“The two usual, that is, the lowest, states of consciousness are first, sleep, in other words a passive state in which man spends a third and very often a half of his life. And second, the state in which men spend the other part of their lives, in which they walk the streets, write books, talk on lofty subjects, take part in politics, kill one another, which they regard as active and call ‘clear consciousness’ or the ‘waking STATE OF CONSCIOUSNESS.’ The term ‘clear consciousness’ or ‘waking STATE OF CONSCIOUSNESS’ seems to have been given in jest, especially when you realize what clear consciousness ought in reality to be and what the state in which man lives and acts really is. Fragments: Eight

“The third STATE OF CONSCIOUSNESS is self-remembering or self-consciousness or consciousness of one’s being. It is usual to consider that we have this STATE OF CONSCIOUSNESS or that we can have it if we want it. Our science and philosophy have overlooked the fact that we do not possess this STATE OF CONSCIOUSNESS and that we cannot create it in ourselves by desire or decision alone. Fragments: Eight

“The fourth STATE OF CONSCIOUSNESS is called the objective STATE OF CONSCIOUSNESS In this state a man can see things as they are. Flashes of this STATE OF CONSCIOUSNESS also occur in man. In the religions of all nations there are indications of the possibility of a STATE OF CONSCIOUSNESS of this kind which is called ‘enlightenment’ and various other names but which cannot be described in words. But the only right way to objective consciousness is through the development of self-consciousness. If an ordinary man is artificially brought into a state of objective consciousness and afterwards brought back to his usual state he will remember nothing and he will think that for a time he had lost consciousness. But in the state of self-consciousness a man can have Hashes of objective consciousness and remember them. Fragments: Eight

“The fourth STATE OF CONSCIOUSNESS in man means an altogether different state of being; it is the result of inner growth and of long and difficult work on oneself. Fragments: Eight

“But the third STATE OF CONSCIOUSNESS constitutes the natural right of man as he is, and if man does not possess it, it is only because of the wrong conditions of his life. It can be said without any exaggeration that at the present time the third STATE OF CONSCIOUSNESS occurs in man only in the form of very rare flashes and that it can be made more or less permanent in him only by means of special training. Fragments: Eight

“In order to understand what the difference between states of consciousness is, let us return to the first STATE OF CONSCIOUSNESS which is sleep. This is an entirely subjective STATE OF CONSCIOUSNESS. A man is immersed in dreams, whether he remembers them or not does not matter. Even if some real impressions reach him, such as sounds, voices, warmth, cold, the sensation of his own body, they arouse in him only fantastic subjective images. Then a man wakes up. At first glance this is a quite different STATE OF CONSCIOUSNESS. He can move, he can talk with other people, he can make calculations ahead, he can see danger and avoid it, and so on. It stands to reason that he is in a better position than when he was asleep. But if we go a little more deeply into things, if we take a look into his inner world, into his thoughts, into the causes of his actions, we shall see that he is in almost the same state as when he is asleep. And it is even worse, because in sleep he is passive, that is, he cannot do anything. In the waking state, however, he can do something all the time and the results of all his actions will be reflected upon him or upon those around him. And yet he does not remember himself. He is a machine, everything with him happens. He cannot stop the flow of his thoughts, he cannot control his imagination, his emotions, his attention. He lives in a subjective world of ‘I love,’ ‘I do not love,’ ‘I like,’ ‘I do not like,’ ‘I want,’ ‘I do not want,’ that is, of what he thinks he likes, of what he thinks he does not like, of what he thinks he wants, of what he thinks he does not want. He does not see the real world. The real world is hidden from him by the wall of imagination. He lives in sleep. He is asleep. What is called ‘clear consciousness’ is sleep and a far more dangerous sleep than sleep at night in bed. Fragments: Eight

“Now turn your attention to what I have pointed out to you before. A fully developed man, which I call ‘man in the full sense of the word,’ should possess four states of consciousness. Ordinary man, that is, man number one, number two, and number three, lives in two states of consciousness only. He knows, or at least he can know, of the existence of the fourth STATE OF CONSCIOUSNESS. All these ‘mystical states’ and so on are wrong definitions but when they are not deceptions or imitations they are flashes of what we call an objective STATE OF CONSCIOUSNESS. Fragments: Eight

“But man does not know of the third STATE OF CONSCIOUSNESS or even suspect it. Nor can he suspect it because if you were to explain to him what the third STATE OF CONSCIOUSNESS is, that is to say, in what it consists, he would say that it was his usual state. He considers himself to be a conscious being governing his own life. Facts that contradict that, he considers to be accidental or temporary, which will change by themselves. By considering that he possesses self-consciousness, as it were by nature, a man will not of course try to approach or obtain it. And yet without self-consciousness, or the third state, the fourth, except in rare flashes, is impossible. Knowledge, however, the real objective knowledge towards which man, as he asserts, is struggling, is possible only in the fourth STATE OF CONSCIOUSNESS, that is, it is conditional upon the full possession of the fourth STATE OF CONSCIOUSNESS. Knowledge which is acquired in the ordinary STATE OF CONSCIOUSNESS is intermixed with dreams. There you have a complete picture of the being of man number one, two, and three.” Fragments: Eight

One thing I understood even then with undoubted clarity, that no phenomena of a higher order, that is, transcending the category of ordinary things observable every day, or phenomena which are sometimes called “metaphysical,” can be observed or investigated by ordinary means, in an ordinary STATE OF CONSCIOUSNESS, like physical phenomena. It is a complete absurdity to think that it is possible to study phenomena of a higher order like “telepathy,” “clairvoyance,” foreseeing the future, mediumistic phenomena, and so on, in the same way as electrical, chemical, or meteorological phenomena are studied. There is something in phenomena of a higher order which requires a particular emotional state for their observation and study. And this excludes any possibility of “properly conducted” laboratory experiments and observations. Fragments: Thirteen

As I have already mentioned before, G. used the expressions “objective” and “subjective” in a special sense, taking as a basis the divisions of “subjective” and “objective” states of consciousness. All our ordinary knowledge which is based on ordinary methods of observation and verification of observations, all scientific theories deduced from the observation of facts accessible to us in subjective states of consciousness, he called subjective. Knowledge based upon ancient methods and principles of observation, knowledge of things in themselves, knowledge accompany-ing “an objective STATE OF CONSCIOUSNESS,” knowledge of the All, was for him objective knowledge. Fragments: Fourteen

“None the less the idea of the unity of everything exists also in intellectual thought but in its exact relation to diversity it can never be clearly expressed in words or in logical forms. There remains always the insurmountable difficulty of language. A language which has been constructed through expressing impressions of plurality and diversity in subjective states of consciousness can never transmit with sufficient completeness and clarity the idea of unity which is intelligible and obvious for the objective STATE OF CONSCIOUSNESS. Fragments: Fourteen