Consciousness is an astonishing and provocative force. Nearly everyone is given the basic capacity to engineer it, which is, I think, some important part of what our species does. We engineer experiences and expressions of consciousness. In a way not dissimilar to the frog, croaking sonorously at the pond’s edge at sunset, or the rooster, crowing piercingly at dawn’s break, we engineer structure and catalyze events both in an invisible world and in the actual world. Cognitive and physical.

Metaphorically speaking, everyone is provided with a hand and a pencil. I here equate drafting with engineering. Most of the participants are unconscious of being one of the engineers, so most of what they do is a kind of scribbling which is, effectively, the signature of the undeveloped engineers. Worse still, this activity strongly inclines them to the role of expressing what they have unconsciously engineered, and this is usually relatively tragic and miserable. Then we have those who are somewhat aware of the hand, the pen, and the media. These engineers can draw, and not merely in the sense of express. Their intimacy with experience is far deeper, precisely due to the attention and creativity with which they use the elements.

Then, of course, there are master craftspeople; those whose skillfulness may as well be magical, and appears, even to experts, largely inexplicable. Occasionally, we are blessed and one of these becomes a teacher. Usually, they will not muchly bother with scribblers, for they cannot yet be helped. But those who suspect or have discovered their own hand, the pencil and the media… these are sometimes taken on… as apprentices, of a sort. Of course, the relationship is always mutual Even a master must learn.