cience book,
which there's no gainsaying.

Now, your solar plexus, most gentle of readers, is where you are you.
It is your first and greatest and deepest center of consciousness. If
you want to know _how_ conscious and _when_ conscious, I must refer
you to that little book, "Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious."

At your solar plexus you are primarily conscious: there, behind you
stomach. There you have the profound and pristine conscious awareness
that you are you. Don't say you haven't. I know you have. You might as
well try to deny the nose on your face. There is your first and
deepest seat of awareness. There you are triumphantly aware of your
own individual existence in the universe. Absolutely there is the keep
and central stronghold of your triumphantly-conscious self. There you
_are_, and you know it. So stick out your tummy gaily, my dear, with a
_Me voila_. With a _Here I am!_ With an _Ecco mi!_ With a _Da bin
ich!_ There you are, dearie.

But not only a triumphant awareness that _There you are_. An exultant
awareness also that outside this quiet gate, this navel, lies a whole
universe on which you can lay tribute. Aha--at birth you closed the
central gate for ever. Too dangerous to leave it open. Too near the
quick. But there are other gates. There are eyes and mouths and ears
and nostrils, besides the two lower gates of the passionate body, and
the closed but not locked gates of the breasts. Many gates. And
besides the actual gates, the marvelous wireless communication between
the great center and the surrounding or contiguous world.

Authorized science tells you that this first great plexus, this
all-potent nerve-center of consciousness and dynamic life-activity is
a sympathetic center. From the solar plexus as from your castle-keep
you look around and see the fair lands smiling, the corn and fruit and
cattle of your increase, the cottages of your dependents and the halls
of your beloveds. From the solar plexus you know that all the world is
yours, and all is goodly.

This is the great center, where in the womb, your life first sparkled
in individuality. This is the center that drew the gestating maternal
blood-stream upon you, in the nine-months lurking, drew it on you for
your increase. This is the center whence the navel-string broke, but
where the invisible string of dynamic consciousness, like a dark
electric current connecting you with the rest of life, will never
break until you die and depart