=1 "Mirror of reversal"
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Mirror of reversal
When something touches the little amoeba it is conscious of the touch, but when the second touch comes it has already forgotten the first. Everything it becomes conscious of, it is. It is not conscious of being separate, of being touched by something, only "there is a touching". If it is hungry, it wouldn't be able to say, "I am hungry", only "hunger", or "there is hunger". There is no reflection of consciousness on itself. The higher animals can add to this consciousness an awareness of themselves, a consciousness which, in man, becomes pointed and painful. The higher animal is still all observation: when he looks at something he lives entirely in his eyes. But in man things start to mirror themselves in his ego. Everything he sees or observes he observes through that, and finds it either good or bad or indifferent for that little ego.
The artists of Altamira or Lascaux or Tassili are still all observation, one could say anonymous and photographic. But the impressionist or the expressionist, as the name indicates, is all impression, an impression on an ego and an expression of ego. Beethoven and Picasso are not describing an event or a form. They both say: "Just see what I can do with that! See what an impression it has made on me."
Sooner or later the great majority of mankind will of necessity attain to this intermediary, individual state, however disagreeable or painful. But consciousness can become even sharper than that, more pointed, deeper and with the seat of the observer even farther in the background. From it he can observe even the ego itself, the observer together with that which has been observed, and can remain entirely separate from the phenomenon he observes. This constitutes the discovery of the noumenon, the eternal, as opposed to the phenomenon, the ephemeral. It is the consciousness of the yogi who observes himself.
Up to now all movements of consciousness, from the amoeba to the man, represent a flow inward. All images, ideas, events, take birth outside and from outside enter the consciousness. With the yogi, however, movements of consciousness start to flow outward. When all the consciousness flows in the direction from deep within in a powerful flow to the surface and outside, we are in the presence of a solar consciousness, and its possessor is no longer homo sapiens but homo aureus, the shining one. From that moment onward the eyes are no longer organs of observation, but lighthouses of consciousness.
From homo sapiens to homo aureus there are also stages.
The mathematician who builds a theorum, or the physicist who discovers an axiom, has no longer that overwhelming impression that it is his ego which produces the theory or the axiom, but rather that an observation has fallen from outside on an inner understanding which has then formulated the theory. And the more this observer becomes pure and without the interference of an ego, the more he is able to express the truth which is relevant for everyone. From this moment on, we could say that more consciousness goes outward than inward. The solar consciousness of homo aureus is a consciousness which receives nothing from outside, because, with a total identity between the observer and the observed, there is no outside. The whole universe, with all its phenomena, is in him, simply because the consciousness which looks through his eyes is as great as the universe and carries it in itself.
See also