The teaching begins with a fact to be held rather than a doctrine to be accepted: you are a soul, an infinitesimal point of conscious light, seated in the middle of the forehead, currently operating a body. Students are taught to run the awareness — I am a soul, my body is a costume — through ordinary activity, not only in meditation. The practical effect is a certain evenness that visitors notice at the centres, and a vocabulary in which people are described as souls rather than as men and women, Indians and Australians. It is also the ground of the organisation's teaching on grief, since a soul leaving a body has changed costume rather than ended.