One realizes that all of existence is a manifestation of consciousness; that ultimately everything is made out of consciousness. This can happen only when one transcends identity with the body. There are many ways that this realization appears. One is the perception that there is an infinite and boundless ocean of Presence-Consciousness-Love, and that all physical forms appear to arise out of this substratum. One's body and the rest of the universe appear as forms arising out of this primordial substance. One feels direct affinity and divine Love for everybody and everything.

Cessation can also happen as part of the love affair that the soul has with her true nature. As she opens up and becomes fully present, without defenses or pretensions, she may feel her intimate love for the absolute. Such love may appear as an ardent desire and longing, or a resistance and unwillingness to keep living in manifestation. She feels she would rather dissolve in the absolute and disappear than experience the various realms. Such longing may lead to a complete disappearance into the unmanifest absolute, as the soul feels enveloped by its delicious darkness, and caressed by its infinite mystery. This intimate embrace can reveal to the soul that she is like a cloud of consciousness particles. As she dissolves she feels only a few particles, conscious of themselves and of black nothingness. As consciousness thins away it disappears in the nothingness. All perception and sensation are lost. There is then not even consciousness of nothing. It is as if unconsciousness. There is absence of consciousness. There is absence of existence, absence and no awareness of absence. It is as if the consciousness thins away like air and the awareness itself disappears. When there is no consciousness at all, there is no experience whatsoever, and no awareness of no experience.

In contrast to the fully conscious individual, the average human being suffers from conscious or unconscious prejudices, whether they are racial, social, or personal. These prejudices not only color a person's perceptions and actions, but also his relationship to others, since relationships involve both perception and action. He does not see a situation or a person as it is, but rather through his own filter of prejudices and biases; and this leads to inappropriate responses and actions. The result is suffering and frustration, and ultimately a dampening of life.

Man's ordinary state of consciousness leaves him falling far short of what he could be: a fully conscious and fully alive human being. This ordinary state falls somewhere in the middle of the continuum between the pathological and the fully conscious, and has no clear demarcations. Growth, as we see it, is a movement or evolution from that middle range toward more consciousness and more life, and is the actualization of more of man's inherent potential.

The presence of Essence implies that the consciousness itself is conscious of its presence. This means that the consciousness itself is directly conscious and aware of the fact of its existence not through inference but by experiencing the existence directly, by being its existence. So to be present as Essence—to experience oneself as presence—is to experience oneself as a self-existing consciousness, as a consciousness whose presence is identical with its consciousness of its presence. Thus, the consciousness of the presence is the same thing as the presence; the awareness of the presence is not separate from being the presence. This is a mysterious perception to the normal mind of ego, which does not experience things that way. The normal mind is always an “I” aware of something, whereas the experience of presence has no subject/object dichotomy. But because it is possible for an “I” to be aware of the experience of presence, it is also possible to mistake that experience for the direct experience of presence. An “I,” for example, could be aware of the presence of essential Joy or Strength, but that would still not be a complete knowing of the experience of the presence of Essence. The latter occurs when the Joy or the Strength is aware of itself as presence. This, then, reflects the reality that the consciousness of presence is indistinguishable from the fact of presence itself. Beingness and consciousness are inseparable, are coemergent. This means that at the moment presence is present, who you are is simultaneously indistinguishable from the fact that you know you are presence by feeling, sensing, touching, tasting yourself as presence. The touching of yourself as presence is not different from the presence itself. The touch, the taste, the texture—in other words, the perception of the presence—is the presence.

Another way of seeing this fact is the direct perception that everything is made out of Love. The body, the walls, the air, the space, the atoms, all seem to be made out of the same continuum, which is this Cosmic Consciousness. There is unity and oneness, although there is variety and difference.

The individual consciousness is the organ through which true nature expresses and realizes itself. As individual consciousness transforms, it develops its own sense of individuation as a personal presence, which is the sense of being a person of true nature, a person that expresses true nature in the world. But there is more to the development of human consciousness than individuation. It can develop in terms of its realization, as well as its capacities of discernment, of freedom, of dynamism. In this path, the full development and maturation of individual consciousness is the metamorphosis into the indestructible inner spiritual body of freedom. This is the full realization of being an individual human being and being the totality of being as two sides of one reality; they are no longer experienced as two at all.

Many traditions conceive of Being as ontological or nonconceptual Presence. But some schools, such as the Hindu tradition, conceive of true nature as pure consciousness. There is actually no difficulty between this view and that of Presence because Presence is the Essence of pure consciousness; expressed in a different way, when consciousness is experienced in its purity, it is experienced as Presence, the ontological and phenomenological reality of consciousness.

In order to understand cessation of consciousness, we need first to understand consciousness itself. We can understand not only the experience of being conscious of one thing or another, but also the experience of pure consciousness, the underlying sensitivity that makes it possible for us to be consciously aware of anything at all. Sometimes pure consciousness is referred to as cosmic consciousness, but I think this makes it more difficult to understand. Pure consciousness is consciousness that is experienced directly and purely, instead of being inferred through the objects of consciousness. Since consciousness includes everything you know, you have nothing with which to contrast it except the absence of consciousness, which is a rare experience.

Consciousness is an aspect of Essence … Consciousness is a substance, although not as dense or substantial as will or love. The substance of consciousness is the substance of light. Seeing consciousness is like seeing the actual photons that constitute the inner light.

I am focusing on the presence itself, the experience of presence, which is the experience of Essence, of true nature, of liberated nature, of enlightenment. It is the experience of the enlightened consciousness that is the self-existing consciousness. The consciousness is enlightened and has always been enlightened. It doesn't become enlightened because it is itself enlightenment, liberation, freedom, reality, and truth. And what makes it be free, liberated, and true is that it is not produced by anything else. It is here right now as itself. It is self-generating. And you can't even say that it is self-generating - it just is; in some kind of absolute, fundamental way, it is now, this very instant, and this very instant is nothing but that.

A third way is in relation to the Impersonal Emptiness and the Personal Essence. One is aware of total emptiness, and out of this emptiness there manifests, as if from nowhere, this divinely beautiful consciousness that then condenses in one drop, which is the incomparable Personal Essence. All beings and physical forms are seen as condensations from this Love that is sometimes experienced as Grace. This third way of perceiving the nature of everything as consciousness has many implications: The manifestation of Cosmic Consciousness as a human being appears in the form of the Personal Essence. The Personal Essence is seen directly here to be the real individualization of Cosmic Consciousness. This is in contrast to the ego individuality which is cut off from everything else by separating boundaries. It is obvious from this perception that the Personal Essence is the real human person, the true development, which is nothing but the individuation of the divine... In this perception it becomes clear that the physical body is an external extension of the Personal Essence. This is in contrast to the ego individuality, which is an extension of the body. One experiences oneself as a continuity starting from the boundless conscious Presence, individuating as the Personal Essence, and manifesting physically as the body. The relationship between the Impersonal background and the Personal Essence is Love. The Impersonal becomes personal through Love, as an expression of Love. The universal Love is the continuum between the Impersonal and the personal, and hence, it partakes of both.