The Secret You Don't Want to Hear

I’m going to tell you something that nobody has ever told you. Something that nobody ever will tell you. Something you probably don’t even want to hear it. Nevertheless, I'm going to tell it to you.

You’re not real.

That’s right. You - which is to say, all the dear little qualities, opinions, talents, abilities, gifts and graces, plans and schemes, hopes and fears, successes and failures, likes and dislikes – all the things that make you that incomparable, delectable, indefinable “you” – the ideals you cherish, the memories you treasure, the feelings you hold onto – none of them are real. They are like bubbles. They are flights of fancy, castles in the air, dreams within a dream. And the dream, my friend, is you. The myth of your separate existence and the time and the space it inhabits, it is all a dream. And the dreamer is God. The only real and lasting Being, the only Source, the only Power, the only Substance, the Beginning and End, Alpha and Omega, it is God. And the only point of view from which creation can be reconciled or justified, the only perspective from which it makes the slightest bit of sense, is God’s.

Consciousness is God. Awareness is God. The dimensionless dimension in which this colossal show goes on, is God. And the same eternal Awareness that permeates all space and time, also permeates the dream that is you. Locked in the cage of your body and mind, playing the role of your existence, that Awareness has come to believe it is you. And it will go on thinking it is you, seeking conditions that appear congenial, avoiding conditions that appear hostile, exploring the potentialities of your dream-existence, life after life, until it finally exhausts them all. And it will exhaust them. First, because it has eternity to do it in, and second because nothing individuality can offer will ever satisfy the aching need for Eternal Omniscience that is in God.

Thirty-five years ago (or 35 lifetimes, or 35 millennia, whatever) when I first understood by inference the truth of what I have just written, frankly, it scared the hell out of me, I can tell you. Because it seemed to mean that the only goal of individual existence was that one reached the end of it. Given the suffering that comes with any degree of self-examination, that seemed cruel to me. I couldn’t see why God would so delude himself as to create such as me. What’s more, I couldn’t imagine what the end of me might mean in terms I could understand or appreciate. Locked in the labyrinth of my life and my mind, I had no way to experience that pure Awareness that lay behind it, and which is God.

Things are different now. I will not say I have found God, because I have not. But in meditation, there have been glimpses. Finding God is not like finding a penny - or a dollar, or a diamond. It is not an event; it is not an act. It does not have a beginning or an end, because God does not have a beginning or an end. God is Eternal Awareness, and the only way to find God is to remain in unbroken awareness of that Awareness. In that Awareness, individuality is dissolved. Eternal Awareness of Eternal Awareness. That is what it means to find God.