Back to Before the Beginning

Back to Before the Beginning In order to find out for yourself what the timeless ideal of enlightenment is all about, the first step you need to take is a very big one. You have to be willing, at least temporarily, to let absolutely everything go. You have to take an inner journey beyond everything you are and everything you know, beyond time, form, thought, and memory, all the way back to before the beginning, before anything ever happened, before the universe was born. Before the beginning, there was no time, no form, and no space—only absolute emptiness. Before the beginning, there was nothing ... but you were there. You don't have to take my word for this—you can discover the truth of it in your very own experience right now, if you are willing to take that radical step and let go—let go of thought and feeling, time and world, self and other. You can discover the timeless, eternal answer to the question "Who am I?"—the answer that liberates you from any and all sense of limitation. The journey you will take, beyond time and form, is the very same that the greatest realizers have taken, and the answer you will find is the very same that set them free. You will discover the source of enlightenment itself. In order to answer the question "Who am I?", in order to go back to before the beginning within your own experience, you have to put your attention on the deepest sense of what it feels like to be yourself right now, and simultaneously let everything else go. Letting go means falling so deeply into yourself that all that is left is empty space. To discover that infinite depth in your own self, you must find a way to enter into a deep state of meditation—so deep that your awareness of thought moves into the background and eventually disappears. As your awareness detaches itself from the thought-stream, your identification with emotion and memory begins to fall away. When awareness of thought disappears, awareness of the passing of time disappears along with it. If you keep penetrating into the infinite depths of your own self, even your awareness of your own physical form will disappear. If you go deep enough, letting your attention expand and release from all objects in consciousness, you will find that all the structures of the created universe begin to crumble before your eyes. Awareness itself—limitless, empty, pristine—becomes the only object of your attention. As your attention is released from the conditioned mind-process, freed from the confines of the body and the boundaries of the personal self-sense, the inner dimension of your own experience begins to open up to an immeasurable degree. Imagine that you have been fast asleep in a small, dark chamber, then suddenly awaken to find yourself floating in the infinite expanse of a vast, peaceful ocean. That's what this journey to the depths of your own self feels like. You become aware of a limitless dimension that you did not even know was there. Moments before, you may have experienced yourself as being trapped, a prisoner of your body, mind, and emotions. But when you awaken to this new dimension, all sense of confinement disappears. You find yourself resting in, and as, boundless empty space. In that empty space, the mind is completely still; there is no time, no memory, not even a trace of personal history. And the deeper you fall into that space, the more everything will continue to fall away, until finally all that will be left is you. When you let absolutely everything go—body, mind, memory, and time—you will find, miraculously, that you still exist. In fact, in the end, you discover that all that exists is you! * * * Why is this experience significant? Because the infinite space you awaken to is not only a quiet place inside your own head—it's a deeper dimension of reality itself. Reality as a whole —the seen and the unseen, the known and the unknown, all that ever was and ever could be—is made up of two dimensions. We could call these the manifest and the unmanifest. Most of the time, we are only aware of the manifest dimension, the domain of time and space and becoming. But like an iceberg floating in the ocean, only visible above the surface but extending far below, the reality we see is resting on an unseen, unknown, unfathomable dimension. We cannot see or touch or grasp this dimension because it is, by its very nature, unmanifest. But you can experientially discover that unmanifest domain when you let go of thought, feeling, time, and world—that static and unchanging, beginningless and endless, timeless and formless dimension that is the foundation of all that is. You cannot go any deeper into yourself than the unmanifest dimension. There is nowhere else to go. Everything begins and ends in that primordial emptiness, which is why the mystics call it the ground of Being. As you cease to identify with objects, that timeless, spaceless, infinite no-place emerges as the very nature of your own unborn self. All sense of boundary, any sense of limitation, including all memory and desire, dissolves in an effulgent sea of completeness that always already exists. When you sink below the surface of the manifest world and awaken to the timeless depth of that empty ground, you find yourself contemplating consciousness in its primordial state, free from all content, before it entered the stream of time. In this dimension, nothing has ever happened. The universe has not yet emerged; you have not been born; even time itself has not yet begun. * * * Scientists tell us that when time began, fourteen billion years ago, something came from nothing. When you awaken to the ground of Being, you realize that when something came from nothing, the nothing didn't disappear. That unmanifest, unborn dimension is the ever-present ground out of which everything is still arising in every moment. It is what the Buddha called "the deathless," and what others call "eternity consciousness." When you awaken to this dimension in your own awareness, you will find yourself always already resting in the eternal moment before time began. This is the recognition that liberates: Prior to everything, I already am. The experience of this recognition is not one of becoming liberated. It is of being already liberated. What you realize when you awaken to that ground is that there is a part of each and every one of us that is already free—from everything. That part of yourself, which is the ground of Being, has never been bound, trapped, or limited in any way. That's the part of yourself that I want you to discover. It's not the part of yourself that needs to become free. It is already free, right now. * * * The ground of Being is empty. It is an objectless, timeless, spaceless, thoughtless void. And yet, there is something miraculously and mysteriously compelling about this empty no-place. When you take the journey I've been describing, you will discover this for yourself—beyond time, beyond thought, beyond self, beyond other, beyond world. When all these objects fall away, what is left is that ground. The ground of Being is not an object, and that is why it is sometimes described as zero. When you focus your attention upon zero, or no-thing whatsoever, you realize that it is immeasurable, unquantifiable, and ever-ungraspable by your linear, rational mind. The mind is accustomed to focusing on objects—that's what its function is. So when you try to focus on something that is not an object, the mind doesn't know what to do. But if you make a decision to contemplate zero, you can begin to penetrate beyond the dualistic perspective that defines most of your experience. When you focus upon zero—when something meditates upon nothing—a flip can occur that throws you beyond the mind and beyond time. What opens up is a nonconceptual dimension of perception that is not ordinarily apparent. Through the contemplation of zero, you drill a hole in the structures of your own ignorance and penetrate the mystery of consciousness. The contemplation of consciousness—which is the contemplation of no-thing whatsoever—is endlessly fascinating. It's like staring at a candle in a dark night—you find yourself mesmerized by something that is unchanging yet infinitely compelling. You feel drawn into something you don't understand rationally but that your heart or soul grasps completely. You are drawn into it, and as you are drawn into it, the only thing you experience as real is the eternal or timeless nature of Being itself. You find yourself in a state of rapture, because the deepest part of yourself has been released from your ego's endless fears and concerns, and drawn out of the time process altogether. The empty groundless ground of Being needs no external affirmation; it is always already perfect, fulfilled, and complete. But it wants to know itself. It is perpetually self-seeking, and when it finds itself, it is affirmed in its own self-discovery. All Being wants to do is delight in itself, forever, endlessly absorbed with its own infinite nature. It seems that the very essence of consciousness at the deepest level is this self-delight. If you give attention to the empty ground of your own experience of consciousness, you will see that self-delight is its nature. Once again, consciousness is not an object. Consciousness is the subject. And the subject is perpetually meditating upon itself. Once you have located that pure subjectivity, and cultivated enough concentration to become aware of its qualities, you will discover that indeed there is something mysterious and infinitely compelling about the deepest level of consciousness. That is its absolute nature. Whether it has been five minutes or five years, when you rediscover that groundless ground, miraculously you will find that it is ever new. This is why, when you awaken to that consciousness, you may feel as if "I could stay here forever." There is no impetus, no desire to do anything. And yet there is more to it than that. If there was simply no desire, that would be the absence of a certain quality. But consciousness has an undeniable presence. How can we describe this paradoxical quality of consciousness? Because consciousness is not an object, you cannot say it is some thing. And yet it is not nothing. Nothing is void; it has no attributes, no qualities. Consciousness is empty of any thing, and yet there is something endlessly captivating about that emptiness. As you contemplate its unmoving depths, you become aware of a presence that is so vast that its nature seems to be everything —fullness, completeness, perfection. The emptiness is full. That's why the emptiness is compelling, because it is full of the knowing of this mysterious everything that is not a thing. It's everything; it's nothing—you can go on forever: everything ... nothing ... nothing ... everything, always meaning the same thing. If you could say everything and nothing in one breath, perhaps that would capture the paradoxical nature of consciousness. So the desirelessness of consciousness is connected to this paradoxical emptiness and fullness, to this overwhelming presence that is everything and nothing at once. This presence is so profound that we could use the word God as a metaphor for its absolute nature: already full, already complete, already perfect. When you meditate upon the depths of consciousness, and become compelled by its utter desirelessness, its fullness and indescribable peace, you can have the experience of being aware of or in touch with God. When you directly experience the absolute peace of the unmanifest ground, you have no desire for the things of this world. Knowing that ground, you want nothing except to be: to have nothing, to know nothing, to be no one, for eternity. Beyond time, two hours or two hundred thousand years makes no difference. You are awake—awake and at peace, dwelling on the mystery of pure unmanifest Being. In blissful, ecstatic indifference, you wouldn't mind if the whole universe disappeared. This is why you feel the sense that "I could stay here forever." When you find yourself feeling that way, you will understand why men and women throughout history have spent years, even lifetimes, meditating in caves. When you directly experience the ground of your own Being, you will understand that mysterious longing to be alone with God, forever.