Everything inside our self and outside our self shines with being, shines with divine presence, shines with ‘I’. To consider a ‘divine presence within’, therefore, we must ultimately address a question: within what?

If we turn our attention to divine presence itself, notions of ‘within’, ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ no longer retain the meaning they lightly hold at the relative level. Continuing in this exploration, we come to recognise that there is just the one and only being, or presence, from which everyone and everything derive their seemingly independent existence.

The separate, finite self houses no separate, infinite presence within itself. The separate self is an appearance within divine presence, or God’s being. The only being there is. God’s being, while temporarily clothed in thoughts and perceptions, seems to become a finite self but never actually ceases to be itself. The more we understand this, the more prayer becomes a traveling inwards through the layers of feeling, sensing and perceiving towards our essential, irreducible being.