Awareness begins with the permanent pressure that the emanations at large exert on the emanations trapped inside the cocoon. This pressure produces the first act of consciousness; it stops the motion of the trapped emanations, which are fighting to break the cocoon, fighting to die.

For a seer, the truth is that all living beings are struggling to die. What stops death is awareness. The new seers were profoundly disturbed by the fact that awareness forestalls death and at the same time induces it by being attracted by the Indescribable Force. Since they could not explain it, for there is no rational way to understand existence, seers realized that their knowledge is composed of contradictory propositions.

For example, seers have to be methodical, rational beings, paragons of sobriety, and at the same time they must shy away from all of those qualities in order to be completely free and open to the wonders and mysteries of existence.

Only a feeling of supreme sobriety can bridge the contradictions. You may call the bridge between contradictions anything you want-- art, affection, sobriety, love, or even kindness.

In examining the first attention, the new seers realized that all organic beings, except man, quiet down their agitated trapped emanations so that those emanations can align themselves with their matching ones outside. Human beings do not do that; instead, their first attention takes an inventory of the Indescribable Force's emanations inside their cocoons. Human beings take notice of the emanations they have inside their cocoons, no other creatures do that. The moment the pressure from the emanations at large fixates the emanations inside, the first attention begins to watch itself. It notes everything about itself, or at least it tries to, in whatever aberrant ways it can. This is the process seers call taking an inventory.

I don't mean to say that human beings choose to take an inventory, or that they can refuse to take it. To take an inventory is the Indescribable Force's command. What is subject to volition, however, is the manner in which the command is obeyed.

Although I dislike calling the emanations commands, that is what they are: commands that no one can disobey. Yet the way out of obeying the commands is in obeying them.

In the case of the inventory of the first attention, seers take it, for they can't disobey. But once they have taken it they throw it away. The Indescribable Force doesn't command us to worship our inventory; it commands us to take it, that's all.

The emanations inside the cocoon of man are not quieted down

for purposes of matching them with those outside. This is evident after seeing what other creatures do. On quieting down, some of them actually merge themselves with the emanations at large and move with them.

But human beings quiet down their emanations and then reflect on them. The emanations focus on themselves. Human beings carry the command of taking an inventory to its logical extreme and disregard everything else. Once they are deeply involved in the inventory, two things may happen. They may ignore the impulses of the emanations at large, or they may use them in a very specialized way.

The end result of ignoring those impulses after taking an inventory is a unique state known as reason. The result of using every impulse in a specialized way is known as self-absorption.