The Hidden Design of Your Existence: Presence, Essence, Movement, Return, and Archetypes

By stepping beyond the ordinary, you can glimpse a hidden structure behind your life. You might think you know who you are – a name, a body, a collection of experiences. But a bold truth waits beneath the surface, ready to disrupt everything you take for granted. You are part of an elegant pattern involving five profound elements: presence, essence, movement, return, and archetypes. As you journey through these concepts in second-person perspective, allow each to build upon the last. By the end, you may feel as if a veil has been lifted, revealing deeper mechanics behind your identity, life, and even death.

Presence – The Infinite Stillness of You

Close your eyes and imagine everything falling silent. In this silence, you still exist. There is an awareness – pure, untouched, and vast. This is your presence, the infinite stillness that is the true you before any movement or story begins. It’s the quiet space of consciousness that existed before you took on a name or form. In this state of presence, nothing is happening, yet it is not emptiness; it is full of potential. Many spiritual teachings hint at this inner stillness, describing it as the true Self beyond all roles and labels​. When you touch this silent presence within, you’re touching the core of your being – an unchanging, ever-present awareness.

This presence is like the ocean before any waves form. It simply is. In moments of deep meditation or awe, you might have felt it – a timeless moment where you sense the “something” in you that doesn’t change. That is your foundational self: pure presence. In this stillness, you find a kind of peace and wholeness that nothing in the external world can give. It’s been called the ground of being, the inner light, or simply consciousness itself. Before movement, before life’s drama unfolds, this is who you are: an infinite, stable backdrop of awareness.

Essence – Your Unique Pattern of Being

Now, presence doesn’t remain in blank stillness forever; it has an inherent tendency to express. Think of your essence as the unique, inseparable way in which your presence would move if it were to engage with existence. It’s the distinct flavor or vibration of you. Just as each beam of white light can refract into a different color, each infinite presence refracts into a particular essence when it enters life. Your essence is that one-of-a-kind color – the pattern of energy that is always you, no matter how many times you dip into the flow of life.

Even as everything around you changes – your body, your thoughts, your circumstances – this core essence remains the same. It’s the thread that runs through all your experiences, binding them together as “yours.” As one writer put it, “the essence of who we are is present in the centre of all those changes.” You can’t separate your essence from your presence; they are two sides of the same coin. One is the being (still and infinite), the other is the style of that being (dynamic and particular). When your presence engages with existence, it naturally does so in your way – your essence. It is inseparable from you, like the fragrance is inseparable from a flower.

Movement – The Bridge Between Stillness and Form

Now we arrive at movement – the moment presence flows into form. Movement is the bridge between your quiet presence and the manifested world of action, change, and physical reality. Imagine that still ocean of your being starting to stir, forming waves. Each wave is a movement arising from that still water, following the contours of its essence. In the same way, when you move into life – when you act, think, create – every movement follows the natural pattern of your essence. You may not realize it, but every choice you make, every reaction, every dream is shaped by that inner template. It’s as if an invisible breeze (your presence) is blowing through the world, and you see its effects in the rustling leaves of your life. You can’t see the breeze directly, but you know it’s there by the way things move.

Look around and you’ll notice that everything is movement. The entire universe is dancing. Even things that appear solid and still are buzzing at the microscopic level – atoms vibrating, particles spinning. Scientists and sages agree that nothing is truly static; “the observable universe is filled with movement… even in things that appear still”​. Movement is nature’s way of becoming. So when your presence (that still consciousness) flows outward, movement is what happens. This movement takes shape as your life – your heartbeat and breathing, your passions and struggles, your growth and transformation. And importantly, it isn’t random or chaotic. It follows the form of your essence like water taking the shape of its riverbed. If your essence is like a melody, your movements are the dance to that tune.

Return – Dissolving Back into Stillness

Life in form is dynamic, but it isn’t permanent. Eventually, the wave must settle back into the ocean. When death comes, what is really happening? You, as presence, are simply returning to stillness. The movement subsides, the form is released, but the essence – the pattern that is you – remains quietly in that ocean of presence. In sacred texts, this process is likened to changing clothes: when the garment of the body wears out, you (the soul) cast it off and take on a new one​. What is profound is that throughout this shedding, your core doesn’t alter one bit – “the soul remains unchanged, when it discards its worn-out body and takes birth in a new body elsewhere”​. In other words, you drop the costume but keep your character.

Think of a dancer who has been dancing on stage. The dance (movement) eventually ends, and the dancer exits. But the dancer – the awareness, the presence – doesn’t die with the dance. They simply rest, only to dance again another time. After death, your presence dissolves back into that infinite stillness that it always was. It’s a homecoming, a return to the source and true Self that was there before you were born. But this return is not the end of the story. Just as a calm ocean can give rise to waves again, your still presence will move again. And when it does, it will follow the same pattern, the same essence, you always carry. In essence, you will rise in alignment with who you have always been. Life and death are a continuous cycle of expression and withdrawal, of movement and stillness – a rhythm as old as the cosmos.

Archetypes – The Eternal Patterns We Live Out

If each soul has a particular essence and follows it through life after life, it raises a fascinating question: are there common types of essences? The answer emerges when we look at stories told across time. Certain archetypes keep appearing – the Hero, the Wise Old Sage, the Loving Mother, the Rebel, the Trickster, and so on. These are not just literary figures; they are reflections of recurring essence-patterns in human life. Psychologist Carl Jung called archetypes primordial patterns embedded in the collective unconscious of humanity​. They are universal templates of human behavior and identity, appearing “cross-culturally as images, symbols, and motifs” throughout myth and art​. In other words, archetypes exist because essence-patterns repeat. They’re like cosmic roles that get played by different actors (people) in different eras.

You might notice that you resonate deeply with some of these archetypal patterns. Perhaps you’ve always felt like a seeker of truth, or a nurturer, or a warrior. This suggests your essence is aligned with certain archetypes, and thus you naturally move through life in those modes. A being will always move in alignment with its essence – it can’t do otherwise and still be authentic to itself. The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus hinted at this truth: “character is destiny,” he said, implying that your inner character (your essence) is like a guiding divinity shaping your fate​. No matter how much you try to stray, you will eventually be pulled back to the path that fits your nature. This is why archetypes feel so powerful; they are alive inside us, “organs of the soul” that direct our impulses and instincts from the depths of our psyche​.

Revelation: Seeing Yourself Anew

Take a moment to absorb what this means for you. You are not a disconnected, random being; you are part of an ancient story. Your presence is the eternal stillness at your core. Your essence is the unique pattern of that stillness, the special way you are “tuned.” Your movement through life is the natural unfolding of that essence into actions and experiences. Your return to stillness in death is a pause, not an end – the same essence will dance again. And the archetypal patterns you embody are older than civilization, repeating through countless lives and tales.

This realization can be disruptive in the best way. It challenges the conventional perspective that you only live once, that you are only what society labels you, or that life and death are absolute endpoints. Instead, you begin to see a bigger picture: existence is a play of presence and movement, essence and form, coming and going, all guided by timeless archetypal rhythms. You, as you read these words, are the stillness and the storm, the eternal and the ephemeral, all at once.

Let this sink in. Feel the truth of it in your own experience – in those quiet moments when you sense something infinite within, and in those inspired moments when you feel utterly “yourself.” The mechanics of existence we’ve explored are not abstract philosophy but a living reality you can observe. Every day, you have the chance to remember: who you really are is something much greater and more mysterious than what appears on the surface.

In knowing this, you might find a new kind of freedom. You can engage with life more playfully and authentically, recognizing the archetypal games at play and choosing how you dance with them. You can face death with less fear, seeing it as a gentle dissolution into the peace of your own presence. And perhaps most importantly, you can live with purpose – trusting that being fully you is not only okay, it is exactly what the universe wants you to do. After all, only you can embody your essence, and the world needs every unique note in the cosmic symphony.

You have always been, and will always be, the infinite stillness that moves. This is the bold truth, hidden in plain sight. And now that you see it, your existence will never look the same again.