God is always Present, in every moment, in the eternal now. God is the very faculty or means through which we are aware. It can be thought of as consciousness itself. The consciousness in you and in me is God’s Being shining.

As the Mormon prophet-mystic Joseph Smith once said,

And the light which shineth, which giveth you light, is through him who enlighteneth your eyes, which is the same light that quickeneth your understandings. Which light proceedeth forth from the presence of God to fill the immensity of space—The light which is IN all things, which giveth life to ALL things, which is the law by which all things are governed, even the power of God who sitteth upon his throne, who is IN the bosom of eternity, who is IN the midst of ALL things.

-D&C 88:11-13

That includes being in you and me, even right now. God is the consciousness through which you are reading these very words on this screen.

Did you know that there is no inherent illumination or luminosity in photons? “Light,” as such, cannot be found there. Photons are, perhaps, ‘packets’ of energy which have the properties of both spread-out waves and localized particles. Photons only take on the appearance of being luminous as they arise within consciousness, in our mind’s eye. It may be that photons are spread-out energy potentials that fill the immensity of space, and only take on the appearance of being a localized discrete particle of “light” when we become aware of them in consciousness, in this actualized awareness we call mind. Thus, you are the light of the kosmos. This “light” is only arising in us. The world outside of a mind is perfectly ‘dark,’ or empty, unactualized in any way. Of course, what else could it be? What would perceive it as illuminated, or as any “thing”?

All of our thoughts are the activity of consciousness, modulations of that consciousness, incarnations within that pure consciousness, rays shining from inside that consciousness. We are agents of that consciousness, emerging from within that consciousness. All there is to experience is the knowing of it, and that knowing is God’s own Self in us, living in us, the source of our life, the energy of consciousness itself.

We could say that God lives in us, since consciousness seems to have become localized in this particular body-mind. Or we could say that we live in God, since all that we perceive arises in that consciousness, including our body-mind. Thus, Jesus was right to say, “I am in the Father and the Father is in me” (John 14:10-11, 20). Both are true, and they are true of us as well. We are arising within God, and God is arising within us as well. Sometimes this is called “mutual indwelling,” the Father in the Son and the Son in the Father, also called perichoresis or co-inherence in Christian terminology.

God is the field of consciousness in which all knowing occurs, in which all thoughts and perceptions and feelings and sensations arise, like waves in the ocean. Our body-mind and its thoughts are like localizations within that consciousness, temporary manifestations of that Ultimate Reality, expressions of that consciousness, that being, that One.

God becomes veiled and hidden from our awareness when the thoughts that arise in and from consciousness believe they are something separate and discrete from the consciousness in which they are arising. The thoughts form a separate entity, a dualistic subjective ego, a separate self identity, an independent being, an “Adam/Eve,” which thinks it is apart from infinite nondual divine consciousness and Ultimate Reality. This seems to be the “Fall,” the beginning of duality and separateness and alienation from God’s Presence.

But how could thoughts be separate from the consciousness in which they have arisen? They can’t, but that is exactly what our thoughts and our self-identification with them think they are. It is a kind of psychological illusion. The thoughts take on their own separate identity apart from pure nondual consciousness, forming a self, a person, an entity, seemingly cut off from its own source and essence.

Once we look at it like this, it seems impossible, and that is because it is. Our ‘self’ is never actually separate from the source in which it arises, thoughts are never separate from the consciousness in which they emerge, the wave is not separate from the ocean. The thoughts that make up our ‘self’ are just finite actualizations or relative localizations of the infinite potential of absolute consciousness, or Divine Being, or Ultimate Reality. In Christian symbolism we call this the incarnation of God. In Buddhism it is the Dharmakaya that incarnates as the Nirmanakaya Buddha. In Hinduism it is Brahman that manifests itself as each Atman. God becomes incarnate in reality, in the flesh, embodied, in us and all things.

There is no time, no space, nowhere we can go, nowhere we can be, that will be outside of this Presence of God, outside of this consciousness, beyond the borders of God, or the Ultimate Reality. God is always present, and is Presence itself, awareness itself, consciousness itself, the “spirit of life” within us, from which we derive all being, all knowing, all our substance, every thought, every sensation. It all arises in God. This is perhaps why, in order to pierce the veil and know God directly, contemplative practices such as meditation help train us to transcend thought, to go back to the source of thought itself, beyond all thoughts of self, to recognize that from which it all arises, this pure open vastness of nondual unitive at-one consciousness.

Do you see why we cannot “think” God? Nothing that arises in consciousness as a thought will be that consciousness in which it is arising. No relative finite manifestation in consciousness can be the absolute pure infinite consciousness, even though every manifestation or relativization or actualization of that consciousness is made up of nothing other than that consciousness. God is Present even while we are trying to comprehend God, even in the midst of that very comprehension. God is what makes that attempt at comprehension even possible. God is the very field in which we are trying to know God. When we let go of the trying, the conceptualization, surrendering the thoughts that are trying to know themselves, and rest in the pure still silent open awareness of being, that is when the realization of God may dawn on us, as us.