Four States of Consciousness

The meeting started with a reading from Ouspensky’s ‘The Fourth way’, Chapter 5, and discussed the idea in the work that with certain knowledge and efforts a man can improve and develop himself and become a more conscious being.

In the waking state a man’s reality differs very little from his sleeping state and very few are sufficiently interested in becoming more conscious, but those who do can observe for themselves that when we are in the waking state, most of our behaviour is mechanical and we do not possess ‘self-consciousness’. This realisation of our lack of awareness is the first step in acquiring self-consciousness.

The next step is to realise that we do not know ourselves or how our mechanical way of thinking controls our actions. Knowing these facts can lead us to study methods of self-study such as ‘self-observation’ noting whether the type of impression that we observe is a thought, a feeling’ or other kind of sensation’ and evaluate if they are useful or harmful to us.

(Read more on this from the book itself. An electronic version of this book is available from the link on the right.)

This led to a discussion of four states of consciousness, sleep, waking state, self-consciousness, and objective-consciousness, and the relative differences between them.








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