Our entire s-called awareness is based in our ability to contact a series of environmental circumstances, Our opinions arise from the papers we read, the television programs we listen to, the neighbours we talk to over the back fence. ll these things arise from outside of ourselves and become the basis of our internal reaction to them. Thus we have two kinds of an outside life - one kind of life which is outside the body, the other is an outside life inside the body, but outside of consciousness. Thus what we call our internal life is merely our outside life moving through our sensory perceptions and loading us with confused testimonies of one kind or another.

Against this procedure we have little or no notion inside ourselves of a true life or true consciousness. We might say, we probably should say, that without consciousness we would find it impossible to record these external factors. That means however that we are using consciousness only as an energy. Using it as we would electricity, as a blind horse, as a mere servant of certain purposes of our own. The academy of science decided that there are only two kinds of electricity - that which was intelligent and that which was not. And what we call consciousness today is probably mostly a phase of energy that would be compared to intelligent electricity. Consciousness now merely supplies the energy by means of which we can arrive at certain conclusions of actions being sensory and bodily as opposed to arising in consciousness itself. If this be true, the average person has very few examples of consciousness in his lifetime. He has not experienced the pure control of his life by internal value alone. It is not certain that he would know how to define consciousness if he experienced it. Perhaps the mystical experience would come somewhat nearer to it. But consciousness is certainly a moving from within the individual of a solutional energy, an energy which solves or completes or a-perceives these things which are otherwise merely intellectual and emotional forces. Buddha held this to be inevitable. That what we know as consciousness is not. And what we aspire to conceive of as consciousness, the real, is a positive pole as yet practically unknown to man. That this consciousness is known to man only in one respect - namely that it manifests as the fact of his existence, which is the only fact he possesses. That consciousness as he knows it may be at best merely a capacity. Instead of being something which we have developed, it is something which says to us in some way, "You can understand if you want to." That there is within you the potential power to know. That in some mysterious way you can be. But having the power to know, we do not know. Having the power to be, we doubt our own exact existence. Consciousness is therefore a kind of capacity. It shows that in some way, man is capable of achieving to a state of reality. Consciousness is therefore the capacity for this and the reality that it can be achieved.

it might be philosophically sound, therefore, to think of ourselves not a conscious beings but as beings groping for consciousness, which in some way permeates and fills our existence yet with which we are not in rapport. it is as thought we were a kind of fish, in an ocean of life, and yet unaware of this ocean. That we are in the midst of an unreality but we have a total unreality. That nearer to us and ourselves and every part of our nature is an all-pervading potential, and yet this potential has not been able to cause us to achieve to any particular state. That this potential may bestow upon us certain things. One is continuance, that behind the generation of species, behind the fact that man is simply a creation which refused to die, that in this order alone is a continuity of life which is rooted in consciousness - a consciousness of life which is stronger than death. Another possible phase in which consciousness may be driving recognised by us is this subtle but continuing urge within us to be better. This sensing of our own unlimited capacity that in some way we are using consciousness without knowing it. That we are assuming there is no horizon to limit us but our own achievement. That we can will anything that we wish to be, to do anything that we wish to do. Somewhere in the root of ourselves there is the archetypal impulse that we should will to do that which is so. That which is true. That in our questing, our final search must be for value, for that which is so. And this recognition that in some way we have the capacity to find what is so, and that we consist of an immortal essence that will continue until this victory is achieved, perhaps the sleeping element of conviction within our natures, but partly expressed, partly articulated in living may be pressures from the positive pole of consciousness.

In psychology, for example, we have a subconscious and an unconscious a divisions of the internal life of man. We differentiate these from what we call the conscious. But it is my suspicion that we have made a complete reversal. That what we call the unconscious is on the outside rather than on the inside. That man actually moving inward moves towards consciousness and not away from it. If this be potentially true, then some of the choices of our modern aphorisms will have to be revised. Because if the pressure is on the outside rather than on the inside as we have been assuming that it is, then what we need is discipline on the outside rather than release. We have a rather elaborate problem here that goes into a great many phases of human life. What the actual answer seems to be, what psychology up to the present time has never dealt with, is the crossed qualities. It has never dealt with that which is the root of things. it has never assumed that the root was the reality. It has always assumed that within man is locked an ant of unreality. That is true to a certain degree. But we must penetrate those unrealities that belong essentially to our objective lives, that these unrealities arise out of our mental and emotional stress and do not arise from spiritual value. Nor do they arise from consciousness on the levels of sense and emotion. The search inwards, therefore must go past this, must go past this mystery that the magicians and the Kabbalists of the middle ages called the mystery of the astral light, the mystery of illusion, and must go further in search of that which is pure, positive consciousness. In this, perhaps, preconsciousness. And perhaps even beyond archetype, which up to the present time has seemed to be the present emergence of consciousness. I think we may go on, as the Buddhist has pointed out, to the discovery of pure consciousness, as absolute suspension of action, with the absolute suspension therefore of all polarisation and all space-time-distance equation.

If then, we do approach the ultimate nature of consciousness, we are likely to find it in Tao, namely a totality, a something into which everything is finally absorbed. A something which is this eternal capacity, forever devouring its own offspring as Chronos devoured all of his children. In this sense also we can understand perhaps how the mystic in his search for consciousness has therefore passed through the search on the level of glamour also, and is no longer concerned with trying ton adjust himself to environment. He is seeking to adjust himself to principle, to cause within himself realising that he can do so he can never be in disharmony with his outer environment. That in some way all problems have to be solved somewhere within the field of consciousness. There are no problems to be solved in the world as we see it. There are no problems that can actually be solved on the level of embodied sense. All problems have to be causally solved, and have to be solved as experiences of conscious awareness. To achieve this end, then, the problem of the retirement of the individual towards samadhi, or towards the nirvanic state, has been not only the teaching in the east but in your Christian mysticism, the same ideas, the same basic detachment from objectivity in the search for consciousness.

Now another point has come in where we have to realise that a term like consciousness may also flow into theology and be changed into something else. Your Christian mystic, and I am thinking now of several outstanding examples, perhaps Saint John of the Cross is as good an example as any, your Christian mystic has always taken the attitude or the opinion that there was a mysterious power in faith, which he called the grace of God. This was a mysterious something, a kind of baptism, a magnificent and mysterious water of holiness, something that came through man out of the infinite and of which apparently he had little understanding or true insight. Yet coming into the presence of this thing he was completely and entirely altered, picked up, lifted out of death and of doubt, and by this peculiar kind of grace became radiant with the love of God, and with the realisation of eternity. Now it is conceivable to us, that this so-called grace of God of your Christian mystic, which is to be discovered only when man has transcended this world, that it is this way in which he has attempted to explain a dimension of consciousness which otherwise cannot be easily explained. Also we realise that the so-called miracle, particularly such miracles as those performed at Lourdes for health every year. Only a small percentage are actually cured. But this small percentage represents a group of persons to whom a particular experience has occurred. An experience of such tremendous intensity of some kind that it has broken through a pattern of common attitude and belief. Your early mystics would take the ground that this experience arose from the complete detachment of the individual from worldliness. That in some mysterious way the world dies in man, and that in this moment of complete suspension between Heaven and Earth, man became aware perhaps, or cognisant of the fringe of the vestment of consciousness. That consciousness begins actually where what we know as reality ends. That it is not to be confused as irreconcilable with the kind of life we know. That it remains always within itself. That it is a kind of seed fro which all lie comes and to which all life must return again. For if life had an origin it arose from consciousness. That if it has a destiny that destiny must be its return again to consciousness.

Now the question that we asked earlier this evening, if consciousness is a certain kind of positive value, how is it that man could ever descend from a perfect state into an imperfect one? This question must be answered by another equation: Does consciousness in its own nature require this all-knowing state? Is consciousness that kind of awareness? The evidence of nature is that it is not. That consciousness is not the kind of thing by which all things are filled, and therefore becomes a positive energy by which all forms of life can be directed. Consciousness apparently as Buddha, Vedantists and Taoists have all sensed, is total life in total and eternal suspension. Therefore it has to be total and eternal suspension. Therefore is has to be total life with total suspension of will. Hence consciousness must be total life without purpose, yet capable of fulfilling the purpose that can arise in the unfolding awareness of all creatures. Like a dark earth into which a thousand different children can plant a thousand different seeds, and in which each of these seeds will grow, consciousness must be an infinite capacity in which all things are possible, but this possibility must arise from the experience of living things, rather than be imposed upon living things by consciousness itself. Therefore the actual fact of consciousness is that it does not move, nor does it lead to motion. It is, rather, the end of motion and that which is united with it becomes immovable. And because it does not move from one state or condition to another it is unchanging. Thus, by degrees as we take away from the concept of consciousness all that limits, all that cannot be truly adjusted even to our immature idea of what totality could be, by degrees we strip away from consciousness all illusion, all delusion, and all error. That which remains remains indefinable. But it does have a complete freedom from all of the terms and attitudes with which we are familiar. Thus in the ancient idea of things, Tao or consciousness in its true sense was this great ocean into which life returned. It was this tremendous cup, that captures and holds life. It is this wonderful sea, this ocean into which all life flows from innumerable fountains and rivers, and the sea remains unchanged and immovable.

Now in Buddhism, if life moves theoretically from this state of ignorance along the path of discipleship and liberation, until finally through the total suspension of error it reaches this tremendous sea of life, merges itself with it, and vanishes like the drop of water returning to the great sea, what, then, follows? Buddha does not tell us in his discourses but he implies and intimates certain things. He said to his disciples that he did not answer these questions because the answers are not profitable. He said, "I know many things that I have not told you, but to tell you will gain you nothing, and only lead to abstract controversy over subjects about which such controversy cannot be meaningful or profitable." But this, he does not say definitely: That we are not able to assume that this re-absorption actually means extinction or the termination of the vast motions and processes of life in nature. What he seems to be trying to tell us, if we can read between the lines, is that actually his fable or his analogy is based upon the same idea as that of Plato and the "race that lives at the bottom of the well."

It is supposed to have been the fable that there was a whole race of creatures that lived at the bottom of a hole in the ground. And these people wrote books and became very learned and wrote and described the universe, just how it was made, and everything. And explained that the universe was the hole in which they lived. That there were no other holes and that there was no other place in space except their hole. That they all lived here together, and that the entire knowledge of the race, of the world, of everyone and everything was contained in this hole in the ground. So after a long time there was produced out of this race of people living in the bottom of the well, one daring soul who was able to notice that far up above there was a little patch of light coming down. And they told him that this patch of light was of course, God. And that therefore all you did to it was worship it. This fellow kept looking up and watching this patch of light, and he saw that it might disappear, and things like that, and he began to get very interested. And at last he gained the courage to climb up the side of the wall of the well. It was perhaps a very difficult journey, but he ultimately achieved it, and finally came to the edge of the top of the well and looked out upon the world around him. And he saw mountains and plains and animals and people and birds, and he saw grass growing and flowers and rivers and all kinds of things. And he suddenly realised that there was a great world up here, that no-one previously had appreciated or understood. So he hastened down the well to share the good news with all his friends below, they pronounced him mad and refused to even climb the well and take a look. And when he insisted upon this procedure of going around and telling them about what was happening up above, they finally found that he was not only mad but dangerous, and it was up to them to confine him and make certain that he no longer perverted the public morals of the people among whom he was living at the bottom of the well. And the story apparently is a clever take-off by Plato on the trial of Socrates , the man who dared take a look over the top of the well and see what was going on in the larger universe.

The analogy to consciousness, I think is this: That what we call living, that what we call consciousness today is the common conviction about value of the people living at the bottom of the well. Somewhere along the line, great prophets, messiahs, teachers, sages and saints have dared to climb the wall of the well, or have climbed the wall, taken a look around and come back and told the people that that is not the way it really is. These saints, of course, have always been regarded as neurotic, or perhaps as mad, and when they were too unsuccessful in describing the situation, they were conveniently executed for the protection of their fellow men, lest others take to the delusion.

Thus by degrees we have lost ourselves in the bottom of the well, destroying everyone who tries to bring us out. In our personal lives we have locked our consciousness in the bottom of the well of our sensory perceptions, our environment, our tradition, and most particularly, of authority, which has been the deciding of our mind by the minds of others. Out of all of this situation we have a new concept of consciousness. Or rather, in this case, consciousness is the way things are, outside the well. If then we go up to the top of the well finally and take a look around, we come into a world that is totally different from anything that we have known. We cannot go back and explain it. Because those who live at the bottom of the well have no words or thoughts suitable to understand what we have seen because they have not seen. But this is not where the analogy ends, and Plato very astutely pointed out the next point. Namely, that when man;s own internal energies, by the mystical experience, are able to contact the world above the well, or outside the well, and this experience returns again to the sensory fractions of man's nature, his own emotions, his own thoughts, his own mind cannot accept or understand them. They cannot find the symbols necessary. Therefore the individual returning from an experience of that kind cannot report it to his own consciousness, or his own personal life. He does not know how to bring this experience through to his objective awareness.

Thus, a pure experience of consciousness probably could not be remembered, because it would not awaken any of the association mechanisms by which it would be tied to the presently familiar. Thus has been ascribed of the saints and the mystics, the conception of something extremely wonderful, and that is all. Something bout which there can never be any clarity of explanation. Once also the individual who lives down at he bottom of the well climbs up to the surface and comes out of the well, as far as the people at the bottom of the well are concerned he is gone forever. He is dead. He has ceased to exist. He has gone forth into a non-existent place which means that he has to be a non-existent being in order to function there. No-one ever expects him to come back and he probably does not. But not for the reason that is assumed. Not because he does not want to come back, but because he has found a larger world and prefers to function there. In the experience of consciousness, it follows that once a being attains to this consciousness, attains to the nirvana, which is to reach the surface of the ground and to look out, to those below it is the end of everything. For himself it is the beginning of reality. For he has just found out the fact. And somewhere in the compound psychical equipment of man there is this point where man departs from the error and discovers the fact. Just where this point is remains psychologically obscured. We do not know. But this tilt from error to reality is a larger difference than we have imagined. Reality is not just our present illusions with some minor reformations. It is not just one percent added on top of the ninety-nine percent of what we know now. Nor is it a shuffling around of those existing factors into a new pattern. According to the ancients, consciousness when it awakens is an instantaneous and complete transformation of everything. Everything moving from death to life. From appearance to fact. From the things as they seem to be to the thing as it is. And what appears to be and what actually is. These are so different from each other that we have no cognition of them. We are still hoping that we are pushing our way along the line of science, discovery and art and all these subjects, and that we are pushing our way into the presence of truth. One by one, our mistakes are disappearing, our virtues are multiplying, our abilities are intensifying and we have made this marvellous and magnificent thing called progress, and that at almost any minute now we are going to wake up in the millennium. We have always had that feeling but for some unknown reason the millennium has been a little slow in appearing. And at the moment it does not seem as close as it did last week before the Lebanon situation wasn't quite as tense as it is now. Just about the time when it looks like we are really arriving, we invent something else and have to start all over again to try to put the world back in order.

Actually, there is a question as to whether we will ever win this race. Actually the probabilities are that the fact of the matter is something that we will never collectively obtain, in the common meaning of this word, that there will probably never be a day when there will be a mass exit from the bottom of the well. When everyone will say all at once, "Let's go." In the first place there are a lot of people who do not want to leave the bottom of the well because it's cool and damp down there anyway. Of course, you may have pneumonia most of the time but still they've grown accustomed to it. The next thing you might say is that it is cosy down there. Everybody knows everybody, everybody has the same faults, and everyone is proud of them. Another thing about it is that there is a barter and exchange system down in the bottom of the well there that has been working for a long time, and there are all kinds of wonderful institutions like prisons and wonderful pension systems and all kinds of wonderful things down at the bottom of the well. Excellent police systems, fire departments, and of course the regular clinic for the psychoanalysis of the individual who would dare to try to climb out of the well. So who wants to leave such a delectable place?

However, in every generation, as has been proved in history, there are some who are born with adventure in their hearts. They simply cannot conform. They are born that way. This means that a certain maturity of consciousness is beginning to manifest itself. They're still part of this mystery of the well bottom, but they are rebels against it. We find the non-conformist. We find that individual who is sometimes called the crank that makes the world go around, and it takes crank now and then to do it. So we have the free thinker. We have the non-conformist who becomes the object of some concern to others. Therefore they are rather happy to see him depart on his long journey and they hope he will not come back. To him it is an adventure. To them it is a well-justified punishment for the general attitude that he has taken. So he climbs the well, by degree, but this is not going to be a common motive because it means to separate oneself from authority, from tradition, from ancient policies and from immediate profit and advantage. The individual who is so short-sighted that he can continue to conceive of his standard of living today only, and would rather perpetuate all of the misfortunes of his race than hazard it, is of no mood to climb out of the well. Only the occasional person does. But some ways those persons live, and they become the great leaders of our race, for it is necessary occasionally for some prophet even to return to the well and to die there in order that those at the bottom of the well should not know of this other world.

I think Buddha, to a measure, did this. Because I think he was one of those who was able to have the awareness of consciousness, by seeing a world of realities. No longer mountains and gardens and valleys, but the realisation that what we call consciousness is not a miraculous, incredible thing. It is simply man climbing out of unconsciousness and coming into a world that he has always been there and the world that he really belongs to. A world which is perfectly natural and normal, something that he has never known, because there is nothing that he is experiencing now that is either natural or normal. His catastrophes have become natural. The uncertainties of his world have become acceptable. I read not long ago a rather important modern book which simply "faces the fact", that we might as well face it, that there will always be wars. There will always be crime - man is built that way. So that is the attitude. These things we accept as normal. We regard peace with certain misgiving - perhaps it will result in certain depression in the long run because there won't be enough markets to get rid of our surplus. Peace is not what we are looking for - we are looking for immediate convenience and comfort and security, but we will hazard security to pay and advantage.

Thus, all this world with its educations and its arts and its sciences, all of this in some way is not consciousness. It is not real, it isn't illusion in the sense that you can put a finger through the middle of it, but it is an illusion in the sense of value. It is an illusion as in the men at the bottom of the well are to the person who is no longer down there with them. It is the proof that we can make things that have no value so intensely important to us, and hold this attitude for so many ages, that we become incapable of conceiving of anything more important. But once the being, once consciousness comes out of the well, into positive consciousness, what kind of a world is it going to be? Is it simply going to be a reformed world of our own? Probably nothing even resembling it. It is going to be a state which we cannot adequately define, probably bearing no resemblance to anything which we know of at all. But it is a state of truth. Of fact, of actual validity in which things which now hope, fear, believe and doubt come to a state of knowing. Knowing being in this case the factual participation in a conscious reality. We may find that in that state, as some of the easterners felt, that consciousness absorbs up, that we become parts of it, that only consciousness itself goes on, and that this consciousness itself goes on, and that this consciousness that goes on is normalcy, is real and is eternal. Therefore that when we come out of the hole, and come into the gardens at the upper end of the well we come into an eternal state, a state which is however eternal and timeless both. In which there is no sense of anything but an eternal now. Perhaps memory and thought as we know them will no longer exist. Perhaps sensory reflexes will have completely ceased, and we will have an entirely new structural nature with which to respond to impulse. All of these things seem conceivable, and in this we go back or go forward or we go toward that which preceded our present state, and from which in some way we departed.

How did we get to the bottom of the well in the first place? Were these creatures engendered there? Probably not. They don't tell us in the story just how they got there but we can take some isolated cases, for instance some of our western Indian tribes that have decided to make their homes of that nature. Why did people go down in the well? Perhaps for protection, originally. The individual seeking protection nearly always exterminates himself, like the Chinese who built the wall around China to keep everyone else out, and all it did was it kept them in. Then, another thing. Perhaps man fell down the well at some remote time. Or perhaps in some very ancient day there was a migration down the well, to explore it. There was trouble getting out again, and after ages man gave up trying to get out. Perhaps this is also the story that is behind the fall of man, that the human being, because of body, which is the well in which he is caught, and perhaps because of the exigencies of survival, fighting against the sabre-toothed tiger, fighting against the tremendous forces of a prehistoric world where man was nothing and the animal creation around him was monstrous and horrible, the very processes of survival, the creation of the stone axe in the cave, the discovery of fire, all these ancient problems kept man very much occupied. He was struggling to survive physically in a world of mystery. Perhaps by the time he had got this survival partly worked out he had forgotten that once upon a time he had crawled down the sides of the well. He was down there now, locked into it by the very thousands of years in which he had struggled merely to keep body and soul together in this world he had no time for reflection, no tie for dreams and ideals. By the time he found the time he had lost the inclination, was locked within a pattern, from which he must now extricate himself in some mysterious way.

It would be interesting, and I think quite conceivable, to assume therefore that this preconscious world, this thing that preceded him, preceded his consciousness as we know it, is true consciousness. We know as consciousness is not consciousness at all. It is simply man's aggregate of awareness faculties by means of which he reacts to environment. None of these faculties can react to consciousness because they know nothing about it. Therefore he does not know how to get out of the hole or the well. Even when he wishes and turns inside himself he finds there is only mystery and darkness. That was the reason why the ancient peoples began their tremendous sense of visualisation, transference of certain centres of value from the outside to the inside, began this process of helping man to move in some way towards consciousness. The retirement of his values, the greater enrichment of his internal life, his seeking more and more on the inside and less and less on the outside actually was his way of climbing the wall of the well. For in man's case he must climb this wall by going into his own source. For somewhere at the top of his own mysterious well, there is this bright patch of light in the sky, this bright patch of light which he sees from below and calls "spirit". This thing he calls "spirit" is the light , the Sun, the natural luminance of another kind of condition of which he is not aware. So in climbing towards spirit he is climbing towards light, towards the normal and proper light of a real world, a world in which the things he fears now appear only as nightmares or madness. He cannot know what he is going to find there, but he may have the same experience as the man who climbs the well. He may discover that what he finds is mainly a tremendous vista to be conceived, to be understood, that it is not a problem which he has to fight or defend himself against. He is merely going to have to be amazed. To be surprised, to suddenly realise that this is the world that he has always dreamed of. That here is the world in which the things which are meaningful in his few enlightened moments are truly significant and truly real. Therefore that in this change there is no adjustment necessary other than the adjustment of finding the effort to climb the well. That by degrees the individual who makes truth his journey, who suddenly resolves to find out the source of himself, the reason for his own being, is the one that ultimately escapes into consciousness. And by attempting this journey he finds that he comes merely into the light of day. He comes into an ordinary world. He comes into the normal universe that to him is incredible. he discovers that Heaven is nothing but the normal universe, that it is the thing as it is, rather than the thing which he had forced into a deformity. That so-called immortality is his natural state, not something that he must fight desperately to attain.

There is nothing between him and all of these things except the courage required to climb the well. The ancient systems of initiation and instruction were dedicated to giving the individual the courage to leave the world of darkness and of dreams, and to seek the world of light and of waking. And to awaken was the ancient symbol of the dawn of consciousness. Man awakens out of matter into consciousness. In some ways this awareness is rooted in consciousness, but not adequately to direct him without inspiration, without guidance, without benevolence leadership from more enlightened teachers and guides. But in all cases, what we are trying to do is to discover the superior state of consciousness. Its complete acceptance is beyond us at the moment, is an experience which we cannot now have. But if we accept the philosophy that this concept is essentially true, then we can begin to loosen the bonds which bind us to sensory orientation, and escape by degrees the tyranny of attitudes and authorities, the despotism of darkness, and we will slowly develop the adventurous insight which will lead us to climb out of the well. These things come to us through thought and meditation and reflection. And before we can make the journey, we must suddenly and in some way convince ourselves that this consciousness is not what we have now, but what we might have were we able to complete the journey of life. Thus, this consciousness to which we seek to return that which was bestowed before the present state existed long before the people fell into the well, and it will exist long after the last person has climbed out of the well. The world of the well is an incident. But the great world of life, which contains many wells, is a reality. Man moving up to it gradually comes into normalcy. Suddenly comes into common sense, value, reality and purpose. These are the elements of a very great drama that the ancients unfolded to us, and we will have to leave these elements for the moment and come back to them again next week, because it looks like time's up.