Lead is the will that supports the conditioning of consciousness. But further, the lead pearl is the unconscious will, the support and determination that has always been supporting the ego-line, the ego sense of being a person. Nevertheless, the ego line contraction, even though it is the personality, is also a role. The role is the personal function or work, developed throughout one’s personal history, as the individual capacity to function in a particular way. In other words, one is born with a work to develop and do on earth. It is the personal consciousness—which, for most individuals, is the ego-structured personality—that develops it. The witnessing space cannot do it, because it does not do. This means that one has a particular personal role, which develops mostly through the personality developing along certain lines. The personality is conditioned to be a certain way, which in time will manifest the role and its work. An unchanging and inflexible will supports this conditioned personality. The will is inertia, lead itself.

Insight expands now to synthesize the understanding of being trapped in my personal life, and the recognition of the presence of inertia responsible for the unchangeability of the totality of the personality. This lead pearl is the determination/will of the personal existence of the ego, which has been unconscious till now, although implicit in all ego manifestations. As long as I am under the sway of this will of inertia, I will be enmeshed in my personal life whenever I am involved with any experience. In other words, the personal life continues to be the life of the totality of the personality, the life of the separate person of ego. This unconscious identification will always subsume new experiences and insights into its own personal life, turning them into possessions of the person of ego. My sense of myself has been trapped in my personal life because I have always had, unrecognized, the will to exist as the familiar individual. The deepening insight into my personal experience and the personal inertia that underlies it, allows the leaden heaviness to gradually expand and dominate the consciousness. I am now this faceted, hard and spherical leaden density, immovable and unchangeable. This is curious. There is the feeling of expansion that accompanies the flow of insights, but there is also the thickening of consciousness as it becomes dominated by the leaden heaviness. However, there is no resistance to the leaden, thick consciousness which functions as the ground of the ego experience of self, and no value judgment about it. There is merely the openness to what is arising, and the curiosity that manifests as an open and open-ended inquiry into it. This openness and curiosity creates the space necessary for the arising and operation of the nous.