by Gurudevi Nirmalananda

You have always existed. You did not come into existence when your body was born into this world. Your own essence is the ever-existent Reality. That which you are existed before the universe existed. Deep inside, you already know this. My Guru said it this way, “The universe exists because you exist.”

When I heard it the first time, I wondered, “Really? If I didn’t exist, the universe wouldn’t exist?” It is true, for you are that existence that has become all that exists. There was never a time that you did not exist.

There is actually no non-existence, for existence cannot come out of non-existence – not unless existence was hidden in the seeming non-existence. This is called the void, the illusion of emptiness that hides the One Existence that you are. Thus there are two, or there seems to be two: existence and emptiness. Which is you?

The void is very familiar for you spend hours there every night, deep asleep. Since you get there unconsciously, you get lost in it. Unfortunately, this is not the only thing you get lost in. You get lost in your mind, in your emotions, in life events and in what you want or fear, as well as what you think that other people think of you. It’s getting complicated, yes? Yes! The One has become many for the sheer pleasure of complicating things.

It’s like a scavenger hunt, a group game that I often played when I was a kid. We would be split up into teams, be given identical lists of things to search for and sent off to see who could find them fastest. The clues were intentionally confusing: it has strings that cannot be tied; it has a face but no mouth or nose, it’s a bed without sheets and it’s always dirty. We had to bring the object back with us… [read more]

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