Ice floats. The cold and heavy are carried.

Three questions from the middle of it, asked in a row and left standing: why ice rises, why the air pressure falls at the hottest hour of the day, and how creatures in the sea build shells out of water that has not enough calcium in it to build them.

They are there because of what stands behind them, which is the riddle of the human being — how he arose, what his past is, what he is for, and what he means according to nature. Then the harder form of the same question: whether science has answered the questions a person actually arrives with.

From there to the soul, and what modern science is able to say about it. Whether that account is the whole of the thing or the shadow of something far larger. Where the missing links are, and whether there is a substance of the soul still undiscovered. The longing that sends a person looking in the first place, and the moment a soul wants out of the social condition that formed it. Cultural atmosphere, and how to read one from the inside.

Before any of that, the hunger modern people have for imaginative and inspired knowledge, and what an image does that an argument cannot — how art carries a soul out of the shape it is currently in. The hidden, and whether the hidden can be measured at all. And a warning left in plain sight rather than dramatised: it is perilous for a soul to enter spiritual realms without spiritual knowledge.

Then spirituality set against religion. Churches, rules, and whether spirituality has any of its own. The difference between a tradition and a spiritual event. Religious fanaticism and scientific fanaticism, handled as one shape wearing two coats.

A spiritual science of the mind, and how a mind is brought to reveal itself. Light, warmth and the life forces. How consciousness forms out of life and spirit, and how pictures form in a soul. Clarification, purification and transformation, named as stages rather than moods.

It closes in the machine society, on the last secret of the soul — which the module says is still slumbering, and waiting. Whether the force driving a world of machines is intelligence and comfort or something with darker corners in it. The mind’s power to make tools out of itself, and where the tools of science had their source. The shadow limbs, and the limbs of will. And the great cultural change that came over the world after the fifties, beginning in Europe, which is the water all of this happens to be swimming in.

Two weeks with it. Long enough to go through the whole module more than once, which is how these are usually taken.

The White Room comes with it, and does not expire. One key, used once, and the room stays open — no renewal, no second charge, no end date. It is the one room here that isn’t a lecture, and the students who already began are in it.