Spheres of Crystal

To get into the unitive world underneath, underlying, and supporting the
everyday practical world
There have to be certain alterations in one’s common sense
There are certain ideas and beyond these ideas, certain feelings that are
difficult to get across not because they’re intellectually complicated not at
all because of that
But because they’re unfamiliar
They’re strange
We haven’t been brought up to accommodate them
In exactly the same way that, in past times, people knew that the planets were
supported in the sky because they were embedded in spheres of crystal
And if they weren’t embedded in spheres of crystal and, of course,
you could see them, because you could see through them they would fall down on
the Earth
And now, when astronomers finally suggested that there were no crystal spheres
People felt unbelievably insecure. See?
They had a terrible time assimilating this idea
Now, do you see what it involves to assimilate a really new idea?
You have to do quite a flip
For example, there are some people whose number systems only account four
quantities: one, two, three, many
So they don’t have any concept of four corners to a table — see,
a table has many corners
And a pile of pebbles is, in that sense, equivalent in many-ness to the four
corners of the table
Now, they have difficulty, you see, in beginning to assimilate the idea of
counting through, and numbering all those corners or all those pebbles
But we’ve done that
And so to us that is perfectly simple
But imagine the kind of mentality, the kind of person, to whom that is not
simple at all
Now, in exactly the same way, there is, here what I’m trying to explain,
a new idea that most people don’t assimilate, and that is the idea of the
total interdependence of everything in the world