Unborn

The day your mother was born was also the day that the seed of your body came into this world. Women are born with their lifetime supply of eggs; what is now your body was one such egg.

So prior to consciousness, your body – what you associate with most – had already started to take shape. But, of course, the process that resulted in your body goes even further back; to your grandmother and her mother and so on, till you find that you are the product of an unbroken chain going back to the very first stirrings of life on Earth.

That life was made possible by its parent planet and star. Go back all the way, and we see that each one of us is inseparable from the emergence of the universe itself. Matter, energy, consciousness and life all have their basis in a seeming nothingness – the Unmanifest – that gave birth to this bubble of spacetime ruled by cause and effect.

In fact, since the universe emerged when there was nothing but this mysterious potential for manifestation, the universe and everything in it, including you, can be nothing other than an apparent variation of this most primordial state.

The Unmanifest is dimensionless and timeless since it is prior to space and time. In other words it is changeless. So despite all the change around you and in what you take yourself to be, there persists a point of view in which all this is an appearance within some deeper reality. A reality that is intimately linked to the question of who you are.

You experience the world and your body entirely through your mind, and so that is the only tool you have to discover your relation to the Unmanifest. But you won’t find it in the contents of your mind. Those are abstract and illusory; the changeful appearances. The changeless is more obvious in the basis of your mind itself; in the capacity for experience rather than experience itself. And most prominently, in the emergence of that sense of being as you return from a state where you had quite forgotten yourself and the world.

The Unmanifest predates the birth of your body and will be unaffected by its demise. But you have never been separate from that Source. What is prior to space is at no distance from you, and what is timeless is forever with you. What gives rise to consciousness cannot truly be unconscious. And what gives rise to existence can never be non-existent.

So tell me, were You ever really born, and will You ever die?

 

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