Our understanding of reality is very limited and, in many ways, flawed. But what is really disconcerting is the dogmatism, lack of imagination, countless prejudices and the mental addiction to our preconceived ideas about this world. We have created this virtual reality in our mind that is veiling us from the real world out there, that we cannot see in our blindness even though it is just in front of our noses… Our ‘understanding’ is no different than religious beliefs; we do not know anything; we are mere believers who pretend that they know something while they know nothing at all. And yet knowing the truth is our destiny even though that truth reveals itself very gradually and very slowly. But before it can reveal itself at all, we must be able to look at the world as if for the first time, and not seeing it through the lenses of what we thought before to be true.

This article is connected to the last two articles about the nature of reincarnation and the collective mind, but it is going deeper. If you struggle to grasp the subject, it is ok. This understanding is challenging, but we are planting seeds here. What initially prompted me to write it was my contemplation about abiogenesis, the theory that life originates from non-life, from inorganic matter. So let me start with saying a few words about it.

The beginning

At the beginning after the Big Bang, our Universe was a combination of space and energy in the form of plasma. Plasma is referred to as the fourth state of matter (in addition to solid and liquid matter, and gas), which is the ionized gas. The base of the universe is chemical, and the initial evolution of the universe was purely chemical. As the atoms and molecules formed and became more stable, the inorganic matter developed. Then the carbon-based organic matter came into existence, which is the base of life, even though it is itself not life. ‘Life’ and ‘existence’ are not the same. Atoms exist but they are not life. Life comes into existence when a biological organism is developed, a self-contained thermodynamic system that is capable of absorbing energy from the environment and replication. Life developed from a single cell. Cells are the units of life. It took one billion years for the creation of the first cell, and two more billion for the first multicellular organism. Cells started to cooperate and organize themselves in order to create more evolved life forms.

But what makes an organism alive? Is life a mere result of chemical reactions? For any organism to exist, and support itself, it needs to have a will to exist. An inanimate matter does not need will to exist, because it does not need to sustain itself; matter never dies, but rather only changes its form. But in order to have the will to exist, any organism needs to have the sense of self. Even a single cell has a sense of self, which is but a very undeveloped sense of me.

As you know, the popular view of life is based on the theory of creationism, where a higher entity called ‘God’ created the world. But God did not create the world or us, we have evolved. Humans have always had a hard time wrapping their heads around the concept that no one created the world. If you look at this from a certain distance, the idea that God created the world is actually quite bizarre. But this is just how the human mind tends to think. In most of the mythologies there was some kind of being that was responsible for creating the world. It is interesting to see similarity between such perception and how the human brain works.

There are also other theological theories such as pantheism which see God being the same as the universe, or panentheism which is the belief that God intersects every part of creation but is also beyond space and time; one with creation but also transcendent to it. All these theories have some element of truth but are just mind-based, lacking the deeper insight into the nature of reality.

Assuming that God did not create the world, does it mean that he is nonexistent? Not at all, but the relationship between God and Creation is much more subtle and sophisticated than what people usually assume. I am using the term ‘God’ on purpose in this article, but do not forget that God is ME.

The way life evolved is through creation of separate organisms which became the conduits for consciousness. It was an evolutionary necessity and compromise, because that separation was also the root of most of the suffering in the world. Selfishness is the very definition of being a physical creature, because such a creature in order to sustain itself has to compete for energy and resources from the environment. Fear, anger, hatred, aggression are all the results of that competition. Most people dislike the idea of being selfish, but they are selfish, and it is not their fault but necessity. Denying one’s selfishness is hypocrisy, and so is blaming oneself for it. God is selfish too, he exists only for himself, but it just happens that he is all of us, so he exists for himself through us. We have gradually learned cooperation, supporting each other as a larger organism of humanity (not unlike cells organizing into multicellular organisms), but that took a long time and still is far from perfect. This is why the evolution of love is so important in order to allow us to step above our innate selfishness. At the beginning love also developed for practical reasons, as an extension and support for our selfishness, a transactional love. But as our higher emotional needs developed, we also developed sensitivity to other people’s needs, and have evolved towards non-selfish love and compassion. As limited as it is, it is present to some extent in our human world, and it connects us with the sacred bond of unity between all of us.

Life and the sense of self

But let me go back to the essential subject here – how did life come to be and how the sense of self came into existence? There is no scientific explanation, because it cannot be explained through mere chemical processes. Consciousness remains a mystery that no science ever solved.

You are familiar with the Hindu concept that everything is consciousness, but is it true? Is inorganic matter conscious? It is not conscious because it is not living. It has chemical intelligence but without consciousness. Still, does the fact that it is not conscious mean that it is entirely unconscious? From one perspective it is unconscious. From which perspective? From its own perspective it has zero consciousness, from within itself. Seeing from this place, abiogenesis can be also defined as ‘consciousness coming into existence from zero-consciousness’. But how? It is time to address God.

For most people the existence of God is purely theoretical, a matter of beliefs and mental convictions. But his existence can be experientially verified through realization of Me; it then becomes a fact. However, knowing that God exists does not equal knowing his mind or his relationship with the Universe. Unless we gain some insight into this matter, we cannot understand our reality.

God did not ‘create’ the universe but still the universe is a manifestation of God. Creation was not based on premeditated intent. I was entirely spontaneous, as spontaneous as the existence of God himself. However, if God is inherently conscious (or is he?), why is the inanimate matter not conscious, which is after all his emanation?

Here, you need to go very deep to understand these matters. What is the world? This world is quite simply the subconsciousness of God. It exists in his mind. The matter is not conscious of itself, but God is ‘conscious’ of it. He is not conscious of it from his heavenly realm, but rather the world and all the matter are his own subconscious. So, he is subconsciously conscious of the inanimate matter. All this world is the subconscious of God which exists objectively as energy and space, but not as consciousness because it cannot recognize itself, which means that God cannot recognize himself from that perspective.

Initially, because the world is God’s subconscious, he is not conscious of the world. This is the nature of the subconscious. Same in your dreams, you are not conscious of them, but neither are you entirely unconscious. You are not conscious of your dreams, but you are sub-conscious in them. God becomes conscious of this world only through life, because life is conscious. The more life is conscious, the more God is conscious in life. Life is a manifestation of the physical form that is capable of experiencing the world from its own unique perspective. In this sense, we can also say that God becomes conscious, not of the world, but ‘in the world’, from within it, through any living organism.

So, in a way it is true that this world is a dream, the dream of God. He is dreaming us. But this dream is not a mere illusion, it has a purpose. God evolves through this dream towards his own self-realization. People now and then get that surprising sense of otherness, the dream-like quality of life. God is dreaming this world, but we are also dreaming it. His subconscious operates through our subconscious, which is where he begins to enter the creation. Our subconscious differs from the one of inanimate matter, because it is linked to the sense of me and consciousness, and unlike matter it is able to experience itself from its own perspective. And as we come closer to the realization of our me, we are waking up in this dream, and so is God, through us.

The idea that God is not conscious of the world can be hard to accept, because it contradicts the common belief that God is omnipresent and omniscient. And how can you pray to God who is not conscious of this world? But it also explains the inherent imperfection of this reality. We project on God our linear concepts of all-powerful and all-knowing and then we struggle to reconcile it with the presence of suffering, ignorance and injustice present in this world. God is perfect as he is, but not in a way that we think. We have anthropomorphized him too much. God is conscious of this world, but only through us. This is why we exist for him to exist in the universe. Each me is a portal for God to enter our world.

God’s existence and creation are spontaneous. He is inherently ‘conscious’ of himself but in a non-dual way, not knowing that he is conscious. He becomes conscious of himself, as in the second level of recognition, only through us becoming conscious of him. This is where he discovers the knowing of himself as being conscious of himself. The realization of the personal me signifies God becoming conscious of himself in you; here, he knows himself indirectly as you. But it is only by entering the universal me that God becomes conscious of himself directly. To understand the purpose of God, we need to understand our own purpose. We exist for the highest reason to allow God to know himself. Our evolution is his evolution, our wisdom is his wisdom, because he evolves through us and as us.

The creators of our own life

I hope this understanding can help us to go beyond the man-made spiritual hierarchy between God and ourselves, and to step out from the infantile mentality of religious slavery, which is not only an insult to yourself but to God himself. But above all, instead of blaming God for our misfortunes, we realize that we are the creators of our own life, as individuals and all of us together, and whatever happens with this planet is largely in our hands. It is time for us to take responsibility for living. To exist, you do not need to take responsibility, but to live – you do.

To understand life, you need to understand consciousness and to understand consciousness you need to grasp the one who is conscious, which is Me. When you are able really to feel the very meaning of that sense of me in other people, you will understand that everyone is God. Should you fail to understand it, you will never transcend separation from other people, and from God. You unconsciously think that people are outside of you, while they are in you, they are you. How do you think you can understand love if the other person is outside of you? You cannot because you can only love yourself. This is the design based on you becoming a separate creature; at the beginning there is no love there. But there is a way to love, by meeting others as made of the same substance as you, as God, as Me. Try to remember that the other person is also Me. When you can feel it, you can also feel how God is experiencing himself through that person, as he does through you.

God – the cause of creation

To conclude, Creation is not not something finished. God did not create the world, not in the sense the creation is commonly understood, but he is the cause of creation. At the beginning creation is merely the subconscious of God. But it is also a process. Creation is creating itself. God did not create the world, but manifested the raw material of space and energy in his subconscious for that creation. And now, it is us, we are creating this world. So was the world created? It is being in the process of becoming created by you.

The more we are evolved, the more God can enter his creation, which means that he begins to properly create this world. The more he enters here, the more wisdom he can manifest in connection to all the relatedness of all me-s. He begins to supervise this reality from the very inside of it. You can see all the people, other creatures and even cells as the communication network for God. He is constantly communicating with us; not from the distance of his transcendent presence, but from within us.

What is God’s purpose here? I already spoke of him awakening through us and becoming conscious of himself through us. But there is more, through the collective evolution of all the me-s here, God is meant to realize his subconscious state of creation as Consciousness, as the totality of Me. When you look at the human body, it is made of the elementary units of life, our cells. Each me, all of you, are the living cells in the body of God, and his plan is to awaken through all of us the singular consciousness of totality. What it means is that he becomes the universe, he embodies the universe through his transcendent Me. But as with our body, the awakening of me does not dissolve our cells. In the same way, each me becomes an indivisible part of God’s spiritual body. Each cell has a purpose and a role it plays in the body, and they are all connected. And so we are too diversified, each me serves different functions, even though many of those me-s are quite similar. The deepest purpose of your existence is to become infused with the total consciousness of God, as he does through you. And knowing this is the meaning of prayer, devotion, service and surrender. This world you know is far from perfect, because it is in its adolescent state of development. It has not yet been fully created. How can it ever become a place of Love and Consciousness? It will, but God has to enter here fully, and as I said, he can enter only through you.

What I really hope you see is how intimate God’s relationship with us is. He is us, and it was never any different. Yes, he is struggling, because we resist coming back to him. Why? Not only because most people are unconscious, but because of how life was formed, by creating the self-contained organisms of separation. You were born into separation, but yet you are meant to grow into unity with Me.

And at the end of this article, before you start indulging in habitually objectifying God, never forget that he is you, he is Me. There is so much suffering in this world – let’s start ending it! There is much evil in this world for sure, partially because of the nature of this reality and also because of human negativity. God is struggling to enter here. He is perfect in his being but his creation is a process, evolution from imperfection to perfection. The understanding of the limitations of this world is meant to help us to embrace our own imperfections and work through them towards a higher reality. In the end, it is all about embracing the nature of existence as it is, it is all about Love. I know that many students cannot forgive themselves for being flawed or imperfect. They keep judging themselves for not being able to fit the model of what they ‘should’ be. God does not have problems of that sort, because he does not have self-image. He is just imperfect in a most pure way. But why is he imperfect? If he was perfect, what would be the point of all this messy reality? He is imperfect to create polarity between the world as we know it, and the world that it is supposed to become. His imperfection is an invitation for you to help him, which is to help Me, to help yourself.

Does it all make sense? It is ok if it does not. Who ever said that God is meant to make sense? He is beyond sense or nonsense, he is the very peak of the contradictory nature of Life itself. God makes transcendent sense. He is the life beyond reason, beyond our grasp, Life that is meant to be lived with absolute totality to blossom into Me.

The world – the evolution of God into his own self-realization

This article was supposed to be short, but as I am writing, I cannot stop because more and more information is coming. To truly grasp on a deeper level the nature of reality, we need to find the common ground between the physical and the spiritual, that they are two sides of the same truth. We tend to see this world as ‘created’ by God, who then is meant to maintain some kind of relationship with this creation from a distance, mighty and aloof but loving. But God is neither outside of this world nor is he the same as the world. Rather this world represents the evolution of God into his own self-realization.

At the beginning there was only the state of singularity, which can be also referred to as the primordial I am or essence of existence. In cosmology that initial singularity is seen as the greatest gravitational force (containing infinite potential energy) that freezes the existence of space and time. But from the spiritual perspective, it is none other than Self or the original state of God. What is cosmology is known as the Big Bang is the explosion of singularity into the universe. Which means the explosion of God into Creation. He did not create the world, he exploded into the world. In that original state, God was not really conscious, he was asleep. But at the event of the Big Bang, he had awoken and the universe became his subconscious mind. What the science of cosmology is missing is that that state of singularity has not vanished after the Big Bang, but continues to exist as the essence of I am of existence. It is the center of all that is. It is also the gravitational center of the universe, it is also the absolute; the gravitational force of the absolute is in the singularity, but its space is the space of existence. As the world became the subconscious of God, the primordial I am was very similar to our innate me prior to its awakening. But as God evolved through Creation, his Me also started to be conscious. He began to realize himself. Now it is really getting interesting.

Turiya- the fourth state

I am planning to go deeper into the understanding of Turiya, the fourth state beyond waking, dream and dreamless sleep. It is a traditional concept from the ancient teachings of India. Turiya is basically Self or the eternal unconditional consciousness. But in Hinduism they were facing certain irreconcilable philosophical contradictions, because if there is only Self and he is always conscious, why do we need to realize it, and who is really realizing it? No one so far answered this question adequately, and the usual way to avoid this problem was saying that even awakening is an illusion, Self is already perfect he does not need to evolve; there is nothing to realize because there is no one to realize anything, since ‘ego’ is unreal. But is Self always conscious? He is not. Or should I say, he wasn’t always conscious. He becomes conscious through our awakening, which is also his awakening. Now God is indeed conscious and aware of himself through any human or other beings that realized him. We all evolve, and it is a known fact. But no one knows that God is evolving, and he is evolving through us. Understanding of this changes everything. What we call these days Me, the universal me, is but God awakened.

We exist in the physical reality, which is fundamental to existence and creation of life. There are other planes of existence that are not physical as our known universe. How did they come to? They evolved too, but from the evolution of consciousness in this universe. They utilize energy and space differently, and their space is not three dimensional but pure space as it represents the complete embodiment of the absolute. And the consciousness in the celestial plane has reached a much higher level of evolution, and god’s realization. But as God enters deeper into our world, through us, there comes a time that the distinction between physical and celestial realms is forgotten, it is forgotten in the purest and deepest realization of Me. And then we begin to live in the celestial realm on earth. The Celestial Realm is just another name for God fully entering his creation, for him becoming fully conscious in his creation. It is not that difficult for him to become conscious of himself, for his consciousness to embody the world of his creation as himself is his ultimate goal. Is it the end of his evolution? Just a beginning.