In Search of the Miraculous

necessary to be convinced of the very fact of sleep. But it is possible to be convinced

of this only by trying to awaken. When a man understands that he does not remember

himself and that to remember himself means to awaken to some extent, and when at

the same time he sees by experience how difficult it is to remember himself, he will

understand that he cannot awaken simply by having the desire to do so. It can be said

still more precisely that a man cannot awaken by himself. But if, let us say, twenty people make an agreement that whoever of them awakens first shall wake the rest,

they already have some chance. Even

this, however, is insufficient because all the twenty can go to sleep at the same time

and dream that they are waking up. Therefore more still is necessary. They must be

looked after by a man who is not asleep or who does not fall asleep as easily as they

do, or who goes to sleep consciously when this is possible, when it will do no harm

either to himself or to others. They must find such a man and hire him to wake them and not allow them to fall asleep again. Without this it is impossible to awaken. This

is what must be understood.

"It is possible to think for a thousand years; it is possible to write whole libraries of books, to create theories by the million, and all this in sleep, without any possibility

of awakening. On the contrary, these books and these theories, written and created in

sleep, will merely send other people to sleep, and so on.

"There is nothing new in the idea of sleep. People have been told almost since the

creation of the world that they are asleep and that they must awaken. How many times

is this said in the Gospels, for instance? 'Awake,' 'watch,' 'sleep not.' Christ's disciples even slept when he was praying in the Garden of Gethsemane for the last time. It is all

there. But do men understand it? Men take it simply as a form of speech, as an

expression, as a metaphor. They completely fail to understand that it must be taken

literally. And again it is easy to understand why. In order to understand this literally it is necessary to awaken a little, or at least to try to awaken. I tell you seriously that I have been asked several times why nothing is said about sleep in the Gospels.

Although it is there spoken of almost on every page. This simply shows that people

read the Gospels in sleep. So long as a man sleeps profoundly and is wholly immersed

in dreams he cannot even think about the fact that he is asleep. If he were to think that he was asleep, he would wake up. So everything goes on. And men have not the

slightest idea what they are losing because of this sleep. As I have already said, as he

is organized, that is, being such as nature has created him, man can be a selfconscious being. Such he is created and such he is born. But he is born among sleeping people, and, of course, he falls asleep among them just at the very time when

he should have begun to be conscious of himself. Everything has a hand in this: the

involuntary imitation of older people on the part of the child, voluntary and

involuntary suggestion, and what is called 'education.' Every attempt to awaken on the

child's part is instantly stopped. This is inevitable. And a great many efforts and a

great deal of help are necessary in order to awaken later when thousands of sleepcompelling habits have been accumulated. And this very seldom happens. In most cases, a man when still a child already loses the possibility of awakening;

he lives in sleep all his life and he dies in sleep. Furthermore, many people die long

before their physical death. But of such cases we will speak later on.

"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.

"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 selfconsciousness, or the third state, the fourth, except in rare flashes, is impossible.