A Hidden Treasure
Imagine yourself floating in space with outspread limbs. Thus suspended in midair your recumbent form gives itself over to a delicious languor, and one by one your senses close down. The eyes 
cease to see and the ears cease to hear. Smell and taste go dormant. Afterimages linger for a time, but in the absence of new stimuli the eidola that haunt the halls of memory slowly fade into oblivion. The void that surrounds you now pervades you. You are dead to the world—and yet you live.
As a sensing subject, your field of perception is just one of the innumerable interpenetrating searchlights that together illuminate the lineaments of the astronomical universe. Other humans perceive other angles of vision, as do all manner of animals, plants and animalcules. We may even conjecture that stones and rivers register the landscapes to which they belong, albeit after a fashion so raw and elemental as to be inconceivable to the diurnal human mind.
Let us, therefore, expand the scope of our thought experiment. Imagine that not only does your soul withdraw into itself, but that all souls likewise withdraw, and in withdrawing, resolve into a single over-soul that now recedes into its own inner deeps, the ancient taproot of creation. All is perishing except His Face.i
Reality holds its breath. All is still and silent. Life lives, but without any sign. The Earth was without form, and void.ii
Sunk deep in unity, the One engulfs in its abyss the shimmering wealth of all that ever was and all that ever will be. Obsidian and jade, tropical waterfalls and Olympian peaks, the attar of roses, wild honey, herds of aurochs, hieroglyphs and cantos, cathedrals and soup kitchens, melancholy, mirth, the Aurora Borealis and the Pleiades, the reveries of teeming worlds beyond number—all these are present and yet absent. Absent because there is no witness. Darkness was on the face of the deep.iii
Eluding the grasp of sensation, evading the reach of intellection, utterly outstripping the powers of apprehension of every knowing mind on every planet and plane within the manifold multiverse that is its flower, the immortal life of the One is now as it always was and forever will be, world without end.iv There is no trace from the traceless. Only a silence pure and deep beyond all imagining.
Occulted within its shadowy drapery, the One luxuriates in the secret knowledge of its own irrefutable reality and unfathomable limitlessness. It knows that it is not a being but Being itself. I am that I am.v Nothing came before it and nothing lives outside it. It is alone.
And in its solitude, by and by, it succumbs to an aching loneliness. It is everything, but it has nothing and no one. What it lacks, it wants. It wants itself. I was a Hidden Treasure and I longed to be known, so I created the world that I might be known.vi
Overcome with longing, the master passion destined to instruct every gesture of the centillion and one things soon to have their day in the sun, the One draws itself to a point. From that point, a center that is everywhere inside a circle that is nowhere, the One radiates its plenitude. Time and space unfurl like roaming tendrils and the Alone exults in the rapturous dream of multiplicity.
Image Credit: Alone in Mexico, Shoshana in 1969
