I suggest using certain metaphors or images because they are like seed thoughts which have a very strong effect upon one. It’s the way that creative imagination works, with symbols. And the first symbol that I’m suggesting to you, we get back to what I said yesterday, is the vortex, is the fact that, instead of using the old classical idea that part of me, like my body, is transient and my spirit is eternal and so on, we don’t make that distinction. We just say that the body also, what ever it is, everything in life is based on this principle of the vortex. That is, in everything there is a combination of permanency and transiency. And so, in a sense, each one of us are a miracle whereby the whole universe is able to survive, to maintain itself, well, a miracle in which, let’s say, consciousness is able to maintain itself by the change, by dissolving, by being supported by, let’s say, a support system that is continually dissolving and continually rebuilding itself.

So, you can say that the invisible axis of the vortex—there’s no axis, no physical axis, it’s just an organization, just an ordering of the universe around a certain location in space— you could say that that’s what we are. It is maintained by the, as I say, the continual dissolution of all that is drawn into it, the continual drawing in of renewed material. Or you could say that that is a way of looking at it. The first step in meditation is to look at ourselves, think of ourselves totally differently to the way we’ve been doing so far.

We are, there’s not, we are not just a vortex, a whirlpool, but we are conscious that we are, as a whirlpool, we are interdependent upon other whirlpools; in fact, that we all together form a wave interference pattern. As I said, the system can only grow by communicating with other systems. That’s interdependence.

[short pause]

And that means, for example, getting into the consciousness of the trees, and into the consciousness of the water of the Ganges, into the consciousness of the beings who may not be visible at this moment who are maybe some distance away.