So this is how one learns to turn within. So I would say the first—there are two steps, well there are four steps—what we were doing, let's try in retrospect to try and realize what we're doing.

We were extending our consciousness into the environment. The physical environment and the psychological environment. So that leads towards what I call the cosmic dimension of consciousness.

And then we were turning within. And, curiously enough, in order to be able to expand our consciousness into that of other people we had to really turn within.

And that's a better way of turning within than what one generally assumes one needs to do to turn within because one generally thinks that to turn within one has to just forget the environment and do what one calls introspection. And introspection is not turning within. In fact one is doing exactly the same thing as one is doing with the outer world. One is still thinking of oneself as a subject experiencing the object that is one's thoughts. So turning within one has to lose the sense of one's self as the spectator.

To discover what is implicit, what transpires behind that which appears, one also has to transform the notion of one's self as a spectator. The whole universe is the spectator coming through our consciousness.

For example, you were swimming at the surface of the water, and there were—of a lake, for example—and there were water lilies and then now you swim under the lake, under the surface, and you see that it's really a network of roots that emerge as the lotus flower—the water lilies at the surface. And when you were swimming at the surface you thought they were discrete entities. And now you see it's all one.

That's what happens. As you turn within you discover, let's say, the implications of what one calls in psychology the context of your problems instead of just thinking of your problems as discrete entities. You see how everything is related.

In fact the best illustration of that is radio waves. Radio waves are not located, one wave in one place, one wave in another. They are spread out, you see? And so as you turn within you discover this strange kind of relationship of situations which are all intertwined. And at the surface they seem separate and when you look within they are all involved with everything else.

You see? And that's why, you see we're used to trying to figure things out with our mind by relating two events and seeing the connection between them but here it is not just the connection between two events, it is the way that the totality comes through those events.