Ancient philosophy says that human beings normally experience only three states: sleeping, dreaming and waking. In meditation, fleetingly you experience turya, literally the fourth state, or transcendental consciousness. When this state coexists and stabilizes with the other three, that is, the fifth state, where I-consciousness expands to become cosmic consciousness. The sixth state is God consciousness whereby you see God everywhere, in everything. The last is unity consciousness: what is within is also outside pure consciousness, and nothing else is.

Spiritually, consciousness is as vast as the universe, both known and unknown. The potential power of this level of consciousness has been merely touched upon. Consciousness at this level becomes capable of magical powers, defying accepted scientific physical laws and giving us a glimpse of probable future.

The conscious human mind is capable of great good and equally extraordinary evil. It is only for the sake of simplicity that we talk of levels with an upward hierarchy. In fact, consciousness, while rooted in causal linearity is dynamic, free moving and nonlinear. The greatest discoveries and inventions were arrived at intuitively. The genius sees what we all see except that, thinks about it differently. The evil genius does exactly the same.

"The supreme paradox of all thought is the attempt to discover something that thought cannot think." A conscious human knows something and he knows that he knows it. The paradox of consciousness is not that we are aware of ourselves but of other things as well, including those that do not constitute the 'real world'. Of course, when we 'conceive' or imagine something 'unreal' even our farthest imagination cannot transcend 'known' symbolism, which is why there are some things that defy definition. One of these is 'consciousness' itself.

Consciousness is our most prized possession. It takes us on incredible journeys and has given us the gifts of insight and transcendence. The same kind of process that gives the earth abundant life allows us to have a sense of self, to contemplate the world, to forecast the future and make ethical choices. Each of us has under our control a miniature world, continuously evolving, unique to our own minds. In the same way that life itself unfolded, our mental life is progressively enriched, enabling each of us to create our own world.

The universe was born from chaos billions of light years ago and evolved through random selection, and is doing so even today. Stars and people are born and die for no better reason than that they simply do. Some stars live longer than others do; some support a host of satellites. Our sun is one of the latter and our fragile planet is just a rock that accidentally came from the sun and eventually became home to many life forms. As life forms evolved through random selection, humans emerged on the top of the food chain and from there, in the blink of an eye, here we are, seriously and consciously looking for answers and meanings in the universe around us.

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