The Great Bliss of Eternal Being and Becoming

Before and after the body

Before we were born into this body, and after we leave it, we are the great bliss of eternal being and becoming. It's pure bliss, pure love. It's unconditional. It's everywhere and everything at all times. Words can't capture it.

In that state, everything is alive. Everything is love, peace, joy, happiness and creativity. Everything is seen as vibrating, radiating absolute peace. The words sound absurd, but once even a small taste of it is felt, you know it's a fact.

You also know that squeezing our consciousness, which is universal, into this little body is extremely painful. When we leave the body, we return to that unspeakable expansiveness. Every question is answered as soon as it arises. Every desire is fulfilled as soon as it's felt. Wherever you think of going, you're there.

This is our natural state. It isn't a theory. It doesn't have to be earned, and it isn't given by grace. It's simply the fact of being. Once you get even a slight taste of it, this human experience is seen from a new perspective, and you ask: why are we having this painful human experience?

Why we come into a body

Consider the possibility that we are eternal life. What we are was never born, and will never die. So why do we come into a body?

The way I see it, universal consciousness is always expanding into new realms, new frequencies and new forms of consciousness. The human body, and the whole earth, is the eternal bliss of being, expressing itself in a new form that we call physical life.

For us to experience in this form, the fullness we know before and after the body, the body has to evolve over time, especially the brain and nervous system. It has to develop the capacity to feel and express the bliss, beauty, creative power, wisdom and love of eternal being, for the benefit of all. This is the process of becoming.

Where the pain comes from

A big part of the pain of being human is that we unconsciously know the absolute perfection of our eternal being. The contrast between that vastness, and life in a physical body is extremely painful. That's why we want to get out of it.

For most people, this knowledge is unconscious. So we keep seeking to experience the perfection of what we are, and it's frustrating because we can't. The body is still developing that capacity: to think, feel and act with the love and wisdom we have as spirit.

So the purpose of the human body, and of all life on earth, is, in simple terms, to make heaven on earth. Heaven is our natural state.

When we realize the body is a temporary aspect of ourselves, there's relief, because we no longer identify with it. We know it's a vehicle in the process of becoming. And that process is automatic. It's an inherent quality of universal consciousness to expand and experience its own perfection in new forms. We don't have to do anything. There is no separate doer. The one universal self is doing it.

Experiencing itself as separate

One of the great capacities of universal consciousness, which is your consciousness and mine, is that it can experience itself as if it were separate from itself. It takes the form of a human being, looks out through its eyes, listens through its ears, and sees other people, cats, dogs, birds and plants as if they were separate. There's no ego doing this. Universal life puts itself into a body and experiences itself as many.

In the perfect non-duality of eternal being, there is no experience. The perfect love, bliss, creativity and beauty aren't known or felt in the absolute. To appreciate its own beauty, it has to experience itself as if it were separate from itself. It has to create a mirror.

The one thing we know for certain

A key part of awakening, or self-knowledge, is seeing that there's only one thing we know with absolute certainty: something is. Existence is. Consciousness is. I am. This can't be denied, because the moment you say, "I don't exist," something is there saying it.

Everything else is relative truth: a perception, a concept, an assumption that depends on opposites. We believe we know the difference between love and hate, but that's relative.

So everything I'm saying about the purpose of human experience is, strictly speaking, a theory. The only thing I know absolutely, is that being is.

We experience what we believe

But here's what we do know: whatever we believe we are, we will experience mentally, emotionally and physically as if it's true. If I believe I was created by the devil and that we're all evil, that's what I'll experience.

Why? Because there's only one mind. The creative power of the one universal mind stands behind whatever is believed. The belief, "I am Adam, and I am separate" isn't believed by Adam the ego. It's believed by the creative power of the universe, and so it's experienced with the full force of that power. That's why it seems so real. As Neville would say, the separate "I" exists only in imagination, and imagination is the creative power of universal mind.

So I want to be very careful about what I believe I am, where I came from, where I'm going and what my purpose is, because I will experience it.

That is the purpose of the teaching of self-knowledge: first, to realize the only certainty is that being is; and second, to realize you are not what you've taken yourself to be. You are eternal life.

Many paths to the same realization

The means to this realization doesn't really matter. It could be a teaching of self-knowledge, an out-of-body experience, a near-death experience, or something unrelated.

I've watched hundreds of hours of near-death experience accounts, and I believe they alone could be enough for self-realization. People describe exactly what Nisargadatta describes: an infinite, universal being of perfect love. Then, when they're pulled back into the body to care for their children or spouse, many of them look at the body and feel they couldn´t possibly fit into it. "I'm infinite. I'm eternal. How can I fit into that?"

They say they can't put into words the perfection of universal being, and they can't put into words the pain of coming back and identifying with a separate body and mind. Many fall into depression, curse God, or turn to alcohol and drugs to escape the pain. This is what Nisargadatta means when he says we have squeezed ourselves into a tiny body in space and time. Of course we're in pain.

To get a glimpse of this, take the most blissful moment you've ever had, maybe the birth of your child, or a walk in the woods when you suddenly felt the unity of all things, and multiply it by ten thousand. That is our true nature.

Pain with a purpose

Once you understand the purpose, the pain becomes almost irrelevant. Think of lifting weights. It hurts while you're doing it, and the next day you're sore. But you don't really mind, because you know you're building strength. We're willing to endure almost any hardship when we understand its purpose.

It's the same with children. When they give you a hard time, you feel the conflict, but you love them completely. You understand they're growing up and becoming. Or think of learning to ride a bike: you fall, it hurts, and it's part of learning.

I feel the pain of human experience. When I watched footage of the war between Russia and Ukraine, young men, some forced to fight, killing each other with drones, I wept. It's so painful to be human. My own personal pain has been relatively mild, but I still feel it. Yet because I understand it in this context, it's like the soreness after a workout. It's part of the process.

Look back through history and you can see the evolution. Five hundred or a thousand years ago we hanged people, beheaded them and burned them at the stake. In some ancient cultures, children were sacrificed to the gods. The further back you go, the darker it gets. The graph goes up five steps and back two, but it goes up. We have no choice in that, because expansion is an innate quality of universal consciousness.

Waves on the ocean of bliss

For years I tried to figure out what Nisargadatta meant by bliss. I read and reread him, in English and Spanish. Then one passage struck me. Someone asked him about war, pain and suffering. In essence he answered that pleasure and pain, happiness and suffering, are all waves on the ocean of bliss, and that if you divide pain from pleasure, you divide yourself, and won't know the bliss of eternal being.

The bliss is prior to mental, emotional and physical pain. It's their root. So we can't be sad about the war and think we've lost our bliss. The bliss is in fully feeling the pain of the war, and understanding it.

Bliss, love and understanding

Bliss is another name for love, and another name for understanding or wisdom. They're really the same thing. Wisdom may sound more rational, love more emotional; one may suit a masculine temperament and the other a feminine one. But it's one thing.

When there's understanding of the purpose of pain, the pain is no longer the point. That's how I experience everything now. I understand the war in Iran. I understand Trump, the Democrats, the Republicans. I see it all as part of the process of eternal being, becoming in physical form. It will be fulfilled, because of or in spite of anything we do. No one can stop it.

What these teachings make possible is understanding, and in that understanding is freedom: freedom from the separate self, and freedom to let others be as they are. In that understanding is the bliss.

There's one phrase I took from Nisargadatta and put in my own words, which echoes what Ken Wapnick said in another talk: good and evil, both ultimately serve the good. The good is the purpose itself, to expand the absolute perfection into all realms of consciousness. Trump and Putin, the Russian soldiers, the Iranians and the Shah, all of them serve that good, and they have no choice in it.

The life review and return

When consciousness leaves a body, it has served its purpose. It returns to pure consciousness, the one mind, and there's something like a life review: what worked, what didn't, how it felt. Then consciousness comes back into a new, more evolved body. It isn't an individual being reborn. It's an amalgam of desires, fears and experiences from human life as a whole. All life on earth is one life.

The integral stage

Right now our culture is extremely polarized. The left and the right are going at each other irrationally. But this is part of the process too.

Ken Wilber's integral theory shows the evolution of consciousness. As consciousness grows, it becomes more inclusive. Parts of ourselves we once called evil, denied or repressed come into awareness. Extreme dualities have to come into consciousness so they can be seen, and then integrated.

If you listen closely, there are beautiful aspects in what some on the left are saying, and beautiful aspects in what some on the right are saying. Each holds a partial truth. Because each represses the other half, they try to fight and destroy it. Once it all comes into awareness, we can find what's common, appreciate both, and integrate them. Then we'll look back and ask why we ever divided ourselves.

It's said that when about 10 percent of a population truly gets this, it reaches a tipping point, because we all influence each other. Then humanity moves into the next level, the integral stage, where we understand all the earlier stages, the wars, the conflict and the suffering, as part of the process of evolution and becoming.

These teachings of self-knowledge are one way this expansion is facilitated. They fulfill the will of the one that we are, which wants to express and experience itself in this realm.

The cover of I Am That

One night it struck me that the key to Nisargadatta's teaching is printed right on the cover of I Am That: the real does not die. Once you know that death happens to the body and not to you, you simply watch the body fall away like a discarded garment. The real you is timeless and beyond birth and death.

Why is that on the cover? Because it's the key. It must be known. Immediately he distinguishes the real from the unreal, the absolute from the relative, the true self from the false self. And notice: what watches the body fall away? You do.

In my view, if this isn't known, there is no self-knowledge. If there's no sense that you are an eternal being who came into a body and will rise out of it, and that before and after the body is perfect bliss, then you don't yet have self-knowledge. You can't just say, "I am awareness." What does that mean? It has to be known.

This is why pain and pleasure can be seen as waves on the ocean of bliss. The body is seen from a new perspective, and its purpose is understood.

Being and becoming are one

In non-duality teachings, we often hear that only the absolute is real, and that all duality and experience is illusion. But Nisargadatta also says that being and becoming are the same thing. He says that beyond the mind there is no experience, because experience is dual, and that once this is understood, you no longer look for being and becoming as separate and opposite. In reality they are one and inseparable, like the roots and branches of a tree.

The becoming isn't a separate self becoming. It's the one universal being expressing itself as duality and multiplicity. We can't separate the dual from the non-dual. The duality of becoming is itself non-dual. And it happens automatically.

Why I'm writing this

I'm writing this book for myself first. It's like writing a song: you have to write something that moves you, not what you think some audience wants. I see all of this in my head as images, pictures and feelings, and I need to put it into words so I can communicate it clearly.

My first chapter will be about purpose: knowing that I am the bliss of eternal being and becoming. I'll draw on passages from I Am That where Nisargadatta speaks of being and becoming, and reflect on each one, showing the things that struck me over time and led me to this understanding.