of the religious person. Naturally it is possible, and indeed easy, to become unaware or unconscious of the fact that God permeates your being; but the religious person retorts that this merely demonstrates a particular type of deformity of the consciousness, which in turn leads the individual into a world of dreams and fantasies. So if consciousness moulds behaviour patterns, it is important to try to discover whether God is the living reality of the intangible world, and whether one ought to be conscious of him; or not. To discover in other words, whether it is the religious person, or the atheist, who is living in a world of dreams. One of them must be; they cannot both be right. As before, I think it best to avoid preconceived notions, and revert to the perfectly relaxed consciousness.
One of the qualities of the perfectly relaxed consciousness, if it exists, must be that it is open to reason, it has no dogmatic or egotistical spasms, and it allows experience either to verify its beliefs, or to contradict them. What happens therefore when the perfectly relaxed consciousness starts to put its fantasy world into practice?
I want to be clearly understood. I am now using the word “fantasy” in the sense in which I believe psychoanalysts use it, to describe the day-dreams, the hopes, the lawful and unlawful aspirations of the individual. Most people put some of their fantasy world into practice. Not the more far-fetched fantasies, but the more reasonable ones; the ones which have some chance of coming true. In fact I think everyone puts their fantasy world into practice to some extent. They have to, in order to keep any interior life alive. Someone who hardly puts his fantasy world into practice at all, we describe as surly, churlish, or simply as a “pudding”. Children's play is largely fantasy-play.
Now as one grows older, the time comes when an honest man has to reassess how much of this fantasy world, which he has tried to create, measures…