To me, one of the most interesting things about the universe is that it can and does exist at different levels simultaneously.
For instance, you exist as a personality, as a person who carries on a daily life. You also exist as a collection of atoms and electrons; simultaneously, that level is also true. You exist at the same time as both those levels, and others.
Similarly, the universe exists at different levels simultaneously.
For instance, there's what could be called the Taoist level of reality, where reality is a fathomless mystery which permeates and lives as all things, and where there is no such thing as duality, no up or down, no right or wrong, because all opposites support each other.
Light supports dark, and dark light. Each supports the other. Life can't exist without either one; it would be like a bird with only one wing. Good supports bad, left supports right, one hand washes the other.
There is no duality, no ambition to get somewhere—where could you get to, since you're already everywhere? No agenda, no preference, no choices, nothing. Just following the flow, and being in love with life wherever it leads.
That is one level, the level of source, the void, the infinitely beautiful nothingness. Nothing is ever separate there, because all is one, the absolute, the unfathomable nothing.
Simultaneously with that level is the level where we seem to exist as separate beings, living "personal" lives, and living in a universe of separate things where this thing called the mind has labeled everything and therefore thinks it all exists separately.
And in this separate existence, which goes on simultaneously with our non-existence, we set up goals. We want to be better. We want to improve. We want to express ourselves more, be more creative and more outrageously in love and so on.
At this other level, where we seem to exist separately, there's the appearance of making choices, and the choices seem to make a difference.
At that level it's really useful to investigate the nature or science of using the mind to produce things. At this level, we create an image and affirmation to focus on, and we then focus that new idealized thing into our consciousness, and it slowly manifests outward into reality. And that level has its truth too. Both are true.
What this means is that as we exist as these separate beings, living lives that are sometimes in turmil or pain, that we also and always simultaneously exist as the bottomless, choiceless love that suffuses and chooses everything because it's in love with everything, it's in love with itself.
—jim sloman, for 7/24/01
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