[Drifter]

HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS

By G. de Purucker

[From WIND OF THE SPIRIT, pages 159-61.]

One of the most interesting things in the human constitution is
what we call the consciousness, and it is a curious paradox that
it is just about consciousness that the least is known.
Everybody talks about it; everybody says consciousness,
consciousness, and consciousness; but when you ask a man: What do
you mean by those words, he begins to hem and to haw. Shall we
say it is awareness? Yes, that is one of the functions of
consciousness. The only thing we can say is that it is, and we
all know what it is.

It does not need to be described. As soon as you begin to try to
define it, you tangle yourself up in words, and you actually lose
all intuition, all feel of what it is. Your consciousness goes
as it were from your central consciousness into the low small
consciousness of words. We all know of men who so entangle
themselves in explanations that they forget about what they are
talking, their consciousness just will not fit into details and
words. They have lost grip of the main thing.

Now human consciousness is unitary and integral, that is to say
there are not two, three, or more kinds of consciousness in the
human constitution. But it is a unitary consciousness that comes
down into our brain minds or into our ordinary consciousness from
the spirit of us, the divine center where the truth abides in
fullness. This human center of us cannot transmit this celestial
visitant fully because this human part of us is beclouded, heavy,
and thick with the sheaths of the lower consciousness. Our
thoughts, feelings, and emotions rise around us like a thick
thundercloud under the sun. But behind the cloud is the one
sunlight. So it is with consciousness.

Theosophical seers for many ages and belonging to different
religions and philosophies have classified human consciousness
for purposes of convenient understanding into four divisions.
There are Jagrat, the waking state, Swapna, the sleeping state,
Sushupti, the utter dreamless sleep, the state of death for most
men, and Turiya, the state of the divine, which god-men and the
great seers and sages have told us of, because these last to a
certain extent experience it.

It is all one consciousness. Jagrat is the state in which we all
here are now -- unless there is someone asleep in the audience,
and if he is, he will be in the Swapna state, the sleeping state
in which he is more or less dreaming. Sometimes people are half
dreaming when they are in the Jagrat state. We call it
daydreaming. I do not mean creative dreaming of thought; I mean
just the lazy dreaming where the thought wanders. It is part
Swapna in the Jagrat state. Next is the Sushupti, as we call it,
which in sleep is dreamless. It is the state of most human souls
after death: perfect sweet undreaming consciousness, in which a
thousand days are as a day, and time exists not because the
consciousness is not in these lower realms of time, measured by
clocks, watches, movements of the celestial spheres.
Consciousness there is not in the time-state. Then we have the
highest of this same unitary consciousness, the source of our
consciousness, Turiya. The Buddhists call it the nirvana. The
Hindus call it Mukti or Moksa. We use these terms also for they
are so definitely descriptive. It is the pure consciousness of
the spirit of man, a ray from the divine, or a spark from the
divine.

Now then, here is the deduction, the moral to be drawn from these
facts. All of us have this one state of consciousness
manifesting to most of us in these three terms: physical waking,
sleeping with dreams, dreamless sleep, or the death-state for
most people until they embody themselves. Do you know what this
means? It means that we men are not alert to what is in us and
what we can do. There is the key to the mysteries of initiation.
First learn to be fully awake when you are in the Jagrat state as
we are now, physical awakening. Learn to be fully awake. Next,
learn to carry that state of self-consciousness when you sleep,
so that you will be as self-conscious when you sleep as you are,
or think you are, when you are awake. Third and next, the
highest: learn to be self-consciously awake after death. For it
is one consciousness working through all three states, and every
one of us has it; and every one of us is subject to these three
lower conditions or states of this one unitary consciousness.

Think what this means for our future evolutionary progress. Why
should we not begin now? I remember a story that was told of the
Founder of the Theosophical Society, H P. Blavatsky.

One of her pupils came to her one day and said, "HPB, you know I
am awfully tired; I have been working all day long."

"So sorry," said HPB, "you had better go and rest. By the way,
do you sleep when you sleep, truly sleep? Well, you are doing
better than I do. I am working while I am sleeping."

She had reached that point where she could keep conscious, in
self-conscious awareness, while other men slept; in other words,
she could be self-consciously aware when most people go to sleep.

The third stage, as I have said, is to be self-consciously aware
after death. When you have attained that, then the next is the
state of the god-men, or the men-gods, whom the human race has
known, the Buddhas and Christs, men like Shankaracharya,
Tsongkhapa, and Apollonius. When you reach that stage, you have
to be conscious all the time, waking, sleeping, after death, and
until you return, for you will then have found yourself.

Have you never asked yourself why is it that after dreamless
sleep or dreaming sleep, you awaken the same man? It is so common
and so ordinary that it slips the attention of the average man,
showing that you are not fully aware, not fully awake. But the
genius sees this, and he recognizes that this most common
phenomenon is precisely one that has never been explained by
science, and yet the explanation is with us all the time. We
return because we never have left. We have rebecome our
self-conscious selves again because we were never anything other.
Consciousness is continuity. We have not taught ourselves to be
self-consciously awake when we sleep, self-consciously awake when
we die. But the power is in you. It is yours for the asking.
You remember that Pythagoras called those who were sleeping this
life and death away, the living dead. How long are you going to
stand that for yourselves?