When We Fall Asleep
In order to experience the imaginary world of our dreams at night, we must fall asleep.
Within the dream state, direct knowledge of our sleeping self recedes as we assume a point of view from which we experience new environments, characters and objects, but the dream stuff is the manifestation of a singular consciousness. In other words the dream is one seamless whole with no real, independent parts separate from the witnessing presence.
Likewise, the infinite, indivisible awareness or reality behind the concept of God knows the world in subject-object relationship by spontaneously and simultaneously generating a world and manifesting within that world as a finite, aware being, as an apparently separate subject of experience.
By perceiving the world in subject-object relationship through the necessary limitations of a finite mind, infinite being temporarily sacrifices direct knowledge of itself in order to experience a multiplicity of localized perspectives within itself. Without the temporary veil of ignorance, the drama of separation and the rediscovery of unity would not unfold.
Infinite being finds itself again through spontaneous acts of grace, when the mind glimpses the oneness of being beyond the illusion of separation and gets a taste of this unity. From the finite mind’s point of view, this unveiling, this collapse of separation, is experienced as the fullness of love.
Using religious language we could say: Once I was lost in the drama of experience, in a felt sense of separation, but now I am found. I was blind, but now I see that the ultimate reality of what I am, aware presence, and the ultimate reality of the Father are one and the same.
When Jesus cites Psalm 82:6 in John 10:34 and repeats the statement, “You are gods,” he is not referring to a separate self attaining godhood, for there is no such self. The reference is to our shared being of the one, ever-lasting Self, infinite awareness, in which we live and move and have our being.