Dr. King's personal quest for psychological understanding carried him from the Behaviorism of the nineteen twenties to the mystic practices of a Near Eastern cult leader named Gurdjieff. His subsequent experiences (which apparently included derealization) were fortified by readings in ancient Egyptian, Buddhist, and Greek philosophies. He seeks to systematize the results, delineating a series of states of consciousness—sleep, waking, awakeness, and objective consciousness—through the attainment of which 'the differing degrees-of-being of human beings are to be defined objectively'. The author finds correlations between the subjective states of consciousness and the objective neurophysiological condition of the organism. The psychoanalytic frame of reference is not considered.