The Five Floors of the House of Consciousness

One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence, but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness... No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded.

- William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

If you wondered about the "five floors of the house of consciousness" mentioned under the name of the blog, you can find the answer to the question from my second book Saatanan Mustat Nahkasiivet, eli Sodoman 104 päivää, eli San Franciscon päiväkirja. If you prefer to read about the subject in English, I hint you to study Dr. Robert S. de Ropp's masterpiece The Master Game.

Briefly speaking, these five floors are:

1) Deep sleep without dreams

2) Sleep with dreams

3) Waking sleep (identification)

4) Self-transcendence (self-remembering)

5) Objective consciousness

De Ropp summarizes the nature of these floors by writing that nature guarantees that man shall experience the first, second and third levels of consciousness. These are necessary for life, for the maintenance of the physical body and the perpetuation of the species. She does not guarantee that he shall experience the fourth and fifth states.

This blog is about my notes from these five levels of consciousness. This means that I might cover quite wide range of subjects here, all the way from the "profane" to the "sacred" (I put these concepts to quotation marks because I see that they are very much interwoven, not entirely contrary to each other). Throughout these notes there is a thing that binds them all together: my effort to remember myself. As such, I hope the notes will be of some use for others with the same personal aim. I summarize this effort of self-remembering with the concept aletheia. It is, as a daemon, the love of my life and I will most likely return to her many times here.