two. A striving towards absolute lack of confidence in anyone or anything, or a striving towards absolute confidence. The perfect consciousness, which is perfectly relaxed, must correspond with absolute confidence. Everyone knows that it is innocence which has peace of mind, and conspiratorial schemers who are tortured by fears and doubts.
The consciousness of immortality is slightly different, because lack of it represents the fear that one's wife's affection will be destroyed by the external disaster of death, rather than by the internal disaster of mankind's tendency to betray. Apart from this, the same argument that applied to the consciousness of God, applies also to the consciousness of immortality. The wife's tendency to treachery, becomes the wife's tendency to panic in face of the fear of death; this is what may shatter his confidence in her. If the wife is to avoid this tendency to panic, she too must be confident of her own immortality, which is what one would expect if their consciousness is shared.
So the final picture is remarkably simple. Ideally in the home of the ordinary man, in contemplation there are these two consciousnesses which are shared between husband and wife, and which blend. When contemplation is replaced by action, the action takes the form of the putting into practice of the belief that love and righteousness go hand in hand, which is wholly consistent with this shared consciousness, and which indeed tends to perpetuate it.
Having got this brief theoretical study out of the way, possibly exciting to the intellectual but deadly boring to the more practical man, it is now possible to have a look at mankind and the world with this new consciousness that I have been speaking about. Mankind is very familiar to us all when seen from the traditional standpoint. When fresher eyes look at mankind, they see that the secret of human nature lies in the quality of the consciousness of the individual.