f others could at that time be
expressed by appropriate rites--and as a matter of fact are often
so expressed even now--MORE readily and directly than by language.
'Dancing'--when that word came to be invented--did not mean a mere
flinging about of the limbs in recreation, but any expressive movements
of the body which might be used to convey the feelings of the dancer or
of the audience whom he represented. And so the 'religious dance' became
a most important part of ritual.

(1) See ch. ix and xi.

So much for the second stage of Consciousness. Let us now pass on to
the Third Stage. It is evident that the process of disruption and
dissolution--disruption both of the human mind, and of society round
about it, due to the action of the Second Stage--could not go on
indefinitely. There are hundreds of thousands of people at the present
moment who are dying of mental or bodily disease--their nervous
systems broken down by troubles connected with excessive
self-consciousness--selfish fears and worries and restlessness. Society
at large is perishing both in industry and in warfare through the
domination in its organism of the self-motives of greed and vanity and
ambition. This cannot go on for ever. Things must either continue in
the same strain, in which case it is evident that we are approaching
a crisis of utter dissolution, OR a new element must enter in, a new
inspiration of life, and we (as individuals) and the society of which
we form a part, must make a fresh start. What is that new and necessary
element of regeneration?

It is evident that it must be a new birth--the entry into a further
stage of consciousness which must supersede the present one. Through
some such crisis as we have spoken of, through the extreme of
suffering, the mind of Man, AS AT PRESENT CONSTITUTED, has to die. (1)
Self-consciousness has to die, and be buried, and rise again in a new
form. Probably nothing but the extreme of suffering can bring this
about. (2) And what is this new form in which consciousness has to
rearise? Obviously, since the miseries of the world during countless
centuries have dated from that fatal attempt to make the little personal
SELF the centre of effort and activity, and since that attempt has
inevitably led to disunity and discord and death, both within the mind
itself and within the body of society, there is nothing left but
the return to a Consciousness which shall have Unity as its
foundation-principle, and