This is the transition from existence to non-existence. At this stage there is nothing to do and no one there to do nothing. The cosmic existence has to go to sleep sometime. As an individual, don't you go to sleep every night? And when you go to sleep, are you an individual? Do you know anything? Do you feel anything? It’s the same thing with the cosmic individuality; it has to go to sleep. When the cosmic individuality goes to sleep, what's there? Nothing. Not only are you gone, but the whole totality of the universe is gone. Complete non-existence. We discover that the sense of our own nonexistence is relatively tolerable as long as we feel that the universe exists. We believe that when we go to sleep and disappear, we will wake up the next day and the universe will be there. But what are you going to come back to when you experience that the entire universe is gone?

The truth of our existence reveals itself only when we start to wonder why we are always moving toward solidity. If we inquire into this, we can follow the thread of why we keep doing it, as if something were pushing us toward reifying, objectifying, making things concrete. Why don’t we just relax and let things be whatever they are? Because if we really did that, we would discover that the whole universe is just an event horizon. We would sense the infinite nothingness “within” all of reality. All of our experience, everything that manifests, is existing just on the edge of a huge black void of absence. It is all a glimmering surface of an infinite black hole, meaning that all of existence is a hologram, an insubstantial hologram.

Finally one is able to go beyond the inertia supporting everything personal. This happens through the process of personalizing the aspect of Existence. The fear is that there will be no existence for anything personal if one lets go of the supports of ego personality. This fear is transcended when the Personal Essence is experienced in the state of Existence. This is another Platonic form, a pure differentiated aspect of Being, where the sense is just existence. Personalizing this aspect one feels a sense of personal existence that is real, and not based on mental structure or the supports of this structure in past or present. The usual experience of the Personal Essence is of fullness and personalness. But when Existence is personalized it attains a density and an immensity that gives the experience the specific feeling of existence. In other words, existence becomes a more dominant feeling than fullness. Existence is present implicitly in Beingness, but now it is specifically delineated.

Realizing our nature as essence and the nature of existence as cosmic oneness gives rise to an even more subtle understanding of reality. A more final stage will appear first as a deep longing and subtle suffering. A longing will arise to disappear, to vanish. The concepts that are questioned are not a matter of whether you are an individual or oneness, whether you are human or God. The question is whether you exist or not. The fact of existence is questioned. We become uncomfortably aware of a sense of existence, even though our sense of this existence has no limitations.

To go to the Absolute brings a sense of losing everything. Even though I am becoming my truest, innermost, secret nature, I feel I am losing the totality of existence, which I love. For a long time I wondered, “Why do I love it? Why don't I love my deepest self more?” So in the state of existence, whether cosmic or individual, there would be the longing and love for the Absolute, for absence, for complete peace, for unspeakable reality. And in the state of the Absolute, there was a subtle longing for the existence that I loved. I realized at some point that I loved both equally, and this seemed to be a big problem. The resolution that happens is nothing the mind can conceptualize. Logically, we can see that the resolution is for the existence and non-existence to become one, for beingness and non-beingness to become one. But no logic can prepare us for the realization that we are the cosmic existence that is completely, absolutely not there. We completely exist as everything and at the same time there is absolutely nothing there. There is no duality whatsoever, no loss whatsoever. Not only are you all existence and no existence, but you are both at once.

And that is how it is anyway—there is no ground. It is not as though somebody is going to take reality away from us; nobody is going to take anything from us. All that will happen is that we will see through our belief, our position, that there is being and nonbeing. We will see through the illusion that there is existence and nonexistence. We will see through our attachment to the idea that we exist now but that nonexistence means we are going to disappear, that our existence is going to terminate. But these are all concepts, conceptualizations, and reality is nothing like that. Reality is this: We are here and not here at the same time, absolutely. We don’t exist and we continue to exist. This doesn't make sense to our mind because of our conceptual positions. We carry a deep conviction that if we don’t exist, we cannot eat, we cannot talk, we cannot do anything. Don’t you believe that if you don’t exist, then it’s all over for you, that you can't live? But reality is not like that. Reality is: You don’t exist and you keep on living. You die and are born again even though you don’t exist.

We see that the nature of the absolute is really the absence of being, the annihilation of presence. This discovery is actually not surprising, for all presence is nothing but the being of the manifest world. Presence emerges as the flow of the logos, as the outflow of being, whose field is patterned by the forms of the universe. And since being is conscious presence that emerges from the absolute, the absolute must be prior to being and its contrasting background. Being, in other words emerges out of nonbeing. The source is a mysterious nonbeing, a nonbeing that is not simply an ordinary nothing, but a metaphysical nonbeing that holds the potential of all possibilities of existence and experience. It is a breathtaking truth: the source and ultimate nature of all existence is nonexistence. Being, with all of its richness and variety, is born out of nonbeing. We begin here to understand the mysteries of Reality; we see that it does not correspond with the apparently obvious, normal perception of things. We begin to appreciate the stupendous mystery that is Reality, and the subtlety of truth, which can quicken the passionate love of the heart to inquire into the mysteries of Being.

One way to understand consciousness is as the experience of pure existence, which is the beginning of your mind, the seed of all experience, the root of all concepts. Such existence is actually a presence, a conscious presence. When we experience it fully, we recognize it as pure consciousness, a field of awareness which includes our capacities of perception and experience. And furthermore, we recognize consciousness as the underlying ground of everything. Everything turns out to be a manifestation of and within this field. We find out that this consciousness is the ground of mind too, of all concepts and knowing. Although pure consciousness is nonconceptual, it is the ground of all concepts and all kinds of knowing, both the ordinary and the gnostic.