The Space Before Thought
“The universe is consciousness.”
Before there is thought, there is feeling without language. Another light is speaking before we are. Thought does not arrive alone. A thought carries meaning, and meaning can carry an entire world.
A word can bring an image. The image can bring remembrance. Remembrance can bring pain, joy, longing, fear, tenderness, anger, or desire. Before we realize what has happened, something as small as a word has opened rooms within consciousness containing decades of human experience. We see imagery and can relive something that happened twenty years ago as if it were happening now.
We carry the past in pockets of ideas shelved in our thought system, waiting to be recalled.
The word home can warm one person and frighten another. The word has not changed. The meaning attached to the word has. This tells us something extraordinary about thought.
Meaning is not sitting permanently inside the word. Meaning is being received through the thinker that encounters it. And if meaning can be attached, meaning can also be released. Not by becoming empty or indifferent, but by allowing consciousness to move beyond the measurement it has previously placed upon what appeared.
There is a space before the thought becomes our thought. Before the word gathers its history. Before the mind decides what something means. Before memory rushes forward to interpret the present through yesterday. There is simply awareness. This is one of the quietest doorways into deeper consciousness.
We are not our thoughts; they are part of the temporal cycle for walking through matter in a story. Consciousness is all that is alive. Temporal ideas, temporal thought, temporal thinking, temporal experiences are all living to change. When we leave the body, nothing we thought ever thought lives again. Thought is temporal. Consciousness is eternal.
Thought is created light. The word created the world.
When Thought Loses Its Measurement
The human mind is constantly quantifying. Good. Bad. Success. Failure. Beautiful. Ugly. Safe. Dangerous. Important. Unimportant. Mine. Yours. The world taught us these measurements, and the personal story gave them emotional weight. We incessantly think, jumping from one thought to another, mixing daydreams, memory, and thoughts of the past and future into what we call the present moment. Rarely does a human being live in any present moment. The mind is too busy in daydreams to pause.
We rarely encounter anything without simultaneously encountering what we have learned it means. We learn the word tree while seeing one. We learn the word flower while seeing one. The word and its meaning are simultaneous. Childhood placed a library of meaning that was only relevant to one idea out of an infinite. Travel in 1 AD meant something very different than traveling on an airplane today.
We learn through meaning. We see through meaning. We hear through meaning. We remember through meaning. We even meet another human being through meanings already assembled around who we believe that person is.
This is how the world’s library remains present even when no book is open. We sit inside words already placed and build bridges between knowing and not knowing; the mind wants to be comfortable in what it knows.
We carry the library inside the interpretation. We live in our narrative, hearing our interpretations of someone talking. The narrator is the world’s interpreter, pretending to know who everyone is and what everything means.
No one sees the illusory in thought or counts all the daydreams they have in one day. We think constantly about what we are about to do or how we did something earlier. We constantly live around our imaginings.
But when thinking can pause, immediately measuring what appears against everything it already knows, something opens. The experience has not disappeared. The world has not disappeared. Thought has simply stopped being allowed to establish the outer boundary of what something can mean. And suddenly there is space. The space between every thought is a living space with more than our ideas moving in it. Space exists before every thought, and in that space is life we haven’t placed meaning in.
Consciousness is all that is alive. The universe is consciousness. The pebble and leaf are consciousness. The space in the room, around the furniture, outside is living.
We’re an idea in the mind of God, and everything we believe is life is an idea in our mind. God created Heaven for consciousness to exist in something. Human consciousness is the tiny pinprick in the center of a humongous circle of Heaven’s Love.
Ten Thousand Years From Now
Consider the impermanence of language. Two thousand years ago, no one knew the words satellites, microwave, atom, car, bicycle, blender, clock, rocket, TV, computer, stoplight, and many others. The idea of life was in another vocabulary, and meaning was applied to those words for their level of consciousness.
Genesis won’t capture the twenty-first century with God. It was given for that specific time in human history and at a period in human consciousness that never lived in what we do today. Today, we can talk about atoms, galaxies, consciousness, thought systems, algorithms, molecules, light, and we have references to airplanes, satellites, computers, and heart transplants.
Ten thousand years from now, many of the words through which we presently understand ourselves may be gone. Our social categories may be incomprehensible. Our institutions may exist only as archaeological remnants. Ideas that presently seem unquestionable may appear primitive. Entire systems of meaning may have vanished.
Yet Love will not have depended upon the English word Love in order to exist.
God will not have depended upon the word God.
Consciousness will not have depended upon our present theories of consciousness. Reality does not require our present vocabulary to remain real. This is important because the thinker often mistakes the ability to name something for the ability to contain it.
We name Love and think we know Love. We name consciousness and think we know consciousness. We name God and construct religions around the name. We name matter and begin believing our measurements have reached the end of matter. But the word is only a temporary doorway. What it points toward is immeasurably larger and sometimes not even what we thought was there,
Detachment Is Not Absence
Detachment acquires another meaning. Detachment is not refusing to feel. It is not becoming cold. It is not pretending something did not matter. It is allowing the meaning we attached to something to loosen enough that consciousness can receive what exists beyond the attachment. It’s creating space that can absorb more.
Pain may have been real. Joy may have been real. The relationship may have been real. The loss may have been real. But the interpretation does not have to become eternal simply because the experience occurred.
We can release the meaning, letting go of the idea of the experience. This is where consciousness begins moving beyond the little person’s world. Going beyond matter isn’t creating a sixty-story tower in our mind, pretending to walk up its stairs. It’s knowing what is beyond teh eyes and belief of what is here for situating another layer already here. We don’t go beyond face-value living because no one believed more was here.
Science has never understood creation, reality, or how matter exists, but it still went ahead and falsely proclaimed a reality. The world we see is one level of thinking within an infinite one. The temporal world gives humans something to live through but can change and is changing. We once believed in gravity; now we know other races are the fabric of the world.
Understanding Heaven has never been in human thought. We don’t communicate with God in conversations to know it. The mind fulfills its ignorance in satan for pretending we know God and Heaven by using human precepts, false idols, and golden calves.
The ego needs meaning because meaning maintains identity. This happened to me. Therefore I am this. They did this. Therefore they are that. I achieved this. Therefore I am valuable. I lost this. Therefore something has been taken from me. Every interpretation strengthens the architecture of “a somebody.”
The Soul does not need to preserve the architecture of “a somebody” in order to remain alive.
The Soul can let the story go.
The Feeling Before the Thought
Movement exists earlier than language.
A movement. A resonance. A feeling. An intent that has not yet become a sentence. Something can move within us before the thinker knows what to call it. The mind then reaches into its library and tries to translate the movement into something familiar.
It gives it words. It compares. It remembers. It explains. And sometimes the explanation may actually make the original movement smaller. The deeper intelligence may have arrived without the world’s measurements, while the thinker immediately translates it into the vocabulary of the world it knows.
Some of the deepest knowing does not initially arrive as thought. It arrives as recognition. Something within us moves before we can explain what moved. The mistake is believing that because we cannot yet explain it, nothing has been given. The opposite is true. Something has been given that thought is not yet large enough to carry.
Pausing and building space, rather than reacting or responding, can create light for absorbing and seeing more.
Love Without the Library
Love gives us another way of receiving. When consciousness holds something only for Love, the old measurements begin losing their necessity.
Love does not need to ask whether the ego won. Love does not need the old argument. Love does not need yesterday’s interpretation to remain alive today. Love can look at what happened without requiring the wound to continue defining what happened means. And gradually thought becomes quieter.
Not because consciousness has become less intelligent. Because it is becoming capable of receiving without immediately reducing what it receives to what it already knows.
That is refinement.
We are no longer accumulating another explanation. We are becoming spacious enough that explanation does not have to arrive first. The word can remain a word. The memory can remain a memory. The world can remain the world. But consciousness no longer has to drive thinking to stop where the meanings once told us to stop.
The space before thought is not nothing.
It’s where the world’s measurements have not yet entered. Where self has not yet claimed what appears. Where knowing and not knowing have not yet constructed their walls. It’s where higher intelligence already is; we just don’t know its light. We’re breathing in more air with more life than just the idea of self.
Consciousness can receive without immediately translating everything through the little person. And when that space in thinking is carried only for Love, light in consciousness increases.
It returns to its proper place.
We loosen the meaning to discover a bigger world that carries far more than this world’s ideas.
By letting go of where we have placed meaning and attachment, something much larger can begin to be received. The mind can know what no university can teach. The pool of consciousness is woven with other races of intelligence. We are more than flesh and bones and are of divine light.
The World the Word Builds
When we carry space around life’s interactions, circumstances, and ideas, something changes.
The event may remain exactly as it was. The other person may not change. The circumstance may still require our attention. But when we quiet the immediate movement to define, judge, defend, fear, or possess what is happening, there is suddenly more room around it.
There is Light. There is peace. There is reverence. And within that space, another hallway of thought can appear. This is important because most of the time we do not realize how quickly we close the hallways.
Something happens and we name it. The name gathers meaning. The meaning gathers emotion. The emotion gathers memory. Memory tells us what the present resembles. Then the self enters: This is happening to me.
Within seconds, consciousness can be standing inside an entire reality constructed from an event that, only moments earlier, had not yet been interpreted.
The event may be one thing. The world we build around the event can be enormous.
Self-Identity Lives in Meaning
We place self-identity almost everywhere. What we own. Who loves us. Who rejects us. What we accomplish. How we look. Where we live. What people think of us. Whether life resembles the picture we expected.
The mind naturally moves toward what maintains continuity with the person it already believes itself to be. We prefer what is comfortable partly because comfort confirms the architecture already established around me.
The unfamiliar can feel threatening even when it contains no actual danger because it does not immediately fit the existing thought system. The ego therefore does not live only in arrogance or selfishness. It lives much more quietly in attachment to meaning. This must mean this. My life should look like this. This person is this. Success is this. God is this. Reality is this.
The more meaning becomes fixed, the fewer hallways consciousness can walk.
The Word
The word has extraordinary power in human consciousness because the word allows an invisible interior world to become organized.
Before the word, there may be sensation, resonance, recognition, feeling, awareness. Then comes the word. And with the word comes distinction. Water. Now something flowing through creation has a human coordinate. Mother. Now a relationship has a coordinate. Death. Now an enormous mystery has a coordinate. God. Now the immeasurable has entered four letters. The word is useful precisely because it makes something holdable by thought. But this is also its limitation.
The word gives consciousness a place to stand, but it can never contain everything it names. God does not become smaller because the word God is small. Love does not become the definition of Love. Consciousness does not become our theory of consciousness. The word allows the thinker to construct a world from what would otherwise exceed the thinker. And gradually we forget the distinction. We begin living as though the name and the named are the same thing.
The Sensory World Strengthens the Word
The senses make this even more convincing. We say tree and can touch the bark. We say body and can see the face. We say house and can enter the door. We say money and can hold what represents value. Matter continually reinforces the vocabulary through which we interpret it. What is tangible becomes easier to believe because it can be repeatedly confirmed by the senses.
But what carries the tangible may remain invisible. We see the heart. We do not see life. We can observe neural activity associated with thought. We do not see a thought sitting inside the brain like an object. We can measure wavelengths associated with visible light. We cannot place Love on a table. We can photograph a person. We cannot photograph the entirety of what it means for that person to be conscious.
The deepest forces of our existence are not necessarily the easiest things to place before the senses. Humanity made an enormous assumption when it allowed visibility to become one of the primary measurements of reality.
One Bandwidth of Consciousness
This opens the larger doorway. Human consciousness is not consciousness itself. It is one localization of consciousness. One bandwidth. One way intelligence becomes experience. One particular arrangement through which creation can be received.
Human beings naturally interpret existence from the architecture available to us: senses, language, memory, nervous system, body, thought. A bat receives another world. A whale receives another. A microorganism participates in an order utterly unlike the human narrative.
Even within humanity, the five-year-old and the fifty-year-old can inhabit profoundly different worlds while standing in the same room. So the existence of one experienced world does not establish the nonexistence of others. It establishes only that this is the world this particular architecture is capable of receiving.
Human consciousness can be understood as one focal point within an immeasurably larger field of God’s living intelligence. Other races of intelligence do not need to be imagined simply as humanlike creatures living somewhere else. They represent other orders through which Divine intelligence is carried, other relationships between awareness, energy, intelligence, creation, and God that do not depend upon the biological architecture through which humans presently recognize life.
No order of intelligence needs to resemble human to live. God doesn’t, nor do Angels, Celestial Light, or Conscious Energy. We are in God’s likeness, and He is consciousness living as resonance, and we are conscious energy; both are Spirit.
Intelligence Before Form
We already encounter a version of this intelligence in ourselves. Before the human being can think: I am developing a heart, a heart develops. Before the infant understands oxygen, oxygen participates in sustaining the body. Before the child understands cellular differentiation, an extraordinary biological order has already unfolded. Before the scientist understands the universe, the universe has already produced the scientist.
Intelligence precedes our explanation of intelligence. We keep looking for intelligence where intelligence resembles the human thinker. But thought is not the highest evidence of intelligence. The order itself is evidence that something deeper is occurring.
Life is always unexplained when we reduce intelligence to human cognition.
The Invisible World
The invisible world need not mean another physical place hiding behind this one. It’s everything participating in existence that our present human apparatus does not translate into ordinary sensory experience.
The human senses already receive only portions of physical reality. The mind receives still another portion by interpretation. Then language compresses what was received into concepts. By the time the little person says, This is reality, consciousness has passed through layer after layer of translation.
And yet we become remarkably confident about what cannot exist outside those translations. The invisible world begins exactly where that confidence ends. Not fantasy. Not whatever the imagination wishes to place there. The unknown. And the unknown is enormous. There is tremendous reverence in allowing it to remain enormous.
Space Is an Opening in the Measurement
This brings us back to the space around thought. When we become still, we are not necessarily trying to stop thought. We are loosening our dependence upon its measurements. We allow the word to remain without immediately entering everything we have attached to it. We allow the person to stand before us without immediately reducing them to our history with them. We allow an experience to occur without demanding that yesterday tell us what today means. And something beautiful happens.
The walls of knowing and not knowing become less rigid. The mind no longer has to fill every open space. The self does not have to be placed at the center of everything that appears. The invisible does not have to become visible before we allow mystery to exist.
Space becomes receptive. This is why Love is so important. Love does not need to quantify everything before receiving it. Love can remain before what it does not understand. Love can loosen the attachment without destroying the experience. Love can allow another human being to be larger than our interpretation of them. Love can allow creation to be larger than humanity’s interpretation of creation. Love can allow God to remain infinitely beyond the word God.
Then thought becomes lighter. Not less intelligent. Less enclosed.
The word still serves us. Matter still serves us. Education still serves us. The senses still serve us. The human story still serves us. But none has to become the wall around existence.
We begin with the word because the word gives us a world. We loosen the word because God has given us more than the word can hold. We go beyond self-identity in matter to self-empty one world for another, losing our lives to gain them in God.
The space before every thought is light not yet known to the thinker.