What more do you think there could be than being always awake to your true Self, and knowing it (i.e., yourself) to be infinite and blissful? Here is a clue: In Cosmic Consciousness, individuals have stabilized Transcendental Consciousness and always experience their true identity as Pure Consciousness. This remains essentially unchanged. “I” have changed (or rather, I have learned my true identity), but the world around, the relative sphere of people, trees, cars, clouds, birds, and everything else, remains the familiar world I’ve always known. In other words, one has gained the ability to perceive and experience the ultimate, Pure Consciousness, in oneself but not anywhere else.

An individual’s evolution from this stage onward involves increasing refinement of perception toward the ability to perceive Singularity or wholeness in the objects of perception as well as in oneself, to raise the objects of perception to the same infinite value as the subject. This is accomplished by elevating what we might call the “perceiving ability” of the Observer, through refining the process of observation. This is a very beautiful and rewarding phase of growth, in which the richness and splendor of the subtler realms of nature and creation begin to be perceived and enjoyed, and a sixth state of Consciousness unfolds.Studies have shown that very many people, at some time in their lives, have enjoyed wondrous moments like this description by the nineteenth-century English poet William Wordsworth, when “meadow, grove, and stream, / The earth, and every common sight, / To me did seem/ Apparelled in celestial light.” The most recent findings available from Pew Research Center show 49 percent of Americans say they have had such experiences.¹These few lines of Wordsworth reveal much of the essence of what TM Founder Maharishi Mahesh Yogi called Glorified Cosmic Consciousness or God Consciousness, in which perception of the subtle levels of nature becomes increasingly possible and real. If and when these glimpses give way to a lasting mode of being—perception of the deep beauty of creation along with inner awareness of Self at all times—this new and further elevated state of Consciousness is born.

It is a state in which the steady persistence of the Pure Consciousness characteristic of Cosmic Consciousness continues as one’s inmost, subjective reality, and alongside it, perception of all of objective reality begins to be transformed into something glorious. Again, the reality of what is there does not change; one’s perception changes to incorporate more of the truth. To an ever-increasing degree, the individual sees the perfect orderliness of the whole range of life and living, and the perfection of what is felt to be the Divine nature, in all the objects that appear to be “not-Self”—in other words, the whole field of relative creation.

The refinement of perception catalyzes the growth of love. When we see something or someone who is beautiful—a glorious sunset, a shimmering jewel, or a drop of water catching the light in myriad colors; or when we hear beautiful music, understand an equation in an “aha” moment, or grasp a fact about nature that reveals the astounding orderliness underlying all things—our hearts just naturally swell with appreciative love. It’s a normal, wonderful human experience.Love is a force that links, binds, and puts together similar as well as dissimilar and even potentially contradictory things—values, ideas, and people. In our model of Observer, Observing, and Observed (Subject, Process, and Object; Knower, Knowing, and Known; or Subject, Verb, and Object), love in its broadest meaning is the verb. It is the process. It is the link that puts together the subject with the object. There are innumerable ways two entities can be connected, bound, or linked to each other.