Perhaps you noticed that we were considering our body, and our mind, and our personality, and our consciousness, but now we consider the whole physical world instead of our body, and so on and so forth. We will be proceeding on those lines. Now these are the Jhanas, instead of the Vipassanas or Satipathanas. And the first Jhana is from the moment that you are able to see that your body is the formation made out of the impersonal forces of nature, well then you look at the whole of nature, the whole of the physical world, and then you start realizing, or better still of course, once you’ve gone through all the four stages of Vipassana, and consciousness is not limited within the perspective, the vantage point of the person, you suddenly realize that the whole physical world now looks totally different. For example, from the point of view of consciousness threaded into, let’s say, the lens of the person, the stars look like points in the sky. The sun seems to turn around the earth. And so on. That’s the way that the universe, physical universe, appears to me. That’s not the way the universe is, it’s the way it appears to me. I’m only perceiving the frequencies and the electromagnetic field that I perceive represents about one fiftieth of the total spectrum. So I’m caught in a very narrow view of the universe. I don’t see the atoms. So the things that I see are within the middle ranges of the scale of values of size, let’s say. And I think that I know the universe? The picture that I have of the universe is a far cry from the reality of the physical universe. It’s just a picture. It’s like the map that I make of a territory is not the territory. It’s just a map, it’s just an approximation.

And that’s how most of us are caught in an illusion. And we are so convinced of it. We argue about it and we act on the strength of this image that we make of the universe that is not the way things are. And the reason is because I’m referring everything to my sense of me as a person. That’s the reason why I don’t see things as they are. The reason is of course because the eyes are programmed in such a way as to refer everything to the eyes.

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Now supposing that I, instead of contacting the physical universe through my senses, which makes, which limits the way I see it, which limits my experience to the vantage point, supposing that I were to experience the universe beyond my senses, without threading the universe through my senses. Supposing for example, that I would get into the consciousness of the trees and the rocks and the animals and the people. Then imagine how different the universe would look. Supposing that when I think of the stars, they’re little points in the sky, as seen from the vantage point of my eyes. But supposing that I were able to reach out with my consciousness into outer space, I would realize that the stars are enormous, and the planets, that I can’t even see when I try to look at them from the planet Earth, are enormous. That’s the kind of state in which you are, if you are high. All of a sudden, the space relationships are altered. You discover a totally different way of experiencing the universe. You suddenly get a direct contact with the universe by eliminating your image of it.

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Now this, we can confirm this in the latest scientific models in that, it is now found that subatomic particles do have some action upon one another by colliding, for example, or by sending signals to one another. Light signals, for example, or radio signals. But we find, it has been found that they influence one another, or interact rather, without being able to reach each other from person to person, let’s say, from subatomic particle to subatomic particle. But because they are all part of the total body of the universe, and so that overall transformations of the body of the universe affect two particles even though they are not able to reach each other. So let us say they communicate through the consciousness of the whole when they cannot communicate directly from their individual consciousnesses to each other…this may be difficult for some of you to follow.

Really, what this amounts to, is that some action is carried out at the individual level, and some action is carried out beyond the individual. And in the same way, we do communicate with the universe through our senses, and limited through the vantage point, you see.

But we can communicate with the universe without being limited by the senses. Now we can do both.

We can walk in the forest, and our eyes may be aware of how the trees look, but we can at the same time experience a kind of transfigured universe, and experience what it feels like to be those trees at the same time as we are seeing them. So we are communicating with them in a limited way through our senses, and at the same time, we are communicating with them in a deeper way. Exactly as I said, you could sit in that concert hall and be aware of the music, and at the same time be aware of what’s going on elsewhere. Part of you, let’s say, consciousness is partly working, functioning through the personalized, let’s say the focalized, let's say focal center of consciousness. And at the same time, consciousness may be functioning without being limited by its focalized center.

For example, the ant may partly be operating from his personal vantage point and partly from the consciousness of the total ant nest.

Carl Pribram says that the brain acts as a hologram but nevertheless, certain cells have more specific functions than others. It’s the same principle.

So this is the first Jhana. A totally different relationship with matter from the moment that one dismisses, let’s say one unmasks, the hoax that one sees clearly that one’s idea of the universe is not the universe. From that moment, one begins to communicate with the universe directly. And as you see, it’s a stupendous experience. Suddenly, you realize how you’ve let yourself be fooled!