There is a living and breathing that occurs beneath the living and breathing you are conscious of directing — a life within the life, a being beneath the being the world recognises and addresses by your name.
Every tradition that has touched the genuine depth of human experience has pointed toward this interior fact, using different vocabularies for the same irreducible truth: the ground of your existence is not neutral. It is not an indifferent matter upon which experience is projected.
It is, at its most fundamental, alive with a love that preceded your individual manifestation and will outlast it.
The Sufi (the gnostic adepts of divine unicity), does not speak of this as theology. The Sufi speaks of it as direct encounter — as the taste of the wine before the cup is raised, as the fragrance of the garden before the gate is reached.
The collective conditioning — the Gaia-mind, the template, the world's accumulated instruction in what constitutes reality — cannot ultimately touch this ground. It can obscure it. It does, persistently and with impressive efficiency, obscure it. But between the apparent world of acquisition and the hidden world of original nature, the veil is made of attention rather than substance.
Where attention rests, there is the world one inhabits.
Shift the resting place of attention from the performed self to the perceived ground, and one discovers that one has always been living and breathing and having one's being in love — unconditionally, without negotiation, as a fish inhabits water without having earned the sea.
