How the One Becomes Many
The Self is timeless, causeless and formless. Therefore, being That, it has no relation whatsoever to time, space and form. Form is in a constant state of creation, preservation and destruction within space, thus creating consciousness called time, and has no relationship to timelessness, causelessness or formlessness. The individual soul, when mature, can make the leap from the consciousness of space-time-causation into the timeless, causeless, formless Self. This is the ultimate maturing of the soul on this planet.
Form in its cycle of creation, preservation and destruction is always in one form or another, a manifest state or a gaseous state, but is only seeming to one who has realized the Self. Śiva in His manifest state is all form, in all form and permeating through all form, and hence all creation, preservation and destruction of form is Śiva. This is the dance, the movement of form. No form is permanent. Śiva in His unmanifest form is timeless, causeless, spaceless—hence called the Self God. Hence, Śiva has always existed, was never created, as both His manifest and unmanifest states have always existed. This is the divine dance and the mystery revealed to those who have realized the Self.
As I explained to a group of devotees in 1959, “The Self: you can’t explain it. You can sense its existence through the refined state of your senses, but you can’t explain it. To know it, you have to experience it. And the best you can say about it is that it is the depth of your Being. It’s the very core of you. It is you.
“If you visualize above you nothing; below you nothing; to the right of you nothing; to the left of you nothing; in front of you nothing; in back of you nothing; and dissolve yourself into that nothingness, that would be the best way you could explain the realization of the Self. And yet that nothingness would not be the absence of something, like the nothingness inside an empty box, which would be like a void. That nothingness is the fullness of everything: the power, the sustaining power, of the existence of what appears to be everything.
“But after you realize the Self, you see the mind for what it is—a self-created principle. That’s the mind ever creating itself. The mind is form ever creating form, preserving form, creating new forms and destroying old forms. That is the mind, the illusion, the great unreality, the part of you that in your thinking mind you dare to think is real. What gives the mind that power? Does the mind have power if it is unreal? What difference whether it has power or hasn’t power, or the very words that I am saying when the Self exists because of itself? You could live in the dream and become disturbed by it. Or you can seek and desire with a burning desire to cognize reality and be blissful because of it. Man’s destiny leads him back to himself. Man’s destiny leads him into the cognition of his own Being; leads him further into the realization of his True Being. They say you must step onto the spiritual path to realize the Self. You only step on the spiritual path when you and you alone are ready, when what appears real to you loses its appearance of reality. Then and only then are you able to detach yourself enough to seek to find a new and permanent reality.”