rs sensations, and begins consciously to know.
But the great field of activity is still and always the dynamic field.
When a child learns to walk, it learns almost entirely from the solar
plexus and the lumbar ganglion, the cardiac plexus and the thoracic
ganglion balancing the upper body.

There is a perfected circuit of polarity. The two lower centers are
the positive, the two upper the negative poles. And so the child
strikes out with his feet for the earth, presses, and strikes away
again from the earth, the two upper centers meanwhile corresponding
implicitly in the balance of the upper body. It is a chain of
spontaneous activity in the four primary centers, establishing a
circuit through the whole body. But the positive poles are the lower
centers. And the brain has probably nothing at all to do with it. Even
the _desire_ to walk is not born in the brain, but in the primary
nuclei.

The same with the use of the hands and arms. It means the
establishment of a pure circuit between the four centers, the two
upper poles now being the positive, the lower the negative poles, and
the hands the live end of the wire. Again the brain is not concerned.
Probably, even in the first deliberate grasping of an object, the
brain is not concerned. Not until there is an element of recognition
and sensation-memory.

All our primal activity originates and circulates purely in the four
great nerve centers. All our active desire, our genuine impulse, our
love, our hope, our yearning, everything originates mysteriously at
these four great centers or well-heads of our existence: everything
vital and dynamic. The mind can only register that which results from
the emanation of the dynamic impulse and the collision or communion of
this impulse with its object.

So now we see that we can never know ourselves. Knowledge is to
consciousness what the signpost is to the traveler: just an indication
of the way which has been traveled before. Knowledge is not even in
direct proportion to being. There may be great knowledge of chemistry
in a man who is a rather poor _being_: and those who _know_, even in
wisdom like Solomon, are often at the end of the matter of living, not
at the beginning. As a matter of fact, David did the living, the
dynamic achievement. To Solomon was left the consummation and the
finish, and the dying down.

Yet we _must_ know, if only in order to learn not to know. The supreme
lesson of human consciousness is to learn