Consciousness: Everything has consciousness because everything has knowledge. Where there is no knowledge there is no thing. Unless there is a knower (consciousness) there is no knowing and no knowledge.

You are what you believe you are. You live, enjoy life and suffer according to that belief. But you probably cannot say what you believe you are. You can only say what you imagine you believe you are.

The truth, as always, lies in the source of all truth — life. What you believe, you live; or you do not believe it. Your beliefs can never be separated from your daily life and what you parade as your belief in discussion and argument is what you imagine you believe.

In the first instance, man believes he is his body and his identification with it actually dictates his life and destiny. But if you are only your body, then Christ, Buddha, Abraham and all the prophets were fools. And if you are not your body, what are you?

Your body is yours. Pinch it and it hurts. Pinch someone else and you feel no pain. But that does not necessarily mean your body is you. It could be an expression of you as the note is the expression of the bell. When the note has died, the bell still is. So your body is yours, but not necessarily you.

What drives you on? What makes you strive so hard? Why do you keep going when you are already under sentence of death?

The desire to exist.

If there is no desire to eat or breathe the body rots and vanishes. Remove desire and the body does not exist. So the body exists because of desire. But whose desire?

When you are asleep you are unconscious; you are absent. You exist only because you wake up and regain consciousness. While you are asleep and absent the body must be breathing because it is alive when you wake up. It is not your desire that makes the body breathe. Even while you are awake it is not your desire that keeps it breathing. Only when the breathing is impaired do you appear and do something about it. So the desire to breathe is not yours, but the body’s.

The desire to eat is the body’s too. You do not decide you are hungry. You first become aware of the sensation of discomfort in the body and then realise you are hungry. In the same way you feel well or sick, hot or cold. You do not decide any of these things. You always appear after the sensation and then decide what action to take. So it cannot be the truth that you are your body.

The terms ‘unconscious’ or ‘subconscious’ (as applied to our own minds) have no place in the science of self-discovery, except to spur us on. They only mean there is something about ourselves we do not know, and that is intolerable, for what is unknown might contain our freedom or immortality.

No one has ever discovered an unconscious mind in him or herself; what is discovered is unconsciousness as lack of self-knowledge. If you become conscious of the unconscious mind it is no longer unconscious. If you are unconscious of it, it’s not you. Anything in-between is a partly observed fact or a theory.

There is obviously something determining your actions, the source of your desires and motivation. If you do not know what it is, and it is obviously not the ‘you’ that you imagine or believe yourself to be, it must be the ‘real you’ undiscovered. To label that ‘the unconscious mind’ is just another way of saying you are not all there. The term is usually an excuse for ignorance, used to account for something which in this living moment you are not experiencing.

If you want to study plant-life you must study plants. If you want to study the mind you have only one mind on which to work — your own. You cannot study someone else’s mind as you can study a plant. You only imagine you can. No matter how hard you look you will not find another mind. You will only find another body.

The actions of your own mind can be observed in your body, but to study a ‘mind’ outside your own you will have to use your mind’s impression of your body’s impression of another body’s impression of a mind. This is the unacceptable basis of every psychology that studies other minds.

Everything has consciousness because everything has knowledge. Where there is no knowledge there is no thing. Unless there is a knower (consciousness) there is no knowing and no knowledge.

To exist, a thing must first possess the knowledge to function as itself. If consciousness has only the knowledge of a worm it appears as a worm; if it has the knowledge of a dog, as a dog. While it has only the knowledge of a worm it will always behave like a worm. As consciousness knows, so it appears and behaves.

The study of the behaviour of a thing is the study of its knowledge. If we can find out what it knows we can predict its behaviour, which is exactly what the scientist does.

Man is the only thing capable of fully knowing its own knowledge or function. To know your function is to know yourself. Men and women seldom know themselves, but like all things they have degrees of self-knowledge; the degree is the knowledge which appears as function or behaviour.

Now we can see why man lives what he believes. He functions according to his knowledge of himself. If he does not know his knowledge or function he is not conscious and does not know himself.

If you do not know what you know it means you are not conscious.

To be conscious is to be consciousness: the knower, the supporter of all knowledge. Knowledge varies but consciousness cannot.

Consciousness, the knower in you, cannot be known, although it can be experienced. You can experience consciousness now by experiencing the fact that you exist. The difference between this and any other experience is that it is done independently of any state or thing. It is the only completely independent action man is capable of.
In this brief moment you will notice that you do not have to know anything. You do not even have to know you exist. You just are; or as you would say yourself, ‘I am’.

You cannot hold that state because you start to think; not about anything in particular, but your mind runs off on an association prompted from outside by one of your senses. You think: you become that thought. And consciousness, or the state of pure awareness, is lost.

It is the way of things in this creation that every condition is the opposite of another. There is hot and cold, high and low, birth and death, pure and impure, gross and refined and so on. The movement of life, where it can be distinguished, always seems to be from the gross to the refined, from the impure to the pure. This eternal, seldom comprehended progression is what man knows as hope.

Knowledge follows this law. At one end it is gross, at the other refined. The lower end, in relation to existence, might be the knowledge possessed by a stone. In relation to man, the lower end might be the knowledge of a brute, the higher end the knowledge of a Christ or Buddha.

The highest knowledge man can possess is that which is true in his own experience. If his experience is limited, so is his knowledge and he behaves accordingly. A brute of a man cannot have had the same experience as a Buddha. But a Buddha must have had the same experience as a brute or there is no progression. The highest knowledge must be the most reliable too, or the law breaks down.

If someone tells you it is raining, and you look around and see it is not, you say it is not. It doesn’t matter what authority the person has; you cannot be convinced otherwise because in your own experience at that moment you know the fact. You know it in the same way as you know you exist, and that is the supreme certainty of all experience.

The faculty you have used is logic. You have started with the first fact; your experience now. Logic always deals with first thing first. You might then say that you know it is not raining because when it rains you get wet and now you are dry. When you start to use the facts of your past experience, you start to use the faculty of reason. As reason moves further away from the living moment into more remote experience it becomes imagination, and the likelihood of error is increased enormously. Reason links man with factual memory. Imagination links him with impression-memory.

To know something in your own experience, just as you know you exist, does not require imagination. All you have to do is observe. You need no outside knowledge, no techniques, no talents as the world applauds them, no authority, no university degree, no books, no assistance. It is the simple, beautiful experience of aloneness (the opposite of loneliness).

The fact is always simple. The difficulty is in seeing it through the mind which always takes the imaginative way — until it is stilled. The mind knows it is the master in imagination and the slave of the fact. It will fight you all the way to self-knowledge. And why not? It is the only enemy.

Your memory is filled with uncountable experiences, a teeming jumble of unconnected matters right back to childhood. Yet when something comes up for discussion only the absolutely relevant details present themselves to consciousness and you express them.

You meet a person you have not seen for twenty years. In the second it takes to shake his hand you recall his name and most of the things you know about him and experienced together. This surely is a miracle. (Perhaps we have never observed it as such because we are always too busy looking for the miraculous.)

This miracle is the unifying principle of individual experience in this life. You have probably heard it called ‘the ego’.
A ‘principle’ is a fundamental element that can be demonstrated but not defined. ‘Unifying’ means reducing to unity; which in terms of time means having continuity.

This principle unifies all your individual experience of life into the one amazing, intelligible, continuous expression which is you.