Thoughts Arise

I am the darkness that was there before the light, I am the nothingness you spurn by day, yet yearn by night. You and I are inseparable; not two, For reality is singular; this you already know to be true. We may seem like opposites to the mind, But are simply facets of That which it seeks and cannot find. Next time you wake up and witness the stirring of life, Notice from where the body and mind arise. In that serene moment before all the trouble begins, Are you not identical to the void, that no-thing? Remember, what you have feared was never the dark, But what may appear within it, to rend you apart.   Photo from labroots.com  

There’s a knock at the door. You open it to find an oddly shaped, red object. You pick it up in curiosity. There’s a card next to it that you could have sworn wasn’t there a moment ago. It says, “This is yours”. You bring the object into the house and are contemplating it when there is another knock. A green one! “Yours truly,” says the card with this one. The odd looking shapes keep arriving. You begin to stack them around the house. Red ones titled “Opinions” in the master bedroom, green ones titled “Fantasies” in the lounge, blue ones titled “Memories” in the backyard, and those confusing multicolored ones called "Emotions" down in the basement. At some point you’re a bit fed up with all the knocking. The next object that arrives is promptly kicked out. The card attached to it swings open as it flies away, “Not mine!” How can all these things be yours if they are coming from a source unknown? Who is delivering them anyway? Poof! Your body has disappeared. “Ah, this must be...

Trace chemicals linger in the air. The wind blows them towards delicate sensors. A receptor fires off, then more in rapid succession. A chain reaction begins. Electrical charges relay the signal from one node to the next, activating them at an incredible rate. It is like a flash of lightning in the darkness of night, illuminating one intricate path among the myriad possibilities of the rest. Spacetime seems to shift. A child squats at the edge of a garden bed. The smell of freshly cut grass lingers in the air. The face of his grandmother smiles radiantly as she points at an earthworm wriggling in the soil. The reminiscence fades back into the present. An interaction of matter associated with electrical activity. A smell associated with a distant memory. The physical and the mental are inseparable. Asleep now, but brain activity spikes. He is a woman waiting in the backseat of a car. Feeling vulnerable, she locks the door. The scene outside the window begins to shift and she realises th...

There is a stage in a theatre. An actor performs the whole day, act after act, until she blanks out in exhaustion. Then she starts all over again. But that is not how it is. There is a host on stage. The host invites the performers, disappears backstage, and then appears again to introduce the next performance. But that is not how it is. There is an audience viewing the performance. It is held rapt by the show, only occasionally given an intermission to draw breath. But that is not how it is. There is no host, nor any performers. It is all a play of light. But that is not all. What seemed to be the audience is just cardboard cutouts. But that is not all. The theatre has no ceiling or walls. The stage is boundless. The performance is endless. But that is not all.  The performance is being watched.  But by whom? Photo created by tawatchai07 – www.freepik.com

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 an...

Eyes closed, body forgotten, drifting in and out of dreams, I realised I had all the ingredients needed to create the world we see. As I woke up and looked into my child’s eyes, I knew we were the same beyond our temporal disguise. The creative force behind our dreams, Bears the mark of what must always have been. That which can turn darkness to light, Is that which can bring a universe to life. This spark, lighting the mind without pause, Is at the root of it all — the real, most fundamental; the causeless cause.   Photo created by andreonegin – www.freepik.com  

Everything we have ever seen or will see is made visible by light. We see an amazing variety of shapes, colours, textures and objects, yet all these forms are really just the reflection of light. Seen this way, all visible forms are as illusory as holograms. What we see are fluctuations in the universal field of electromagnetism, rather than separate things. But this is not the entire truth. The light we see when our eyes are open, is the same light we see in darkness as visions and dreams. So light can even appear to us in the absence of an external source. Visible light enables the sensory perception of sight, but the conscious experience of sight depends on the light of consciousness. This applies not just to sight, but to every experience. There is a unity to consciousness as our senses merge to form aspects of a single conscious experience. Whatever is known through the mind, is a reflection of the light of consciousness. From this perspective, consciousness can be seen as fundame...