The consciousness is the intelligence; the intelligence is the soul; the soul is the spirit; and the spirit is God. Therefore consciousness is the divine element, consciousness is the God-part in us. And it is through consciousness that we become small or great, and through consciousness we either rise or fall, and through consciousness we become narrow or we expand.

One finds in Greek mystical symbology and also elsewhere the two wings of an eagle, and this symbol is the symbol of consciousness. When the wings are open it means the expansion of consciousness, which can also be called the unfoldment of the soul. In any path you take, when you wish to go further in the spiritual journey, be it religion, occultism, philosophy, or mysticism, you have to come to the expansion of consciousness.

What is consciousness? When we say: "a loaded gun", we mean that there is a bullet in it. Consciousness means the loaded intelligence, intelligence charged with knowledge, with impressions carrying ideas. When we speak of moving pictures, where are they? On the screen; but we do not see the screen, we see moving pictures. Consciousness is pure intelligence which is impregnated with some idea, which is conscious of something. And what is intelligence? Intelligence is the soul; there is no other trace of the soul to be found except the intelligence. Very often people, not understanding, say the seat of the soul is in the heart, or in the right or left side of man; but in reality there is something more expressive than any side of man's body, and that is intelligence.

There is a story which demonstrates the idea of the universal or general consciousness apart from individual consciousness. There was a magician who imagined that he was fluid, liquid, moving, rising and falling, and turning into the sea. Then he imagined, "Now I am solid." Atoms grouped together, froze and turned into ice. Then he thought, "I am not so cold. I can try and be stable, and will not melt"; and he turned into stone. Next he said, "Now I want to change. I do not want to remain stone." And he became a tree. "But," he said, "still I am not moving, not working"; and he twisted and moved, and turned into an insect. But the magician thought, "How helpless it is to live as an insect! I should like to play and sing"; and he turned into a bird. Then he said, "I want to be more gross and dense, and feel myself more intelligent"; and he turned into an animal. Finally he said, "I want to stand on my hind legs, to stretch my spine"; and he turned into man.

This is the phenomenon of a magician who wanted, who imagined something and who became it. One finds this idea also in the scriptures.

In the Qur'an it is said, "Be, and it became."

It was the magician's work: what he was conscious of, he became. First there was the consciousness, and then the idea it held turned into something.

But there is another question: if the magician was so powerful as to think and turn into something, then why did he himself become obscured? The answer is this, that when a man has said, "I would like to rest, to go to sleep", naturally he has lost his activity. Turning into something made that consciousness, which is divine or universal consciousness, limited; and this limitation robbed it of its own consciousness. This is the deepest point of metaphysics.

For instance, when the consciousness thought, "I will turn into a rock, I am a rock", it became a rock. The consciousness did not lose its fluid substance, but intelligence no longer knew its own existence. And yet when the magician thought, "I will turn into a rock", what went into the rock? Just one little thought of the magician. Only, because of that thought he could not express himself, nor feel as he felt in the condition of being a magician. When he turned into a rock he did not feel through this thought, he felt nothing.