A Merging of Being in the Universal Quintessence
From time immemorial, all persons working within--or in conjunction with--the Perennial Tradition have taught that humans are an aspect 3 of the Universal Quintessence. This identical message was brought to us from Hermes (about 1900 BCE), by Synesius (370-415 CE), Sankaracharya (510-478 CE), and Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822 CE), to mention only a few.
We can get a sense of unitive consciousness by contemplating images such as the one at the beginning of the essay and by reflecting on common experiences in which we have a feeling of merging with others in a shared event.
Crowd consciousness is a neutral factor; it can be used either for good or bad effect. A propagandist can use crowd consciousness to entrance a group into ideas and actions which the people would not ordinarily fall for in their usual state of consciousness. Conversely, a well-intentioned speaker can move an audience to lofty moral ideals and beneficent actions.
Humans have always sought unitive consciousness at mundane as well as transformative levels. Language is essentially a tool which allows human connectedness. The invention of the telegraph and the telephone ushered in a process of two person distant-but-simultaneously-connected-consciousness. Radio and television allow for connectedness in a unidirectional mode at the mass level. Unfortunately, almost all of the content in current radio and television is mind-destroying instead of mind-expanding.
Today, though millions of TV viewers are able to instantly hear and watch events happening thousands of miles away, there is no interaction, no feedback. The Internet has introduced an additional dimension, providing both bi-directional and multidirectional modes of communication. The Internet allows thousands of people, including complete strangers, to share experiences and emotions without ever coming together spatially.
Thus far--except in a single modality--the "unitive consciousness" made possible by the Internet has not been used in a transformative manner.
As unitive consciousness is a beneficent identification with the One Quintessence, humans can also allow themselves to become partially or totally possessed by negative or malevolent entities: personalities or ideologies. A creature that allows itself to become completely possessed by another entity, devolves into a mere host for the negative force, a sub-human.
At present, many persons are conditioned, through social influences (family, religion, education, TV) to become in their essence nothing but an egomaniac: a demented entity possessed by its ego; living only for itself; obsessed with mind-destroying activities and pleasures; capable of no genuine feelings for others; uninterested in learning, understanding, or developing to a higher state.
Fortunately, the highest reality of humans is their participation in the One Quintessence--which is referred to as God, the Oversoul, the One Mind, Unity, Infinite Love and Goodness. If a human works assiduously, she can cast off the illusions with which she is programmed, and regain her essential oneness with her Higher Self: the Unitary Quintessence.
The better we transmit this energy or allow it to flow through us, the higher grade we occupy; the more alive and contented and effective we become. The great common carrier of universal spirit is an immense ocean connecting all individuals. The energy field, the ocean, the all-surrounding substance in which individuals are suspended, is a great sea of undifferentiated force.
We must DIE to our present state and be re-born in a higher state. But that shouldn't be too hard, since we've been breaking out of spaces since even before we became a fetus (when we pushed through cellular walls during mitosis) and then when we were "born" by passing out of our mother's body into this anything-but-ordinary world.
If we're to advance beyond our current terrestrial state of being, we must shunt off (become detached from) our ordinary sense-based existence and attain spiritual re-birth. Only through introspective contemplation can we understand this process of spiritual regeneration into unitive consciousness, by the inwardly turned eye of the mind. Through the Divine Light of contemplation we penetrate that
darkness which does not comprehend the Light, but in which Higher Reality lies concealed.
We spring up to a Higher Life by struggling to consciousness and comprehension in the new realm of the One Quintessence. We release ourselves into the surrounding Universal Life so our experience can explain itself.
We recognize that we contain in ourselves the elements of a decaying sense-world. Those elements, we realize, are at work in us, and if we identify with them exclusively we devolve to a sub-human level of egomania. But if we work to understand ourselves and attain inner self-discipline, we can break the power of negative sensory-world influences, as the newly-forming immortal elements come to life within us. We not only slough off old, negative patterns of thought and behavior, but we develop new virtues, such as patience, sympathy, reasonableness, caring, and insight, to mention only a few.
We gain an awareness of our transformative powers when we learn to discipline devolutionary forces in us that would pull us down to a regressive state. As we gain ascendancy over the elements of hatred, lust, greed, violence, and ignorance, we come to an understanding of higher powers within us that lead to unitive consciousness.
Overcoming the self-obsession which ordinary life encourages in us demands self-awareness and a commitment to a higher life of virtue and discernment.
Plato made it clear that the ultimate attainment of unitive consciousness is possible only through muesis (literally, "closing of the eyes"): turning away from external sense-data and discovering truth through an introspective process of contemplation and meditation.
We avoid becoming good-feeling junkies or seekers after psychic powers, because we know these are dead-ends. True ecstasy leads to a permanent state of continuous awareness of the divine. In the unitive state--a dimension separate from time or space--we naturally possess super-normal powers which are used in beneficent ways. We recognize that the terrestrial domain serves as a training ground in learning how to die to the elements in us which keep us from ascending to a higher life.
It is possible to become what we might call "ecstasy junkies," persons who exult in the unitive life but feel no responsibility to others on the earth-plane. Our liberated powers must be applied to assist persons in the world of the senses. As we saw above, we gain permanent higher essence only as we allow ourselves to become conduits of higher knowledge to others on the terrestrial plane.
Previously, it was our responsibility to seek our own release. But now, having attained the first stages of unitive consciousness, we're required to share whatever insight we've gained with others on the earth plane. Other teachers and prophets were our liberators, and we must now add to the common heritage of knowledge of the higher unitive state.
Until now we've striven as individuals, but now we must seek to coordinate ourselves with the whole, so that we can bring into the supersensible world not only ourselves, but everyone existing in the world of the senses.We must now share with our fellow humans the powers which we've acquired. Entry into the higher regions of the supersensible world is barred so long as we haven't applied all the powers we've acquired to the liberation of our earthly companions.
All of our instruction in the unitive state, to begin with, deals only with the development of collaborative powers in this work. The process of dying to old ways of understanding and acting and re-birth to new dimensions of being and experience must continue uninterruptedly.
Participants in Dialectical Meditation should be at the highest possible level of discernment of Dialectic, Higher Consciousness, and Unitive Consciousness
An advanced being thinks: "Gratitude, humility, and self-surrender constitute the essence of worship of the One Quintessence."
Begin this essay by contemplating the image above by Piero della Francesca (1420-1492). While meditating on this painting, reflect on specific elements: 
Return to image above.
"A thing of beauty is a joy for ever
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing."
While meditating on della Francesca's painting--and Keats' poem--you should attain a definite feeling of serenity, similar to contemplating such an image as this. Retain, as much as possible, that sensation of tranquility as you proceed.
"May not you and I be confluent in a higher consciousness, and confluently active there, though we now know it not? We finite minds may simultaneously be co-conscious with one another in a super-human intelligence." 
In this essay, we're examining what is called unitive consciousness--a merging of our being with other beings in a higher state of awareness. William James referred to this state as being "confluent in a higher consciousness." We are able to achieve unitive consciousness because we are--in our highest reality--an aspect of the One Quintessence. 2 We've fallen into illusion by thinking that our body or mind is our self, when we are in reality our Higher Self, the One.
"True, without error, certain and most true; that which is above is as that which is below, and that which is below is as that which is above, for performing the miracles of the One Quintessence; and as all things were from one, by the mediation of the one, so all things arose from this One Quintessence by adaptation."
"It is a clear Light, which fills with true virtue every mind that has once perceived it; it is the nucleus and bond of all the elements which are contained in it, and the spirit which nourishes all things, and by means of which nature operates universally; it is the virtue, true beginning, and end of the whole world; in plain terms, the quintessence. . ."
"This world is engendered by the Real, and has the Real as its Self, the Real is its material altogether. That Real than which there is none higher, THAT THOU ART, the restful, the stainless, secondless Eternal, the supreme."
"The One remains, the many change and pass;
Heaven's light for ever shines, Earth's shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many-colored glass,
Stains the white radiance of eternity,
Until death tramples it to fragments. -- Die,
If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek!
Follow where all is fled!"
"Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats"
"Man did not weave the web of life;
he is merely a strand in it.
Whatever he does to the web,
he does to himself."
While sitting in an auditorium or stadium as part of a large crowd, you experience an elementary form of group consciousness while joining in collective cheering or waving. Ordinary "crowd consciousness" is a lesser embodiment of a higher form of unitive consciousness as delineated in this essay.
I use the word "higher" to indicate that unitive consciousness occurs in a conceptual, metaphysical dimension unlike ordinary experience which takes place in the everyday perceptual, sense world of people, places, and things. In unitive Consciousness, our being is actually merged with that of others in a Great Ocean of Unity--the One Life. 
We also get a sense of unitive consciousness when viewing a transformative piece of art or listening to a transformative piece of music. For example, when listening to Miles Davis' Sketches of Spain, arranged and conducted by Gil Evans, we recognize that Miles and his band entered into a higher realm of consciousness when they created this piece of music. And listening to Sketches of Spain in a receptive mood allows us to enter that same confluent world of higher awareness.
State of Being
Characteristics
Capabilities
Unitive Consciousness
Union with the One Quintessence
Awareness of the Oversoul
and Higher Consciousness
Inspiration
Meditation
Contemplation
Self-Possession
Self-Awareness
Critical thinking
Awareness of self
and the world
Reasoning
Informing oneself
Improving oneself
Beginning of possession by outside personalities and ideologies
Egomania
Mindless pursuit of pleasure
Celebration of ignorance
No longer able to
think for oneself
Illiteracy (unable to read and unable to understand)
Total possession by outside personalities and ideologies
Hysterical blindness
Hysterical deafness
Suicidal behavior
Unable to see or hear what's happening in the world
Supporting people who are destroying you
The purpose for our experiencing human existence appears to be our learning to identify with our Higher Self, not with our lower self: ego, body, appetites, will, intellect.
"Despite the soul's fall there lingers in it, although in a condition of atrophy and enchantment, a residual germ of that divine principle which once wholly actuated it; a germ capable of being so stimulated into activity as to raise the personal consciousness even to the point of unity and identity with the Universal Mind and through the healing efficacy of that principle's transmuting potencies, to effect such an organic change in the psychical, and even the physical parts of our present frail and imperfect nature as will bring them into a divinised condition."
"There is a continuum of cosmic consciousness against which our individuality builds but accidental fences, and into which our several minds plunge as into a mother sea."
Advanced humans are realizing in their own lives and then teaching others how to become co-conscious with one another in a super-human Intelligence. Whatever is known within this super-consciousness is known at all points. Social evolution involves learning to create institutions which provide for the development of each individual to the limit of our potential.
"We lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which makes us receivers of its truth and organs of its activity. When we discern justice, when we discern truth, we do nothing of ourselves, but allow a passage to its beams."
We live in a universal spiritual substance by virtue of which all living things exist through their ability to transmute this general force into something individual. Humans are energy transformers; we are alive and developing in proportion to how much of this universal force we accept and how freely it flows through us.
"We are living in, surrounded by, a finer more powerful substance. You can call it what you please - ether, electric field, or spiritual vibrations. When we are pervious we are permeated by it and obtain from it various elements of expansion and growth. But ordinarily in our world-absorbed consciousness is no chink or cranny by which its influence can enter. We are like people swimming in a sea completely encased in diving suits that admit no drop of the life-giving water. Only on comparatively rare occasions when we are off our guard, so to speak, do we permit ourselves even unconsciously to be reached by it."
We find ourselves in a "box" and if we're to advance in our personal development, we must break out into a higher state of being.
"What is at issue is the conversion of the mind from the twilight of error to the truth, that climb up into the real world which we shall call true philosophy."
We realize it would be folly to stay in the old world and try to theorize our way into the Higher Consciousness. We break our shell--die to our old self--and stick our head up into a new world."Thou must thyself be the way; the understanding must be born in thee; thou must enter into it, so that the understanding of the work in the practic art . . . may be opened to thee."
"The Perennial Tradition consists entirely in acting as the situation requires; he that acts appropriately in each occasion attains to the rank of savant."
To be fully understood, the unitive consciousness must be worked for, attained, and then manifested. I can only describe the features of the unitive consciousness and how it is attained; the actual achievement of the higher state must come from your own inner work beyond reading and studying.
"By no explanation, nor any familiar analogy do we here presume to aid the natural intellect to a conception that transcends it, and which can only be attained through the identical experience."
The first steps in achieving unitive consciousness are to relax our sensual bond, dissolve our ego, and purify our consciousness so it is capable of experiencing its higher life in the Elysian light.
Learning to relax to the point of stepping outside the body requires diligent effort and experimentation to find just the right procedure that works for us. "All that we teach is nothing else but to dissolve and recongeal the spirit, to make the fixed volatile and the volatile fixed, until the total nature is perfected by the reiteration. . .
Albertus Magnus
Falling away from our ordinary sense of being, we pass through subconscious allurements which we must reject--or become possessed by lower powers. This is what the mystics and poets refer to as the passage through Hades or the Underworld. We must have cleansed ourselves of egomaniacal desires and behaviors to withstand these potentially overwhelming temptations. "It is necessary that a man should have his right opinion as firm as adamant in him when he descends into Hades, that there likewise he may be unmoved by riches or any such like evils, and may not, falling into tyrannies and such other practices, do incurable mischiefs and himself suffer still greater; but that he may know how to choose the middle life as to those things, and to shun extremes on either hand, both in this life as far as possible and in the whole hereafter."
As Plato explains in his writings, we attain the unitive state by gaining mastery of the essential procedures of philosophy (the search for wisdom): philosophic reasoning and dialectic. "He who is not able by the exercise of his reason to define the idea of the Good, separating it from all other objects and piercing, as in a battle through every kind of argument, endeavouring to confute, not according to opinion but according to essence, and proceeding through all the dialectic energies with an unshaken reason--he who cannot accomplish this, neither knows the Good itself, nor anything that is properly denominated the Good. And would you not say that such a one, if he apprehended any certain truth or image of reality, would apprehend it rather through the medium of opinion than of science; that in the present life he is sunk in sleep and conversant in the delusions of dreams; and that descending into Hades, before he is roused to a vigilant state, he will be overwhelmed with a sleep perfectly profound."
Attaining the unitive state requires that we transform our entire state of existence, which is originally composed of bewitchment by our senses and possession by the beliefs of our culture. Only if we die to that old mode of thought and activity and are re-born as persons with the ability to think and act for ourselves, the capacity to discern truth and goodness, are we capable of the requisite virtue and understanding which make unitive consciousness possible. "Plato beautifully unfolds the passive method of the Divine Intuition, and the three elevating causes of love, hope, and faith, to those who do not negligently read what he has written. For what else than love conjoins the soul to beauty? and where else is truth to be hoped for, asks the philosopher, except in this place? And what else than faith is the cause of this ineffable muesis? For muesis, in short, is neither through intelligence nor judgment, but through the unical silence imparted by faith, which is then better than every gnositc energy (when it surpasses this), and which establishes both whole and individual souls in the ineffable Unknown."
What we first experience in the unitive state is the essence of wisdom: illumination. This makes it clear why Plato said that the ultimate goal of human life is the search for and the love of wisdom (philosophy). This experience of illumination--an inner light making all things clear--is attested to by a great number of mystics and teachers:
Shining flashingly through the depths of the World.
Hear the voice of Fire." Chaldean Oracles
It is beneficial and necessary to experience moments of unitive consciousness, epiphanies, ecstasies, and inspirations. Through their inspiration, we gain the desire to enter the path leading us from death to the old sense-world to a higher life. 
We are grateful that the loam of our mortal life has matured the seeds of immortal being. And we know that if we remain as we are--seeds within the sense-world--that we will never experience re-birth into the Unitary Quintessence. Our earlier being in the transcendent came to an end with birth into the terrestrial plane. Now, earth life in the sense-world must move on to birth into the higher realm, by dying to our present earth-seed state of existence.
An effective process for learning to enter the unitive consciousness is Dialectical (Shared) Meditation. 4 