From the Unknown we come and to the Unknown we return. If we are utterly honest with ourselves, we have to admit that everything between our birth and death is no less a Mystery: it is not just a matter of who we are, or even what we are, but perhaps most dramatically, where we are.
For no matter how embodied we are, our awareness—that pure Being of Essence manifesting within Existence—remains ever an autonomous entity, free at every moment to shed both body and mind in its cyclic return to spiritual reality.
To be embodied is an unfathomable Mystery, an inexplicable miracle as viewed from within manifestation—but this is counterbalanced by the equally mysterious disembodied awareness we experience during states of mystical union, meditation, physical duress and death.
This book stands alone as a working-through of the process of The Many returning to The One. The process of The One unfolding into The Many has been treated fully in my The Before Heaven I Ching: Reading the Text of Creation. Although the present work can be thought of as a companion volume to that other, it is neither necessary to refer to that previous work nor is it necessary to have any familiarity with the I Ching.
