Sentience is like a man who sits on a beach looking at the world with feelings but no understanding. Everything he sees, hears, senses, impresses him and this evokes deep emotions but although these emotions are 'selfish' he cannot find himself in this world and for this reason he cannot love the world.
Sitting on the sand he notices something sticking out - letters. He takes them out one by one, they have been there a long time and look quite old and valuable so he decides to take them home, hoping they can tell him something about the world and his place in it.
Intellect is like the man who takes the letters he found in the world to study at home, separating each letter out with great care, polishing preserving and memorising only the form and substance, quality and quantity. Comparing one to the other and making tables of names which can distinguish them so that at any time he can recall them in his memory. When he does this he becomes more knowledgeable about the letters, but he knows they have no relation to him - they are what he is not and for all his work he is disappointed. This is study.
One day while looking at the letters for any flaws he chances upon a discovery. If he puts them together in a certain pattern they create words, he wonders if their purpose was not to be studied singly but rather in connection with one another. This was a wonderful revelation but no matter how many patterns he creates, the words are still outside him and so they cannot tell him anything about his relationship to the world.
This is imagination.
Consciousness is like a man who decides to swallow the letters so that he might become one with them. When he digests them he can no longer see them and at first he is sad, for he thinks he has lost them. Even so he is inspired to walk into the world and when he does he can feel these letters within him, speaking in his limbs revealing to him, through his movement outwards, that he is always one with the world and that this oneness is his relation to it.
This is inspiration.
Now he understands the truth, that what he felt with his sentience and studied with his intellect were necessary stages for becoming selfless in knowledge. Now he knows how to read the ABC of the spirit, the occult script.
Spirit Consciousness is like a man who when he walks out into the world with the ABC of the spirit in himself feels so much love for the truth he sees, the words in all he sees, that he takes these into himself consciously and unites himself with the spirit in all things. Now begins the preparation of the Philosopher's stone because he understands how microcosm and macrocosm meet in the human being - how above and below meet in the soul to bring about life.
Life Consciousness is like a man who, when he takes in the truth of the world into himself feels no selfish emotions, but rather his emotions are transformed to a selfless love for the truth. The truth of the world is inside him now and it brings him renewed life and he loves this life for its own sake.
Now he can live into the macrocosm, the spirit in the world, not as a guest, but as a citizen of that world.
Human Consciousness is a like a man who in loving the truth feels an impulse not to remain in the macrocosm but to return to the microcosm, to remain a human being so he can turn the truths he has found, through an effort of his will, into a good action, for the love of that action, and the sake of those who have not yet found the truth.
Now does the spirit of world, truth, become through love, a force of individual goodness in the man and once again he walks it into the world doing good deeds for the love of the deeds which are based on truth. Such a man has turned the letters he once found into words and those words into deeds. This is Divine Bliss - living in goodness.
What is the deed that such a man living in goodness can do?
He speaks out new letters and then buries them in the sand for someone else to find.
