Before Anything Existed
3 min read · Desmond Olubunmi
Part 1 of 12
Before anything existed, there was only life itself.
No time. No space. No cause and effect. Only a boundless, silent, living stillness — whole and complete in itself. Every deep tradition has pointed to this same reality and given it a different name. The yogis called it emptiness that is not empty (Shunya). The Taoists called it the nameless source (the Dao). The mystics of the West called it the ground of being.
It is pure awareness — perfectly still, utterly silent, without form or division. Before the first thing ever happened, this is what was. And it is still what is, underneath everything.
Everything, Still Unborn
This stillness was not empty. It held everything — all of creation — but held it silently, the way a calm ocean holds the potential for countless waves without a single one yet rising.
Everything that would ever exist was already there, resting in pure potential. No universe. No galaxies. No separate beings. Only the silent, sleeping power of nature (Prakriti / Shakti) at rest within boundless awareness — complete, undisturbed, waiting.
The First Stirring — How the One Becomes the Many
So how does a formless, silent stillness become a living, moving world? How does anything at all arise out of pure consciousness?
This is not something the mind can reason its way into from the outside. The mind only holds what it has already experienced — and none of us were there to witness creation. We find ourselves already inside it. So rather than imagine an event we never saw, we begin with the one place consciousness and the world actually meet in our direct experience: attention.
Notice what happens in your own experience. Nothing exists for you until consciousness turns toward it. The moment your awareness lands on something, it appears; without that awareness, it simply isn’t there for you. Consciousness is like a light, and everything we call real becomes real only when that light falls on it. Consciousness comes first. The world appears within it — not the other way around.
From this, the most coherent understanding of creation emerges. Creation is not something built outside of consciousness. It is a projection arising within consciousness — the way an entire world arises within you when you dream. In a dream, mountains, people, whole landscapes appear vividly real, yet all of it is made of nothing but the dreamer’s own mind.
In exactly the same way, the entire universe is being projected within one infinite consciousness, made of nothing but that same awareness.
But here is what must be understood, or everything that follows will be misread. There are not many consciousnesses. There is only one.
Imagine all of life as a single, all-encompassing light. Now imagine a sheet stretched across that light, pierced with countless tiny holes. From the far side, it looks like thousands of separate little lights shining through. But there are not thousands of lights. There is one light behind them all, appearing as many. This is exactly what we are. Each apparent individual — each body, each mind, each separate self — is not a separate, self-contained consciousness. It is the one life shining through a particular opening. The form is real as a form. But what shines through it is the single, undivided light of all existence.
So the body and mind are not the ultimate reality. Life itself is. The body and mind are simply the openings through which the one consciousness pours in to look upon and experience its own creation. And within that creation, hidden inside countless forms, this one life is slowly beginning to wake up — to remember, through the very forms it has become, what it has always been.
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