What you have to realize is that life is a pattern of immense complexity.
Each one of us is a very, very delightfully complex undulation of the energy of the whole universe.
The process of growth, the basic process of biology, is one in which lower orders are always being superseded by higher orders. But the lower order can never figure out—or only very rarely figure out—what the higher order is that’s taking over, and may see it as a terrible threat; as total disaster, as the very end.
You never know what the next step is going to be, because if you did know you wouldn’t take it—because it would already be past. Do you understand this? That any certainly known future is an event of which we can say you’ve had it, and in that sense it’s past.
When we play at games, and we—say, in chess, or in bridge, or whatever game you’re playing—the outcome of the game becomes certain, we at that point cancel the game and begin a new one. Because the whole zest of the thing—and which takes me back to the idea that this whole thing is a hide-and-seek game—is that you don’t know what the next order coming up is. But one thing you can be sure of: it will be an order, and it will comprehend you.
Going back to this illustration of every living body as something like the flame of a candle: the energies of life—in the form of temperature, light, air, and food, and so on—are streaming through you all at this moment in the most magnificently harmonious way.
It’s a characteristic of consciousness that it ignores stimuli that are constant.
So that if you do become aware that you are not simply that scanning mechanism, but you are your complete organism, then—very swiftly in turn; as a consequence of that—you become aware that your organism is not the way you think about it when you look at it from the standpoint of conscious attention, from the standpoint of the ego. From the standpoint of the ego, your organism is your—kind of—vehicle, your automobile, in which you go around. But from a physical point of view, your organism is, again, like the candle flame or the whirlpool: it is something which is a continuous patterning—or activity—of the whole cosmos.