What is the most ancient secret of mysticism? The most profound and fundamental miracle of existence is consciousness. What is there if there is no consciousness? Consciousness is omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent. It is all knowing; what can be known without consciousness? It is ever-present; even in deep sleep we hear the little noise that awakens us. It is all powerful; consciousness is the groundstate of our intelligence.

What else is there in the universe that is omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent? Some say that God is. It's possible that God and consciousness are not different; they are the same.

The religious scholars say that God is formless and unknowable. Formless, yes. Unknowable? Well, it is true that the mind cannot conceptualize or encompass consciousness. It was Saint Francis who made the brilliant observation: "That which you are looking for is That which is looking." But God, or consciousness, is knowable. It is through meditation on the awareness of just being that we become conscious of consciousness. This is the profound state of mystical union that all seekers strive to attain. This is liberation, this is heaven, this is the enlightened state.

It is consciousness that sees through our eyes, and feels the warmth of the sun. It is consciousness that knows the thoughts of our mind. To know God is simply to awaken to the radiant illumination of inner stillness that reveals pure consciousness itself. The fundamental wisdom in mysticism is that God is the unseen Seer seeing out of our eyes. It is mysterious how this unseen Seer came to take up residence in this body. After all, it is not the body that sees, it is the conscious indweller that reads the senses.

Like the sun, the Seer illumines all that is before it. Darkness only arises when something obscures the light of the sun. Similarly, the darkness of ignorance only arises when the mind (ego) obscures the self-luminous Seer. Thoughts in the mind distract the Seer from its natural state of immersion in the blissful contentment of just being.

When faced with an insoluble mystery, the mind often resorts to logic to escape the cognitive dissonance of the perplexity. We prefer the comfort of deduction to the ambiguity of mystery even if the deduction runs counter to our experience. Whatever arises in the mind is imaginary: the word water does not quench the thirst, the thought of light does not cause the darkness to recede. In our quest, only the witness of the mind knows Truth.