The accumulation of knowledge is a continual process and, as Itzhak Bentov wisely noted, it is difficult to know at what point what should stop and commit one's thoughts to writing, "at one's present level of ignorance." The ideas below are ones which I would have included in The Science of the Soul had they not occurred at a stage beyond the final proofreading of that manuscript, at which point to include them would have meant to delay its publication date.

• July 5, 2003: Because the same individual pre-existent astral subconscious and causal superconscious minds/bodies underlie the conscious mind of this one life regardless of the latter's stage of psychological development, there is obviously much more to the progress in individual evolution than a simple noting of which stage they are in: there is a huge difference between "sensitive" children and budding "alpha males," for example, even if both may be in the same "red meme" stage of development at that young age. One may, of course, ascribe that difference to a growth along "moral lines" within that stage; but that, although correct as far as it goes, is also more of a classification of symptoms than exhibition of a deep understanding as to where such moral leanings would originate, i.e., via the influence of our higher bodies. Indeed, without understanding the astral and causal structure underlying human consciousness, one very easily slips into a taxonomy of the structures in human psychology/consciousness rather than a deep understanding of them—enumerating levels and lines of development, or different "types" of intelligence, without being able to see their common grounds and relationships, much less being able to relate inspiration to the astral, or deep insight to the mechanism underlying causal-level intuition.
  
  
• July 5, 2003: Even if all aspects of our phenomenological experience of the passage of time could be accounted for by the idea that it is only the conceptualization of our internal mental milieu which allows us to mark that passage—neglecting, for the moment, the dilation of subjective time in higher states of consciousness—the obvious fact is that, even in that specific context, holding indefinitely to a single concept would provide no more means of marking internal time than would the total absence of concepts, i.e., that it is not conceptualization itself but rather variations in the content of that conceptualizing which would produce the internal sensation of the passage of time. And since different concepts are also, however slightly or subtly, different states of consciousness, variations in concepts again equate to (or derive from) variations in one's level of consciousness. And this, of course, is how vastly different techniques of meditation can lead to the same Self-awareness, even if they may have different effects on training one's conscious/frontal mind through their practice (e.g., experienced practitioners of vipassana meditation, which explicitly emphasizes witnessing awareness, score differently on some perception-related tests than do expert practitioners of "content" forms of meditation, where the emphasis is typically on the steadying of one's level of consciousness in concentration on a single idea/concept, with techniques of life-force control working to remove sensory distractions from that attempted focus).
  
  
• July 5, 2003: Whether our particular memories derive from events occurring a split second, two seconds, two minutes, two weeks, two months, two years, or twenty years ago or more, they are all of the same nature, being internal re-creations of things which occurred in the past but which, so far as linear, sequential time is concerned, no longer exist. As such, they are all of the same status as far as the witnessing Self is concerned: past lovers and past loneliness, past successes and past failures, are equally non-existent from that perspective, with the only thing that's "real" being what is happening Now. However, short of being spread through space and events on the causal level, any human sensory experiences become internally known to us only via a time-delay of pulses of electricity propagating along our nerves, so that our experience there, even "in the Now," is not only of external phenomena which existed in the past, but further is an experience only of a coded representation of those phenomena, not of the phenomena or "reality-as-it-is" themselves. Additionally, one can witness conceptualizations arising in one's internal milieu (e.g., in the One Taste state) just as surely as one can witness the same milieu without conceptualizations. Indeed, the Self could not, from the perspective of pure witnessing, draw any distinction between memories, dreams, visions, hallucinations, or conceptualized or unconceptualized "real" sensory phenomena occurring "in the Now"; it is simply witnessing whatever arises in consciousness, without categorizing it.
  
  
• June 14, 2003: Throughout the history of academic spiritual studies, the standard teaching has been that the subject/object duality is dissolved either when one stops conceptualizing one's sensory experiences, or through undivided concentration (on a particular concept). And yet, in more recent expositions, one will instead find the idea that this subject/object duality is dissolved only in the One Taste state, where the Witness is phenomenologically experienced as having become everything. How to resolve this trio of diverse perspectives, while respecting the truth in each one? What is common to all of these teachings regarding the subject/object duality is not a particular level of consciousness, nor the misled idea of "conceptualization as the root of all duality," but rather simply a steadiness in the level of consciousness (and consequent unawareness of the passage of time, via its "flying"), gained from years of practice in concentration/meditation.
  
  
• May 29, 2003: "What lies beyond irony?" is a far less interesting question than is the more scientific "What lies beyond phenomenology?"; for an insightful answer to the latter discloses a mathematical structure to consciousness which exists independent of culture, sociology or human conceptualization. And that eternal structure yields not merely the variety of spiritual experiences (on top of the daily experience of conceptualization itself) in peace, bliss, light, intuition and witnessing, but even the ultimate One Taste existence. For all of those are simple and straightforward outcomes of the steadying and raising of one's consciousness/attention to particular already-existing levels within one's own higher being, then filtered through the kinks of one's frontal personality when being grounded into daily life.
  
  As Bentov once noted, the universe is not "spiritual" as such, but what we call "spiritual development" is the key to understanding its mysteries. Even that "spiritual development," however, is not "mysterious," but is rather wholly lawfully explicable. If the individual detailed understanding of that revealed "mystery" decreases one's sense of wonder and awe at something which many would like to be "beyond human understanding" or conceptual expression, one can always take solace in the fact that these precise laws are upheld only by an Intelligence beyond human comprehension. In general, though, just as a person delving into the study and creation of music will delight in learning musical theory and the audio engineering means by which specific sounds are created—with that knowledge increasing one's enjoyment of the art rather than rendering it sterile by "removing the mystery from it"—intellectually-understandable solutions to the "mysteries" of religion/spirituality allow one to not simply "enjoy" those in their various sociological and esoteric aspects, but to intelligently understand them. After all, to someone of such a fertile mind as Bentov, every question answered produced "ten new questions" to investigate, thus increasing one's sense of wonder at the interwoven self-consistency of the universe, on the physical level and beyond.
  
  
• May 21, 2003: Itzhak Bentov's observation, a quarter of a century ago, that movement at infinite velocities is the same as being at total rest everywhere at once, is profound but not paradoxical—these are simply two different ways of describing the same state of omnipresence, and those descriptions are equivalent rather than being mutually exclusive, and thus do not generate a paradox.
  
  
• May 21, 2003: If conceptualization were the actual cause of our experience of the passage of time, any states of consciousness above the bodies which produce our concepts could have no experience of that passage. And yet, if we are to believe Bentov and the reflections of consciousness in the characteristics of special relativity, those same states experience a dilation of subjective time, whether or not time is thus felt to be "flying" or "dragging." In that mixed scenario, we would have consciousness bound by time, but unable to experience it at, for example, the causal level. If the sensation of the passage of time comes from variations in our level of consciousness, however—which would indeed translate, in our daily lives, to the shifting from one idea to the next, as the orthodox theory asserts, but can also embrace much subtler thoughts and intuitions, even to their finest texture, than would normally be grouped under the category of "conceptualization"—that will potentially apply to all states of consciousness and to all levels of reality, even if the transition between states is so quick, and the residence in the same states is so steady from one’s practice of meditation or from being free from the physical in higher levels of reality, as to cause that phenomenological sensation to vanish. (The practice of meditation certainly increases both the speed at which one can enter higher states of consciousness from one's daily awareness at a particular sitting, and the length of time for which one can remain in such an altered state. A self-similar process occurring on the "micro" level as on that "macro" one would be exactly of a quick transition between otherwise-steady states, with the frequency of those subtle transitions corresponding to the degree to which time is felt to be "dragging.")