woman of sixty is her own soul's doing.
So what about the perfectly relaxed consciousness, or more likely such a consciousness shared? The reconciliation of the conflicting desires of two self-centred, and probably selfish people, is a very difficult problem. It is not easy for people to live together, as the figures for divorce show, particularly now that the prophets of the permissive society have demolished many of the conventional patterns of behaviour which helped ordinary people to thread their way through the labyrinth of life with modest success. Nowadays men and women have to face each other, with almost no rules of behaviour to guide them. Is it any wonder they go astray? But abolish self in a shared consciousness, and there is no obvious limit to the integration that a couple would find possible. The limit normally imposed on the integration of husband and wife is the unwillingness of the character of the one to surrender any further to the character of the other.
The problem mirrors the problem of religion. If heaven were full of self-centred people, its eternity would be unbelievably boring, and I for one would welcome eternal death as an escape. Yet the eternity of heaven must be mirrored by something in this world, or the probability is it does not exist: that it is just a world of make-belief. The Gospels make it pretty clear that Christ's promise was that in heaven his followers would dwell in him, and he in them; and I can readily understand that the endlessly growing in-dwelling would sweep away all thoughts of boredom from the mind. But his promise was not confined to heaven; it was that it could happen in this physical world as well. If with him, why not between men and women? What would happen to the process of aging, if men and women achieved this? What would happen if men and women achieved an in-dwelling in which an ever-growing integration swept away all thoughts of boredom, or routine, or tedium from the mind? It would be the…