The self-contraction

We are unaware of God right now only because of something we are unconsciously doing (an act of self-contraction) in every moment.

Adam and Eve expelled from the Garden of Eden

But if, in Truth, there is no separation from God, then why are we not aware of God right now? Why are we not aware of the nature of Reality as I've just described?

For one thing, it is not because we are being punished! We are not being excluded from seeing God because of "original sin", or whatever. It is not because we are inherently separate from the Divine (because we are "creatures"), or because we are being separated from the Divine during the lifetime by some kind of "barrier" like the physical body, which, upon falling away at death, will reveal God. If that were so, how do we explain the great saints whose Revelations of the Divine took place very much while they were alive?

No, there is something we are doing (unconsciously) in every moment that actively separates us from God, and hence from the awareness of ourselves as arising in God, or from the awareness that God exists. Avatar Adi Da Samraj refers to this primal act as the self-contraction. The self-contraction creates the sense of a separate self in a Godless universe. Wherever these self-reflecting body-minds arise, Consciousness tends to get trapped, twisted around a body-mind, creating a clench, an ego, a "private consciousness", a solitary vortex, in an otherwise Indivisible Field of Consciousness, minuscule in comparison to the great and infinite God, but which is enough to trap Consciousness into believing Itself to be confined to that body-mind.

The sense of being a separate self is an illusion! But it is a profound illusion, one that is constantly being reinforced on every level — individually, through intimates, and through our culture. Messages fly from every direction confirming that "the self" is a fact and a fixed thing. Everyone accepts that this “self ” can be modified (to some degree), and even improved (the literature on self-improvement is vast), but the suggestion that it is completely and only the result of a (profoundly unconscious) action which, were it to cease, would dissolve the sense of separate self is a radical and unfamiliar one!