The ability of the entity to transform energy into an idea and then to construct it physically determines the entity’s place on the physical evolutionary plane. simple organisms are capable of “picking up” fewer communications, their range is less, but the vitality and validity of their constructions is excellent. In simple organisms such as the paramecium and amoeba, the few sharp ideas received are constructed almost simultaneously, without reflection. The organism needs no other mechanism to translate ideas. What is has is sufficient.
More complicated organisms – mammals, for example – have need of further mechanisms to construct ideas because they are able to perceive more of them. Here memory is an element. Now the organism has a built-in ghost image of past constructions by which to perfect and test new ones. Reflection of some sort enters into the picture, and with it the organism is given more to do. Slowly, within its range of receptivity, it is given some choice in the actual construction of ideas into physical reality.
The reflection is brief, but for a moment the animal partakes of a new dimension. The shadow of time glimmers in his eyes as the still imperfected memory of past constructions lingers in his/her consciousness. As yet, memory storage is small, but now the instantaneous construction is no longer instantaneous, in our terms. There is a pause: the organism – dog or tiger – can choose to attack or not to attack. The amoeba must construct its small world without reflection and without time as we know it.
Entities with still broader range need more complicated structure. The scope of their receptivity is so large that the simple autonomic nervous system is not enough. The amoeba constructs each idea it receives, because it is able to receive so few. All must be constructed to ensure survival. With man/woman, the opposite becomes true. He/she has such a range of receptivity that it is impossible for him/her to construct all of his/her ideas physically. As his/her scope widened, a mechanism was necessary that would allow him/her to choose. Self-consciousness and reason were the answers.
Suddenly, time blossomed like a strange flower in his/her skull. Before this he/she was transfixed in the present. But memory produced another dimension in the animal and man/woman carried it further. No longer did memory flicker briefly and disappear, enclosing him/her in darkness again. Now it stretched brightly behind him and also stretched our ahead – a road on which he/she always saw his/her own changing image.
He/she learned continuity: And with his/her focused memory at his/her command, man’s/woman’s ego was born, which could follow its own identity through the maze of blazing impulses that beset him/her, could recognize itself through the pattern of continuing constructions and could separate itself from its action in the physical world. Here you have the birth of subject and object, the I AM who is the doer or constructer, and the construction itself.
This new dimension enabled the species to manipulate and recognize its own constructions and freed it to focus greater energy in projecting some ideas over others. In other words, conscious purpose became possible, physically, Somewhere along the lone, however, man/woman began to divorce himself/herself almost completely and artificially form his/her own constructions. Hence his/her groping, his/her sense of alienation from nature, his/ehr search for a Cause or Creator of a creation he/she no longer recognized as his own.