Answering metaphysical questions
What is the nature of things beyond the physical world?
There is an emptiness that is nowhere. An emptiness that is totality. An eternal field of infinite possibility. It has no distinctions such as form or size. It is intelligent and aware. It is conscious. This emptiness is consciousness. Consciousness is reality. There is nothing else. There can be no other than consciousness.
What is the physical world?
There is a thought of separation in consciousness. Consciousness expresses separation as existence. You know existence as the universe. It is the world in which you live. Existence is transitory. It has no permanence. It comes and goes in cycles of birth and death. As such, existence is illusion. It is not eternal. Reality is eternal.
What am I in the world?
You exist as the me of the body in spacetime. Your body is a union of elementary particles collected from a universe of particles and shaped by genetics and culture into a personality that has senses, feelings, thoughts, and emotions on which it acts. The me of the body is transitory. It is born, it lives out its lifetime, then it dies. As such it is not real. Reality is eternal.
What is my reality?
You are neither your body, nor its personality. You are the energy that is existence. Existence is consciousness expressing the thought of separation. You are consciousness-expressing. Consciousness expresses separation like a dancer expresses dance. The thought of separation becomes a movement of energy in consciousness. That energy is consciousness-expressing. You are the energy of expression that is existence. You are the dancing that is the dance.
What is my true nature?
Dancing is the I AM that is dance. Consciousness-expressing is the I AM that is existence. I am that which I AM, or twia, is consciousness expressing the thought of separation as existence. You are the expressing that is existence. I AM is your true nature.
"I am not my body, nor do I need it. I am the witness only. I have no shape of my own. You are so accustomed to think of yourself as bodies having consciousness that you just cannot imagine consciousness as having bodies. Once you realize that bodily existence is but a state of mind, a movement in consciousness, that the ocean of consciousness is infinite and eternal, and that, when in touch with consciousness, you are the witness only, you will be able to withdraw beyond consciousness altogether." NISARGADATTA MAHARAJ (1897-1981)