Course XXXII - Teaching 8: Non-Being

If this was a right teaching, it could not have anything besides the above designed drawing.
But by explaining this teaching here, the student can understand why a human mind cannot account for the Non-Being.
Where did the activity and potentiality of God-Creator remain when those vast streams that, from eternity to eternity expand the potential and active power of the Universe, plunged again into the bosom of God-Creator? Where were those radiant factors of energy? Where were those luminous figures of Gods-Architects?
Nothing existed.
All returned to its early state and all is absorbed in the bosom of what is immeasurable and without duration.
Neither time existed because how may time exist without duration?
Even the Universal Mind is non-existent in what is unconditioned, because how could the Universal Mind go into that vastness with no supports to sustain it?
Just shadows filled that boundless vastness.
Everything was in the dreamless sleep of the Infinity.
But all these sentences become no more than childish concepts of what needs words to express itself. When you wish to account for the Absolute One, no matter how pure and select your explanation may be, in an inexorable way you fall in dogma, sophism and speculation.
You can intuit these ideas just in the abstract, because how can human-minded beings enter where mind does not exist?
Great Initiates –who in their ecstasy reached the shores of the Eternal Sea to glimpse the unconditioned state of God, from where very few return to the state of consciousness– never could express it by words.
If all disappears in the Non-Manifested One, then this state of Non-Being is supreme annihilation, absolute nil and complete void.
Thus a student thinks in front of this definition.
But what a marvelous Eternal Substance! Since nothing can become from the nothing, nothing can disappear from what was, just as the Non-Manifested One remains always, simultaneously the Manifested One never ceases to be.
These stages of Non-manifestation and manifestation are lines traced by the human mind to explain both the Essence in Se and the expressed God’s essence. But, really, manifestation and the Non-Manifested One never change aspects, but are always. If they changed, two gods would exist together.
This is like an individual that in his view has traveled through a way during a period of time established by his own life span. This was mere self-deception and daydream.
Illusion of yesterday is span of time today, and a man understands that yesterday and today are no more than fickle reflections of his own imagination, but he overcomes time and duration, and lives this magnificent present time, the Eternal moment.
A contemporary philosopher properly says: “If you wish to be happy, forget your past and do not worry about your time to come, but live the present moment to the full”.
A being lives illusion and abstract time simultaneously.
Illusion did not take anything from abstract time, but these two aspects –illusion and reality, manifestation and Non-Manifestation– are so closely united always that you will never separate them.