None loves God but God, and there is no lover and no beloved but God. Lovers grasp this when they reach the point of seeing God in everything that exists.
– Ibn Arabi
This is what was revealed in the oneness shift when this human self was an angsty atheist sixteen-year-old. All is God, without exception. It’s all God expressing, exploring, and experiencing itself in myriad ways. It’s God that takes the form of the universe, the stars, the trees, the wind, this human self, and any temporary sense of being anything else than the whole of it.
If there is a lover or beloved here – one that loves God and God loves – it’s God taking that local and temporary form. It all happens within and as God.
At the time, I said that existence as a whole is God and consciousness. Existence forms itself into all there is to express, explore, and experience itself in always new ways. Since I didn’t have anyone interested in this, I wrote it in my journals in different ways, always aware that words cannot come even close to touching it.
HOW I TALK ABOUT IT TODAY
These days, almost four decades later, I don’t mind saying it in the same way, although I notice I am more drawn to another way to say it. It’s not a better way, although it’s slightly more differentiated.
To myself, I am fundamentally consciousness. I am made up of consciousness, and the consciousness I am takes the form of this whole field of experience.
It’s not wrong that I am this human self in the world. It’s how others see it, it’s what my passport says, and so on. But more fundamentally, I find I am what the world – as it appears to me – happens within and as. I am what a thought may call consciousness, and the consciousness I am takes the form of the world as it appears to me.
Even more fundamentally, I find I am capacity for all of it – for consciousness and all it forms itself into.
Any sense of lover and beloved happens within and as the consciousness I am. Any sense of God, the universe, the world, others, trees, stars, this human self, and so on, happens within and as the consciousness I am.
I still don’t really talk about this with others, apart from briefly if I happen to be with someone who notices it for themselves. Just like when I was sixteen, I mostly put it to – in this case metaphorical – paper here in my journal.