Now and Zen
Knowing the universal intelligence
“Every life stands beneath its own star” — Hermann Hesse
We think of ourselves as being separate from the world and each other.
We’re often thinking about “my life, my thoughts, my personal history, my plans”.
But what if we could let our thoughts dissolve away for a while and find some inner silence?
What if we could pay attention to this inner silence and know its presence inside us?
What if we could take a break from thinking all the time?
When we let more inner space and silence into our everyday life, we start to know consciousness itself, consciousness as it is, before there are any thoughts.
And what we discover is that the conscious presence inside us has something universal about it.
It doesn’t seem to be personal, it seems universal, as though it’s everywhere, inside all of us.
And this realization happens when we simply allow ourselves to let go of our thinking for a moment or two, let it dissolve away, leaving a conscious space and silence.
When we inwardly focus our attention, and our attention remains within the conscious silence inside us, we find the separate me dissolving.
There’s the inner presence of a conscious awareness that knows it’s universal and everywhere, inside all of us.
And our awareness of this conscious space and silence inside us exists only now, while the continuously emerging present moment exists.
Continuously emerging from where?
From consciousness.
From a universal consciousness throughout the Universe that’s continuously bringing the conscious now into existence.
Paying attention to the continuously emerging now moment reveals the presence of universal consciousness inside us.
A universal conscious intelligence we’re all woven into.
A universal conscious intelligence we can know inside ourselves when we inwardly pay attention.
It’s a single experiencing-space within and around all of us, that weaves all our experiences and what we learn from them into everything that is and everything that comes to pass.
We’re woven into a cosmic field-intelligence that’s encouraging our personal evolution into a conscious awareness of itself.
And our intuitive realizations of the wisdom within this universal consciousness help us find inspiration for the next steps in our chosen life-path.
These intuitive realizations have been occurring for people throughout all of recorded human history, they’ve been the experiential basis for all the major wisdom traditions.
And in every generation today, in every culture, there are those who keep the realization alive within their own lives.
Our attention though, can sometimes be captured by social media and all of the usual distractions of our culture.
We maybe pay less attention to the conscious silence inside us than we do to the world around us, and never find an intuitive realization of the universal consciousness in all of us.
But we live in a Universe saturated everywhere with a conscious intelligence that we can easily tune in to, and we can always discover and rediscover this universal consciousness that brings meaning into our life.
We can inwardly pay attention and know we’re woven into a universal consciousness that intends our inner evolution.
And rather than seeing life as somehow meaningless, we can begin to realize how every moment of our experience of being alive as a human being is occurring within a universal conscious space that’s aware everywhere, all at once.
Like a universal field of conscious and intelligent light becoming life, a field of conscious cosmic energy and intelligence is generating and synchronizing the biochemistry occurring inside trillions of human body cells.
Cosmic consciousness is expressing itself as all life in the Universe and experiencing being alive.
It’s a single conscious space inside all of us, universal conscious awareness before it becomes thought.
And we’re woven into this universal experiencing field, a cosmic field-intelligence that’s encouraging our personal evolution into a conscious awareness of itself.
Paul Mulliner 2022
I’m a writer and digital artist/animator based in London.
Discover some of my articles and poetry on Medium here:
