After the dissolution of the cosmos — when one great cycle of existence had ended and the next had not yet begun — the entire objective universe rested in a state of perfect equilibrium.
No motion. No becoming. Everything that would ever appear… held in absolute stillness.
And in that stillness, there existed the supreme Lord. Eternal. Unborn. Self-effulgent — meaning, luminous by his own nature, needing no external light to shine.
He is the all. He is omnipotent.
Yet he is beyond conception and beyond description. He is known by many names — Atma, Brahman, the Self — but the text is careful to say these are viewpoints. Pointers. Not the truth itself. The truth cannot be held inside a name.
He is — and yet the world does not recognise him.
He is within this very body — and yet he seems infinitely far.
From him, countless divinities emerged. Vishnu, and others beyond counting — the way countless rays pour from a single sun. And from him, infinite worlds arose — the way ripples appear at the surface of an ocean, without the ocean itself ever moving.
He is the cosmic intelligence into which all objects of perception enter. He is the light in which both the self and the world are seen.
He ordains the nature of every created thing — what fire does, what water does, what a seed becomes.
And in him, worlds appear and disappear — the way mirages form and dissolve repeatedly across a desert plain. The world — which is his form — vanishes. But what he is does not change.
He dwells in all things. He is hidden — and he overflows.
By his mere presence, this apparently inert material world and all its inhabitants are ever active. The world does not move itself. It moves because he is in it.
And because of his omnipresence, his omnipotence, his omniscience — his very thought materialises.
This is the Lord who was there before the worlds arose.
And who has never, in truth, been absent.