In Part One, I suggested that to call the world an ‘illusion’ is to say nothing against its reality – only something about the way it appears to us. The world is the One, perceived through the filter of a finite mind. This essay, taken from a guided meditation during a live retreat, traces what follows from that simple fact: how reality comes to appear as a world of separate things, why your heart carries a longing nothing in that world can satisfy and where, at last, you may find what you seek.
The Price of Taking Form
Wholly undivided, the One is formless. Being formless, it is infinite. And being infinite, it remains wholly within itself, knowing itself alone.
Infinite being is a dimensionless field or presence within which all possibilities lie enfolded, though their manifestation requires the aid of a finite mind.
It is your mind – that is, the faculties of thinking and perceiving – that draws manifestation out of the infinite, making the infinite appear in form. It is the infinite itself that modulates itself as the activity of thinking and perceiving and, in doing so, appears to itself as the world.