When I say divine being, I mean being which is the nature of all reality appearing with the quality of divine love, the dimension of loving light that glows and has a sense of heart to it, a sense of purity. Since I refer to this dimension as divine love, and being is the infinite ground appearing as any of the boundless dimensions, I put the two together to refer to divine being. I’m not saying that being only appears with that quality, but when it does have this quality of love and tenderness, lightness and joy, then I call it divine being, and so by that I basically mean “being as such” that is manifesting with the harmony of love implicit and inherent in it. You’ll notice when we go to other boundless dimensions that I won’t necessarily use the term divine being. I might use supreme being, for instance, if I’m talking about the dimension of pure presence—what I call the supreme dimension. And it’s true that what I call divine being or supreme being is taken to mean God in many teachings—mystical traditions in particular tend to take the experience of being to be the experience of God.  

This divine quality gives the love an incredible softness and gentleness, as well as an amazing beauty and sense of harmony. Its boundlessness is evident in the way this exquisite, delicate, soft, graceful, harmonious sense of sweetness and presence comes through everything. It comes through the walls and fills the air. It holds the earth, it holds the whole universe, pervading everything, constituting everything. It is omnipresent—it is literally everywhere and in everything. It is not somebody’s love. When we say divine love, we mean it’s the love of the divine being, and the divine being holds the whole universe. So the whole universe, all of physical reality, including human and all other beings, is experienced as this exquisite sense of purity, which is fresh and intensely sweet at the same time. This love has a warmth and coziness to it, which we could say is similar to what lovers experience, but it has a quality that transports us beyond that, bringing a lightness, as well as a sense of release and freedom.  

It is somebody having an experience as long as the universe of consciousness is being funneled into a particular locus of consciousness.  It’s like the individual having an experience of the boundless dimension operates as a kind of sphincter, constricting the flow of universal consciousness into what feels like their own particular experience. But when that sphincter is completely relaxed and the funnel is dissolved, then there is only the presence that is there, which is universal consciousness, unconstricted. And at this level we recognize the quality of this consciousness as pure love. The closest thing we know to it as humans is love, though as I’ve said, this isn’t love in the sense of loving somebody. It’s consciousness, it’s light, it’s presence. But sweet. We shift into a whole different universe. In a sense, we move from the physical universe to the heavenly universe. It doesn’t mean you’ve gone anywhere. Heaven is not anywhere else and God doesn’t live in a heaven. God the divine being is nothing but the reality that we are always in, but without us having an experience of it.  Reality being itself, conscious of itself, just as it is, and without it being funneled by a particular individual. So we can talk about an experience of reality, and think we’re having one, but in truth it’s a distortion. There is no experience of reality, there is just reality.  

So there is this evolution of our personal approach to being. First the relationship has a personal feeling of love for and connection with being. At some point there is a feeling of union. And then ultimately we become an extension of being, an individual expression of beingness. But remember what I said: being is not one thing in particular. We’re exploring it from the perspective of divine love at the moment, so we’re calling it divine being. But that doesn’t mean that every time we relate to or experience ourself as being, well, that’s the way it is, and there is no more to the divine or to being. Because being doesn’t have an end in that way. It doesn’t have a final form.  

Presence is what characterizes true nature and sets it apart from all the other categories of experience that fall within the realm of the ego, which is to say, the ordinary consciousness. The experience of presence negates all the fears and conflicts that the ego habitually engages in. The primary turning point on the path to enlightenment is the realization of oneself as presence. This experience begins the whole process of realization, development, and liberation, which continues until one comes to see that presence is everything, and that everything is presence. When you experience everything as presence, then you are experiencing Universal Being, or Divine Being, or Being-as-such. But whichever way you experience it—personally or universally—the important thing about the experience is the fact of it being presence, an actual beingness. So, I want to discuss briefly what presence means. 

Now, one of the challenges in approaching the boundless dimensions is that as you go deeper and deeper into them, there’s less and less in it for you, as you are no longer the central part of the picture. Once people see that, they often wonder why anyone would want to go there, and what the point of it all is. However, part of the intelligence and compassion of the divine being is that it frequently presents its nature at the beginning in a way that is attractive and accessible to human beings. This is through the quality of love. And so we begin with the first boundless dimension, which I call the dimension of Divine Love.  It is easiest to open to because it is closer to our usual human experience. The word “love” means that it still feels familiar to the human being; it makes sense to the individual soul and is something we appreciate. This, of course, implies there are other boundless dimensions besides that of love, such as presence or awareness, for example.   

Contemplating my inner state, I experience myself as a thin film of the gooey substance of the personality, stretched over the tremendous presence of the absolute. Then I become aware of the world as a harmonious unity of all appearance, a oneness. I see all of existence as beauty beyond words, full of love and grace. But even this is only a thin skin; its substance, its inner nature, is the vast, completely black absolute. Through my turning towards the absolute, and loving it exclusively, risking the loss of the divine being and the unity of existence, the absolute reveals itself as the inner nature of this unity. The immense silence discloses itself as the self of the divine being. I recognize that what I love most is the essence of the divine, the very self of god. It is the divine ipseity, the self of everything: absolute blackness, complete annihilation, beyond being and nonbeing. The absolute is majesty; when it manifests its crystal brilliancy it also has beauty. The beauty evokes passionate love; the crystal form of love attains a deep pomegranate color. The feeling is more than love; it is more like bedazzlement. The beauty bedazzles and enchants. I feel a deep devotional and passionate love, and desire for it to take me and completely annihilate me. That is what I have always wanted. 

When her rigid structures are made transparent through the unfolding of her process, the soul feels this as an increase in consciousness and presence. At a heightened level of intensity this presence reveals itself as luminous light that now overflows her personal boundaries; the overflow that melts these boundaries is actually the overflow of divine love and grace. Thus it reveals itself as the boundless ocean of Being and love, consciousness and light, the substance and true nature of everything. She experiences herself as a form held by this loving light, inseparable from it. She is an offspring of the divine light, one of its loving and exquisite manifestations. But her light can grow so intense that even her sense of being a form of light becomes outshone, and she recognizes herself as the light itself, in its boundlessness and infinity. She is then the true nature of everything; she is the ground. More exactly, she is everything, as one divine being, where substance and form are wedded into an inseparable Reality. She is ultimately true nature itself, in its divine boundlessness and omnipresent grace. All things are equal, equalized by the unity of appearance. 

But when we understand the boundless dimensions, the boundless world of being, we recognize that the world we live in is actually an expression of the purity of being. We begin to see that the physical world—and even the world of strife, pain and suffering—is not a separate world from divine being, because it’s not separate from love or awareness. The physical world is the divine being, but looked at from a limited perspective. It’s the same with the human being, the human soul. You can experience yourself from a limited perspective, or from an open perspective. If you look at yourself from an open perspective, you are light, a body of light. You are presence, you are fullness, you are consciousness, you are beingness. If you look at yourself from a limited perspective, the perspective of your images and identifications, you become the clunky physical body that has a problematic personality.   

By divine being I refer to the unity of being, when the experience is of everything, the whole universe in all of its content and dimensions, as pure consciousness, pure presence or pure love. This is a state of oneness and harmony, the state of the real world, but I differentiate it from the experience of the absolute, which is transcendent to presence and consciousness, and turns out to be the inner essence of the state of oneness. 

With having an experience on the other hand, there is always my experience, your experience, his experience, her experience. We cannot conceive of experience that is not related to somebody having that experience. So the notion of experience is inextricably linked with ownership. When you say, “I’m having an experience,” or “You’re having an experience,” you’re saying that the person owns that experience. See? This is something we tend not to be aware of; we take it for granted that experience is always owned by an experiencer. And that is why it’s difficult for people to understand divine being. Because everybody then thinks that divine being or unity of existence has experiences, just like us. So we make divinity or supreme being into some kind of individual existence living in time and space that has a sense of ownership.  Because we may never have challenged this sense of experience always being owned, a major issue arises when the divine being begins to show itself to the individual. The individual thinks, “Oh, oh. I have to let go here. But if I let go, if I surrender, who’s going to have the experience? I’m gonna miss out. I’m not gonna be around to enjoy it!” That becomes the struggle, you see. You might long for the union and oneness of the surrender, but then you worry that this surrender means it’s not going to be your experience. It might be somebody else’s, God’s experience maybe, but it’s not going to be yours. And then you think, “Oh no, I want the experience. I want to be the one who surrenders, and I want to be there for the union and the merging.”