The three words in the title mean the same thing: the non-personal (no sense of I) absolute reality, God, the Absolute, the unified, eternal field of Pure Consciousness in which there are no duality or opposites. What is it?
According to Indian metaphysics, Brahman (God) is eternal – never born and never die. There is no space and time in Brahman. Space and time are created at the creation of the next universe from Brahman and do not exist outside of the universe. And both disappear when the universe dies, dissolving into Brahman. He is nowhere and never, which can be seen as ‘everywhere and always’. To us He is nothing, a void, like a vacuum, but from Him universes are born. That is why physics describes the Big Bang as the birth of the universe from a dot, because there is no space and time yet. And so, even though everything is made of Him and He is present at every point in all universes, we cannot see God because He is not an object of any physical universe. But man can realize Him on account of the aspect of Consciousness that man inherits from Him.
Brahman has three main aspects: Being, Consciousness, Bliss.
– Being is easy to understand: if I listen to myself I feel without any doubt that I am, I exist. This is because every living being is made on the same principle: a material or energetic form is taken, a piece of God (a Soul) is connected to it which contains the Atman (individualized Brahman) – all three aspects of God, including Being, which give us this clear assurance of our existence. Moreover, this is not a personal sense of existence, but a divine one. The form (body, personality) feels it and assumes it for itself. Despite a newly born child has no personality it has this sense of Being and knows exactly what is Being and that everyone owes him everything: mum, dad and the whole world. He screams and demands: I am here, pay attention to me and give me what I need to maintain my Being.
God’s Being is the only thing that really exists. Everything else in the universe is just projections of this feeling distorted by form’s senses and personal mind interpretations.
– At the heart of the Consciousness aspect is the only expressed property of God – Self-Consciousness, a continuous Awareness of Being. It is exact definition of Life. God is also present in every point of the universe because every object in universe is Consciousness as well as space and time. The properties of Consciousness can only be described through the absence of properties: unborn, not moving, unchanging, unperceived, without form, eternal. Consciousness is the basis, the canvas, the screen on which the drama of the perpetually changing picture of the universe takes place. It is simultaneously the basis and essence of any object – material, energetic or mental. Physicists search for the God particle which the other elementary particles are made of. Consciousness is what they are looking for. But the problem is that Consciousness, God is not part of the physical universe, its object. Therefore, it cannot be found as an object of the universe, which is the focus of scientists’ efforts and searches. Consciousness can only be felt through Itself by directing one’s attention to the Soul, which contains the Atman, which in turn has the property of self-realizing. By placing one’s attention and shifting the center of perception to the Atman, one receives all three aspects of God and is even able to become aware of the very process of continual awareness.
Atman Consciousness is the basis of perception of any living being that has a Soul. Man realizes himself and the world around him only because of the presence of the Atman in human form.
Consciousness is life itself. The only and most accurate and universal definition of life is the one and only property of God – the realization of one’s Being, the “I Am”, which carries the Atman, endowing the human form with it. The separated form (the Soul, as a very subtle but still separated object in the universe) gives the sense of “I” (there is Me and there is the World separated from me). And “Am” means that very sense of Being from God. Therefore God Himself, who has no form, also has no sense of “I”, is not dual, is One, a unified field of Consciousness realizing its Being.
The world is Consciousness moving within Consciousness.
– Bliss is an inherent aspect of God. It is a feeling of bliss that is generated by Being itself. Human pleasures, joy, admiration for beauty, perfection and harmony are but faint projections of divine Bliss. From the pleasure of the taste of food (svadisthana chakra), the pride of victory or achievement (manipura chakra), the pleasure of human love (anahata chakra), the subtle joy of scientific discovery or the feeling of perfection of the world order (vishuda chakra) to the inhuman manifestations of bliss that are difficult to describe, at the level of sahasrara chakra. For example, the feeling known in Christianity as Manna of Heaven has nothing to do with human happiness. It is sparkling, cold, does not evoke any familiar human emotion, and yet it is a feeling of absolute delight. Or the experience of Oneness (the feeling that I and the Universe are the same, One) is unknown to most of us and it is shock for the first time. The finer a person’s perception, the higher bliss they experience when they are in a state of awareness – the Presence.
As one realizes and experiences God more and more deeply, the limitations and meaninglessness of human life, its primitiveness and lack of clarity and understanding, become apparent. The physical universe itself has no purpose or meaning, for it arises from the ocean of Consciousness, lives for a while and dissolves again in Consciousness. No matter what heights we reach, no matter how many objects we collect in this universe, everything will disappear and dissolve in the ocean of Consciousness. Death always has the same scenario: you come naked and you leave naked. And this is the most wonderful and beautiful thing in all worlds – there is absolutely nothing to worry about.