June 2008

The universe is one great city, full of beloved ones, divine and human, by nature endeared to each other.
Epictetus

A fourth way school offers objective knowledge on the human machine for observation, and with such ideas as ‘body type’ and ‘chief feature’, one develops a consciousness that is ‘not this body, not this mind, not these emotions’ but of the ‘Eternal Witness’. Observing ‘I’ creates a distance from one’s mechanics. 

Yet this distance is not empty. The relationship of the ‘Eternal Witness’ to the machine is one of acceptance. It is a higher world that observes, a higher world that accepts, by contrast to the many I’s, whose condition it to reject every other sovereignty but their own. Sleep serves an offering to Third Eye, transformed through the awareness of ‘Eternal Witness’.

Transformation does not mean better gears and levers for the machine, but as it applies to consciousness. In the process, mechanics remain the same even as consciousness invisibly flowers. The esoteric science of Alchemy alludes to transformation as changing base metal into gold. The work of schools is an example of transformation. Schools witness periodic cycles of upheaval, war and controversy, and students daily transform human sleep. A student observes their psychology and separates from it. 

Again, this separation is not empty. Students of a school mechanically do not choose each other, yet a bond develops between them through the work. Students value the struggle of others to be awake. The work enters filial friendships and physical desires, and as a result of conscious efforts, students experience agape, the classical Greek term for conscious love of all things. Yet a rare form of love, while not exclusive to schools, often develops between students who are present with each other, the amity of consciousness. One is awake with others who are awake, truly enlightened company.