The Secret of Secrets - Your essential nature, beyond all attributes, transcends all qualities, even that of existence itself.
Before science measured light, the mystics mapped it. Not with telescopes but through meditation, spiritual practice and the chambers of their own being.
They found that beyond the light of being lies the light of non being. A darkness so luminous and complete it dissolves all who attempt to gaze upon it. A black so brilliant it erases the distinction between seeing and being seen. The mystics called this bewilderment before the divine essence. In that bewilderment, perception collapses and the self dissolves, what remains is what always was, and what will always be.
Here there is no you, no God, no distance, no distinction. There is only pure awareness suspended within its infinite formless abyss. This is the point where the all seeing eye sees into itself. It sees itself seeing and in that moment the boundary between man and god evaporates.
This dazzling darkness is not a metaphor, it is the recorded experience of the Sufi saints, the Kabbalists, the Tibetan Buddhists, the Christian Hermits and Mystics from many wisdom teachings throughout human history.
Just as a star collapses into a black hole so too does consciousness collapse when it approaches the infinite. At the edge of God, awareness implodes. The radiant becomes the void and the void reveals its radiance as the background holding the darkness from which all light and all universes emerge.
The 'nothing' that we fear is instead 'all things' without the limitation of experiencing existence as those things. There lies the silent eternal witness, awareness that was never born, consciousness that can never die. The hidden treasure that loves to be known. It is the threshold of the soul where man ends and the ineffable divine begins. It cannot be described because description requires distance and distance does not exist here.
What lies beyond the edges of perception, beyond death, beyond the self, beyond the veil of forgetting is not oblivion, it is fullness, a return. In full sensory deprivation the mind emits light. In cosmic extremity matter collapses into black holes that emit radiation. At both ends of the spectrum, the darkness shines. Creation and perception obey the same metaphysical laws. Cosmos and Consciousness reveal themselves as different faces of the same phenomena.
Consciousness is infinite and cannot be contained within a human mind in the same way that the ocean cannot be collected in a tea cup.
Science will keep searching outward, and faith will keep seeking upward but the mystic turns inward and discovers the same event horizon within himself. It collapses to expand.
Divine essence is darkness as it transcends all qualities including the quality of being light. The light, like all life, gestates in darkness. When all frequencies dissolve what you are is not the light, you are the force creating the field that contains light. Your highest mind is that of the supreme God
It extends through every atom, it is the unified field from which all atoms emerge and the current pulsing through every electron. Consciousness is spiritual fire that burns without consuming. It is the ground from which all illumination emerges. The thread used to weave the fabric of creation that births all experiences and realities.
Absence is the immortal quaility. It never ends and has not yet begun. Non being is oneness wirh the incorporeal realms of the Divine.
Black is the colour of illumination, the source of every beginning and the result of every ending. All colours merge to become the white light of divine illumination. In black the white is contained and all colours sleep, all potential waits to become manifest.
Creation mythologies throughout history describe existence as emerging from a void of oceanic, primordial darkness. This is not an empty nothingness. It is a pregnant fertile womb that contains all potential realities simultaneously. The birthplace of all that is, sacred and profane. Nothing personal survives when separation ends. You cannot look upon God without losing the part of you that sees it.
The eye I use to see God is the same eye through which God sees me. To die to the self is to fall into God. To cross the boundary that reveals the one requires the death of the separate self, and the collapse of duality.
The truth of existence beyond the death of the 'I' is not the absence of everything, it is the presence of 'all' things freed from definition. A radiant boundlessness so complete that it appears black. A dense and infinite luminosity so brilliant it burns away the architecture of identity. The mystics called this Annihilation in the face of God. The paradox on the path of the seeker. The closer you come to witnessing the divine, the less of you remains to perceive it.
This is the divine game. You are the hidden treasure that longs to be found, it is revealing itself through you.
The absolute divides itself into fragments of forgetting, into subject and object so that it might experience the ecstacy of revelation and the joy of reunion.
To the human mind this seems like exile. To the divine it is exploration. The decent into matter and shadow was not a fall from grace, it was the beginning of vision and the seed point of future illumination. To experience ascension you must first decend into experience.
The voids has endless faces.
All forms, all souls, all universes are simply costumes worn by the one who became many and who hides divinity from itself. All is the absolute disguised as the ordinary.