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Hawkes, Jacquetta – A Land – The gathering of consciousness
Identifier
021705
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
Jacquetta Hawkes – A Land
This gathering up of consciousness during time can be followed also through space. It stretches up through time from the placid mass of cells on the drying mud, through reptiles browsing on the branches of trees and the little mammals peeping on them through the leaves, up to Proust in his exquisite, agonizing web.
So, too, at this one moment of time I can feel consciousness stretching from the crystalline virus that blights tomato plants, through fish, reptiles and mammals to the minds of men.
Indeed it is obviously only an expedient convention to stop with the forms of life that are earliest in time, or the simplest in space. Consciousness must surely be traced back to the rocks-the rocks which have been here since life began and so make a meeting place for the roots of life in time and space, the earliest and the simplest.
Why, indeed, stop with this planet?
Even if nothing like the human psyche and intellect have developed elsewhere, it is necessary in an indivisible universe to believe that the principle of consciousness must extend everywhere.
Even now I imagine that I can feel all the particles of the universe nourishing my consciousness just as my consciousness informs, all the particles of the universe.