To have the perfect consciousness of God is not the summit of a lifetime's ambition of saint or prophet. It is the fundamental pre-requisite for an ordinary man living anything like a normal life in (inter alia) an industrial society. He will not have this consciousness all the time of course. As I was at pains to explain in the early chapters, one's perfect, or perfectly relaxed consciousness, necessarily becomes hardened by any intellectual discipline whatever, e.g. a professional training. The consciousness tends to become permanently hardened and distorted by any indulgence into parochialism; and tends to go into spasm with egotism, bad temper, or thoughts of revenge.

I am not suggesting that the common man should go around saying, “I am like God. I have the same type of consciousness”. Quite the reverse! It would be even more idiotic than to go around saying, ”I'm honest“, or ”I'm sane”. But it is interesting to note, by the way, that such an egotistical assertion about the consciousness is almost certainly untrue. It has been assumed that the perfect consciousness is perfectly relaxed, perfectly uncorrupted (i.e. still retaining the complete faculty of distinguishing between truth and falsehood).