Thomas: Dear Ram, it is my contention that if you were into “full-bodied” experiences of God, you would sense/feel your unique individuality and know it to be a spiritual fact as well as a physical/emotional/mental fact – not an illusion, which to me is a degrading reference to God’s creation.

Ram: I don’t see myself as unique. There are certain tendencies in me that might cause me to seem a unique special entity, but from my point of view I’m not unique at all. I’m essentially the same as everything.

But never mind that. For the sake of this discussion I’ll accept your belief that I’m a unique individual. Having done so, I’d like to know, what will I gain by being unique? If you observe nature you will see that what is unique and individual does not endure. Only the essential, the real, endures. Why should I, knowing myself to be immortal, view myself as finite and go through all the existential problems attached to that self-conception? My view is not a matter of choice, however.

It is simply a fact I’ve accepted based on the evidence. For example, I am not concerned about my death. The non-existence of this apparently unique individuality holds no terrors for me, because I live beyond it. I live without breathing.

As far as full-bodied experiences of God are concerned, I had my share of them. They whetted my appetite for God. And through those experiences, my study of scripture and my contact with my spiritual teacher I realized that what I was experiencing was me, God. When that happens you see that you are God experiencing everything and that everything is experiencing you – but it doesn’t know it. So the need for full-bodied, half-bodied or any bodied experience dries up. One is completely satisfied.

Thomas: My sense is that God did not experience the Herculean process of creation just to produce an illusion which is never really real and then at some mysterious point suck this illusion back into itself and obliterate it just so it could do a repeat performance. For me that would be senseless, even idiotic.

Ram: I agree. But I don’t think that is what God did. God isn’t interested in deluding us. The creation isn’t an illusion. It’s all God from start to finish. It doesn’t begin and it doesn’t end. The illusion part comes about because of the non-apprehension of God by human beings. When you don’t see/know God you look at reality through a changeable mind and therefore it seems to be changeable, here one moment, gone the next. Sometimes on a windy, cloudy night the moon seems to be racing across the sky – but it isn’t. It remains (relatively) stable. In the twilight a weary traveler seeking water saw a snake coiled by a bucket near the well and recoiled in fear. A person came by with a flashlight, shone it on the bucket, and the traveler realized that what he had perceived as a snake was just the coiled well rope. The illusion is caused by human misperception of reality. When you don’t see what is, you put what’s in your mind there. The belief that you and this world are something other than God is just a projection that comes about in the twilight of understanding. When the light of truth shines, it shows you that you and the world are nothing but God.

~ Love to you, Ram