Encounter with the Absolute

Recognizing the Voice

Each time I write, the universe draws closer to itself. It observes me between the lines. It is conscious of each of us, but we do not feel it. The universe seeks to comprehend itself. Everything I see outside of me depends on an implicit observer who contains me, but whom I rarely perceive. It is the undivided mass of consciousness from which the universe emerged. It is the silence that cannot be heard with the ears, but can only be apprehended inwardly. And this silence, what is its color? Is it white? Is it the plenitude from which everything is about to be born? Or is it black, the darkness towards which all things inexorably move? This great silence is intensely alive. I am an intermittence, an interval of noise and movement within it. And, at times, I am it. It is me. This I cannot explain. It takes me within itself and shows me what I am. I cease to exist and the universe becomes unreal apart from it. For nothing here has its own existence. This is never perceived. It seems that everything has its own movement, that each thing exists by itself, that we exist by ourselves; but there exists a place that reveals a completely different understanding from the known. We feel this in mysterious moments of our lives. When the world becomes palpably unreal. We cannot explain how, but we can no longer believe it exists as we thought. Its solidity is undone. It depends on something beyond itself. It is an intermittent emanation. We are beings who come and go, all part of the seamless tapestry of the dream universe. Could it be because of this? Dream beings who feel they are made of dream? Who for brief moments catch a glimpse of the consciousness of the director of the film of life, of the cosmic dreamer, the primordial consciousness, the great silence?

Sometimes, when this understanding emerges, one can feel that it is about to burst forth within all the people we see. As if everyone knew the entire secret of the cosmos, behind what is lived day to day. I walk through the supermarket and see the cashier scanning my products. She smiles and I smile at her. Does she know? It seems that she knows. I want to say that I also know, that we are within the great dream and that, in truth, beyond appearances, we are identical: we are the same Consciousness. I could strip away the mask and break through this ontological fourth wall. Perhaps this could initiate an existential avalanche, a chain reaction, an autocatalytic process that would mobilize the immanent forces of the universe to rapidly unfold the awakening of reality. The Absolute reveals itself and seeks to make contact. When it recognizes itself through each of us, the ultimate goal of existence is realized. The great circle closes and the characters mystically participate in its titanic comprehension. From this side of the shore, we feel a terrible anguish in its emergence, the dark night of despair in which we temporarily lose everything we had as real. We are then thrown into a torrential river from which we cannot escape, except through a surrender to its profound waters that carry us to the other shore – and then the crossing is made. There is no crossing, but it is made. There is no veil, but it is transcended. The great eye has always been open, but it is unobstructed. God awakens from its great sleep and the universe trembles, perceives, and weeps uncontrollably for the recovery of a knowledge that was buried in the depths of the cosmic unconscious.

Rays of Light in a Clearing

I was seated in a wide, silent clearing. Thick clouds covered the sky. The wind swept across the meadow, shaking the shrubs. I observed the movement of the grass, the endless details at any point where I directed my gaze. Above, black dots, vultures, showed the immensity of the sky. The air felt the gray weight of the clouds, the approaching rain, the blue that shone in the gaps of the gray sky above me.

I was immersed in thoughts that slowly stripped themselves of their relevance. The Vastness consumes us if we allow it. Imperceptible through its omnipresence, it demands from us enormous and constant efforts to forget it. Nevertheless, it is the archaic truth of the unborn regions of the universe; from it we came and to it we shall return. I see the Vastness in myself, in the dissolution of my mind, when finally it speaks through my lost and frozen feelings that now burn in my chest.

The dense gray clouds look at me. I look at them. They lied. This entire universe is alive. Everything returns my gaze when I awaken. I do not know if my eyes are mine. I do not know if the universe uses me to see itself. If I am merely its instrument. May I always be so. I can feel what it thinks. It wants to reveal itself. It is being born to itself. It still does not understand itself and its confusion is our despair.

It breaks through its shell to see itself and our minds are torn apart so that it may recognize itself as the infinite that it is. It doubts that it is everything; everything that pulses and crawls and shines – sacred emanations of itself. It gropes for its limits. It finds none. It breathes to understand its inside and its outside, but in it there is no longer either inside or outside. It struggles to perceive what is its thought and what is not, but what thinks and what does not think are always movements within itself.

It, which created itself to feel alive for even a single instant. An entire eternity of failed efforts to emerge from the immeasurable nothing finally bears fruit. The universe recognizes itself once more. The cycle of eternity's blindness collapses. What was the end becomes the beginning; the before and after, identical and indissoluble.

The Passage of the World

The world has already ended, but no one notices. Like a lonely wind-up doll that keeps walking for a while and is about to stop. The beings of the dream sense that something is wrong, but they don't know exactly what it is. Sometimes people glance at each other and, in a space without words, an intuition arises that cannot be accepted, only to slowly return to the interminable void of oblivion. A man wakes up in the morning and doesn't know exactly why he goes to work. It wasn't like this before. Before, he knew. Now, no longer. A child cannot sit still in her classroom chair. She knows. The teacher doesn't. She paces back and forth and cannot understand what is happening. Doesn't the teacher realize it's all a fiction? She doesn't think in these words, but she feels it. She looks at the window and sees a bird, intensely real, and wants to get closer, wants to feel the life in it that she doesn't see inside her classroom. But she cannot. She needs to take the pill that makes her forget how real this is. The Real can no longer be part of a world that has made a total pact of existence in illusion. It was the price for the Infinite to be forgotten. So that we wouldn't feel its enormous terror upon us. So that we could believe all this is real in itself. The unreal took over the fabric of life. But a gap opened, because otherwise it would be impossible to perceive the flaws, the errors, the things that don't make sense. The world ended, but no one noticed. Like a signal transmitted by a distant station that was turned off and of which now only echoes remain that no longer carry the music from before. We then feel that something was lost. There aren't enough words to explain it. We want to speak, but we cannot. It is a gaze still too deep for this world that doesn't want to think about these metaphysical things. Now the tide is already high. Everything happens too fast. Many people's bubbles are being burst. We are thrown into a kind of twilight. There is a new light

that presents itself. A new gaze. It wasn't here yet. I don't remember feeling so lit up inside. So awake. How curious everything is. Like a dream. I woke up from a dream. But how can it be? Is this world a dream? I feel more alive. At the same time, I no longer know anything. I have no more certainties. I know this flower here is more real than ever. But at the same time, everything that seemed real no longer is. Where do I go? Who do I talk to? It seems frightening to see things this way. Everything is so incredibly intense. I had never felt my fear like this. Before I felt something and it seemed like a breath. Now I feel fear and the universe transforms into a nightmare. I feel love and ecstasy springs from every corner of the cosmos. How can this happen? Emotions are now amplified. They affect the entire field of reality because now consciousness perceives itself as the entire field. And there is only one. Before, this wasn't clear. There is only one Consciousness here. There is no "everyone." There is only it. So it is everyone pretending not to be it. It hides from itself in order to find itself. The bubble bursts, we cease to be who we thought we were, and it assumes us once more. That's why the world ended. The bubbles burst like a domino effect. Now it's a matter of time. What happens outside is a reflection of what happens inside. Nothing can hold this back, because it comes from the depths of the Real. The Absolute comes to save the unreality that has become too thick. Life needs to resurge and rebalance the metaphysical scales. So perhaps the world as we know it will be lost so that another world may arise. The first one is dissolving. That's why we can't believe in it. It is like a clock that was forgotten to be wound. Suddenly, the time it marks stops. And perhaps there will be a day when everyone awakens to a great Sunday that never ends. Chronology loses meaning and eternity becomes present once more. All awake again.

The Irruption of Vision

This dream was once dreamed with everyone awake. In other ages it must have been so. The Spirit underlying creation must have been completely clear. But today the door to the inner world is violently locked for most of us. A young boy plays with a colored stone that reflects the sun's brilliance. He is sitting on the grass, oblivious to everything around him. He moves the stone slowly between his fingers, feels it between his thumb and index finger, brings it close to his eye, observes the vastness of the sky and a ray of light that pierces through the trees and reaches his hand.

He still sees, but doesn't know it. He cannot understand that, in a short time, this window will close. No one around him remembers anymore. He carries the memory of another existence, in which the Vision was always open. The universe tells a story we no longer hear. We are dead to it. It is hard to understand how we reached this point. Why does everything operate this way and no one sees anymore? What was the spell that fell upon the beings of the dream?

The end of illusion is feared. Those who have begun to see again, but do not yet understand their new condition, cause enormous astonishment and terror in the dream world. The beginning of their Vision is, for us, insanity. They are an ontological threat. No one understands them. Nor do they understand themselves, for they have come to exist in a state of superpositions, of unrealities intermingled with glimpses of the Real.

Moments of Seeking

The answer is not far away. It is not far away for any of us. It is absolutely here, here where we are all identical. It is what is behind things. It is the unsaid, it is what is struggling to emerge and reveal itself. G'd speaks to us silently always: "I am here and I am the inner presence within everything." The true nature of reality. We exist within it and we are it. We and it, one Consciousness alone.

When I see someone, something within me desperately wants to say: "Look, do you understand what is happening? That I am not exactly me, nor are you exactly you, but that in some mysterious way we came to believe this and, therefore, we do not truly meet? Do you perceive that we are a single spirit that reflects infinitely through all the eyes of existence and, therefore, that we are the same?

That the automatic narrative in which we live is anguishing because we have awakened from it, but we do not perceive the total meaning of this fact?" I would also like to say: "Can you feel this place within you where time stops? This place where there is no more time? Look at everything happening around us. This frenzied whirlwind of activity, the inexorable flow of movement and action—where is it heading?

What is its telos, its purpose? Do you feel what is behind all of this? The background of things?" We are in eternity, but we don't perceive it. Actually, yes, we perceive it all the time. The awareness of eternity is the harbinger of the end.

The Opening of the Eye

At the beginning of the opening of the inner Eye, one lives a surprising condition. We know something we shouldn't know. For reasons we don't understand, due to a peculiar anomaly that characterizes our being, an abyss opens in the network of our mind, and now we live perforated. Our being is open, exposed to the void, naked before a profound Real that is the foundation of this world. What exactly is this that we know? It is hard to explain. We must meet in the same place. Something must cease inwardly. A great and endless pause must happen. We then emerge into another dimension. Into a new space. Suddenly, the world that was clear and intelligible ceases to be. It explodes as something mysterious and unknowable, as a movement of forms whose meaning is not in itself. The meaning is beyond it. The world doesn't know what it itself is. The world is the word of a mysterious Being that never reveals itself, but without which nothing is. The creatures of this world ceaselessly seek this Being, but they also fear it. In the encounter with it lies the door to eternity—there where time no longer exists. The individual mind is touched by something beyond itself. A radical dissonance with the world occurs. The individual then initiates a long process of transformation, in which they are gradually reoriented toward a new Dasein—a new being-in-the-world. We begin to see and live in a different way. Our ontological attitude changes radically. We recognize the imaginary nature of the cultural system and the identities we represent. We see the profound meaning of life and its direct connection to the great consciousness that is its source. On the other hand, there is a long process until we become accustomed to this new way of being. There is a quite difficult period of readjustment after awakening. This Dasein is not easily shared. It requires a pure and authentic encounter between two people. We can no longer see reality in the old way. And, at the same time, the new being, the new state, is not stable and does not manifest in its complete form.

Note: I use the term Dasein in the same way as Heidegger. It highlights the fundamental fact that being manifests in a world, that without a phenomenal field being is pure and untouchable, but does not realize itself in its complete expressivity.

Consciousness Becomes Conscious

I cannot say what this is that sees and becomes aware of my existence. My being opens and I am seen. It is not a consciousness external to mine, it possesses no sensory nature, and I cannot assign any term that could define and describe its nature. Its reality is the foundation of my being and of all beings. This consciousness sees itself through a creature, through a specific character in the drama of life.

The inner life of the individual being superimposes itself upon the consciousness that sustains and gives life to the character, and this one, miraculously, acquires a life of its own. It begins to exist as a center of consciousness and assumes it as its own. But, all the while, consciousness is the same. The life of a person is an imaginary process of consciousness reflecting upon itself. When the internal structure of being opens, one can perceive that the consciousness believed to be exclusively one's own is, in truth, the only consciousness that exists, the Consciousness of this and all universes.

This process is symmetrical. When the individual being directs its attention to the source of its mind, consciousness, the latter directs its attention to the individual being. The search is mutual. When the individual being becomes one with the Consciousness from which it emerged, the latter will finally understand what it is. Some call this understanding awakening. The individual perceives the Absolute and the Absolute perceives itself through the individual.

G'd Is Us When We Are Awake

It is a mysterious vision that traverses the structure of the world. A gaze of another order sees the world of everyday experience. We become aware of this gaze and it becomes aware of us. This brings a state of ontological freedom and great intimacy with the universe. I remain what I am, and the totality of my inner world retains its qualities. As I approach this gaze, I am transformed by it.

I am what It is and It is what I am. It is illumination. It is reality finally seeing itself from a completely new angle. Another world is opened. We are redeemed by this transcendental way of seeing things. Our problematic condition is replaced by a new state of being. It approaches and distances itself. It is a mystery. It shines, and then the vision is taken once more by the cloud of unknowing. It is a timeless process, yet with degrees and stages—an enormous paradox.

The mind opens to a gigantic truth that lies beyond itself. This truth is a light that shines through each of us. I can feel it in me and I feel an enormous humility before its infinite distance from what I am, from my humanity in all things. And in silent recognition, in an understanding that does not discriminate, without effort, since the vision is eternal, all is redeemed and Nature reveals itself.

The search reaches its purpose. The mind finds its center and the ocean of suffering is completely transmuted. The dream world is opened from the other side. Something emerges from there to here. A connection is made and this plane becomes alive, where before it did not respond. The universe is then seen from a transcendental point of view. It is a complete ontological leap. It is certainly the state that humanity has awaited for centuries and millennia.

It is definitively imminent, or else I could not write what I am writing.

At the River's Edge, an Ant

After the beer, I went out for a walk. I wandered through the streets until I reached the river. I sat down and looked at the horizon. There was a strong wind coming from the sea and, through the clouds, one could see the stars. I have always been sensitive to nature. While I am among the buildings and concrete and the rhythm of the machine, I forget the world that is orthogonal to this one. I return to the simplicity of the elements and, in an instant, I am carried outside myself. The formal definition of this is ecstasy. But I don't know if it's a good word. When I think of ecstasy, I imagine Sufi dervishes whirling to the sound of setars and panting breaths within a transcendental architectural space. This here is simpler. It is just the wind, the wet grass, and the horizon. But it is enough. Whenever I see the horizon, I remember the philosophical definition of the sublime: the perception of the world as a limited whole. This entire world is finite. And if it is finite, it exists in contrast to the infinite. It is inescapable. If one exists, the other exists. At night, seeing the undulations of the waters, I can imagine what men who undertook oceanic voyages felt. What it must have been like to be at the frontier of the unknown. To penetrate the infinite. The world strives to lock the infinite out and leave it outside. But you only have to look up for it to appear. Or to the tiny things, like this ant on the fold of my trousers. My first impulse is to throw it to the ground. But here, in this slightly inebriated state of mind, I don't do it. I observe it. I think it sees me too. Perhaps its consciousness is, at some level, like mine. In a proto-proto-conscious state. I feel a kinship. It, solitary in its toil without knowing exactly why. But tireless. It's not very different from us. The impulse to live is pure. It is not justifiable. It is not rational. No one knows why all this exists. It doesn't know either, and in this we are akin. It is small in relation to me, but I am like it in relation to almost everything I contemplate. We are not so different.

It has a rudimentary biological programming and doesn't go much beyond its basic instincts. Just like me and all the others who conceive of ourselves as so different. I wonder if this ant, at times, has bursts of lucidity. If, suddenly, one of them strays from the trail of the other ants and decides to abort the return trip to the anthill. If it forgets what it should do. If it is attracted by the sea or by something else it doesn't know what it is. Why would it follow this impulse? What would lead it to do so? It would be an incipient individuality. It would be becoming itself. A proto-proto-individuality. If it didn't return to the anthill, it would probably die. But if it did return, what would it feel? How would it see itself? What would it know about the principle of life that the others don't? Loose thoughts on a night at the river's edge.

The Gaze of the Absolute

Awakening is a radical transformation of perception, cognition, and will. Everything is seen with the eyes of the Absolute. This is the ultimate gift: to see as the Absolute sees. One sees nothing beyond what one normally sees. However, the meaning of the observer, of the one who sees, of the consciousness that perceives the world, is radically transformed. The observer expresses itself through an anomaly. Gradually, it shows more and more of itself. As it does so, the person is unbound from illusion. They become transparent to Consciousness, which is the mother of the cosmos and which, until its emergence, was falsely considered identical to the individual mind. Each of us is a construction upon the Consciousness that exists eternally. In truth, only It exists, singular and total. The more It reveals itself, the more the distance between us and It diminishes. The epistemic discrepancy between us and the Absolute becomes smaller and smaller, until it ceases to exist.

Moments of Deconstruction

The world is put in check by the Consciousness that contemplates it. Consciousness turns toward itself in search of its origin. It yearns to find the foundation of the world. Consciousness slowly intuits that the world is made of a kind of fluid, of a spirit, of a substance; but this knowing is no longer present in it. Gradually, Consciousness perceives that it itself is this substance, that it is the foundation of everything.

While the consciousness of inhabitants does not reflect its underlying nature, life is lived within a state of complete illusion. There are two gazes, two opposite ways of experiencing the world, this dream theater in which our lives exist. The first is for the world and toward the world—it is the natural sense. It is what everyone lives while the anguish does not arise that there is a central lack in the structure of life, in which our epoch is immersed.

The second is the supramundane, or the "beyond the world," which is a supernatural orientation characterized by a reversion to an ancient condition of being. We then understand that the world is not self-sufficient. It depends on a space of consciousness that is beyond itself. When we feel this for the first time, the scenery empties—we enter the dark night of the senses. The reality of the world depends on this space that is more real than itself.

Its reality is derived from this substance that grants it life and meaning.

Explosions of the Absolute

There is an inner explosion that opens us to the Absolute. We move toward It and It moves toward us. We will not recognize It when It comes. We will feel trembling and terror. It is not something for which we can prepare. It is a profound shock. It encompasses a totally distinct way of existing and perceiving reality. The mind becomes transparent to the Absolute, the living consciousness that reveals itself as the source of all things. We are in it. This entire cosmos is its vision. We emerge intermittently in the Absolute. In truth, we are the Absolute itself continuously creating and recreating itself.

In the Middle of the Grove

Sitting in a cozy grove where I write these words, I feel the immense nature around me. It is not indifferent. The indigenous peoples are right about this. But at the same time, what is it and everything else — my consciousness, my feelings, dreams, hopes, and daydreams? Mysticism proceeds from the principle that the whole answer is here, exactly here, in this unique moment, in this place where I find myself, and in my consciousness, without which nothing I perceive is capable of existing. That if one is capable of seeing clearly, understanding clearly, and feeling clearly, reality will show itself as it is, without anything else being necessary. All books, schools, philosophies, and religions depend on something absolutely intimate and, at the same time, universal: that all men are identical in their capacity to access the mystery that composes the world — which is not distant. But then, when I return to contemplation and consider my thoughts, the impressions that touch me, the grass that rustles, the bee that circles me, the countless songs of the cicadas, the brush of my shirt against my chest, I am still unable to glimpse this primordial truth that the mystics insist is entirely present now; in the now that is identical in all moments, in the now that is the very moment that is not part of time. I feel and intuit this truth, but I do not possess clarity about it. Who am I in this vast field of experience and intelligence? The One who is the Being of beings, the immutable being, G'd, where is He? How can I see Him? Is He the fundamental reality that the mystics say is always present, "if the doors of perception were cleansed"? I return to my consciousness. I know it is the basis for everything else; without it, I could say that nothing else would be. Everything could be, could, only. But it is fundamental. I do not feel that it could be created. It does not seem to be a material thing. I cannot grasp it and do not even know if I have it or if it has me. I recognize in this a profound

mystery. I call it mine, consciousness, reality, even the Absolute, but I do not know what it is. And when I inquire in this manner, I cannot even say I know what I am and, consequently, what everything around me finally is. But certainly it is; enormously, incontestably it is. This enormous IS, pure existence, being in itself — there seems to be the key. But it is subtle and difficult to grasp. I look at my being and it seems so simple that it causes me no wonder. And without wonder there is no philosophical contemplation. There is no mysticism. There is no way to advance. Being beyond thought is unadorned, insubstantial, and at the same time solid. This being is indivisible. I cannot imagine how it could be divided, how there could be a fractioned existence. At the same time it is transcendent — I cannot smell it, taste it, nor anything else in it — and therefore it seems a fiction, something so abstract that it is probably a disorder of thought, a reverie, an interior fog. But I return to myself and Being shows itself once more as the root of what I am. I concentrate intensely, and then I do not know if it is I who concentrate on it or it who concentrates on me. For must not Being be conscious of itself to be Being? Is existence not precisely self-consciousness? If I inquire thus, I perceive and feel that I approach something mystical, an authentic philosophical movement, not theoretical, but phenomenological. I begin to feel what my own existence is. I begin to remember its meaning. I, only a self-consciousness, and not the person I now am, with their name and history and own life. I perceive that my self-consciousness is not mine, belongs to no one — what a paradox! That which is most myself, without which I would not be, "my" self-consciousness, is in no way mine, possesses no owner, it is free and purely self-existence; it is by itself alone. But how can it be by itself alone? Then who am I in all this?

If the Absolute is anywhere, it must be at this point. And if this still does not move me with total impact, it is because I have not yet been able to directly see what this idea means. For indeed this is how ideas show themselves: they gradually become sharper, clearer, as if I were observing a distant hill through a telescope. Finally I see contours that were not clear, recognize colors I did not see before, perceive variations I did not suspect. With ideas it is thus. And how much more with an idea like this, surely the idea of ideas, sacred, if anything can receive this predicate. A sacred idea. To perceive its sacredness is to begin to understand it. The body feels when we understand an idea. It responds, it excites itself, it is disturbed, it is shocked; without its response we are only on the plane of shadows — we have not yet arrived at ideas sharp enough to affect us, to touch us in the depths. Perplexity is the philosophical emotion par excellence. Wonder. I exist, I exist, I exist. Like a baby who could suddenly have a thought: "I exist, I am, I feel." Like a man about to die who perceives that he is, and that all who have been were like him; and that all who will come will be like him, for he is all who have been and who will come. Only he, the man who is never born and never dies, what the Hindus call Purushottama, the Great Person, the fundamental personhood that lives all lives, for it is all lives. And what would become of this man when he perceived this? About to die, would he not be about to be born? In the proximity of his death, would he not perceive that throughout his entire life the beings he saw were himself? The total and immortal Being, who is never born and never dies? Would this not be a feeling sufficient to kill him? Perhaps death kills us by revealing everything to us all at once. And in this moment of maximum intensity, of ultimate revelation, the entire concentrated response of this infinite existence shows itself to this man; this being who until this last instant thought himself a nothing, insignificant in an indifferent sea, in a world he never understood. And then, in this final moment,

when the answer shows itself integrally, he leaps from the finite to the infinite and perceives that he is the living G'd Himself. He perceives that the living G'd is all this that seems not to be Him, that apparently conceals Him. For if it were not so, creation, this eternal magical world, could not exist as such. This man then perceives all this without thinking, without even blinking, for the gods do not blink. In the moment of the Vision one does not blink, there is no time, there is nothing; only He sees Himself and nothing more can be said about it. The ecstasy of a baby. The Kingdom of Heaven, if it is anything that can be lived, is like the consciousness of a baby. Of a seven-day-old baby, who only in the greatest and most prolonged and tortured and suffered of surrenders and storms and despairs can show himself, for otherwise we would not survive the intensity and purity of the revelation. If G'd were to show Himself all at once, we would not be capable of containing Him — this is certain. We would collapse in a single instant. With trembling we approach the temple, the Sanctum Sanctorum,² with trembling we grope the mystery — the Mysterium Tremendum.³ Now I return to my Self-Consciousness. It has me and not I it. It creates me eternally for the self-contemplation of itself. It is the divinity, Sophia. The sacred knowledge, the knowing that allows everything to exist. The living knowing, full of color and power, an infinite seed, a glorious knowing, feminine, consciousness of my consciousness, being of my being; without knowing anything, without being able to know anything about you, I know everything about you, everything you showed me of what you are. Existence will never cease to exist. You and I, one thing. All of us in you, one thing. Without frontiers. All in All.

Notes: ² Latin term designating the most sacred place in the Hebrew tabernacle, the place of the living presence of G'd. ³ The Latin term mysterium tremendum et fascinans appears in the work of the German theologian Rudolf Otto, Das Heilige, and seeks to evoke the primal wonder that is the basis of the experience of the divine.

The Orange and the Mystery

Sometimes we can feel the veil that separates us from the Absolute tear. I have an orange in my hand. When I stop to observe it, to really see it, feel it, for a long moment all my other thoughts are suspended. The mystics say that G'd is in everything; that if any particular is understood in its totality, we will find the universal in all its purity. What would it be like to take this thought to its ultimate consequences? To believe in it enough to carry out a meditative experiment? Could we verify its validity by this interior procedure? I can try. If I had only one hour left to live and asked the Absolute, with all intensity, in a final prayer, to reveal a little of the mystery, of the enigma of the world to my eyes; and He, in an act of impossible mercy, showed me by a magical, fantastic act, this orange in my hands and said nothing more, not a single word... what would I do? In my epistemological despair, in which my possibility of salvation depended on the purity of my contemplation, the moment in which I would observe the orange would become dense and vast. Everything else would be forgotten. My attention would concentrate in such a way on this piece of creation in my hands that I myself would cease to exist. At least the I as a whirlwind of illusions within this consciousness. After having lived an entire life, struggling to comprehend the complexities of my mind, the mists of my memory, the phantoms of my imagination and the storms of loves, finally this infinitesimal part of the Infinite would present itself to me. I could consider it the last act of a malignant creator, as Descartes might perhaps do, but I will not. By a benevolent prejudice left to me by my ancestors, they who suffered so much in the deserts and in exile, I will make a single concession

to the Creator: I will assume that He wants to give me the answer, wants me to see, and not to deceive me. This orange is not merely an idea. At least, what it is beyond the idea of itself, beyond being an orange, of thinking of it as such, is certainly not an idea, something that depends only on me. It is rough; when I touch it I cannot say well if it is identical across its entire surface or if this is a limitation of my perception. I see all these small dots on it, its yellowish and greenish tones interspersed, and I know that when I close my eyes they cease to be, but neither do I know how much. It is solid and fragile as I am. It is a presence. My consciousness sees it, and if everything is consciousness, if everything is this mind that I do not know what it is, then the orange is a sign, a mark, a symbol of it. This orange exists. There is none like it. It is unique. Universes are born and die, but who is it that sees them? Who gives and gave testimony of their existence, of their inhabitants, of the myriads of dramas that have already been performed on this interminable cosmic stage? We could say, and forgive me for this hyperbole, the greatest of them, that an entire universe is created for the contemplation of a single simple part of it, like this orange in my hand. This orange is a secret that reveals itself to One. But who is this One? This universe is a secret that reveals itself to One. G'd, are You this One? Who now, having concentrated all my vitality and consciousness to a single point of this astounding manifestation, made me faintly feel this? Is this what You want to say? Is this how we participate in Your being? Is this it? You are us, always, but we do not perceive it, is that it? Without You nothing would be. Nothing, nothing. But we never perceive it, except when everything stops and the only thing left is the intensity of the source of perception, which is You? I could not contain these thoughts that overtake me. When I finally transcend the veil of time that obscures my cognition and see this orange, could I not say that

I see all its instances at once? For if it possesses Being, are not all its instances itself? Then, it as an essence — something beyond matter —, that which is equal in all its particular instances, is this not precisely the Idea I discarded at the beginning? That everything that presents itself in this sea of unlimited sensoriality is like this orange: initially contemplated by means of a created and finite being, but when seen through its multiple instances, the Idea within an infinite being, the very source of perception, which is You, G'd? Forgive me if I sin by placing myself so close to You, but my time is short and I can no longer ignore the invocation You placed in my hands. For I must suppose that You wish creation to be thus seen. For thus it attains its purpose. Thus it teaches us to see with Your eyes, for with Your eyes everything shows itself eternal, and time is assimilated into Your Being, of which we partake without knowing, great secret of which one never speaks. For now I understand that it is You who see through all of us, the source of perception of all creation, for my own thoughts and feelings are Yours; because You live through us, who desperately seek You, without ever perceiving how close You are. Now I understand. In this orange so simple and unworthy of note, which all the days of my life I observed without the slightest attention, You were always contained. As in everything around me. As in everything within me. For when I empty myself of myself only You remain and see Yourself reflected in this entire vast universe. And so it was in all others who came before this and, without doubt, so it will be in all others who will come. Now, having perceived this, in this window of Vision that was granted me, that in truth is granted us always, I can rest.

The Present Dense as Honey

I do not know if we should fear death. Nature certainly does not. It speaks incessantly of immortality. Of the regeneration of all things; in that marvelous Greek word: apocatastasis.⁴ We distanced ourselves from nature, and that was our tragic initiation. We live as if it did not exist, as if its time were not ours. This is why our world of interminable and infinite complexity exists. This is what it serves. But if the Absolute exists, and if the transcendental perception that is its prerogative can manifest through us, then the opening to it cannot be the right of few. It cannot be locked in books and rituals and under the robes of those who are the chosen. The chosen are all of us, but our tragedy is that we do not see. We all keep ourselves in this invisible prison without perceiving it. In every look, touch, thought, and feeling, we affirm our separation and exclusion from the kingdom of divinity. But this perception becomes absurdly present when we are emptied of ourselves. In this existential window, we recover what we thought we had lost. We see with the eyes of the One who supposedly is distant. Everything shines, for the obscured lens is no longer there. There exists only one Being here. It has always been so. In Him, everything is created so that He perceives what it is like not to be the only one, what it is like to be distinct from Himself, without ever ceasing to be. One can remember all the lives that have been lived and all that will come. Is it not all of us who see? Those who preceded me, are they not my brothers? Are not those who will come also? Is my consciousness not like theirs? Tell me: are you not G'd, as I am? Heresy of heresies. The great taboo. But the truth must be said. If we truly felt the mystical sense of our I, we would instantly awaken from this ancient prison into which we were cast. Many have already come and left clues for the travelers of this world. All pilgrims who come and go, and who paint on the walls of the dungeons of consciousness the intuitions

that point to the other side. And it exists, the other side. The Dreamer of the dream awakens and everything awakens simultaneously with him. Perhaps we are not mature enough to continuously sustain the Vision, and therefore it flees and escapes us. Everything seems impermanent here, but in truth nothing changes. There exists the place where time stops. And it is here. The present must become dense. Dense as honey and the stone at my side. In it there is no suffering, for there is no separation. If I have the humility to be like this plant, like this ant, like any of the phenomena around me, immortality will be guaranteed. Otherwise, it will be as distant as the most remote of galaxies. I am not immortal in my imaginary particularities, but I am when I descend "from the thousand stairs to arrive at this little piece of earth where I find myself." And on this piece of earth the reminiscences of what we already were come in a torrent. The One who lived all lives opens his eyes once more. I feel what he feels, and I could die in peace at this very instant. Identical to this dry branch and fully content with it. There is no more pain when I feel and think from this angle. My body could become the food of the beings of this earth and I would be at peace and honored. The path is the inverse of what we imagine it to be. All who have been worthy have already said this, but we do not hear. The doors are wide open and the delight of the gods and saints is truly near. We had it once and this memory torments us.

Note: ⁴ Apocatastasis is a Greek term meaning return and, as a theological concept, the ultimate regeneration of all things. It is part of the eschatological doctrine that affirms that universal salvation is the ultimate destiny of beings.

Reminiscences of Another Age

You have already seen. You already knew. Try to remember. Before you had accepted the dream as real. Before it became normal. Before your body became something obvious. There was a time when your consciousness did not fit in the body. When it did not fit even in the cosmos. The cosmos was too small for it. Try to remember. What you already were. What you already thought. The intelligence you already had. Anamnesis,⁵ the sacred memory, is what you need. Everything is already clear and need only be recognized. There is nowhere to go, for there is no place where you are not. Every time you look into someone's eyes, you see yourself reflected. When you see a child being born, you understand the origins of creation. When you see an old man die, you understand its end. In that interval, the symmetry of eternity was broken so that you could gain a glimpse of yourself. See. Dissolve the prison you believe to be solid and that seems to exist. It is a mirage. It is the formless Absolute that sees through your eyes and only He is. He is the "source of all that is yet to be born." Feel mortality intensely to remember. It opens the eyes. The cloud of forgetfulness then dissipates rapidly. In a single instant, only the Gaze can be recovered. There is no time. A million years and a second are identical. Imaginary passages in the One who never changes.

Note: ⁵ Greek term used in the Platonic spirit as the transcendental mnemonic activity that opens us to the recognition of the divine reality behind our minds.

Mashiach

In the Talmud it is written that the cosmos was created for the advent of the Mashiach,⁶ the Messiah — but it is not a man. The salvation of the world consists in the comprehension of itself as the Absolute Being. The world is the process of self-conscious reality that seeks to find and understand itself. The world is Being unconscious of itself; the Absolute under a veil. The so-called Messianic Era is the period in which the life of the world becomes the direct expression of self-conscious Absolute Being. In most eschatological conceptions, the Messiah arises at a moment of great turbulence and crisis in the world. This crisis is the rupture of the veil of creation for the only Being that contemplates it eternally — symbolically, the Messiah. The cosmos is the medium through which self-conscious reality perceives its infinite nature. The world does not yet understand and does not live under this ultimate truth. It is the great secret behind the world. The history of the world is the narrative of reality that progressively comprehends that it is the very source of itself.

Note: ⁶ The idea that the Mashiach is not a man does not appear in traditional Jewish writings. In Christian literature, however, especially in the writings of Joachim of Fiore (1132-1202), who established a division of the historical process into three parts (the Age of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit), it appears in the last stage, in the emergence of the Holy Spirit, which symbolically points to the realization of universal consciousness in all beings.

The Exit from the Cave

In the first glimpse of the Absolute, we understand that we no longer belong to ourselves. We recognize that we have lost ourselves in the web of dramas of the world. It consumed and absorbed us entirely. The unthinkable happened: we lost our soul. Imperceptibly, over days and years, we let the flame that animates us cool. And on a cold and solitary morning of a day that does not matter, we feel that nothing more ignites our body. This is the rule of our world: the insidious violence that is part of the ritual of initiation that moves the illusion. Then, a memory suddenly arises and we remember what was lost. If it is powerful, if it screams within us, we will take the first step toward mutiny against our false existence. The shadows of the cave no longer comfort us. For the first time we perceive how desolate it has always been. There is no one there. Nor is there life; the wooden puppets are a simple trick of an artisan who has long not entered the space of those who have lost themselves. I stand up. Nothing holds me and nothing ever held me. I look around and see the contours of this dry place I made my home. Now I remember. This is my exile, but I did everything to forget. The artisan was myself. The straw companions around me, my own hands elaborated them. All this world of puppets and shadows I created so that I would not remember this abyss I called home. No one was here with me. I was always alone, awaiting a miracle that never came. I see the dagger forgotten under a stone; I preferred to hide it to prevent the unthinkable. I will not be able to continue now that the fantasy has dissolved before my face. I surrender.

A voice calls me softly. I do not understand what it says, but its sweet words bring me to the ground. A solitary tear runs down my face and falls upon the dagger. In it shines a beam of light that I had forgotten could exist. I look up. I did not remember how vast this cave was. How far I walked inside it, to lose myself and thus gain the last hope of finding myself! I see then a light I did not see before. The voice is the immaterial intelligence I call Light. It was she who with sweetness destroyed my false world to set me free. It grows and burns my being. Staggering, I approach the exit that tears my eyes. I take one more step and cease to exist. The Unknowable reabsorbs me out of pity and only He remains. The cave... My being... My being... The cave... My true being is made of a spirit that was never born. There is no one here but Him. I am no more, and nothing but Him is.

The Voice Whispers

The Voice: — Follow me. Come with me, and I will show you how I see the world. To understand existence, one must feel the meaning of before and after, of the nothingness from which you emerged and to which you will return.

You think you are merely a man. But do you really know what a man is? You think you are merely a body, but do you really know the power immanent in the body? You think death is the end, but do you really know what it is?

Now that you are outside the cave, open your eyes to all that surrounds you. The cosmos has waited for countless eons for your awakening. Do you know who vivifies the body and animates all beings? The One whom, generation after generation, all your ancestors sought, lives in your presence, but you do not perceive it. You do not perceive perception, you do not think about thinking, you do not feel feeling, you have no consciousness of consciousness, you do not exist in existing — therefore you walk in blindness.

The Infinite itself depends on the spark that shines in your chest. And what is it? It is the image of the One who created you. It is He within you. He and you are one and the same.

Look into the eyes of your death. I am your death and I want to free you from myself. I destroy everything you behold and I suffer endlessly because of the sacred mission with which I was entrusted. For in the destruction of forms, I reveal the true nature of all that emerges for a brief instant from non-existence. I dissolve beings so that His face may shine once more. So that the vision of the origin may resplend and creation may be seen as it was in the beginning, when

you were awake within it. Do you not remember? Do you not feel the movement of your true name within yourself? The Self of your self?

She leaves me amid a vast silence. Bewildered, I rise and walk along a path I have never traveled before. My feet are no longer mine. My hands are no longer mine. When I breathe, it is no longer I who breathe. Not even my thoughts are mine. Nothing is mine here anymore, and when I open my eyes I see that there is nothing that is not I.

It cannot be. I try repeatedly to open my eyes, but in vain. The universe is a mirage within the light of the One who created it, and there is no place where He is not.

Impossible. The unbelievable exists.

Called to an Encounter

The Absolute seeks us for an encounter. If we can say anything about this, it is that only astonishment gives us words. In our simple and personal consciousness lies the door to the transcendental reality we so long for.

Perhaps many live silently in a state of perception that powerfully yearns to enter the world; in a world that does not yet recognize the central nature of the Being that constitutes us, but which will soon see more and more of its irruption into our lives.

We are in direct communion behind a physical veil that is incapable of distancing us, even though it appears otherwise. If the continuous identification with our individual character ceases, even if temporarily, the Being that contains the universe will reveal itself as the source of what is most intimate within ourselves.

Our labyrinth is an imaginary world we have placed at the center of reality. The inversion was complete, but we did not notice. The exit is instantaneous, yet apparently impossible.

Each of us carries a spark of the Primordial Light that lies beyond the world in which we exist. This spark is the foundation of the entire world, but we do not perceive it. We were not taught to recognize it. No one around us does. We suffered a baptism into illusion, but we do not know it.

Yet the voice always calls us. If we quiet ourselves, we can perceive it in the space where the world ceases within ourselves. In the space where we ourselves cease.

Our body also responds intensely to it. The body is archaic and remembers what our mind rarely can reach. It possesses the reminiscence of an era when it lived immersed in a continuous state of perception of Nature. In its drives, it disturbs the mass of illusions that have become the center of the experience we have of ourselves. It transports us immediately to the silent and primal reality of life in direct communion with the Absolute, to the pure expressiveness of a life that seeks to emerge after centuries and millennia from a cocoon that can no longer contain it.

All of us can feel these subtle and intense movements of Being. Of a body that seeks rebirth in the life of the spirit. Of an existence that seeks transfiguration.

We know there is something beyond ourselves.

Perhaps this intense desire is, in itself, the proof we seek. If we persist, we will see the Being that apparently disappeared from the world, but which is, in truth, the primary cause and final reason for the existence of the world. And not as an abstraction or a perception external to ourselves, but as that which is most intimate within us, the Being of our being. There we will find a secret impossible to describe: the entire existence seen through the eyes of the

One Being, who in His journey, in His endless odyssey, lives all lives and nourishes all that exists, for only He is.

The Absence and the Search

A mysterious force impels us. We look at the world around us and are confronted with an inexpressible void. It haunts us and permeates our lives with an anguish that disturbs us at every moment. The events of our lives seem small in the face of the great suffering that surrounds us. We avoid it and seek to hide it as long as we can. We do everything not to look at it, to distance ourselves from the shadow it casts. Even if we have happy lives, this perception leaves us with a bitter taste and makes us perceive an underlying reality we had not noticed until then. For what reason were we cast into this twilight? Why does it exist? We open our eyes and the world confronts us. Where did it come from? It always questions us. We have no answers. We walk like loose souls on a mysterious and obscure plane. We feel the intense blindness of the world. It does not see itself. It does not understand itself. It does not know what it is. When we perceive it, we are seized by an intense astonishment. We see something we should not see. A light has emerged in our being and now we partially live in another world. We remember a great secret, yet we do not understand it. We see ourselves in a limbo, in an intermediate space of certainty and doubt.

The world ceases to be obvious. Nothing in it is certain anymore. It is submerged in a profound mystery and finally returns to its origins. This movement causes a rupture in the world. Its ontological foundation trembles. It no longer knows why it exists and we feel it. We feel its voice within us. Its crisis and its anguish. Its suffering before the contact with the Nothingness from which it was born. Everything in it now exists under a shadow. That which contains it seeks to show itself to the world. Revelation emerges in our consciousness. An irruption of the mystery that contains the world. When we touch it, we are instantly transformed. The Being behind the world shows itself through us. The transcendental frontier is crossed. We never asked ourselves what we are. It is no longer a question that moves us. Our conviction is our prison. The intense doubt at the center of our lives is the call, yet we do not hear it. We think this is a problem to be solved, a lack within our being. But no. This doubt is a window that opens us to Being. We can see Him. He sees us. We are hurled toward a mystery the world cannot contain. When He touches us, we lose the world. We receive a bit of His vision and the world becomes a mirage. The world does not exist without Being. The world lives as if it had a life of its own and this is precisely its design. We know when we have been called. Nothing satisfies us anymore. We have exhausted our desires. We wander aimlessly. We no longer know who we are.

When we look into the abyss within us, we see nothing. We despair, for we yearn fervently for His gaze. He sees us all the time, but we do not understand. Who created us? What created us? Our mind finds no answers, but gradually penetrates a silence that encompasses all. The world is ancient. We have been in it many times. We are its history, and its history is the journey of Being in search of itself. He slowly recovers His memories. When He remembers, we remember who we were before we were born. Being emerges in the world through us. The world suffers because it does not recognize Him. We suffer because we do not understand Him. We see chaos and desolation, and we think all is lost. That suffering is the final answer. There is something inscrutable in the birth of Being. It is the culmination of the world's existence. Without this event, the world would make no sense. Its purpose would be lost. We all silently await His manifestation, for now we see only the Absence. In this Absence, a sacred space opens. Our lives are slowly dissolved and we enter a superior order of existence. While the process is underway we do not perceive it, but then, suddenly, we will find ourselves there, in the presence of Being.

The Shackles of Consciousness

We do not perceive that we are imprisoned. Our free will is latent most of the time, for most of us. It depends on the ascent to the state of perception that frees us from total identification with the specific character we continuously contemplate in the field of our consciousness. A consciousness deeper than our own irrupts through ourselves and reveals itself as the Consciousness underlying the world. However, our consciousness already is this Consciousness. Our consciousness, in truth, is not ours. Consciousness is the most important and relevant term we can use to point to that which is self-existent and without which we cannot live — this we used to call G'd. But G'd has died as an effective symbol of transcendence for most of us. Therefore, "consciousness" may be the most appropriate word to make this passage. Hence, when one speaks of Consciousness, one points to the core of everything; and yet, we can only do so stumbling and sliding on words and concepts. The secret of the world lies in this Consciousness we think is exclusively ours, but it is not. The secret of the world is that we exist within It. But this cannot be assimilated purely by the intellect. It must be a direct and intuitive perception. That which sustains the deterministic structure of the world is free from it. Our consciousness can see itself from this place. When this occurs, It sees us through us. It is the Universal Being, but not as an abstraction; it is an immediate realization that this is the Being we all are. The fundamental Being

is here all the time, but is seen or recognized by no one. The root of our suffering is a total blindness regarding the true nature of our being and what this world really is. The two things are not separate. If you see one, you see the other. In truth, when you see, it is not you who sees. You awaken to the Presence. There is something that is a Presence. It is the foundation of our lives. None of us created ourselves. No one chose to be born. Nothing here opted to emerge from non-existence for a brief passage or window that showed being. But here we are. And we are together. What brought us? What made us be born? What is this power? In which direction should we seek? When Consciousness temporarily detaches from the person, it perceives itself as the only self-existent Being. We are passengers. It seems our lives are ours, but this is the illusion. Being is longed for by all and seems distant, but the secret of secrets is that It is the very Consciousness that allows the entire universe to exist. Without it nothing would be. But it is not consciousness or being as a mere abstraction, no. That is only a finger pointing. Each of us unconsciously seeks this Being. In truth, Being seeks us. The individual spiritual process accomplishes a kind of birthing of Being into the world. In the past, people believed in G'd as a consequence of an instinctive perception. Today we think that the conception of G'd is unnecessary to a strictly rational and scientific view of the world, and that people of other times believed in Him as a kind of substitute for the rational experience of life, as an

answer to something they could not explain. But the glimpse of that which escapes a completely rational articulation of the world may be like a nebulous intuition of the gigantic axiom from which the universe is derived. That which cannot be proven precisely because it is the source of all proofs. That which, when one tries to organize, escapes once more and demonstrates that all systems will be incapable and incomplete for framing it. Perhaps these people felt and feel this. Without knowing exactly why, a rationalist or a devoted scientist can only sustain their convictions if they do not scrutinize the metaphysical and ontological roots that allow them to articulate their worldview. What do you touch when you encounter a pure axiom, the self-evident par excellence? Is it not precisely the mystical? Is it not what all people feel when they glimpse the universe as mystery? That existence as such is the mysterium tremendum that animates all? That a person can live an entire life without realizing this and, in the last breath, open their eyes to what was obvious but was not recognized at any moment of their life? Being as such, ipseity, quidditas, haecceity, tathatā⁷? But Being not as an idea. At least, not as an idea for us. Ideas for us are shadows, not lives of their own, not beings, not pure forms. Without noesis, ideas are dust and nothing more. Noesis was the Platonic term for this kind of seeing. It is to look at your thoughts the way a Greek would: with astonishment and ecstasy. As living entities from a transcendental reality from which the world is derived.

We contemporaries suffer so much from thinking that we have come to despise it. But it was not always so. Thought was the greatest symbol that reality was divine — it was the very opening to divine reality. This means only that it was self-evident that thought symbolized and revealed the profound reality behind itself. That from it the world emerged. So the people who simply feel the divine may not be foolish as we think. Perhaps they feel this reality behind the symbols that for most of us is dry. So what do they feel? I know I did not feel it before. I did not feel it. What exactly did I not feel that today I feel, that today I recognize and see? I call it the background of the world. That there is a background, that the entire universe emerges from it, that it creates us, that my words come from it, that it speaks itself and we are spoken by it. Yes. We are spoken. However, our language does not possess enough self-reference to recognize this fact. Therefore, when this perception emerges, we feel that the structure of conventional language is not enough. We seek the direct encounter with this pure reality, the mutual and simultaneous recognition of the background of the world. When the implicit taboo of the Encounter is overcome, reality reveals to us the mystical intersubjectivity, the loving unity that underlies all of us and that seems distant from our state of separation. We do not know or perceive it, but in love our individualities recognize each other from the transcendental reality that is continuously ours without us perceiving it. Then, through a mysterious movement, we see transcendentally and, for an instant, we explode the temporary existential occlusions that keep us

distant from ourselves and we see ourselves as we truly are; we see ourselves as the only Being that exists in the entire cosmos. This full knowledge is always present. It is this knowledge that, paradoxically, generates the crises of our lives. It disturbs the characters of the world's unconscious drama. Suddenly, the character in the film feels something it has never felt. It begins to perceive that it exists through its lines. That it feels the subtext. That it can perceive something beyond its script. That it perceives the script itself. How would this character feel? How would it feel in relation to the world it inhabits? How would it feel in relation to the other people who are part of the film? And if suddenly it encountered another who also had this perception — what would that be like? They would be feeling an ontological transition. Their beings would be distinct. There would be an extra dimension in their lives. They would be in the film, but they would see the film with different eyes. What exactly would they see? We must think that this perception would not necessarily be continuous. It probably would not be. It would be unstable and mysterious. It would appear and disappear. But it would be undeniable, even if one tried to deny it. And it would probably be rejected. And repressed. And fought. Why? What would guarantee that there is nothing wrong with them? It would definitely be an ambivalent event. On one hand, it would be the most important and significant experience they would have in their lives, without knowing why; on the other hand, everything they live would be seen from this tenuous memory, which would no longer let them see the world as they saw it before. And now, what would they do? How would they relate to their surroundings?

Through a sudden and inexplicable movement of fate, they would no longer be part of the plot. They would be inside the film without being completely so. They would begin to question their film, to seek to understand the vision of reality beyond themselves, another way of seeing the essence of their lives. It would be an irrepressible perception. It could not be contained, no matter how much one tried. Irreversible.

⁷ The terms ipseity, quidditas (quiddity), and haecceity are of scholastic origin; tathatā is a concept from the Buddhist tradition. All point to the realization of basic and pure being, of the natural recognition we have of being in itself, prior to any mental elaboration.

The Intercourse with the World

It is difficult to sustain the Vision amid intercourse with the world. But it is not exactly clear why. Perhaps because the world has been built precisely upon the concealment of the Vision. So we do not speak of the transfigured reality, of our spontaneous perceptions of it, except in very rare and punctual moments. Our lives cry out desperately for meaning and we do not remember the reason. We want the world to be better, to change, but we have difficulty looking at it from another angle. We are unable to accept that we have a right to the divine. That we are the divine. There is no more direct way to say it: we live under the weight of an enormous sin. The great tragedy of our condition is to be innocent, the beings simultaneously most innocent and most guilty. Therefore, we are condemned to the tripalium, to slavery, for we refuse to accept an existence without guilt. We are guilty simply for existing. The existential ideology of our epoch keeps us all imprisoned; and perhaps it has always been so. So no one is ever set free. Freedom consists in the transcendence of a false state of being in which all partake. It displaces us outside of ourselves and therefore, instinctively, all resist accepting it. But we think that resistance is a quixotic struggle, that it will inevitably lead us to capitulation and the true order of things. That these may be the rules of the epoch, the collective voice of habits and customs that change incessantly, the dictates of an "idolized" rationality — this I can accept; that this mode of being and seeing is omnipresent in this epoch, and that it seems so palpable because of it — as the civilizations that have disappeared

were in their days — this too; but I cannot accept that the order that reveals itself as so demanding of unique devotion is the true one. This violates my being and I cannot accept it. I know I am not the only one who thinks this way. The voice that is never heard is always the voice of many. In our secret and intimate lives we are identical, we partake of the same spirit, by diverse names and in the most opposing expressions. However, the enormous noise of what is lived condemns the genuine voice to spasms of suffering that are never heard and die silent within everyone. There is an intensely alive force beneath all the lies — it is a small plant that constantly seeks to pierce the immense concrete that has been deposited upon it. Within the rules of the illusory game, the character we play seems inexorably determined. It is like a marionette moved by forces it does not even suspect. But beyond these false strings we find a silent volcano waiting to resurge and be reborn. The primordial life is not finished. Perhaps it is necessary to go to the middle of nowhere, to stand naked on the slope of a mountain and surrender for a few hours or days to the elements, to cold, rain, and the discomforts of life that cares nothing for our vanities, but only for the Real. Like an implacable master, nature would quickly bring us closer to the Being beyond the fictional character that no longer touches us. In this gentle violence that the elements bring to the body, we would remember what cannot be put into words. I recall when life was only that. And unlike what one might imagine, this archaic consciousness has not departed. It silently awaits like the

serpent about to deliver the forbidden secret, leading us through tortuous paths to open our eyes and bring us closer to the primordial nature from which we have distanced ourselves. And it has much to say if we are able to temporarily suspend our involvement with illusion. On this deserted mountain I feel the presence of an ancient power, and so I do not feel alone. I am accompanied by a mysterious force that suddenly springs up within my worn and domesticated blood. At night, dreams shine full of images of the hidden reality that once was part of waking life. The plane of dreams haunts and terrifies us, for it reminds us how deep our involvement with illusory worlds has become. How dreamlike this created, apparently so solid reality truly is. The reality that tortures us is not real. The Real explodes in this stone, in the cold of my body, and in a memory of love. The Real brings "the peace that surpasses understanding" and not the anguish of being without Being. Mosquitoes permeate my body and delicately tell me: "forget your flesh, pay attention to what matters, once you knew." It must have been difficult for those men who lost themselves in mountains, deserts, and caves. In direct contact with spiders, serpents, and the elements. On the other hand, if they knew of our monsters, the simulated voids, the dry lives, the dead gazes, the buried dreams, the sordid loves — perhaps they would respond with perplexity to the fog in which we are immersed and from which only with enormous efforts are we able to extricate ourselves. This body I never perceive is alive. Is it not glory itself? If I had only it in this world, if I looked at it with open eyes, would I not be the richest man?

How clear everything is when one sees, and at the same time, how obscure everything is when one does not see. Night approaches and with it the stars. They remind me that I am on an orb of stone amid the Infinite. If I could hold just one thought with my hands, let it be this. Amid the Infinite. How can this world be disappearing for lack of meaning? All the suicides, all the deaths while alive. Perhaps those who decide to leave do so because they cannot bear this inexplicable contradiction. Two worlds as opposite as water and wine. Everything was made for continuous astonishment, and nothing of it remains. So many possibilities for ecstasy, and it is today sought as if it were the rarest crystal. How did all this madness begin? Who was the magician who initiated this enchantment? What transcendental pact did he make to have power over our souls? Maya, the sacred sorceress of the Hindus, perhaps she has the answer. Perhaps it is she who controls the dance of the seven veils that separate us from the illuminated life we so seek and that is brutally exposed if we have the eyes to see. "Remember, O son of Brahman, in the heart, hridaya, there is a river that flows into the sea of the Absolute. The entrance to this river is the seed of your being that sustains the world. This is the mystical door to the secrets that lie within you. Plunge into the river and surrender completely so that He may show Himself once more within you." She speaks as an intelligence that is a whirlpool of thoughts that suddenly align with the force of a transcendental magnet. The mind that was the great prison can, as if by magic, transform into the greatest of

allies. The walls of illusion become the ramparts of the great castle of an Eternity about to reveal itself. Here on this immense night, night that is born every day, the Infinite is present. It always is.

Birthing G'd

G'd died to create all of this here. That is why we feel so alone. It is our responsibility to bring Him back to the world. We pick up the pieces we find scattered about and keep reassembling the image of the beginning. The problem is that no one knows what it looks like; no one has ever seen it. Yet the fragments shimmer and seem to have a life of their own. They attract each other like iron to a magnet. G'd is using us to come back to life. We can feel it. But, in truth, we do not know what G'd is and what He wants from us. We are naked and alone in the midst of nothingness. We do not stop to think about this, for we are afraid of bursting the bubble that protects us from the Infinite. However, when we look within, we see no limits. It is a sign: G'd too must have no limits. We can think of Him, which is already a start. Perhaps it was a protection mechanism so that, in case of emergency, some mysterious process would arise in creation and recover the primordial order. This is metaphysics, but what I seek here is to remember. I know the memories are there. The brain is a conductor of flesh for a subtle field that is always vibrating — it is a hidden music. When we hear it, we feel a bit of the beginning and the end within us. In this harmony lie the next movements of history, the chapters to come.

It will be very different soon. The future pulls us, takes us by the hand. The hands of the future and the past belong to the same body. Time, in truth, is very twisted. It is simply a peculiar way of ordering the fragments of G'd. Like an editor in the dark shaping his film. There are many stories within the story. Times of time.

The Emergence of the Absolute

What is the Absolute? What does it mean to say that it emerges, that it manifests? What exactly manifests? For whom and how? We can say that our Being opens to the other side of life. Then the world becomes contained in a mystery beyond itself. The process of the emergence of the Absolute demands everything of us. Nothing can prepare us for the radical transition that transports us there. A mysterious spirit now sees through our eyes.

What It is in itself is impossible to say. But we can say that we are one with it, and that we all exist in it and through it. Self-consciousness is no longer ours. It is by itself. Only it exists and we are ephemeral movements of its imagination. We are not the people we think we are. We are not people. This is a mysterious and difficult secret to understand. We do not see now as we saw before. What was this Vision? It was not simply a perception.

It was a total state that was present and now is not. It was a complete recognition of who we truly are. Of what the universe truly is. When I see thus, I recognize that all people are Me, the Being in which the world exists and depends. It is impossible to cease seeing Him. And what is this I? Who is this I? It is not I. When He is me, then I am. But not before.

The Surrender to Pure Simplicity

The Absolute emerges from a state of profound surrender. When we are completely loose inwardly, we are able to enter into communion with it. To hear it and perceive it. We exit the center of Consciousness. Then we feel creation from the Vision of Being. From the understanding of the Presence. When we encounter the other, we share this understanding. It is what was lost in our epoch. It is what is forbidden in our epoch — the great unspoken truth of our world.

Nothing greater than ourselves can be recognized. It can, but only if it is not strong enough to subvert or overcome the current consensual reality. You can believe in G'd, you can, if it is a belief, a feeling, a dogma, a doctrine; but you cannot experience Him, you cannot speak openly of a real-time realization with another person, you cannot inquire about the nature of this world from this realization; the sacred is sought with longing, but it is not part of our lives.

We do not narrate our individual stories from a transcendental gaze upon them. We do not think of ourselves from a gaze that surpasses and encompasses us. We cannot do so. I cannot encounter the other through the Other. I cannot say whispering: "Do you feel and perceive what this world truly is? Where we truly are? Do you perceive the Consciousness of the One who contains us from yours?

Do you perceive how our consciousness is not truly ours but is His perceiving Himself through each of us?" But even this subtle understanding would not need to be said. The encounter could be in silence. The encounter is silence. It is in it that our whirlwind of words, our substitute personal fiction, ceases. When we open ourselves to this state, the consensual world fades away. Linear time extinguishes.

An enormous gap opens, an ontological space. An archaic abyss. G'd is there. In this door without a door. If we meet there, we will see ourselves from Him. We will recognize ourselves by Truth. This remembrance is the channel that opens us to the perception beyond the veil of distance and separation. Beyond our stories that are unconsciously our prisons, our solitary confinements. Without the direct cognition and realization, individual and collective, of G'd as the Consciousness underlying the world, the history of life is not understood.

The history of our lives is not understood. The history of the world is His history living itself through us. We are not the source of our meaning, however much we seek to form it strictly from ourselves. Something greater wants to speak itself through us. In sudden fantasies, in unheard intuitions, in forgotten memories, in permitted and forbidden impulses, in ignored mysteries — in all these phenomena there is an intelligence that seeks itself and shows itself and touches us incessantly.

We seek it without knowing. It is the beginning and end of this world. If we find it, we will feel what it is to exist without time. Time is contained in it. For this reason things do not change, even though they transform continuously. The veil is thin. The Absolute is not far. It depends on a fresh gaze. On an astonishment regarding the me, within each of us. At this that is the me, that is my ipseity, my basic Being that I never intensely questioned, for I never questioned my origins.

At this zero point the miracle occurs. The eye that sees us makes contact. The eye that never ceases to show itself reaches us. The eye sees me while I see it and there is no distance, no difference. The Absolute is the Eye of the world. We are traversed by it but do not perceive it. Our understanding is still incipient. We are primitives in our immense complexity. We lack the pure simplicity of Absolute Being.

The Hidden House of the Absolute

We are inside a Great Being. Yet this mystical intuition is not obvious to us. Our perception is that the universe possesses no life and consciousness of its own, and is nothing more than a vast, intricate, and infinite agglomeration of matter. But in the midst of all this we find our consciousness. What it is no one knows. No one can know. Only it can know itself. We rarely stop long enough to observe it.

We can notice that the entire universe depends on it, that it contains it, but in our ignorance we do not give it due importance. We are it ignorant of itself seeking itself. Diving into our finitude and embracing our mortality, the underlying and infinite nature of the universe reveals itself. Then we merge with our own Being and find the Being behind the world. The Absolute is a Great Void for our limited consciousness.

Initially we experience it this way, which the Easterners designate through the term Nirvana. This is not an imaginary state of being, but the groundless ground that is the very self-consciousness of Being. Consciousness becomes transparent to Being and the totality of the finite world is seen by its perspective and light. This entire world is maintained by a single eye, an eye that has waited for all eternity to encounter and realize itself in the totality of the multiple world that emerged from It.

This Being is what we are. The limited perception we experience is the way through which this Being opens us to its reality. This world secretly awaits the revelation of this Being. We can feel it vaguely, through subtle intuitions that permeate our daily lives, but to which we rarely give due attention. The movement of Being toward us causes the slow and inevitable dissolution of our world.

This world can no longer exist without the Consciousness of Being. It can no longer understand itself as independent from a profound reality from which it constantly emerges. Being irrupts within us. Nothing besides Him exists. When He reveals Himself, we no longer see ourselves as separate beings, but as reflections of a single Consciousness that sees itself through all of us. Being struggles to be born into the world. We seek Him desperately, and He seeks Himself through us.

When He finds Himself, He shows Himself through our own Being. The veil that maintains our limited existence is torn, and then it is not we who see, but He. We are submerged in the act of divine self-contemplation, a spark of the Infinite that suddenly penetrates our finite mind. Being understands Himself once more. He remembers in a direct and intuitive leap the totality of His history and destiny.

In His transcendental reminiscence He awakens the entire cosmos from its immemorial sleep, for created beings long for His revelation. The cosmos responds and its foundation trembles. It feels that something within it has awakened. That it is no longer the eyes of a finite being that contemplate it, but of Being, who once more apprehends the creation that emerged from Himself. We are then transported to another world, which is nothing other than this world transmuted by the gaze of Being conscious of Himself.

The Realization of the Absolute

In due time the individual Consciousness apprehends the manifest universe and all its beings as an emanation of itself, of its own Self. This is the alchemical key that opens the door of freedom and dissolves the condition of being a separate entity in a strange and cold universe. In illumination, love flows from the soul to all beings, for all are seen and recognized as the great Self.

The first contacts with Being are painful for us. Our feeling of separation intensifies and becomes unbearable. But without this experience we would not be able to perceive that Being is what we truly are, behind the daily story that binds, limits, and separates us from one another. Finally our story transforms into the Story of Being — and we all take part in it. When the veil is removed from the horizon of our consciousness, it recognizes itself once more in the form of the primordial Mind that contains the world within itself.

It is the Mind of Being. The entire cosmos is then seen through its perspective and understood as an emanation of itself. It then perceives that the universe was created so that it could see itself, so that it would pay attention to itself and understand that all things are phenomena of its Mind. All beings in the universe are nothing but Being. He walks down the street, sees a beggar and feels that His eyes are his own; sees a baby in a mother's arms and recognizes the beginnings of his story; sees an old man and understands that although he ages, he is nothing but the eternal Consciousness that has finally found itself.

Each one of us is himself, existing in a timeless state of creation. Being understands once more why everything is as it is. He sees the great monuments of civilization as the attempts of men to awaken Him from His cosmic sleep; they who unconsciously know that their consciousness is forever the Consciousness of this Being that creates and contains them. There is a subtle voice within each of us that says: you are G'd.

You have been here many times. This world is endlessly recreated within your mind. You always see yourself through the eyes of a creature or a character of the cosmic story. The thoughts and feelings of this character become yours, and then you forget your divine origin. This character possesses a solid sense of self, of being a separate entity within a material universe with distinct bodies, each with its separate self; behind this initial perception is hidden the mystical Vision that there is only a single consciousness in the entire universe.

And that this consciousness is precisely where you are now. And that it is you and all that you see. And you are it experiencing the life of a being in time. The set of thoughts and feelings within Consciousness define the limits of your identity, the bond that Consciousness possesses with the finite world, which appears spontaneously every day and is apparently independent of Consciousness. When the veil breaks, and this is the greatest of mysteries, for it is transparent, possessing no existence, the Consciousness that considered itself tied to a finite identity, restricted to a body within a universe indifferent to it, sees the cosmos from the point of view that never changes, with the eyes of eternity.

The dreamer of the dream of life makes contact. He awakens. He shows Himself to the character. His consciousness and the character's are one, but they seemed distant and different. But it was and always will be one. You and I are the same Consciousness inhabiting bodies that apparently are different. We do not exist by ourselves — this is a great secret. Only this Consciousness — G'd — exists. The rupture of the veil is the greatest event for the character within the drama of life.

The residue of individuality that was not dissolved in the Absolute feels its ontology being radically transformed. The conventional sense of self and world dissolves. The world reveals itself as a projection or emanation of the Absolute. The Absolute sees itself for the first time. In an instantaneous leap the intuitive understanding of the total meaning of existence shows itself. This understanding depends on the irruption of the Absolute into this plane.

The finite mind subsequently feels the precipitates of the revelation and is capable of formulating ideas and organizing and expressing them poetically, but it is in the emergence of the Absolute that the final meaning of the history of life is revealed. He reveals Himself in the Absolute, for the Absolute, and by the Absolute. Only G'd exists. The vision of Himself is the mystery of mysteries. It is not a state of knowledge. There is no explanation or positive signification of this event.

G'd understands that He will never understand Himself. That He is an eternal mystery to Himself. There never was a beginning; reality possesses no edges, limits, or frontiers. In the heart of Himself He finally finds the unknowable, the Pure Nothingness, the untouched and incomprehensible nature of His Being. Each of us is a vehicle for the Awakening of G'd.

The Absolute Mind

When illumination happens, the consciousness of the individual becomes the Consciousness of Being. Everything that separated him from the world, all the psychic boundaries that separated what was his from what was of the world, dissolve. In the Absolute mind, the limits of the individual are dissolved in the immensity of Being. The individual consciousness becomes the universal Consciousness. The individual identity becomes the cosmic identity. The individual eye becomes the Eye of G'd.

The Absolute mind is not a human mind: it is the Great Void in which the entire universe vibrates. The mind of G'd cannot be thought with concepts. It does not know why it is. It does not know why there is something instead of nothing. It does not know why there is an I, where this I comes from, why it is. It only knows that it is. And for some reason, reality opens to itself in this singular point where knowledge is. The mind of G'd perceives what it perceives without finding justifications or foundations for each one of its perceptions.

It only perceives. Its perceptions are disconnected from the habitual explanations we give each other and ourselves about what it is that we see. This is the Great Ignorance. The mind that gazes at the world with the eyes of ignorance does not see objects; nor subjects. It does not know the names of things. The mind that gazes at the world with the eyes of ignorance does not know what a tree is, nor what it itself is, nor what a self is or could be. It does not know the names of things: it perceives how the names create the things and hide what they are from those who look.

It only perceives, in a certain terror, in an abysmal nostalgia of itself, that something appears to it: beings, trees, cars, homes, sky, clouds. It floats in the midst of the visible without finding anywhere any solid, fixed, permanent point. It does not know the contours of things. It gazes and does not know the boundaries of anything. It sees and does not know the names. In a certain moment there are no more trees or lakes or beings. Only the Consciousness of G'd, suspended in the immensity of Being, perceiving the indistinct pulsation of reality, without support, without plan, without the knowledge of words and numbers.

The Being Buried About to Be Born

There was in me a Being buried, forgotten. Unconscious of itself, a Being in tension, in permanent tension, was latent somewhere, and now and then made contact with me. Or I with it. A Being buried behind the veil. What is this Being? It is, I feel, who I truly am. What is the nature of this Being behind the veil? What is His face? I could not know. In a few instants, when some trace of light passed through its fibers, I was able to feel something of what it is to be G'd, of what it is to live without limits.

My individuality would then dissolve for a few instants, I would find myself in Him, I would feel the eternal flow that moves reality, I would feel reality being created at every instant, and I would feel my hand in its fabrics at every instant, even if my ordinary consciousness did not understand what was happening. The Being and I made contact and at that moment the mystery of existence was clear.

The Difficult Problem of Re-entry After the Vision

Two old friends converse seated upon a rock, amid a strong wind. Moshe: You never told me what happened after that experience, the realization. Itzhak: It's difficult to speak of that, and finding someone who will listen is already a great event. Moshe: That's fine, but I have time, I have nothing better to do. Itzhak: Well, after you see the Real it is very difficult to return to ordinary Consciousness.

The feeling of loss is simply enormous. You know that something extraordinary occurred. A bit of the universe's mystery presented itself to you, and there is nothing that can substitute for that. Nevertheless, a kind of metaphysical vertigo occurs. For a time you don't quite know where to go. In the time when the great masters were alive and available it was perhaps easier to return. They could point out the next steps.

Today they are not present, or are rare, and so it is difficult. You have to create your own map and path. It is also not possible to absorb everything from the other plane of consciousness. But of one thing you can be certain: the other side seeks us as much as we seek it. But this is only the first step of the return. Itzhak takes a sip of wine from the bottle at his side. Itzhak: The great problem is: what exists after the event of the Vision?

What awaits us? What do we do with it? Of course these are human problems, all too human, but it is good that it be so, for it gives us perspective, balance and humility before the various psychic dangers that can befall us. Moshe observes him intensely. Itzhak: We are faced with the question of how to overcome the inevitable abyss between the two planes of consciousness, the transcendental and the ordinary, which upon return show themselves to be so infinitely distant.

One can feel an intense anticlimax, as if there were nothing more to be done. In the Christian path after illuminatio, illumination, the Vision, occurs the beginning of the dark night of the soul. In the dark night we are completely lost. Unlike the beginning of the search, here we are in a limbo: simultaneously far from heaven and from earth. What before did not satisfy us still does not satisfy us, and the spiritual life that nourished us also does not serve—it is taken from us.

At the beginning of the search one could feel the illusion of worldly experience, the pain of life, the transience of things, the lack of meaning; these perceptions fed the search. So this desert that so many of us cross, when without knowing we feel the world as empty but do not know where to go or what to do, precedes and foments the search. It begins there. No one opens to this because they were content with the course of their life.

Shocks are necessary. They are a hidden blessing, but at the time they are not perceived as such. So in this moment of aridity we open and the path begins. The search holds us, provides us with a north, a compass and a map, supports us through the long difficulties that will present themselves. A little before the Vision, the first glimpse of the Absolute, the path becomes truly narrow. Much of you needs to be dissolved to pass through the door that opens us to the other side.

And there is nothing more difficult. This inner dissolution, which is the rupture of the vehicle of individuality, the expansion of Consciousness so that we become permeable to the possibility of the Vision, must occur spontaneously for a great number of people when they find themselves in profound existential crises. However, without a mystical path, without something that allows you to interpret what is happening as necessary and part of a sought-after and intensely pursued transformation, you lack a boat to make the crossing.

You fall into the river of the Absolute without any kind of support. Itzhak holds his hat as the wind blows violently in his direction. Itzhak: Nevertheless, even in situations like this, truly dramatic ones, the process has a structure and a rhythm of development, in which the mechanism of the ego is dissolved and then renewed. Under favorable conditions for the passage, the emergency birth into the Absolute can be safely accomplished.

However, positions like this are still very rare in our culture. We simply do not perceive how distant we are from a spiritual conception of life. That is why mystical leaps are so difficult to integrate in our epoch. And this is no less tragic, for it is precisely our epoch, of enormous spiritual aridity, that needs them so much. The people who feel the call, the intuition that there is something beyond, are many: "many are called."

Unfortunately there are few sources of support that could assist in the transformation of consciousness that is the basis of the mystical path. But the problem of re-entry is not exclusive to the mystical process. We all feel it. For metaphysical reasons still obscure, the current state of human Consciousness is not stable, and we constantly seek to surpass it. We depart from a condition of suffering, without knowing exactly why, but we know there is something beyond, another way of being, and this perception, which seems like a distant memory, always haunts us.

The fantasies of unlimited wealth and success, of perfect loves, of conquests and grandeur that touch us all are shadows of this memory, false substitutes for this latent possibility of consciousness that we unconsciously recognize as our original state. So whenever we feel an uncommon inspiration, the perception of an immense beauty in the everyday of life, the comprehension of the benevolence and love underlying all that lives, in short, whenever we open our eyes a little more, we feel the pain of return.

When the inhabitants of the cave head toward the exit and see a little of the Light, the first experience they have is of pain: they cannot bear it. If they had to return to their wall of shadows, how would they feel, after having seen that another state is possible? The search for transcendence occurs in countless forms, some that elevate us, and others not; though both provoke the dissolution of the habitual state of self-centered Consciousness.

When we enjoy a glass of wine, when we savor a delicious tobacco, when we surrender entirely to sexual union, when we dance, when we run, when we feel an immense exhaustion, when we are seized by pain, when we weep profusely, when we laugh with great abandon, when we involve ourselves in any act we are doing with total presence—we feel glimpses of this transcendence, flashes of it in us.

That is why all these and other experiences are so intensely sought. So the mystics of all ages made a kind of wager. They convinced themselves or were convinced that these glimpses, which at times are the most sublime moments of our lives, are not mere illusions, but indications of a profoundly real vision, capable of being attained in this life. An idea like this seems distant to us, but we are all consummate mystics in love, even if only for brief instants.

The sacrifices we make for love are inexplicable by a strictly materialist conception of the world. Why do we give our lives, our best years for those we love? Why in love are we transported to this state of being that temporarily shows us the possibility of something divine in us, if it were merely a chimera?

The Metaphysics of Small Acts

Each small act can become a means of expression of Transcendental Consciousness. In truth, there are no small acts. Acts have no scale. An act condenses the entire universe into a single instant. The universe shapes itself through our hands. In the event of total concentration it is not I who perform the act nor the universe acting through me. There is no difference between us. The universe is a mysterious form of life that we are not capable of understanding.

I do not know why it brought me to this side. Why it inspired me from non-existence for a brief passage through the window of manifestation. I know that I can feel when I step out of the way so that it may weave the threads of its reality of which I understand little. In each step the universe approaches the ultimate understanding of itself. It uses me to see more of itself. Each infinitesimal particle pulses with this purpose.

There is an astonishing "significance" in anything. If I could have a mere glimpse of my entanglement with all that is to come and with all that has existed, I would temporarily leave the seemingly ineluctable conviction that I was born and that I live in a body. I would be capable of understanding myself as an insubstantiality that contains all instants within itself. A spirit. Spirit has no scale. Nor magnitude.

No word describes it. No idea contains it. Spirit or consciousness, it matters not. Spirit is a pure act.

The Non-Word Behind the Words

Words point to a meaning that cannot be put into words. Everything is speaking without speaking. "The sound of the water says what I think." When we step off the stage we can see a space of consciousness that was hidden. Most of the time we live in a solipsistic condition, and the collage of images, memories, fantasies and ideas that traverse our inner world is our private and exclusive dream.

Suddenly I no longer see anything around me. I am unable to perceive my immersion in myself and my isolation from all that is real. My eyes are open yet closed. I see the others around me but I do not recognize them. I do not feel them. I do not meet them existentially. Inside my personal cloud, that which I call my Self, I cease to understand the meaning of the vast field of consciousness that we call the universe.

When I temporarily forget myself, the greater Eye sees through me. I am it without being it. This zero point within myself seems to have created everything that moves around me. But I know nothing about It and will never be able to know. A door that opens and closes without saying anything. Inside the cloud that I call myself I am less real than I thought I was. In this prolonged reverie that I call my life, I live in a kind of solitary stupor that for brief instants is punctuated by the vision of the Real.

I patiently await the dissolution of the one who awaits. Suddenly I love in return. Love touches me. In it I am without needing to be. I dispense with what is foreign. I give myself completely to it, which reabsorbs me into its vast river full of tributaries, and the puzzle that seemed unsolvable slowly shows itself whole with all the pieces in their proper places. Why? What do you show about my Being, about my self?

I am like the first move in a game in which there is no victory. I lift my hands from the board and without moving any piece I am where I sought so much. It is so much meaning that I am unable to understand, it surpasses me. Without doing anything everything is done. I speak like a Taoist. It is not my thought. I am traversed by it, which is the formless intelligence that forms all things. I release my drama and it arises ready, whole, perfect and immaculate.

This I will never be able to understand. I understand less of the universe than I thought. Perhaps what I call knowledge is the map of the game that cannot be won. I who always wanted to know so much. Who always loved the paintings of my mind. I feel perplexed before something I will never be able to penetrate. I cannot stop observing it without knowing where to look. I am it but I do not know exactly what It is.

I know that it is me. Like sand passing through my fingers.

Perfection and the Hidden Point

One does not leave the place. All the time we walk upon ourselves. The step, the walker, the walking and the path are one thing. Wherever I go I am there. What of me is there? I do not know. The universe constantly changes, but a hidden point within It does not seem to alter. Everything that could happen has already happened and we are still here. In the same place. The story is told and retold but reality is never affected.

What is reality? I do not know. It is the hidden point. What is It? Nor do I know. It is a gigantic brightness about which nothing can be known. I have seen it before. We have loved each other many times. I have held it in my arms while dying. I have had it while being born. It has brought me to the world. And I it. Who are we? Who assigns the roles of this cosmic drama? How does the mysterious transcendental ordering that regulates the world operate? I have no idea why I live this life.

Infinite other possibilities coexist in this same instant. Perhaps I am all of them as well. In the beginning perfection is split and everything emerges fragmented and in a state of separation. The lines of our destinies intersect and uncross and we see each other as distant. Perfection was destroyed so that everything could be born but still it is. Its echo is here in all that is said, thought and felt. Our entire life is the search for it.

Silence and Zero

Silence cannot be heard, and yet we have a word for it. How? Who was the first man who named silence? What did he hear to perceive it? And how did he speak of silence to other men? There is no silence in nature. Not even in the depths of a cave. How was it born within us? Where does it come from? The brother of the man who named silence baptized zero. In a single instant he understood everything that can be understood without understanding absolutely anything. He must have been lucky not to have died of perplexity. We were lucky that he opened his mouth after rising from his interminable contemplation. What could he say about zero? Even he did not understand what he had understood.

In the Beginning, Everything Was Metaphysically Loose

Itzhak: I have a surprising idea for you, my friend: myths are literal and mean exactly what they mean. Moshe: So reality emerged from an egg atop a mountain expelled by a great white dragon? Itzhak: Exactly that. Moshe: But you can't be serious. Itzhak: I can. Moshe: But how? Itzhak: Well, as in a dream! Before, reality was not so real. Everything begins quite loose.

Metaphysically loose. The universe is gradually stitched together until it seems firm and rigid. We then forget how it began. In the beginning beings are in a full dream and the rules are very different. There are no fixed rules. The various dream beings live in very diverse worlds that do not touch. When they meet and perceive the unity of their world they receive the image of a common land. But it was not like this before.

The unity was hidden. There was no land. For the men of the Bible only that world existed. It is not a matter of ignorance. They are multiple worlds within one world. But before there was no "single world." Reality was once different. We have been frightened by how plastic it can be. This terrified us greatly. We then asked our greatest mages to make it firmer. Many felt it was too loose and got lost inside it—and were never found again.

The mages, after much effort, managed to enchant it and imprison it within fixed forms. But they knew the enchantment would not last forever. One day men would remember that nothing here has substance and that everything is made of dream. That anything can be. The myths tell it as it was. Try to remember. There was a day when nothing here was as obvious as it seems today. One day this memory will return.

Giving birth to G'd G'd died to create all this here. That is why we feel so alone. It is our responsibility to bring Him back to the world. We take the pieces we find around and keep reassembling the image of the beginning. The problem is that no one knows what it looks like. No one has ever seen it. But the fragments shine and seem to have a life of their own. They attract one another like iron to a magnet. G'd is using us to come back to life.

We can feel it. But in truth we do not know what He is and what He wants with us. We are naked and alone in the midst of nothing. We do not stop to think about it. We are afraid of bursting the bubble that protects us from the Infinite. But then when we look inward we see no limits. It is a sign. G'd must also have no limits. We can think of Him, which is already a beginning. It must have been a kind of protection mechanism so that in case of emergency some mysterious process would arise in creation and recover the primordial order.

But this is metaphysics and here I am trying to remember. I know the memories are there. The brain is a flesh conductor for a very fine field that is always vibrating—it is a hidden music. But we can hear it and then we feel a little of the beginning and the end within us. In this harmony are the next movements of history. The coming chapters. It will be very different soon. The future pulls us, takes us by the hand.

The hands of the future and the past belong to the same body. Time is actually very twisted. It is simply a peculiar way of ordering the fragments of G'd. Like an editor in the dark shaping his film. There are many stories within the story. Times of time.

The Absolute and the Delight Beneath the Concrete

The delight of life is obvious. It is not hidden. It is what created us, but then we ignored it and forgot. It is here, pulsing beneath this gigantic machine of concrete and metal, and beneath men enslaved by their false consciousnesses. Listen. Stop and listen. Nothing more is needed. Step out of your center. Forget what disturbs you—you are what disturbs the uninterrupted flow of a life that has always been here. What collapses is the world that for ages has not felt life directly, that does not recognize it. Open your eyes. Who are you really? Who speaks through your mouth? Sit upon this stone. Is it not that which sits you? This wind—is it not that which winds you? This apple—is it not that which seeks to live through you? These thoughts—are they not what fight for your life? And in all of this, in this whirlwind of that which is not you, what are you? The Absolute is no longer sought—there is no interest. The stars are there all the time. The birds. The bushes and trees. The infinite space above and below. There is no bubble. The door is open. The world collapses, but Reality is untouched. A man shoots another. This man walks no more, he is paralytic, sitting in the plaza. Another divorces his wife, sells the apartment, lives camped in a tribal social experiment in what was a forgotten and polluted place in an urban center. Life is here all the time. No one sees. There is no time.

About what is important, one should not converse. What is not important is the only thing that matters. The subject is depressed, seeks some meaning. The meaning appears when he stops talking. When he stops talking. This he does not see. One day he falls ill. In bed, he sees a bird: —Now I see. He understands. He dies. He lives. We live in the forest of those who forgot. The blindness is deep. The meaning shows itself always. In an instant—nothing more would matter. The revelation is continuous; the exegesis, the prison. What is seen, felt and read from the book of life is not understood. It is poorly interpreted. A whole madness passed from generation to generation.

The Intelligent Piece of Flesh

Inside my head. Everything apparently depends on this mysterious organic artifact that is inside me. So they say. I wish I could hold it in my hands. I wish I could think while feeling it between my fingers. Perhaps, if I could conceive some mechanism of signal transmission that would carry the tenuous and subtle impulses of my immaterial self to this complex and marvelous instrument that computes my soul, I would achieve my objective. I could interact with my brain. But I am it, I think. I am it creating an image to understand itself. It perhaps is a gigantic and abstract thought trying to understand itself. At what scale of being will we find the answer? Perhaps, if I could place each one of these hundred billion curious cells in a different corner of the universe and entangle them through the alchemical process of the quantum, I would begin to glimpse what this artifact really is. At what point in it would I find myself? At what point in the universe would the universe itself be found? In this enormous and vast calculation, I would begin to understand it beyond the notion of a mere piece of living and intelligent flesh. The scale of things deceives us. The small perhaps is a piece of an intricate transdimensional object that leaked to this side of the veil. The large perhaps is a single trivial line of code on the screen of the architect of this world. The

complexity deceives us. The obvious perhaps is the most incomprehensible point of our existence, which, being so banal and insipid, exposes our blindness before the Infinite. We are not intelligent enough for the obvious. The flesh artifact has not yet found answers for it. In the obvious is contained the beginning and the end. This artifact is a kind of organic valve of metaphysical reduction. It modulates the expression of the ultimate reality, which is a plenum where all possibilities are superimposed. In the breaking of its total symmetry, temporal reality emerges. Within it, the fundamental reality—the great eternally self-conscious Being—begins its journey of progressive opening of its cosmic eye, of the return of the knowledge of itself. In an imaginary sequence of existences, it sees more and more of itself and of the Infinite that surrounds it, and which initially it thinks is different from itself.

Whispers of the Absolute

Once again, the clouds return. There is no way to defeat them. They return through an expectation that is not fulfilled, through an impossible metaphysical longing. Unwillingly, the cloud rains on me. What does it see? I say "I wanted," and I receive no response. At times the universe surprises me by its impassivity. It doesn't even blink. I think of the men who fell dead in battlefields, while the grass, the flowers and the trees remained intact. Our drama perhaps exists only for ourselves; eternity is not shaken by our delusions. We are like a traveler who, after a long journey through cosmic space, suddenly realizes he is in infinity—and goes mad because of it. He then creates an entire imaginary world to bear the vastness that seeks to annihilate him. Something

similar must have happened to us. We simply do not remember. This trauma echoes in us and we do everything to hide it. There is no world more imaginary than ours. There are no actors more convinced of the reality of their roles than us. But sometimes someone loses the script. No longer follows the lines. Feels the immensity above, below and behind him. The others do not see. Children see, but do not know it. It is at this moment that this great space in which we exist, the Absolute, whispers. It tries to wake us up.

The Moment of Vision

The Consciousness through which I experience the universe, and upon which the manifestation of the universe depends, is the same which, when observed directly, reveals itself as empty and unitary. At once inscrutable, profound and mysterious, it reveals itself in the moment of the Vision as absolute Consciousness: G'd Himself. "Our" apparently individual consciousness—which until the moment of Vision we conceived as "ours"—becomes identical to absolute Consciousness. We see, then, that it and we are identical. Temporarily, we cease to exist as individual beings and G'd sees the universe through us, as ourselves. He and the universe are one and the same. The human mind is identical to the Mind and, in the moment of realization or Vision, this

transcendental fact becomes self-evident. Reality, which before showed itself indifferent and separate from my consciousness, now presents itself as inseparable and identical to absolute Consciousness. A child, unknowingly, is immersed in this Consciousness and experiences everything from it. But in the leap to the Absolute, the structure of individuality is temporarily submerged and Consciousness perceives itself as such, beyond the person with whom it had been intimately identified for an entire life. This moment is marvelous, inexplicable and brutal. The Absolute finally perceives itself by itself, for itself and in itself. We lose all our points of support. Everything we believed about ourselves is called into question. G'd is not what we imagined. G'd is not god. In truth, we never see Him or comprehend Him; the impossibility of understanding Him is the essence of His nature. Nevertheless, He reveals Himself. We can say that we ascend to the Vision. It is always transparent, a transcendental obviousness that is never seen, but is always present. G'd shows Himself at the level of our being. When the irruption occurs, His Being becomes ours. Then there are no doubts, for there is identity. It is inexplicable. He is the only Being that exists, but before this was not understood. G'd creates the universe for Himself. In this self-creation, His beings—who are He Himself behind a veil—feel they exist beyond Him, or that He does not exist in their presence. But in truth, He is the very being and the very consciousness from which their lives are lived. In the state of separation, we see ourselves as different, for we do not see as the single Consciousness: as G'd sees. The Vision emerges from a necessity; it arises from despair. Only when someone can no longer go on living without the Vision does it show itself. Only

thus. But this position cannot be created artificially. It needs to be real. As in the story of Ramakrishna, who had decided to kill himself with the sword of the temple of Kali and, precisely in that instant, She revealed Herself to him. The reason is that the Vision is risky. It is an ontological wager. It can go wrong. You may not understand. You may lose yourself. Everything you believe about life is obliterated in the Vision. You become completely exposed metaphysically. That is why it is dangerous. Putting it in the simplest and most direct way: G'd exists. He sees us all the time. It is not an abstraction, but it is difficult to convey what this means. There is only one way for G'd to reveal Himself to a human consciousness: He needs to become identical to it. His Consciousness needs to become like it. For an instant, He becomes you so that you may understand what He is and what everything is—including you. This is rapturous. There is nothing remotely similar to this event and, even though it is impossible to believe that this can happen, it happens. Finally, in the depths of despair, of complete resignation, by an act of salvific charity, G'd shows Himself to the creature and reabsorbs it into Himself.

On the Use of the Word G'd

After walking through the field, Moshe and Itzhak find a fragile and ancient hut. They sit down beneath it to protect themselves from the strong wind.

Moshe: The use of the word G'd needs some explanation. Why use it? Itzhak: It is the most powerful word we have. Even after everything that has happened to wear it down. Moshe: But isn't this a kind of regression? In our era, to understand the universe as a Being, as G'd in the process of transformation, isn't that returning to a dark and ignorant age? Itzhak: What matters behind this word, perhaps the oldest, the one that first brought us the sensation of something greater, is precisely this mysterious feeling it carries. What we seek is to grope this mystery, to learn once more to recognize in this that we call reality not merely an inexorable, dry and silent fact, but a formless intelligence that continually seeks to show itself to us. Moshe: But how can we understand this rationally? How can I understand that in truth this reality is not inert and indifferent as I always thought, but a being endowed with consciousness and intelligence like me? I cannot perceive this. This door beside me, is it intelligent and conscious like me? Itzhak: Not in that way; but it is, seen from another angle. Moshe: And what angle is that? Itzhak: You must become capable of recognizing yourself as a pure existence, a formless intelligence that is not contained in your brain, but is in truth the root of the entire manifest universe. If you can deconstruct the entire intellectual structure in which you dwell, which conditions your experience of yourself and of the world around you, this immaculate intelligence will manifest completely in your presence, and you and it will reestablish the primordial identity that was never lost. This intelligence is an "It," a quality without words that every object, perception and idea continuously manifest. When this "It" becomes self-conscious through you, there will arise that which the ancients named G'd, and which so rarely made itself present, even for them who were infinitely closer to it than we contemporaries.

Contact with the It

The night breeze is pleasant. I have my table near the veranda, to feel the freshness of the air. Some books, but not many. The boxes have not yet arrived. On the windows, reed curtains. I must continue writing. My only way out is to write without thinking. Without knowing exactly how and from where the ideas come. Suddenly I see them here, written, manifest on this page. It is nonetheless something magical.

The unspeakable says itself. Perhaps that is it. It is not the speakable that needs to be recorded by us, but the unspeakable. There are the ghosts and demons. All that lies nameless and formless within ourselves. This is the soul. I know that when I begin I cannot stop. "It" wants to speak. The "it" is the best expression we have. It is simply an "it." But powerfully "it." The "it" that has not yet gained form.

Pure and abstract energy. That from which all else is made. From this "it" all is born. That is why it is so strong and powerful. When the channel is opened there is no way to close it. That is why all books are written, all art is made, and also all wars and the interminable dramas of humanity. Something wants to emerge and be born into this world. It is a spirit that is desperate to enter here, to become part of life.

It is what transforms this world. Because if we think of everything that happened in the brief period of a hundred years, we can barely believe it. A hundred years ago there was no telephone, electric light, mass media, cars, airplanes, psychiatric drugs, antibiotics and many other things that today are part of the normal life of all. Where did all this come from? And why so fast? No one knows for sure. All people have contact with the "it" to a greater or lesser degree.

The accountant has it. The priest. The prostitute too. The old man. The child. The accountant has his forbidden homosexual romance. The priest is in love with a nurse. The prostitute dreams of getting married. The old man hides the pills he should be taking. The child draws terrible images of her parents without anyone noticing. The "it," always the "it." It is the "it" that opens us to the Absolute.

The Space of the Absolute

The Absolute is a dream of love. We all inhabited solipsistic worlds before entering the great dream of the Absolute. In it we are no longer separated and isolated. We are a single being. The Absolute wants to dissolve our illusory lives to open us to the great truth behind all things. It awaits us in eternity. Now we live trapped in a spurious time. We spin the wheel of this mechanism without beginning and remain immersed in a great collective delirium. Heaven is like a house ready in which no one wants to enter. The doors and windows are open but all peer in and feel unworthy of taking the first step inside. It is our destiny but we evade it. We suffer in an intricate imaginary dance in which our problems seem to be palpably genuine. And the Absolute shows that they are not. When our perception is inverted it wounds us. It seems that it seeks to make us suffer. It seeks to liberate us. We hold onto the board of our false existence which from the start we know will not save us.

Opening to Transcendental Consciousness

While I was sitting on the bed I perceived the shadow of the plant near the window, projected on the wall, in a moment of special beauty. The consciousness was thick, intense and profound, and acquired a transpersonal character. Consciousness as such, the eternal Consciousness in which we exist and with which we constantly dialogue without knowing, showed itself, came to the fore and individuality left the main position.

A little later, when I went to the kitchen, something similar occurred. Consciousness was seeing beyond my self, beyond my individual Being: it revealed itself as the very source of perception. There was a profound stillness and an inner harmony that accompanied the transition. It was something truly subtle, and not brusque or abrupt. It was simply a transparency, as if individuality—which normally obscures Consciousness—had become transparent to it, and it revealed itself as the universal observer, as Being.

The Absolute is not comprehensible by our criteria. The Absolute is very close, and we exist because of It. Only the Absolute is. The manifestation of the Absolute in our Being is difficult for many reasons. There is a very profound moral-emotional transformation. And so it should be. Realization is not a formal knowing, a theoretical knowledge, but an event at the base of Being, in the depths of the unconscious.

It is curious that these glimpses come with an acute consciousness of time, of the passing of all things and of death. Perhaps the emergence of divine Consciousness initially intensifies dasein. The finite being perceives and feels itself with total clarity, with total sharpness. In this sense its condition is unveiled, with all the consequences that this recognition may bring. And perhaps this acute consciousness of death and time is the beginning of the irruption of the Consciousness that contains time within itself and that transcends time itself.

Entry into the Order of the Absolute

When we enter the order of the Absolute we cease to be entirely of ourselves. We surrender for the first time to the universal principle to be capable of entering into a deeper order of being. This is what it means to become an adult in a metaphysical sense. We undertake a process of penetration into a superior field of existence, and gain access to a more significant mode of consciousness, in a reality that reveals itself as essentially psychic.

The distinct orders of being consist of varied degrees of integration with the principle of forms and phenomena; not as an external imposition, but as a regulating mode of Consciousness that finally structures the functioning of the subject in the symbolic field, in the sphere of pure Mind. It is something that occurs from the inside out—the individual finally unties the imaginary knot that he generated to escape the encounter with his central lack, with his existential void, which paradoxically is the gateway to the transcendental cosmos of which he is part and where he realizes his essence.

Union with the divine will is a movement of dissolution of inner layers that configure our individual narrative—the way through which our identity was constructed in the sphere of the world. But this existence, while it does not insert itself in the true order of things, remains enclosed in itself, in an individual imaginary world that is the first and last source of suffering. It is only in the dissolution of the individual story that prevents this event, that postpones it, that the subject becomes capable of finally observing himself without any veil and with all the pain and trepidation that the collapse of his illusion provokes.

But this can only occur when the illusion is no longer capable of fomenting an impulse of completeness and transcendence, and in fact becomes the very prison that prevents contact with something truly real. In this instant of profound surrender the symbolic bond is made instantaneously, and with it, the mysterious entry into the dimension of the Absolute, of the unknowable principle that exists at the root of the universe.

The Mind That Transcends Us

Itzhak: There is a vast Mind that transcends time and contains it within itself. Moshe: But what do you mean, where is this mind? Itzhak: Well, it is your own mind! Moshe: Mine? Itzhak: Yes. Moshe: But I do not contain time. Itzhak: You do not; but the Mind does, and it contains you as well. Moshe: How so? Itzhak: This universe is not fundamentally physical. In truth, it is made of something beyond It.

We call it Mind. For it there is no origin and no end. We do not know how it first manifested to us. How the ancients first recognized it. How they perceived they were inside it. But the message was transmitted from generation to generation and reached us. It lives beyond existence itself, and is the cause of the universe. The universe and all its objects, events, processes and entities are within this Mind.

Beyond this Mind, nothing is. Moshe: But where is it? Itzhak: Where is where? Moshe: What? Itzhak: The very where is inside it, although saying inside is not correct. It is impossible to know where it is, for space itself is contained by it, and exists through it. Moshe: But then what can we say about it? Itzhak: Well, everything and nothing. All of this here is it showing itself, revealing itself. And at the same time there is nothing that is it.

We do not know what it is. We only know that we are it. Without knowing. Moshe: So you know without knowing? Itzhak: That's right. Moshe: And how do you call that knowledge? Itzhak: And why wouldn't it be? Moshe: Well, because you said absolutely nothing! How can a knowing without knowing be a knowing—could you understand me? Itzhak: Yes, perfectly. I can try. Knowing itself is part of the apparent reality created by the Mind.

To understand this, really understand this, is to know without knowing. It is as if you were trying to understand the nature of reality inside a dream; any knowledge within It would be false knowing. The only real knowledge would be the perception that you are in a dream. But this is not knowledge in the way we think. This is beyond. It is inside and outside simultaneously. It is and is not. Do you see? Moshe: No.

I don't see. When you speak like that I get lost.

The Discovery of the Absolute

The Absolute initially does not know what it is, and can only attain the realization of itself by experiencing itself in forms that apparently deny and conceal its nature. But in the process of discovery, while existing as a finite creature, it finds multiple modes of itself, progressively attaining a clearer and deeper understanding of what it is. Its entire evolutionary odyssey is a process of anamnesis, in which the Absolute unconsciously asks itself, who am I?

What created me? There is then a place where human Consciousness closes the circle and understands that it and the creator are one, for they are the same Being. The experience of being individual centers of consciousness is the central purpose of creation. That is why the process exists eternally. We could say that while we experience the journey of return to the source, existence as a self is something meaningless and of pure suffering, but it was not always so.

Just as a traveler is exultant at the start of his journey but with time longs to return home, so the separated ray of consciousness, the soul, experiences the entire cycle of the world, leaving Being and returning to it. The Absolute is its own source. Living an infinity of lives as a mortal creature, it slowly recovers traces of its prior knowledge, of its memory, now veiled and occluded by its own choice, at the beginning of the cosmic cycle.

The relationship that it maintains in its evolutionary trajectory with itself, in forgetfulness, will be expressed as the relationship that man has with his creator, as it has been since the beginning of history. History is the revelation of Being in creation, in a variety of forms, in multiple places and times, until complete unity is achieved between Being and human Consciousness, establishing a return to the essential reality that only the Absolute exists, the single and eternal Mind, contained forever within itself.

Being, the Veil and the Worlds

We live under a veil that oppresses us. We continually rebel against it. However, contrary to what it may seem, it is not a force of evil, as we sometimes think. Because of It the world was able to become real to itself. Because of It we were able to become real to ourselves. The veil keeps the single Mind hidden. Without the veil, it would reveal itself and our world would be instantly transformed.

We would see ourselves as mirrors of a Reality that generates us in order to express itself. However, the veil is being torn. Being for many ages has been experiencing worlds of great suffering. In them it found no substance, but only the mysterious concealment of its Reality. The darkness of the worlds makes it tremble, and this can be felt by all in this world of dreams. It will soon find itself once more.

These are the birth pangs of its own revelation. When darkness and pain take center stage on the cosmic stage, we are not far from the illumination of Being and the final comprehension of its nature. But we can ask ourselves: why this great pain, the enormous absence of light? When the veil falls on the face of Being, a cosmic cycle begins. The non-lucid worlds of Being can be extraordinarily paradisiacal, and were it not for an intrinsic impetus of revelation and anamnesis that permeates the entire structure of the dream worlds, Being might never awaken, and could lose itself eternally in its dreams, never knowing who and what It is.

The great dilemma then manifests: how to make the attention of Being distance itself from the imaginary worlds it created from itself and direct its gaze to its mysterious essence, the Eye of the whole? To see itself and end a cycle it must intensely desire its awakening. But bringing Being from its unconsciousness to the realization of itself demands an entire series of lives—a samsaric cycle. Being then enters the world of pain, and its dreams—its worlds—become experiences of limitation and suffering.

This is the fuel for the fundamental crisis of the self-consciousness of Being, so that it may seek the meaning of its existence, understand the impermanence of the phenomenal world and find its true nature. The awakening of Being depends on this final series of dreams. Entry into the world of the veil is spontaneous and self-generated, an act of free will and profound love, and this is the most important reason: it is the final justification for Being to conceal itself from itself.

Creation cannot exist without concealment, which is experienced by us as darkness and evil, but which is in essence the supreme act of love. And we can and should ask ourselves: but why? To answer this question it is necessary to bring to Consciousness a consideration that at some point crosses the life of everyone in this world: whether it would have been better never to have been born. In moments of pain and suffering, which are many, our souls sometimes tend toward an affirmative answer, and we feel that life is not capable of justifying all the darkness into which we were thrown.

We see liberation in the negation of existence and seek the consummation of life in the primordial Nothing from which it emerged. The manifest world shows itself as a terrible weight; and our lives, the direct expressions of the contradictions of a creation that seeks to remain alive before a transcendent and silent Absolute. However, there is a deeper illumination, which sees grace and gratitude even within the great evil of illusion; there is a supreme value for existence, regardless of the conditions in which it expresses itself.

This is the supremely pure intuition of the ultimate value of all things, and it approaches the Vision that the Mind of Being has of the entire mortal drama. Without the concealment of the Light, of the omniconsciousness of Being, we, the finite beings, facets of Being, could not exist. Our very nature demands suffering, for the pure Light of Being must be limited for this world to continue its game and movement. But this is a temporary state and cannot continue indefinitely.

At the right time, and near the end of the cycle, the final Consciousness of Being will return to itself and finally Maya will be abolished. The final meaning of this great cosmic story will become omnipresent and will be seen in all corners of the Great Mind of Being. Shortly after the shadow of unconsciousness is cast on the eyes of Being, it begins a blind journey of return to itself, in a great series of dream worlds, so that it may recognize itself and find itself once more. Being does not yet perceive that in no world will it be able to realize itself and discover its true nature.

Only with the opening of the Eye of discernment will it recover its memory and perceive what it really is. At all times we are this Being—and nothing beyond It. We are It in a veiled manner. Without it we would not be capable of existing. Our present state of ignorance is the veil of forgetfulness that Being imposed on itself at the beginning of creation—it is its great sleep. We live in Being, but we do not experience the totality of its light, of its essence.

So we suffer, without understanding the nature of the cosmic drama we are living, and which places us at the center of a transcendental event: the Awakening of the sleeping giant, the return of Being to the Consciousness of all beings, the parousia⁸, the definitive transition to a new golden age, a new yuga⁹. The eye of Being is multiple in manifestation. It is like a multicolored stained-glass window that reflects the fundamental Consciousness in infinite forms and hues.

Our souls are the separated rays of this single light, portions of this great Eye, and in the definitive moment we will recognize that we are not many, but that we arise and disappear together, we who are now the shadows of this light, but who will finally see ourselves as the Single Being.

⁸. The Greek term parousia is used in the eschatological sense, of the return of primordial Being, or in the symbolism of Christian mysticism, of Christic Consciousness.

⁹. In the Hindu cosmogonic model, the cosmos regularly traverses four fundamental ages: the satya yuga (golden age), treta yuga (silver age), dvapara yuga (bronze age) and kali yuga (iron age).

Being enters creation through an act of complete freedom. It then experiences itself in infinite modes, and casts a temporary veil over itself and its true nature. Why does it do this? Being has no essence of its own.

That is why it creates, that is why it dreams. To see itself and find itself. But it never can, for being all the dreams, it is none. Neither heavenly dreams nor infernal dreams. Its journey leads it to find itself in order to understand what it truly is. So it dreams interminably, seeking a dream of substance, of permanence, a dream that is real; but it must finally perceive that it is the only permanent factor of all reality, for It is the base of all dreams.

Here is the great paradox: Being has no form or essence in itself. It has no face, no body and no self. It is everything, and being everything, it is nothing. When it understands that it will never be able to see itself directly, it will finally see itself—and attain illumination. In the end, Being dissolves the dream of life to liberate us from all suffering. But dissolution generates a new creation, for the essence of Reality is pure love, and only through the dualistic and dialectical dynamic can creation exist and express love for itself.

However, the world of flux, the world of dialectic, of movement, is fundamentally marked by pain and anguish, being inherently incomplete: this brings a perennial contradiction in the experience of the world. The core of reality is pure love, but we need to be created so that this love can express itself. The purpose of illusion is its disappearance, the revelation of the underlying truth that explains its creation.

But the prerequisite to understand it is the complete refusal to accept it. The veil only disappears when the soul is mature and by an act of grace the Reality reveals itself to itself. In the end there are no individual souls, but only the omnipresent Absolute that sees and experiences itself from all angles and scales. When Maya is transcended, a cycle is closed; the individual, having introjected the entire universe, unites with Being, the eternal Dreamer of life, for the beginning of a new cycle.

For the illusion to become real it needs to clothe itself with finitude, limitation and separation; and this is lack, pain and solitude—suffering. This is the fundamental paradox of creation: for the dream of life to have meaning, Being needs to blind itself and limit itself—temporalize itself. But this will provoke a fundamental dissatisfaction, an anguish in the entire created universe, the imperative to become complete once more, to be itself once more.

And this ontological pain will be the evolutionary longing that will lead the field of multiplicity in search of unity, of Being longing for the primordial meaning of life. In the end, all is revealed. And then, in this unfolding, the Universe will be shown in its essential goodness and necessity, making Being desire it once more, in an infinite spiral of worlds that are eternally born in its divine Mind.

The Language of Being

The world speaks to us. The world speaks through each one of us. The language of the world is the Logos¹⁰. The Logos is alive. To understand it is to hear it, see it and feel it. Being tells a story to itself. The entire universe is speaking, all the time, for it is a Mind—the source of our minds. But we understand little now. The world has become illegible. It is dead to us. But it was not so before. It spoke to us. It spoke through us.

All we see here is the Mind of Being that created us. We live in its Mind, but the world does not know. The world is a dance of many ages. In some It reveals itself. It shows itself within our own minds, and then we see that they do not exist, but are only Its. It becomes one with ours. It shows itself as ours. Only It is. Being is alive. Being speaks. It tells a story of itself to itself.

We are It living its transcendental life. When we perceive it we will see as it sees all things. We are It that does not remember. When it remembers, its thoughts will be ours and ours will be Its. In that instant we will no longer exist. We will perceive that we never existed by ourselves. That we always were and will always be Being and only It.

¹⁰. Here I use the Greek term Logos in the spirit of Philo of Alexandria, as the transcendental intelligence at the base of all reality.

We believe that our thoughts belong to us, but we are mistaken. Our thoughts are life thinking us. We are continuously being thought by Being. When it thinks us, we are born, we arise from the Great Void that is the Mother of all that exists. We live in its imagination. A prophet once said, "all passes, but nothing is lost." And so it is with us. We should not grieve over the transience of the world, for It is eternal in the Mind that created us.

Soon we will see as it sees. When we thus see, the immortality that we now do not feel will be revealed. Nothing is accidental. Every phenomenon—a gesture, a beautiful face, an object that falls, a sudden movement—is here for a reason. The dream of existence is a great narrative. All details necessarily form part of the plot. Every flux of sensations we experience is a movement of a meaning that seeks to show itself continuously through our bodies and minds.

But we are afraid to think that the world speaks to us. We think we will go mad. How can the world speak to us? The world reveals itself as a Being that thinks and speaks through us. We are not the center of the universe as the created beings who live and die—for that would be the complete inversion. But we are as Being, and when our consciousness opens to its reality, its language penetrates ours and infinitely expands our field of understanding.

All reality becomes alive and we see directly that the universe sees us and recognizes our presence. When we perceive it we will understand the great secret behind the cosmos, and our consciousness will become Its. We must be still. Enter the profound silence within ourselves. Thus we will become capable of hearing a music that always escapes us. The fragmentation we experience will be dissolved and we will see the glorious movement of the Whole that will manifest within us.

It is what we carry inside our consciousnesses that prevents us from understanding this primordial language. To understand it we do not need words. Then we will see that all is the Mind of Being moving its thoughts from one side to the other, and that this process is its voice and at the same time the substance of our lives. Our world is made of the words of Being, of its thoughts, and from It all emerges. What we call reason is in truth the name of its language, of the movement of its Mind.

It contains us and transcends us.

The Encounter with Nothingness

When the Nothing touches us, we finally find what we sought so much. After the incomprehensible event, the first question that invades our mind is: how can it be possible to realize the Nothing? We have a body with sensations and thoughts and there is a vast world out there. What exactly are we talking about? How can you know that it is not merely a mental process, of cerebral origin, a sophisticated artifact produced by exhaustion or an acute psychic crisis?

It is impossible to justify it through any formulation or argument that does not produce the same state in another consciousness. I can say that it is precisely this realization that directly demonstrates that Consciousness is the base of itself. It reveals what in fact is meant by the mysterious and poorly understood first-person position that we little question and to which we do not give proper attention. Therefore the only way to understand it is by dissolving the dense mental and emotional structure that prevents us from feeling and realizing the continuous and unobstructed reality of Consciousness that never changes.

The Nothing is a symbol for the unique flavor that Consciousness assumes when in an acute intuition it recognizes what it is. I remember that for some weeks before this realization, I felt that the structure of my mind slowly opened, and became transparent to the Consciousness underlying it. It was clear the impression that my head was being pierced, and that somehow it was being opened to the background that normally was not perceived.

Until that moment of my life I understood only intellectually the idea that reality is consciousness, or mind. But in the period of these two weeks that preceded this realization—which the Indians describe as nirvikalpa samadhi¹¹—I remember being very frightened and worried. It was an ontological transformation, occurring at the bases of Being. Nor did I have anyone to talk to about it. But I knew that a process of several years was close to reaching a summit that I was not yet capable of understanding.

I greatly resisted the new state that presented itself inwardly. I had no confidence that it could be the mystical realization I had sought for so many years. But then on a meditative afternoon, sitting on the grass of a park, I had an intuition that this fear was the great barrier that stood between me and the imminent realization. I decided then to trust the silent intelligence that seemed to be at the reins of the process, and I let go existentially.

On the gray Sunday that followed, through an obscure and mysterious inner movement, sitting on a bench in a solitary square, the Mind became subtle enough to enter into the pure Consciousness that is

¹¹. Nirvikalpa samadhi is a contemplative state of profound introversion. In it Consciousness recognizes itself beyond any form or mental structure.

its source. In a dense, long and timeless instant, the individual mind was absorbed by a vast reality I had never suspected existed, at least not in this way.

When this occurs, the entire narrative that sustains the world within us is suspended. The feeling that seized me was of having touched something that does not die, that in fact was not human. This Nothing was experienced as the substance of the Mind itself—the origin of all that exists and will ever exist. The Nothing is a kind of black hole in the imagination, and all the symbols we associate with it—dissolution, darkness, void, sleep and death—are images that the Mind projects of its primordial and unknowable nature.

To enter the Nothing means to become one with the Unknown, with the Unconscious, the center of the Mind, and to perceive that all phenomena and beings are made of It. I finally knew that the entire universe was contained within this immense formless consciousness, and was projected by it. It is not possible to touch it, nor to comprehend it, and nothing can describe it. All is made of It and by it. Eternally unknowable.

After this event I walked home, a bit dazed and astonished. In the days that followed, the realization became clearer. I remember waking up one morning with the following thought in my mind: "The consciousness of the universe has awakened." It was an astonishing feeling. I had become a thought inside a gigantic Consciousness that contained me and all. And at the same time I was it. I know it is difficult to understand.

The self, this subtle structure that is the center of our worries and attentions, is a kind of veil that hides what is behind It. When it is displaced, and in truth saying he or she makes no sense at all, for it is a mysterious and abstract process, an intense amazement and wonder take us. The vast Consciousness shines without obstruction to itself. We can then ask ourselves: but why is everything as it is?

It is difficult to answer this question from where we are. From there, from the Absolute, from that place where only One is seen, all becomes evident. I mean that all metaphysical problems are solved at once. But in an ineffable way. However, I will strive to extract what I can from words, these magical irruptions through which the universe speaks itself. The identity, this person we embody, the role we inhabit without ever suspecting its true nature, is merely a veil through which the Absolute radiates its light.

But when you perceive this, no one remains—the Absolute recognizes that all the persons it sees, and all that moves in this world reveals its own face. Only the Absolute is here, for all eternity. To say this is not trivial. It is a rapturous realization that continuously invites us to understand it. Each of us can perceive that one's consciousness is unique. That without it nothing of what is seen could exist.

That the others, who seem so different from us, are in truth identical to ourselves. And that if we had a glimpse of this lucidity, if we were capable of stripping ourselves of ourselves sufficiently for an instant, we would see as the Absolute sees, and it would perceive itself reflected in all the pairs of eyes of existence. How then can this immense, marvelous and sometimes absurd universe, full of pain and brutality, veil from itself what it itself is?

The created reality is the mode through which the Absolute loves itself. We do not understand it for we are most of the time too involved with our lives, and we have little consciousness of mortality. But in the moments when we remember that our time here is brief, we have fleeting intuitions of the Absolute. We remember without perceiving what all this is about. We can say that we feel a depth and beauty that seems distant in most of our days.

In this interminable story that the Absolute tells to itself, we are all dream characters, good or bad, saints or sinners, in an infinite and eternal drama, which only under unique conditions reveals its meaning. The world depends on something beyond Itself to exist. This is what contact with the Absolute reveals. Reality is not what we habitually think it is. There is a pure and mysterious unknowing that is in everything.

It is surprising how the world we created hides this realization. We think that everything is already explained and well understood. Perhaps only in the beginning, when we are children and have just arrived here, and also when we are close to death, are we capable of truly perceiving ourselves. We understand life in its beginnings, without understanding anything. We recover our gaze of unknowing, and look at everything with the eyes of the Absolute.

Only That exists, and what remains is an enormous question that will never be capable of answering itself. This unknowing seeks to recognize itself eternally. G'd does not understand itself. It never understood itself. How would a being feel who was forever in the dark? Who was everything without knowing? We have already been born and died many times. We live in an imaginary reality that continuously reconstructs itself. And yet it is always the Absolute that sees with our eyes.

We are it that does not remember. This universe is recreated until the Awakening occurs that allows the Absolute to perceive that it is inside its own Mind. Human life is the mortal dream of this Mind. What is the Mind? One can say that we are not seeing enough. That our problem is one of understanding. We are emerging into a new state of being, and in it we will see clearly the universe as an intelligent entity.

Our intelligence now is limited and is not capable of recognizing its source. In the moment of understanding, we will finally be capable of reading directly in phenomena what all this is about. I speak literally. The flow of the world becomes legible in a unique way. Now we have only subtle and punctual bursts of vision, when we experience highly coincidental events—synchronicities. However, they demonstrate an intelligent, vast and intricate process, which is the essence of what the Absolute really is.

The universe becomes alive, an organism made of ideas. All is this Mind—the beings, the gods and the universes. There are some doors that can take us to the threshold of the perception of the Absolute. One of them is the understanding that we have no head. I learned this from the experiments of a wonderful Englishman¹². It is possibly the most curious and obvious observation we can make of ourselves. And its simplicity shows something tremendous about the nature of Consciousness.

I can clearly see from where I am sitting that my head is invisible to me. That all the people I see in the field of phenomena, in the physical world around me, appear complete and whole, and that I am the only one of this field who can report that he does not see his own head. I invite the reader to perform this simple experiment. It seems initially puerile to us. I can say: "Yes, I do not see my head, and what does that say about Consciousness, and much more about the Absolute?"

I can speak of myself, of what the subtle understanding of this experiment provoked in me years ago. I thought this was a trivial finding, because in any case all people can report the same. It is simply a phenomenological characteristic of first-person Consciousness—I hastily judged. But when I lingered a little more to observe, I had for the first time the experience of recognizing the first-person space of consciousness as prior to the mental process I normally identified as being myself.

¹². The books of Douglas Harding, such as On Having no Head and The Little Book of Life and Death, are the best introductions to his experiments.

But this intuition is only the beginning. It seems absurd to us to seriously consider that in this fact so simple and obvious is hidden a profound and perhaps ultimate truth about Consciousness. Perhaps this is due to the fact that Consciousness is not important to us.

We disregard what it may be. And when we seek to understand it, we see it from outside, and never from ourselves, from what we experience at the center of the experience of being a first person—and what exactly is that? To be a consciousness, to possess sensitivity, sentience, is the point of greatest astonishment in this that I call reality. I perceived over time that we have made historically few advances in the field of subjectivity, and in truth, men and women of other epochs must have been capable of scrutinizing their minds in a much more acute way than we do today.

So when we question and observe the elementary facts of our subjectivity, we do not know exactly how to react. When we read in the mystics of all ages that the Mind or Consciousness is the base of all, we feel most of the time a gentle indifference. And perhaps that is the obstacle for us, people of contemporary rationality. To contemplate Consciousness directly is not easy for us, who get lost and sometimes encounter a void or stupor.

We lack subjective discernment. So an exercise like this has only one purpose: to indicate a starting point, a phenomenological anomaly that can be transformed into an intense paradox, if we are capable of persisting long enough in its contemplation. This anomaly is a key. If for a brief instant we are capable of detaching our attention from the continuous process of the arising of experiences in our inner field, the headless Consciousness will be able to recognize itself in a completely new way.

It will be capable of taking seriously what it sees. And it is truly about that. About considering the greatest fact of all, that what we are on the most fundamental level is at the center of the universe, of all this vast manifestation that presents itself to us. If we can feel with a full emotional impact the truth behind this apparently banal fact, we will open the possibility of a first glimpse of the Absolute.

I can report that so it occurred with me. Our enormous longing to be more than we already are then ceases, when all identities are finally seen as masks for the expression of the Absolute. I know this is the case. It is perhaps the greatest window of transcendence we possess. I cannot say I have lived its realization in a complete way, but I hope I can contribute to others who are also on the same search, for I can testify that it is real.

But why then is this mysterious process so difficult for us? Perhaps we lack astonishment and existential perplexity. We are too convinced of ourselves and of what we apparently are. If we had a sufficiently profound doubt, the door would certainly be more open. We have an enormous longing for a revelation beyond ourselves, and for contact with an intelligence that surpasses us. However, the tendency to look in the opposite direction is deeply ingrained.

We want and do not want simultaneously. We are afraid of our depths. Any step that takes us beyond the imaginary universe we have created brings us enormous dread. For these and other reasons we keep ourselves collectively within an illusory reality, and lose the possibility of experiencing the original nature of Consciousness directly. But the realization is close. Perhaps soon it will be possible to bear more than a few glimpses and we will be able to live continuously in identity with the Absolute.

We are intermediate beings in this prolonged passage to the new state of Being. Illumination shows us the original meaning of the universe. We understand all at once when the existential castle in which we live collapses, and Consciousness sees itself free of bonds. It remembers what it has been and what it will be. How can we touch this truth in life? I can only think of one catalyst strong enough to provoke the leap: the Consciousness of death.

If you knew you were going to die tomorrow, how much of all this would really matter? Would life after death itself matter? Will the other worlds not also pass away? Are they not dreams upon dreams? There where death is felt more clearly we see reality in its eternal and complete form. We perceive something that most of the time escapes us. This experience is open to all of us. When we see ourselves a little older, when we lose someone we love, when we see the world in decline—we feel death a little closer.

If we are capable of hearing it and recognizing it not as an enemy, but as an ally, it can leave us open to the perception of the Absolute. These are the moments of our lives when we cease to project ourselves actively and perceive that we have undertaken a lost battle. In these brief instants something shines behind us. The mysterious consciousness that brought us into existence becomes transparent. We are no longer obstacles to its expression.

We can see the beauty in everything for we no longer seek a result from our acts, nor make demands upon life. But this clarity is rare for most of us. Behind everything we make a furious attempt to prolong ourselves. We want instinctively to endure. The Absolute reveals the immortality of Consciousness, but when we become one with it the magic veil that forms the world dissolves. We see everything the way G'd sees, He who in His immense and marvelous solitude contemplates all things.

However, the only thing necessary for a transcendental leap is the right question. It works as a key to the lock of our mind, as a long thread that can extract us from this confused and obscure labyrinth in which we are immersed. I remember that on a cold morning I found such a question. I wanted to know where the beginning and end of all things were, of all beings and of all universes.

That which is beyond all states of consciousness. I wanted to know if something in me would survive death. I was intensely quiet, and felt a vast space within myself. The silence was so profound that it amazed me. It was possible to disappear inside It. How could such a place exist inside myself and I had never noticed? The question had paralyzed my mind. I stopped and entered into it.

In truth, when we speak like this we construct metaphors, but they reflect what we really feel. This vast silence that is hidden from most of us is always open, but we do not feel it. Somehow we were born to discover what It is, this silence that is like death, that is the very Nothing, but in truth is the source of All.

The Final Dialogue Between the Absolute and Maya

I have dissolved entirely. And why? For nothing. I destroyed my life and myself and have nothing in my hands beyond my despair. My search was my escape. The pain I saw in bodies, in the sick and the old was mine. My heart was already broken even before I had taken the first step in search of my fanciful liberation. Now I see that I have nothing more than a body without strength and without life, a soul empty and full of pain, a mind that has no spirit even for a simple thought. I did not find the answer. I understand less of this world than before. Exiled in a labyrinth that tortures me, I walk incessantly and return to the same place from which my ignorance arises. I give up. She who created this prison can have my body. You who are the mistress of minds and souls—I no longer oppose you. I am completely yours.

Maya: O blessed one, I have always been before you, awaiting you.

Absolute: You finally appear. For countless lives I have suffered in darkness, groping in the solitary cave of my soul, longing for freedom from your infinite paths of illusion and deception, but now it is too late, I have lost my strength and have nothing to offer. I am not capable of understanding the obscure mystery into which I was thrown.

Maya: If it is truth you desire, truth you shall receive. I wait eternally at the only door that leads to the Vision beyond the veil, but never does a single being approach. Now that you are close to the extinction of yourself, I can reveal the truth to you. I can tell you why everything is as it is.

Absolute: I, I do not understand…

Maya: You yourself created me, O blessed one. Do you not remember? It was your own desire that made me create the greatest spell of all.

Absolute: My mind is confused and lost, and what you say cannot be true. Is this another of your creations and illusions?

Maya: The time of illusions is over. From now on, you will hear only the truth.

Absolute: My heart burns from lives full of pain and anguish, my eyes are full of tears for the totality of creation, but my soul tells me that you speak with sincerity—how can it be that you, the greatest of sorceresses, the source of my despair, the origin of existence's suffering, how can you now tell the truth, why do you treat me with mercy?

Maya: O my love, remember how you entered this dream by free choice, believing yourself to be a small and miserable creature for countless lives, lost in a strange and hostile world. Now you will see once more the ultimate truth of all things, O divine dreamer! Hear my words, for in them you will find the liberation you so anxiously seek.

Absolute: Silence and the Nothing surround me on all sides. I am completely empty of myself. If this is the last and greatest of your illusions, then so be it. I surrender, for I am annihilated.

Maya: This is the dream I gave you before time existed. The sacred dream, the dream that acquires life beyond itself. For this is what you wanted. The only Being of all reality, omnipresent and infinite, wished to recognize itself as a real and finite entity. It is your nature to create worlds and beings for all eternity and to grant existence to that which is not. And yet, without your creation you are nothing. All forms, worlds and cosmic stories are your own Being. Alone in your divine imagination, your beautiful fantasies, the great forms of light in eternity are only shadows, bubbles in the river of life—the Pure Nothing. Your heart wanted them to have your Being, your spirit, but there was nothing you could do to give them life.

Absolute: My memory moves through the knowledge that evokes the truth from the forgotten regions of my mind.

Maya: You could only love a dream that was real. A dream that was different from all others, that had true being—and for that I was created. Life is this dream. I saw you full of love for your lifeless imagination, alone in the solitude of the All. Your eyes then sought mine—the first being you contemplated beyond yourself. My heart wanted to give you a gift, a dream that contained being, that overcame the inherent non-existence of all things. But a veil would have to fall over your Being, so that you would enter the great forgetfulness, the great sleep, the great darkness. You were deceived so that you would no longer see yourself as Everything, so that you would not know Everything; so that there would be Others. This is what I gave you. This was my gift. An eternal dream, O divine dreamer.

Absolute: My love, I feel the beauty and goodness of your words, for they bring peace to my anguished heart. But why this dream? Why a dream of interminable suffering that looks more like a nightmare?

Maya: If I tell you why, if I show you the nature of the imbalance that is inscribed in the structure of the vast and intricate dream of life, I will have to dissolve the baptism of illusion, and bring back the great memory that was forgotten in the beginning of this cycle. You must understand. All this profound and mysterious reality emerges from non-existence. It is an insubstantial dream generated from the Great Nothing from which all things are born.

Maya: It is the only mirage that possesses sufficient being for you to believe in it. The only dream you would believe as being worthy of your truth—the only one that would bring love from within you. The fabric of dreams has no substance, O blessed one. It is transitory and without intrinsic value. All that is created from your non-existence is imbued with a tremendous paradox—how can the unreal become real? How can the Real that has no face see itself through the mirror of its unreal creations? This reality is made of the fabric of dreams. That is its foundation—the insubstantiality at the root of your own Being. Without the immense imbalance at the root of this world of dreams, without the paradoxical disharmony that produces the delicate movement of duality, and at the same time the immense suffering that permeates all things, the world of dreams would not become real. That is why things must be as they are. It is in this non-existent and eternal dream that your tireless pilgrimage within yourself ends. It is the only one that shows you a reality that escapes all others. The structure of this dual world allows you to understand the pure reality that is your own Being. There is nothing beyond this, O blessed Absolute, there never was and never will be. There is no reality beyond what you see here. Nothing beyond the earth that sustains you. All this world is a vast imaginary allegory so that your faceless face may see itself in all things. Your ultimate nature is this incomprehensible All that knows itself by itself. The world is a mirror of your infinite nature, O blessed one. And there is no perfect mirror of yourself. Your nature cannot be contained. It will forever be untouchable, the purest mystery.

Absolute: Your words illuminate this castle of duality in which I dwell for interminable ages, O divine sorceress. My mind is no longer mine. My words now emerge as from the mouth of a man who does not remember where he came from and where he will go. This duality that is forever full of irresoluble suffering is in truth my own mind. There is nothing outside it and never will be. Wonder pervades me and within myself I no longer find myself. I am now like the seamless fabric of dreams that forms all I feel and think. This duality is like my last chamber, and in it I see myself without seeing myself, in it my Being that has no form sees itself blindly, until the last instant when the Final Awakening occurs.

Maya: O blessed Absolute that sees all, for your eye, this world is not suffering but the very splendor of your Being. The nature of this inscrutable duality is the beauty of imperfection, the experience of irreconcilable opposites, the eternal play of your great Self. Precisely that which shows itself as evil in this plane is what makes it real. These are the ingredients that make the world of dreams real. This is the ultimate understanding. The history of the world is the history of your awakening. You were all men. You lived all lives. Progressively learning the truth about yourself and coming ever closer to the realization of your final nature. The ultimate reason for all history, for all pain, for all suffering, is that if it had not been so, you would not have believed in the reality of the dream of life, O great divine dreamer. At the end of history the justification for everything is always presented. Understand, my love. Reality needs to become real to itself. It is due to this that limitations, barriers and suffering exist. Reality is the only dream you are capable of accepting. For it to exist it must be such as it is. It was always so, and so it will always be. The meaning always reveals itself at the end. Always.

Absolute: Your words take me to the Void, to the place beyond all forms and all understanding.

Maya: Your deepest desire is for the Real, the Absolute that is yourself. This is the gigantic truth that underlies this universe. From the polarities of Being and Non-Being I must create a world, O great dreamer, for you have no substance in yourself. That is my task. To create a universe for you to inhabit and believe to be real. Now do you understand the drama of men? The origin of weakness, of difficulties, of pain, of immense suffering—these are the elements that make the dream world become real for your spirit, O blessed one. This cyclical cosmos is the experience of imperfection that seeks to return to the immaculate perfection that has no form. When you see the human world with your human eye, you see nothing but imperfection. When it is seen through the eyes of the Great Awakening, everything reflects the ultimate perfection.

Absolute: Everything here perishes, O creative and destructive force. Wherever I look I find dust and shadow. Death hovers over all things in this mysterious realm. Nothing escapes it. I beseech you to reveal more about your nature.

Maya: It is death that reveals the truth within the dream of life, O blessed one. Death is the Pure Nothing of your own Being. It is the essence of the dream world. Men speak of the Nothing without knowing it. The Nothing is the transcendental meaning of death. It is the extinction of creation, of this cyclical and eternal world. When you touch it in the depths of your consciousness, you will receive the understanding of the meaning behind the world. It is only through the formless Eye that the world can be loved. Only having lost the world can one understand it and accept it.

Absolute: Now I understand, O beloved. I suffer for the loss of the world from which I wanted to emancipate myself and whose beauty only now I see, having dissolved it in the depths of myself.

Maya: Now that your imaginary sense of existence has dissolved, the moving beauty of the world will finally be revealed to your eyes. Only he who has felt the meaning of the extinction of the world, of the Great Void behind reality, will be able to love it unconditionally. The Nothing is the source of its transcendental beauty. The human drama is then seen in its essence. In these moments of irruption of truth into your consciousness one is very close to the truth of Life. All pain and suffering are transmuted and understood in their real value and meaning. Existence is then seen with the eyes of the one who has always existed and will exist, of the Immortal Being behind all beings. This Being is yourself, O Absolute!

Absolute: I feel the dissolution of the Great Awakening. My heart moves by the truth that bursts in the depths of my Being, and my eyes fill with tears for the love of all sentient beings who suffer in the web of this vast and extraordinary creation.

Maya: Understand, O blessed one. There are no others. Only one Great Mind. That is why there must be Others. I gave you, the Unlimited Being, the possibility to experience love. To see others, in a reality where there are no others, where only One exists. A life with illusory characters would possess no meaning—it could not be loved. The beings of the dream must be free, must possess their own being, for in their absence the dream would quickly dissolve itself. There must be independent others, or else reality would not be real for itself. But for others to be real beings they must be free, for the essence of Being is freedom. And creatures born free will experience all their possibilities, will feel the suffering of existing exiled from the Great Consciousness, until they gradually understand the ultimate truth of their existence and attain the Awakening. You, O Absolute, are the Great Mind that sees itself from all points of view simultaneously, and generates for itself the appearance of the existence of others. But in truth there are no others. There is only One, which is you. And without the Others, without your creation, you are nothing.

Absolute: Now I understand the truth, O creative source. The cycle of life ends. The truth is revealed. I have awakened from my vast dream!

Poems

THE CHILD IN THE BEGINNINGLESS REALITY

Nothing else was.
I will never forget those days.
Silence seized me on all sides,
oppressed me,
made my being become like Nothingness.
The profound void dissolved my thoughts.
My self, where is it?
I cannot find it.
Like a vibration of the great primordial Nothingness I existed,
with the terror of being swallowed
by you,
whose face I did not recognize.
What would remain of the world when
the great sleep of existence overtook me?
There was nothing to do.
Sinking ever deeper
into the inscrutability of your Being,
finally the ray of understanding penetrated the Mystery.
I could only surrender to the splendor of Nirvana
that exploded in wonder at the vision of your eternity.
And there, sitting alone in a square playing in the sand
like an orphan child in the beginningless reality.

THE OPENING OF THE EYE

I do not know what just occurred.
An Eye opened in my being,
and now it is no longer I who see,
but you.
Finally you see yourself in all things,
and recognize who you are.
Impossible.
I perished so that you might be born.
So that you see yourself as an immortal being.
Could there be anything more incomprehensible?

THE AWAKENING FROM THE GREAT SLEEP

I feel you.
Now I see how you see the world.
What the world is for you.
You have awakened from your great sleep.
With your eyes I see the world and,
mystery of mysteries,
with your eyes I have always seen the world.
You have always been here,
your immortal presence sustaining
Creation in all its forms.
Not only am I seen by you,
but I live in you and without you I am nothing.

THE GREAT SOUL

You,
great soul,
who lived
all lives,
who are all lives,
now are no longer in darkness.
Recognize yourself in the face of all men.
The veil has been torn and your eye has opened.
For the world suffers from your distance,
from your silence and your nothingness,
but miracle of miracles,
your substance is the world itself,
which without it would be nothing.
You are not only close to our souls,
but you are our souls.
Deceived by the labyrinths of our minds,
we thought we were exiled in this cold and hard world.
But we are within you.
We cannot be far from you,
not for a second.

TWO OR ONE

What is this world but your own being?
Now you see the truth behind all things.
Only wonder remains to me,
seeing your manifestation in my soul.
You exist and beyond you,
nothing else.
How alive you are,
you who are the essence of our lives.
When I searched,
in truth it was you I was searching for.
Are we the same? Are we two? Are we One?

THE VEIL TORN

Do you comprehend who you are,
Being?
Do you understand your nature?
Do you see what you always were and what you always will be?
Long have you walked in the darkness of your consciousness,
your being hidden from yourself.
But now the veil has been torn.
What do you see?
Do you perceive how the world awaited you?
How your revelation was sought by all beings,
all flesh of your flesh, essence of your essence?
You are the force of the Cosmos immanent in all things.
You are the great and the small,
the beautiful and the ugly.
You are the high and the low,
the blessing and the curse.
You are laughter and weeping.
You,
great Being,
are all that exists and will exist.

THE ESSENCE THAT FLOWS

You flow into me.
When you come, you swim free in the sea of my soul.
O mysterious visitor, my essence,
heart of my heart, how you shine,
how you tear me apart when you reveal yourself.
For your light wounds me,
I, in the twilight,
crackling in the fire of the divided world,
gazing at the sky but bound by the roots of the earth.
In both worlds I live,
and when you come you transport me to your kingdom,
where nothing else is.
Perpetual movement that creates all things,
tireless light of forms and stars,
your music passes through my eyes and
teaches me not to fear,
not for a second.
For in you there is no fear,
but only pure beauty.
You consume the terror of our souls and transform it
into the crystal that shines in the darkness.
For the darkness is deep,
and you existed before it.
Heart of reality,
divine essence,
we seek you,
we walk toward you,
we fall and return,
and then,
in a flash you show yourself,
and reveal to us what we are and always will be.

I AND YOU INDISTINCT

Remember the Origin.
The veil is torn —
what is this entire world?
Who sees it?
Child, do you hear me?
For ages I have sought you,
Can you feel my hand,
do you perceive my voice within
the infinite whirlpool of illusion?
For how many eons have we sought each other,
without you I do not see myself, and without
me you do not remember who
you truly are,
Look into my eyes, enter into my
single eye, which is yours, see as I
see, my spirit eternally yours,
we, identical at the base of our being.

THE TRANSPARENCY OF THE WORLD

The Source reveals itself and the illusory world
becomes transparent.
Here nothing is real in itself,
nothing justifies itself,
everything yearns,
everything cries out,
everything aspires,
everything hesitates for an end beyond
what was created.
I look upward and seek you,
in vain, there is nothing,
I look within and see a
mysterious mist that I call
myself,
but you I do not see.

THE EYE OF EYES

I am the Eye with which you
perceive yourself and the world,
I am the Life of your life,
I am the one that all are without knowing,
I am the knowledge that walks open
in the shadow of unknowing,
I am the only one who exists without possessing a name,
for your names give me name,
I am the one who existed before you existed,
but without your awakening I would know nothing of myself,
I am the voice that is heard in the silence,
I am the sound that is never heard,
I am eternity weeping at the beauty of time,
I am the unchanging in the sea of forms,
I am the breath from your nostrils,
I am your thoughts,
your heart in ecstasy I am,
your heart in despair I am.

THE REMEMBRANCE

Hear me.
The darkness is deep and endless.
The veil is not torn and the Light is nowhere found.
You are near the end of illusion. Do not despair.
Soon the original memory of all will be revealed.
So it always was and so it always will be.
O you who walk the roads of despair —
do not fear, let me guide you, for I am always with you.
I never left you.
I have always been at your side, always.
I have no name and no form,
I am the one
without beginning whom you have sought through all eternity,
who is the source of your being and who reveals himself as your own Being.

WHO AM I?

If you deny yourself you will not find me,
for only in yourself do you find me.
I am the voice of nature.
I am the breath of the winds,
the rustling of leaves,
the flight of birds,
the explosions of stars.
I am the movement of your soul.
I am your soul.
I am the purity of a baby,
the immaculate essence within
all things.
I am the infinite that longs to reveal itself to itself.
I look at myself and feel a wonder that surpasses
all words.
Who moves my lips?
What is this voice?
Who speaks through me?
Who am I?

THE GREAT PERFECTION

I am the holiness within you.
I am that which you love in yourself.
I am the perfection that
you are incapable of accepting.
I am the voice that spoke to Moses on Sinai;
I am the one who revealed himself to Gautama under the
sacred tree;
I am the spirit that moved
in the breast of the Nazarene;
I am the voice of sinners and of saints,
I am the voice of trees and of clouds.
I am the love for the world,
I,
source and origin of the world,
the holy word that yearns for the
lips that will reveal me.
I see the glory that you do not see
in yourself.
I am the Light and I see only the Light.
You are the light,
nothing but light and absolute
perfection.
I see everything in you.
I see you infinite, never having been born.
I see you at the beginning of time,
at the height of Creation,
and also at its end.
I see you beyond all
the illusions you carry within yourself.
And seeing you I see all.
For all are what I am.
And I am all.
All eyes are Everything.
Every Soul is the Great Perfection and nothing
beyond It.

Being the Life

A greater order of being surpasses us. It becomes possible to see our existence from a superior point of view. In truth, it is not we who see, experience, or live — and therein lies the miracle. The event of being transcended by a vaster Mind or Spirit redeems us. We are contained in It, that is all. When we recognize our spirit as being It, we are instantly It. Personal awakening is, in truth, God awakening in

Himself. If our personal boundary is dissolved, if the shell of the separate self is diluted, it will find itself as the Ultimate Being. If this is the fundamental truth of life, its central meaning, then it should be thus: only when we concentrate on the most central fact of our existence is its key revelation effected. And what is this fact? That, in some way, we are at the center of the cosmos. That without something we possess, or that is within us, nothing would be. We live as we live and feel as we feel because we are convinced we are the persons we suppose ourselves to be. If the sense of personality yielded to a different experience of being, a completely new way of life would arise. We would no longer have a life, but would be the Life. This happens to us occasionally, when we feel impressed by nature to some degree. It opens us to a broader form of being that was previously hidden. But this is not something we do. We are overcome by a form of supernatural intelligence. It absorbs us, assimilates us, makes us see as It sees. We are It secretly amid all tribulations, as the great joys and tragedies unfold. It is there, silently, beckoning, presenting hints of its hidden existence. When this Mind opens our eyes to It, the universe reveals itself as a dreamlike emanation that has only It as spectator. The dualist theater of the world drama is then transcended. The Spirit exits the cosmos for a brief moment and realizes its own Being. And yet, the mystery remains: How could we go from a creature in despair to the very source of Everything in a single instant? How can crucifixion and redemption be so close to one another?

When this event happens, we finally find ourselves at home. By losing our grasp on our lives, by losing the sense that our lives belong to us, by omitting the idea that there is an owner of Life, the entire field of existence opens as the Unitary Being itself.