I am referring to a kind of experience, a kind of state of Consciousness which seems to be as prevalent among Human beings as measles. It is something that simply happens, and we do not know why it happens.

And although there are all sorts of techniques which claim to be able to promote it, and which are more or less successful in doing so – and sometimes rather less than more – nevertheless, there is this peculiar thing that happens to people.

And it has been recorded as far back in time as we have any recording at all. And that is coming over people the peculiarly convincing sensation that their ordinary sense of individuality – of personal identity – is transcended.

And the individual suddenly feels an experience that instead of the ordinary feeling that ‘I, as an individual, confront a World that is foreign to me, that is not me’.

In this kind of experience ‘I find myself to be of one and the same nature or identity as the world outside me’.

In other words, I suddenly feel no longer a stranger in the world, but as if the external World were my own body.

The next aspect of the feeling is even more difficult to assimilate to our ordinary practical intelligence.

But a very overwhelming feeling that everything that happens – everything I have ever done, everything anybody else has ever done – was part of a harmonious design. That there is no error at all.

And so, to the person in this state of Consciousness – which I call mystical – that all seems very weird, very absurd. But it’s not something that you criticize in an unkindly way.

But it is not something that you criticize in an unkindly way. You don’t say, ‘Those damn fools!’ You say, ‘It’s such a pity that they don’t see it.’ Because although they are going around in this wildly ignorant pursuit, one of the funny things about it is that they don’t realize that there is a dimension, a sense, in which their pursuit is magnificent.

It’s to give an obverse sense to the saying, Father, forgive them for they know not what they do. Turn that into its opposite. Not forgive them, but give them a blessing because they don’t know what they do. Give them an honor.

In other words, the intensely serious preoccupations and anxieties of mankind appear from this standpoint not to be foolishness, but to be a kind of marvel …

… in the same way, perhaps – as you could say – that the protective coloring of a butterfly, who has somehow contrived to make its wings look like enormous eyes. So that when a bird who is about to devour this beast is confronted by these staring eyes, the bird is a little hesitating – as when you stare at somebody they’re always taken a little bit aback.

And so the butterfly appears to stare at the bird. And perhaps, you see, this phenomenon – of the marvel of staring wings of the butterfly – is in some way a result of anxiety. The anxiety to survive, all the problems and struggles of natural selection.

… Nevertheless, in this intense struggle, we are unknowing poets.