I recently had a revelation about consciousness, in the largest sense of the word, by which I mean that labels in the paragraphs below are not meant in any specific ideological sense. I offer this in the hope that the inferential chains outlined here are not too obtrusive to open minded thinking.
If we imagine the idea of God, then there's the inevitably necessary concern for the Mind of God, to the extent that these two things are different. Let us imagine that God and the Mind of God refer to different things, just like you and your mind are not the same thing. Then we realize that this makes no sense, because we would need to include other non-Mind components of God – God's eyes, God's eyelids, God's cornea – and quickly we would also realize that something that represents the true, final, most complete Whole, as does God, cannot be comprised of parts. This way of imagining a Universal Being makes no sense.
But now, by contrast, let us imagine that God and the Mind of God refer to the same reality. If that is true, then God is Mind, which is to say, this Mind is the universal consciousness that can only be defined as an awareness that is everywhere and in all things. This in turn means that there is a kind of awareness built into everything, not only in us as humans, and living creatures. The only true and literal meaning of universal consciousness is that this awareness is in every space in the universe; there can be no place in the universe, no matter how colossal or miniscule, of which universal consciousness is not conscious, and no space in which it is not present. Mind is totally and simultaneously everywhere.
God, which is to say, God's Mind, which is to say Mind, which is to say Universal Consciousness, which is to say "the pervasive awareness of and in everything" is the source of existence. Every religious and ancient text that has referred to this awareness has made exactly the same claim – that is, not a similar claim, but exactly the same claim. And the power of this claim is such that it remains the most central tenet of most world religions - can they all be wrong?
In Christianity, the Old Testament literally opened with it: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made." For Islam, the Quran (Surah Al-Baqarah, 2:255) states that "Allah, there is no deity except Him, the Ever-Living, the Sustainer of existence." In the Hindu telling, the great Bhagavad Gita, (10:8) makes the same assertion: "I am the source of all spiritual and material worlds. Everything emanates from Me. The wise who perfectly know this engage in My devotional service and worship Me with all their hearts." For Buddhists, the tiny Dhammapada. (Chapter 1, Verse 1) holds that "All mental phenomena have mind as their forerunner; they have mind as their chief; they are mind-made. If one speaks or acts with an evil mind, 'dukkha' follows him just as the wheel follows the hoofprint of the ox that draws the cart." In Judaism, the Torah also repeats the indivisibility of the supreme being (Deuteronomy 6:4): "Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one." Taoism's foundations rely on the Tao Te Ching, whose first chapter holds that "The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth. The named is the mother of ten thousand things."
In these religions, this cosmic awareness clearly precedes every subsequent concept, including Time (as Time is something that cannot exist before existence itself). What we know most directly about time is that it demonstrates change. It is therefore a compound structure, causing or accompanying a multiplicity of states; there may be one concept of Time, but everything subject to the temporal dimension is pluralized into divided slices of its existence. The before/after nature of temporal passing will not allow us to see the totality of anything; we may only be privy to reality presented through momentary glimpses.
But Time is not all. There is, in the primitive truth of Existence, a dimension that is "not of Time," and which is more fundamental than it, or any other constructs, components, or facets. Existence is singular; Time is plural.
This implies that an Existence exists "before" the before/after structure of reality (even though this is a somewhat vague claim). Necessarily then, this also implies that the idea of our reality as something grounded in a before and after these days, moments, hours, events, and eons that pass, is not the real Existence, but something mediated by and woven within what is in some way a temporary subjectivity or state of mind or existence that is operating at a specific level that is local (i.e., not exactly the same everywhere in the universe) to but shared by all of us here, perhaps in this planet, and less so by anything living within the solar system, and even less so by anything beyond it, until one reaches the most expensive universal spatiality in which no localized, fractional "before or after" exists in the way that the earthly subjectivity that we share understands it.
Perhaps, then, the idea that we see things with our senses and call them real is not an illusion, but we see all things as a series of states which change in apparently temporal sequence: that is an illusion.
But the existence of something as a collection of facets or phases or stages that it possesses at any given time is not likely real beyond our earthly shared subjectivity and perceptual understanding. We must be inserting that sense of temporality into the wholeness, and for any intelligence beyond our local region of the universe where this subjectivity of time exists, there must be a way of seeing reality that is more comprehensive, more considerate of All, more complete.
The psychic Edgar Cayce, whose subconscious visions were verified when he gave readings of people in distant parts of the earth about whom he would not possibly have known anything, mentions something of this kind in the star of Arcturus, which apparently is a world to which souls are sent for intermediate improvement between incarnate journeys here on earth. Brief fragments of two readings provide clues to this expanded reality, which is informed by the influence of Arcturus, one of many mentioned in these readings ("entity" means the soul of the person for whom the reading is being given):
Also we find the Sun and Arcturus, the greater Sun, giving of the strength in mental and spiritual elements toward developing of soul and of the attributes toward the better forces in earth's spheres. (TEXT OF READING 137-4)
For, as long as an entity is within the confines of that termed the earth's and the sons of the earth's solar system, the developments are within the sojourns of the entity from sphere to sphere; and when completed it begins - throughout the music of the spheres with Arcturus, Polaris, and through those sojourns in the outer sphere. (TEXT OF READING 441-1)
We may not be entirely to blame for our built-in conceptual shortcomings, and if a higher intelligence is visiting this planet, it must be challenged to see what we see, to understand reality as we see it, which is a slice of reality, and to feel the constraints of our (selfishly) narrow thinking, which may be an inescapable by product of our shared subjectivity as prisoners of time, removed from the greater insight that other intelligences can perceive, closer to pure existence, such as must be evident in their worlds. My apparent revelation, all told, may be just a set of assumptions, or it may indeed be that all of this will continue to escape notice until the proper vision is attained.