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Cosmic Consciousness by Ali Nomad

III AREAS OF CONSCIOUSNESS

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While expressing a very limited degree of consciousness, yet there is evident a certain degree or aggregate of cell consciousness, which transcends that of the mineral and vegetable life. This apparently _advanced_ degree of consciousness, does not, as we have stated, presuppose a nearer approach to immortality, however, for the reason that we apply the law of the survival of the fittest to all manifestation, and that which is best fitted for certain stages of the planet's life during the process of evolvement, may be most unfitted for succeeding stages, and will, by the inexorable law of survival, be discontinued--discarded, even as the properties and stage-settings of a drama are thrown aside, when the play has been "taken off the boards."

It is admitted, therefore, that those forms of life having the power of locomotion, involve a more complex degree of consciousness, than does that of the mineral or vegetable.

In that phase of life that we see possessing the power to move, to change its immediate environment, even though not capable of changing its _habitat_ we may perceive the beginning of that consciousness expressed as "free-will." Here, we assume, the organism recognizes its self as distinct from its environment, and from its counterparts, etc., but this recognition has not sufficient consciousness to _assert_ that recognition, and so we say that there is no _self_-consciousness. There is what occultists have agreed to call simple consciousness, but this does not include a realization of identity, as apart from environment. This may be better understood if we separate these degrees or phases of consciousness into groups, applicable to the human organism, leaving, for a time the consideration of whether or not some human specimens are higher in the scales than are some animals.

Physical, or sense consciousness, is shared alike by man and the animals.

Beyond this phase of consciousness we may classify the human species in the following terms:

Physical self-consciousness.

Mental self-consciousness.

Soul (individual) "I" consciousness.

Spiritual self-consciousness.

Physical self-consciousness is that phase of self-recognition which knows itself as a body distinct from its neighbors; from its natural environment. This awareness of the self it is that actuated pre-historic man when he manifested the blind force that is sometimes called "self-preservation," which force has erroneously been termed "the first law of nature."

Preservation of this physical self is the most "primitive" law of nature, but not "first" in the sense that it is the most important, or the strongest.

The world's long list of heroes refutes this idea. The pre-historic species of human, then, in common with his brother, the animal, sought to preserve this physical self, because he felt that this physical self, his body, was all there was of him, and he wished to preserve it, even as the _wise_ man of to-day, sacrifices everything to the preservation of the moral and spiritual Self which he realizes is the _real_ of him.

To this end, he cultivated physical force, sufficient to overcome his environment; and as he developed a little of that consciousness which we term mental (using the term merely as a part of the physical organism called the brain), he realized that co-operation would greatly enhance his chances for self-preservation, and therefore, this mental consciousness impelled him to annex to his forces other physical organisms so that their united strength might preserve each other.

This side of the story of man's evolution in consciousness is not however a part of our present work, and we will therefore leave it, for a brief consideration of the successive steps in attainment of consciousness, leading through devious paths, and through millions of relative time called years, into the present state of man's consciousness which in so many instances presages the oncoming of that state, called liberation, or illumination--mukti.