Page 10 - All India Magazine May-2019

one likes to call it between the lower planes of mind, life,
body supported by the psychic and the higher planes which
contain the spiritual kingdoms where the self is always free
and limitless,— and it can break or open the lid or covering
and ascend there and become the Self free and wide and lu-
minous or else bring down the influence, reflection, finally
even the presence and power of the higher consciousness
into the lower nature.
Now that is what consciousness is — it is not composed
of parts, it is fundamental to being and itself formulates any
parts it chooses to manifest — developing them from above
downward by a progressive coming down from spiritual
levels towards the evolution in matter or formulating them
in an upward working in the front by this process that we
call evolution. If it chooses to work in you through the sense
of ego, you think that it is the clear-cut individual I that does
everything; if it begins to release itself from that limited
working, then you too either begin to expand your sense of
I till it bursts into infinity and no longer exists or to shed it
and flower into spiritual wideness.

CWSA 28: 22-23

Scientific views of consciousness
The ordinary view of consciousness is based on normal
superficial experience plus science. For physical science con-
sciousness is a temporary phenomenon in an unconscious
world, something evolved in an animate organisation that
somehow develops in an originally inanimate and uncon-
scious Matter. It is not inherent in life, for the plant has it
not, it is rather a growing flicker that, once established, lasts
intermittently through sleep and waking while life lasts and
disappears with the dissolution of life. The ordinary mind
identifies consciousness with human waking consciousness

10 All India Magazine, May 2019