In stillness it can become apparent that the dimensionless ground, that is “before all things” (Colossians 1:17) underlies both phenomenal reality and the perception of that reality, since the mind’s original awareness – its intrinsic consciousness – is awareness of the ground itself. In this sense,

Consciousness is an intrinsic property of matter; indeed, it’s the only intrinsic property of matter that we know, for we know it directly, by ourselves being material conscious things. All of the other properties of matter have been discovered by way of mathematical physics, and this mathematical method of getting at the properties of matter means that only relational properties of matter are known, not intrinsic properties.

Rebecca Goldstein, in a personal communication to Annaka Harris

As long seen in the Dzogchen concept of rigpa, the ground is both dimensionless and atemporal. It is empty, from our phenomenological point of view, even of “emptiness” itself. It is no thing, in the most utter sense of that phrase. And yet each of us can be said to have it, in the identical sense that all beings are said to have “Buddha-nature”; only our own confusion, our incessant and self-identified thoughts, get in the way as the clear light of the moon is obscured by clouds. (There is even a Dzogchen term for this too – ma-rigpa!)

Perhaps this sounds complicated. The attempt to say it gets that way; and yet it is the simplest thing. All that is needed is to remain still enough, open enough to plain awareness; the ground is open, cloudless, without end or beginning. It isn’t even there. It, simply, is.