The ultimate source of existence is the Void, the supracosmic Silence, the uncreated and absolutely ineffable Supreme.
The first possible formulation of this source is Universal Mind. Here, too, words fail, for Universal Mind transcends the dichotomies, polarities, and paradoxes that harass the relative world and our finite minds' comprehension of it. Insofar as description is attempted, the Vedantic ternary--Infinite Existence, Infinite Intelligence, Infinite Bliss--is as serviceable as any.
God is not limited to his foregoing, "abstract" modes. He can be encountered concretely, as the God of the Old and New Testaments, Buddha, Shiva, or in other modes. These modes do not, however, wear the mantle of ultimacy or provide final answers.
The phenomenal worlds owe their existence to Universal Mind, which Mind does not itself become implicated in their categories. Man, together with the three-dimensional world he experiences, is but one of innumerable modes through which Mind experiences itself. The heavy physicality and seemingly objective finality of man's material world, its space-time grid and the laws of nature that offer themselves as if they were the sine qua nons of existence itself--all these are in fact highly provisional and relative. Under exceptional circumstances, people can rise to a level of consciousness at which they see that taken together they constitute but one of innumerable sets of limiting constructs that Universal Mind assumes. To saddle that Mind itself with those constructs would be as ridiculous as trying to understand the human mind through the rules of chess.
Created entities tend progressively to lose contact with their original source and the awareness of their pristine identity with it. In the initial stage of this falling away, those entities maintain contact with their source, and the separation is playful, relative, and obviously tentative. An image that illustrates this stage is that of a wave of the ocean. From a certain point of view the wave is a distinct entity--we can speak of it as large, fast-moving, green, and foamy. But its individuation doesn't keep it from belonging to the ocean proper.
At the next stage, created entities assume a partial independence and we can observe the beginnings of cosmic screenwork, the Absolute's assumption of veils that are gossamer-like in the beginning but grow increasingly opaque. Here unity with the source can be temporarily forgotten in the way an actor can forget his own identity as he identifies with the character he depicts.
Eventually the veiling process reaches a point where individuation looks like the normal state of things and the original wholeness is perceived only intuitively and sporadically. This can be likened to the relationship between cells of a body and the body as a whole. Cells are separate entities but function as their body's parts. Individuation and participation are dialectically combined. Complex biochemical interactions bridge provisional boundaries to ensure the functioning of the organism as a whole.
In the final stage, the separation is practically complete. Liaison with the source is lost sight of and the original identity forgotten. The screen is now all but impermeable, and a radical change of consciousness is required to break through it. A snowflake can serve as a symbol. In outward appearance it doesn't look like water; to understand that nevertheless it is water we have to get down to H2O.
Human beings who manage to effect the requisite breakthrough find thereafter that life's polarities paradoxically do and do not exist. This holds for such contraries as matter and spirit, good and evil, permanence and change, heaven and hell, beauty and ugliness, and agony and ecstasy. In the end, there is no difference between subject and object, observer and observed, experiencer and experienced, creator and creation.
--Stanislav Grof, "LSD and the Cosmic Game: Outline of Psychedelic Cosmology and Ontology" (Cleansing the Doors of Perception, Huston Smith, pp. 95-97)