A human being comes into the world blind, with senses and feelings not yet fully formed. The only thing they possess is their humanity. The first reality that opens to them is that of the senses, which they use to break this illusion. They see, hear, smell, feel and taste. Yet they cannot taste what it means to be human, for reality lies beyond all this: within the human being. But to see the human in another, one must understand what lies beyond it. This is the reality beyond the human: the mind.
The mind begins to exist through thought. It is one of the few phenomena in the universe capable of bringing itself into being. It can create concepts and definitions, then imprison itself in an abstract reality of its own making. To escape this prison is to go beyond it. To transcend the senses, one must become blind, deaf and silent. But to transcend thought, one must think more deeply. One must create within thought, bring something into being; and this is God.
Here, human beings will find the truth itself. They cannot understand it by shedding their human qualities. First they must accept those qualities and bring them into being, because nothingness cannot be fought. In the absence within this reality they have created, they will find a root: existence. Although existence, like everything else, rests upon nothingness, to understand that nothingness they must first give it existence in the mind. Beyond existence, an idea lies at the foundation of everything. This is where everyone begins to go astray. It is called the “I”.
The self is the concept that sets humanity’s greatest delusion in motion. Human beings confine the starting point of reality to themselves and fall into contradiction with their own selfhood, having grounded everything in the conceptual existence of nothingness. There is no difference between destroying existence and bringing nothingness into being: what we find in the end is the same. But when we go beyond this, beyond even that self, we will see the relation between light and darkness. That relation is a cause.
Existence is nothing more than a cause, for everything is a reason. Causation is a balance: it allows all things to arise in succession from one another. Being does not destroy itself, because its cause is non-being. The human being is an idea, because the cause of the universe is an idea. Thought, or information, does not explain why something exists, because its existence is its own cause. The existence of the idea of the human, beyond the human being, is also its own cause. It must exist, because the knowledge of the human has no possibility other than existence; it carries its own reason within itself.
It understands, grasps and compares; it takes itself apart and brings its inner knowledge to light. It shares that knowledge with the human being, who begins to understand themselves. To understand oneself: that is where existence begins. Through another human being, a person can understand the reason for their own being. They too are a reflection, a reflection of everything in the universe and the world. For human beings can think and imagine; they can carry all reality within themselves. The bounds of imagination contain even what lies beyond imagination, because it too carries its own cause. The human being is the only matter that can know itself, and so can understand all matter. God signifies what lies beyond this.
Self-understanding alone means nothing, for to understand another human being, one must also look within oneself. In the mirror there is only a reflection; truth lies beyond even that. Going beyond is neither moving forward nor going back. It is descending to the roots of concepts. Those roots are causes. Knowledge itself is the cause of something. To understand that cause is to form knowledge itself. For a human being to understand their own cause is to form the human. Meaning itself: here lies the true nothingness. This is God, the essence of meaning. The hardest thing to express, resting on no cause, for it is cause itself.
Here we encounter a similar metaphor: imagination. It too is a boundlessness that creates its own limits. It can hold meaning so infinite that it could create even its own cause. This is a power capable of understanding non-being itself, the true reason for the human being. It is concerned with neither existence nor nothingness; it simply is a phenomenon, flowing, passing and continuing. Like a cycle, it has no end, and no one knows its beginning. It has no cause because it can bring its own cause into being; it needs no other. Nothingness and being are merely two simple concepts to it; space and time are only an illusion. Perhaps it will never cease to exist. Perhaps it is the sole reason you exist at this moment. It is that which lies beyond the human: sometimes a god, sometimes a “human”, sometimes a stranger. In trying to understand the reason for their own existence, human beings discover not only themselves, but the way existence creates meaning.
The human delusion concerning God begins with the “I”. By starting to deceive themselves through their own selfhood, human beings have destroyed God and created a new god for themselves: the self. They have copied it into their own minds and those of others, and believed in it. Sometimes belief is so powerful a phenomenon that it can go far enough to bring things into being. Humanity has persistently tried to strip God of being a cause and place God within a collection of concepts. Through belief, it has succeeded. But no belief can defeat truth, for truth is the cause of everything, and to destroy it would mean the destruction of all things. Thus human beings have become imprisoned in an illusion and begun their search.
Mythologies, religions and beliefs are thoughts born of these contradictions, and they always keep a truth alive within them. However much human beings flee from it, the love within them that inclines toward it prevents their escape. Perhaps at the end of the path, perhaps at its beginning, that love will bring them face to face with truth. For the illusion of existence ends with truth. A person wonders whether existence too is a lie, yet a lie is itself a form of existence. For at the heart of everything lie truth and love. Straying from this, the human mind has said “I think” and brought itself into being. But what being would wish to destroy itself? What truth would deny its own essence? Denying their own essence, human beings have said “I exist”, rejected the human and relinquished their right to be human, to be free.
Truth also holds freedom and the capacity to imagine within it, for, as we have said, these are the reasons for one another. Human beings sometimes forget that they belong to a greater whole. Betraying the whole of which they are a part, they think only of themselves. They believe so firmly in the reality of the image in the mirror that they cannot see their true identity, their being. The true nothingness lies in this blindness. This blindness is nothingness itself, as far removed from truth as it is opposed to existence. This is precisely the world humanity inhabits. The self disregards even itself, deceiving itself if necessary and joining in the illusion. This, in fact, is shirk: setting up a partner beside God. This is the human delusion, the battle humanity has lost. In truth, there has never been a victor in this struggle, because the loser has always been the human being, ceaselessly destroying the human within. This war against truth, this striving for existence, has created a vast nothingness, because humanity has created its own cause: the inescapable cycle of annihilation. When human beings truly destroy truth, destroy God, they will also have renounced their own existence.
Human beings see life as a long road, but what is a long road is time. Life is nothing more than a phenomenon. For some it may be very short and simple, for others very long and complicated. The road, however, comes from time. Time is the wholeness a person sustains in existing. It is every moment in which that wholeness is maintained. This concept does not always flow in the same way. Everyone’s time is different: some are imprisoned in it, while for others there is never enough. Insatiable, they flow along this road, wishing to possess all time.
For God, however, there is no time, because the concept of time is an expression of the self’s ego: this ego assigns time a value and wants to possess it. When did time become so important? Why did time become the thing that flows, while change, and the underlying truth in which reality changes form, lost their importance among human beings?
The more human beings try to possess it, the more time becomes the one thing they truly lose, the one truth slipping through their hands. The moment they bring it into being, they are condemned to lose it. In a sense, they have condemned themselves to suffer the pain of their own disappearance forever. They cannot even taste nothingness; all they feel is annihilation. Time is a boundary for the human being, the thing that gives rise to the self. The date that brings “them” into being is the date of their formation. To them it is profoundly important; to the universe, it is nothing. To them it is as real as numbers and ownership, but to the divine it is no more than an empty concept.