Diamond Heart Book 4

One: In the World but Not of It

There is a Sufi saying, “to be in the world but not of it.” This phrase can have many meanings. The meaning depends on the situation and on your own development and capacity for understanding. To be “in the world but not of it” is a matter of orientation. I will talk about some of the meanings of this phrase so you will have a better understanding of what we are doing here.

When a baby is born, it is pretty much all Essence or pure Being. Its essence is not, of course, the same as the essence of a developed or realized adult. It is a baby’s essence—nondifferentiated, all in a big bundle. As the infant grows, the personality starts developing through interactions with the environment, especially the parents. Since most parents are identified with their personalities and not with their essence, they do not recognize or encourage the essence of the child. After a few years, Essence is forgotten, and instead of Essence, there is now personality. Essence is replaced with various identifications. The child identifies with one or the other parent, with this or that experience, and with all kinds of notions…

Essence was there in the beginning, and it is still there. Although it was not seen, not recognized, and was even rejected and hurt in many ways, it is still there. In order to protect itself, it has gone…

There is nothing bad about having a personality. You have to have one. You couldn’t survive without it. However, if you take the personality to be who you truly are, then you are distorting reality because you are not your personality. The personality is composed of experiences of the past, of ideas, of notions, of identifications. You have the potential to develop a real individuality, the Personal Essence, which is different from the personality that covers…

If a person believes himself to be the ego, resulting from identifications, ideas and past experiences, then he is said to be “not in the world, but of it.” He is not aware of who he really is, of his essence. This is difficult to understand…

The ego, or the sense of ego identity, takes the place of what we call the real identity, and the personality as a whole takes the place of Essence. The personality is a substitute, an impostor. The world is the same for both Essence and personality, but the way the world is seen is different. A person who is “not in…

Let’s give a few examples of how being identified with your personality distorts reality and results in suffering. Let’s take the issue of proving yourself in the world, of being independent, on your own, strong, successful, making a place for yourself. That’s a big concern, a major preoccupation. Nearly everyone has this goal. This can be an aim that comes from an essential orientation or a personality orientation. There is a big, big difference. Establishing yourself in the world and being independent means…

Usually when a person is beginning to work on herself, she has no idea of the difference between choices that are motivated by personality and choices motivated by Essence. She may think that doing this kind of thing instead of that kind of thing will help her be herself, but there is no clear guiding principle. The person not only lacks a guiding principle, but because of ego identifications, she believes what her personality is urging her to do and is very vehement about defending these things. “This is me. This is who I am. This is what is best to do.” Every time you question her plans for the future or her ideas about who she thinks she is, she feels threatened. To even begin to question these structures means the possibility of destroying all her beliefs.

In the Diamond Approach we say that the drive of the personality for independence and identity is really a distorted reflection of wanting a certain aspect of Essence—what we call the personal aspect.

How do you apply “in the world but not of it” to this situation? “Being in the world but not of it” means that you continue doing what you do. You continue to pursue your career as a physicist, a gardener, a mother and so on, but all the time you remember that it is only a reflection of something else, that what you most deeply want is to actualize a part of yourself. So the main effort is directed toward understanding that part of yourself and actualizing it. If you live that way, it is true that you are in the world, but your motivation is different. You are not of the world. Your purpose is not to be a physicist, a gardener, or a mother. Your purpose is find the precious pearl, your Personal Essence.

Your body is all pleasure; your mind doesn’t exist. Because we had this experience with mother during our infancy, we believe very deeply that to have this state again, we must be with another person. So, we search for the right person. What we are actually searching for is that sense of merging, the golden, melting feeling.

What does matter is that whatever you’re doing, whether you’re in a relationship or not, you need to look inside yourself and find what the barriers are that prevent you from experiencing that part of you that can feel merged and melted no matter who you’re with or where you are.

relationships can be a crucible for discovering a certain golden essential substance inside.

Your essence is very intelligent, very generous. It has a way of throwing a conflict in front of you so that by looking at that conflict, you’ll find out something you need to know. The situation that you are given is perfect in terms of timing, place, the people involved, your capacities, the capacities of the people around you, every detail. The situation is such that if you actually try to understand it, you’ll understand something about your essence. The situation is not there to give you a hard time. You’ll have a hard time if you look only at the manifestation, seeing the conflict itself as a difficulty. If you look at it from the perspective of ego, of identification, you’ll suffer and continue to suffer. But if you see that you fell on your face and you’re suffering because you tripped over something that was in your way, then you’ll want to find out more about what that was, more about that barrier. What we do here is look at the barriers that you bring to work on in this group. We dismantle them, analyze them, examine where they come from in terms of your childhood and your relationships and your life in the world now. From that material, we eventually get the real and precious metal—or the gems hidden inside it. That’s why all that stuff was there. You think that by working on your issue of independence you’ll finally be independent, you’ll be able to support yourself, earn a lot of money, do what you want and all of that. That’s all true, but it’s not the most important factor. The most important aspect of working on any issue is for something inside you to develop. The rest will follow almost effortlessly.

Now, Essence is “in the world but not of it.” It’s not sensations, emotions, or mental events. Yet it is “in the world.” It is like the gold in the rock. It is not the rock; it’s in the rock. Essence is in the sensations, emotions, and mental events, but it’s not any of them. Precious stones are in the earth, but they are not the earth itself. They are something else. So is Essence in you. It’s not your flesh, not your emotions, not your thoughts. But it is embedded there. Essence is in you like the gold in the rock, like precious stones in the earth.

There is a deeper meaning to “in the world but not of it.” Once found, Essence goes through a development, an alchemical refinement, until it reaches its basic nature—the true nature of Essence, which is the nature of everything.

God, the essence of the Essence, is everywhere. It is in the physical body, in sensations, in thoughts, in the animate and inanimate. It is in everything, but it is not these things. It’s in them but not of them. So God, the essence of the Essence, is “in the world but not of it,” and this is the deepest meaning of the phrase.

Essence develops very quickly the moment it is seen and recognized. It thrives on recognition. If you don’t recognize it, it stays dormant. The moment you recognize it, it starts growing. It feeds on light. This is very important for certain aspects of our Work here. We must recognize what factors actually contribute to our change and development.

Perhaps you get a cold at the same time you feel that your heart is open; you might decide your heart is open because of the cold. You give the credit to your cold instead of acknowledging four years of work. The cold is probably a resistance against further opening. Getting sick is a common resistance to expansion. When you fail to recognize the value and impact of your essential work, you deprive yourself of the possibility of that work continuing, giving you more understanding of truth. It is very important to have this discriminating faculty not only in terms of orientation—what we talked about earlier—but also in terms of what the real influences are in your life. If you do not give credit where it is due, you invalidate what actually brought about the growth—your own work, your own capacity, your own essence.

Then they would have to start all over again. I was lucky; I didn’t invalidate anything. Whenever I moved on to something else, I understood exactly what I learned from the earlier experience. I found that this makes quite an important difference. Sometimes it’s not easy to tell what’s contributing to the understanding and clarity in your life. But if you can discern what it is that is contributing, you’ll increasingly move towards your essence, because only Essence brings this about.

Student: Is it possible that some people have more Essence working in them than other people, even though they’re completely unconscious of it? AH: Yes, it happens. It’s what Gurdjieff called stupid saints, which means Being with no knowledge.

Essence can bring to fruition the potentialities of the talents that already exist, but being intelligent or not intelligent, or creative in one way or another, has nothing to do with Essence.

Two: The Theory of Holes

What is a hole? A hole refers to any part of you that has been lost, meaning any part of you that you have lost consciousness of. Ultimately what we have lost awareness of is our essence. When we…

Then we feel a sense of deficiency. So a hole is nothing but the absence of a certain part of our essence. It could be the loss of love, loss of value, loss of capacity for contact, loss of strength, any of the qualities of Essence. There are many of them. However to say we have lost parts of Essence does not mean they are gone forever; they are never gone forever. You are simply cut off from them. Let’s take, for example, the quality of value or self-esteem. When you are cut off from your value, the actual experience is a sense that there is a hole inside that feels empty. You feel a sense of deficiency, a sense of inferiority, and you want to fill this hole with value from the outside. You may try to use approval, praise, whatever. You try to fill the hole with fake value. We walk around with lots of holes, but we usually aren’t aware…

These holes originated during childhood, partly as a result of traumatic experiences or conflicts with the environment. Perhaps your parents did not value you. They didn’t treat you as if your wishes or presence were important, didn’t act in ways that let you know that you mattered. They ignored your essential value. Because your value was not seen or acknowledged (perhaps even attacked or discouraged), you got cut off from that part of you, and what was…

Some of your holes get filled with what you believe you’re…

person. For example, you may feel valued because this person appreciates you. You don’t know consciously that you’re filling the hole with their appreciation. But when you are with that person, you feel valuable, and unconsciously you feel the other person is responsible for your value. Whatever this person is…

Your unconscious does not see that part of the person that makes you feel valuable as separate; you see it as part of you. When the person dies or the relationship ends, you don’t feel that you’re losing that person; you feel you’re losing whatever is filling the hole. You experience the loss of a part of yourself. That is why it is so painful. It feels like you’re being cut and something is being taken out of you. That’s what the wound and the pain are about—the hurt of loss. You may feel as if you lost your heart, your security, your…

That’s one thing people are talking about when they say that we “fit” each other. Each person fits the other’s holes. This fits into this hole, that fits into that hole. When two people live together, they may feel full and complete because they feel…

When you experience this loss and separation directly, you have the possibility of seeing that what was filling you wasn’t really you. If you stay with the hurt and the

pain of loss without trying to cover it with something else, it is possible that you will feel the emptiness. You will feel and see the hole. Then, if you allow yourself to feel the deficiency, the emptiness, you may find the essential part of you that will fill the hole from the inside, once and for all. It’s not even filling; it is the elimination of the hole and the identifications with the deficiency. In that way, you regain part of yourself. You connect with the part of your essence that you lost and that you thought only somebody else could provide for you.

If you understand the deficiency and its source, you might even remember the actual event or pattern of events that brought about your loss of value. A hole is usually filled with the part of the personality that has the memory of what was lost, the situation that brought about the loss, and the hurts and conflicts associated with it. We have to go through the hurt at the deepest level and get close to the hole itself to see these…

So, any deep loss is an opportunity to grow, to understand more about yourself, to experience holes that you believe can only be filled by someone else. Unfortunately, people usually defend…

They think the hole, the deficiency, is how they really are at the deepest level, and that there is nothing beyond it. They think something is wrong with them, but this feeling that something is wrong is an unconscious knowledge of the presence of the hole. People will do anything to not feel the hole. They believe that if they get close to a hole, it will swallow them up. If they are coming up to the hole of love, for example, they might feel threatened by a devastating loneliness or emptiness. Other holes will bring up what feels like a threat of annihilation. No wonder we don’t want to go near these holes! But in our work here we have seen a surprising thing: when we stop defending against feeling a…

This spaciousness allows Essence…

and it is Essence and only Essence that can eliminate the hole, that…

AH: Yes. You might have anger as a result of a deficiency, especially as a defense against feeling a hole. Most feelings, specifically those that are automatic and compulsive, are the result of holes. When there are no holes, there are no such emotions. Sadness, hurt, jealousy, anger, hatred, fear—all of these are the result of holes. If you have no holes, you don’t have these emotions. You have…

Our whole society is set up to teach us that we should get the outside to fill our holes; we should get value, love, strength, and so on from outside. We talk about how wonderful it is to do things for other people, or to fall in love, or have a meaningful profession as if these activities are what give life meaning. We attribute the meaning to the person or thing we think is responsible for it rather than to Essence, which is really responsible. Our whole society is arranged so that people fill each other’s holes. Civilization as we know it is built around…

The more mechanical we become, the more culture is a matter of filling holes. Many people say that in the past there was more love and presence, more recognition of reality, and that people were more in touch with their essence than they are now. You’ve heard of the Golden Age? In the Golden Age, people experienced their essence, no holes. The Silver Age began as Essence diminished and the holes began to appear. Then came the Bronze Age. Now we’re in the Iron Age. It’s the darkest and heaviest. Iron is nothing but defense. We can sometimes feel the…

Allowing ourselves to tolerate the holes and go through them to the other side is more difficult now because everything in society is against this. Society is against Essence. Everybody around you, wherever you go, is trying to fill holes, and people feel very threatened if you don’t try to fill your holes in the same way they do. When a person…

That is why it is important to have a group…

there is a community of people involved in the task of self-understanding. You have the support of many people who are allowing themselves to feel the holes instead of filling them. It is very difficult—almost impossible—for one person alone…

S: So what’s in the hole is a fake feeling? AH: Yes. If you lose your value, for instance, if at some point you get cut off from it, there will be a hole left. The hole will be experienced as a sense of inferiority or a lack of self-esteem. But that is not a real feeling. It is the absence of the real feeling of value or self-esteem. This inferiority will often be covered by an attempt to feel superior as a defense. But that’s not a real feeling either. It’s an attempt to hide, a pseudo-feeling. If you get angry when somebody does or says something and you feel inferior, that again is a pseudo-feeling. All these pseudo-feelings are coming up because you are not in touch with your real value. They are compensations. They are real in the sense that you do feel them, but they are not real in the sense that they are a consequence of losing what is real. This is an important difference. When you have been cut off from a real feeling, something else tries to take its place: the emotions. By feeling the emotions, you can see what it is you lost and experience it. When you experience real value, you see it is very different from the pseudo-feelings that covered over the loss. Emotions are reactions, while essential states like Value are states of Being. They are not reactions to anything.

Have you read Plato? Remember the Platonic Ideas or the Platonic forms? Socrates said that nobody could ever teach you about the forms. The only way you can know them is by remembering them. You have a memory of them, although you may not be aware of it. By retrieving the memory, you come to the Idea. What you return to is not emotions; you return to your Essence. Essence is more real and more substantial than emotions. Essence is as real as your blood. It is not a reaction.

Some people are not only cut off from their Essence, they are cut off from their emotions, too. This makes them very far from themselves. They have only their thoughts, which are the results of the emotions. This is the way we lose ourselves and come to identify with our thoughts. First there is Essence, then the loss of Essence, then the resulting emotions, then the loss of the emotions or the conflict around them, which creates all kinds of thoughts. So understanding emotions can help untangle the knots of defenses that are attempts to avoid experiencing the holes. Emotions can point to where Essence has been lost. Most people wonder, if you don’t feel emotions, what will you feel? The more you feel Essence, the less you feel emotions. You will still have sensations, which will be deeper and stronger than before, but your emotions will not be deeper and stronger. An emotion is only a response of the nervous system, whereas Essence is not a response of the nervous system. There is something there filling you. Part of you is present.

Some people consider the essential aspects the “real feelings.” But what people usually call feelings or emotions are not Essence. Love, Peace, Value, Strength, and Will are aspects of Essence. With Essence, instead of experiencing anger, you experience Strength. Instead of feeling superior or inferior, you experience Value. You experience yourself as a rounded presence that is full and powerful.

Many people do try to fill their holes by being here. But there is another side of it, which is that the Work itself is oriented toward experiencing the deficiencies and not just the fullness.

We could easily do all kinds of things to give people wonderful experiences here. We could do meditations and certain exercises, and everybody could feel wonderful things. However these will not last unless the person actually confronts his deficiencies, his holes, and goes through them. It is not a simple process, nor a short or easy one. It takes time and a lot of effort. To experience a hole and not act from the deficiency, is very difficult because of the powerful drive to fill it. You sometimes feel as if it is a matter of life and death.

AH: Yes. Many people earn their livings by filling other people’s holes. Many businesses are there to fill people’s holes. I have no moralistic attitude about filling holes. I don’t think it is a sin. I don’t think you should feel guilty about it or punish yourself for filling holes. Sometimes you fill your holes; sometimes you fill someone else’s. So what? I prefer to try to understand whatever is there. I’m not building a religion saying, “Thou shalt not fill holes.” You can look at everything you do in terms of holes or filling holes. You will see that all the time you’re either filling a hole, tolerating a hole, or experiencing the real thing that was lost. This is going on all the time, at every moment. In this Work, the holes you deal with get bigger and bigger. First, you encounter the smaller holes, and then the bigger holes, until you get to the biggest hole of them all,

which is the loss of everything. It’s called death. When you die, you lose everything. So one of the last holes is the loss of the body itself. Physical death is like a big hole—a black, dark, empty hole with nothing in it. You try to fill that hole with the body. If you let the body go, at least in your consciousness—I don’t mean that you necessarily die…

Most people think they are their bodies. It is one of our deepest identifications. That is one reason why we have cravings for physical pleasures. I think the basis for the deepest craving, the craving for physical pleasure, is a hole. The hole is the cutting off…

Of course, nobody wants to believe that. “If I let go of that one, what will be left for me? If I don’t eat cookies twice a day, have sex every other day, and do this and that, how am I going to enjoy…

The Work is not about changing yourself. You do whatever you do in your life and just study what’s happening. That’s all you need to do: Study your life to understand it. One of the ways the Work was done in the past was to retire into a monastery and renounce everything. The point was not really to reject everything; it was an attempt to experience holes. In time, such practices took on a moralistic tone—the feeling that it’s bad to have certain kinds of external contact. The purpose of such retreats is to allow yourself to feel the holes and not fill them so you can see what they are all about. I remember a diagram by Meher Baba. In this diagram, he…

One more thing about the theory of holes. As I said, the holes get produced when you’re a child. When you’re a baby, you have no holes; you are complete when you are born. As you grow up, because of your interactions with your environment and certain difficulties you encounter, you get cut off from certain parts of yourself. Every time you get cut off from a part of you, a hole manifests. The holes then become full with the memory of the loss and the issues around the loss. After a while, you fill in the holes. What you fill the holes with are false feelings, ideas, beliefs about…

After a time, we think this is who we are. We think we are the fillers. The personality is trying to take the place of the real thing. That’s why we do a lot of work here on understanding our personalities. We study the development of our personality until we are finally able to experience the memory of the situation in which that particular hole formed. We can look at each…

S: I’ve noticed that lots of times when a man invalidates me, I’ll feel a hole. I don’t seem to be strong enough to stay with it before it fills up with panic and longing and self-devaluation, and soon I’m identifying with those feelings again. Would it be just a matter of practice to let myself feel the hole in a more direct way? AH: Yes. That’s what I’m saying. We work to tolerate those feelings, to stay with them and not try to fill the hole with something else. Sometimes the filling happens automatically. That is why the personality is called automatic. It is mechanical. After a while, everything happens automatically. You don’t even know you’re filling holes. S: How do you slow down the process? By simply seeing it? AH: Yes, by seeing it while you also have some awareness that you’re trying to fill a hole. It is helpful to resist filling the hole. You might take an aim: “For the next two weeks, I will not try to get approval from the outside,” or “Every time I see myself wanting to get approval from the outside, I will just…

The actions of the personality are two-pronged. One prong is always attempting to avoid the hole, to avoid pain, and to experience pleasure. This is automatic. The other prong of the personality is always attempting to fill the hole as soon as something happens to expose it. This is also automatic. The false personality is mechanical in the sense that after you lose an essential quality and…

So when you’re feeling low, you get somebody to praise you. What else can you do? Really, that’s what most people think. If you’re feeling unlovable, find somebody who likes you. People usually identify with these…

To begin to work on such a pattern, first you need to observe it happening over and over, and see that it doesn’t really work. Generally, people don’t come here until they have begun to see that their way doesn’t work. Most people believe in their strategy so completely that they think if they just get better at it and do it a few more years, it will work. Maybe they haven’t found the right person or the right situation yet. If they just make a little more money, things will…

I think this perspective gives us a particular perspective on society: The hole is taking over! Most of the time, society is attempting to fill holes. What do you think commercials are about? They appeal to your holes. They find a certain hole and try to give you the best filling for it. Good advertising agents are very effective with holes; they see which holes their product can fill, and they appeal to that hole. They make millions that way. S: Does advertising appeal to existing holes, or does it create new ones? AH: Your holes are created in your childhood. I don’t think advertisers can actually create new holes. They emphasize the existing holes and appeal to them in different ways. Take the need to be beautiful, for instance. Some women feel they are not beautiful. You can appeal to this deficiency in many ways. Advertising stimulates and

reinforces the hole-filling mechanism. It stimulates the desires that result from the holes. Inside your holes are pictures of what you think you want from the outside. Our unconscious is made of these images, and we keep looking for what’s in those pictures. Advertising works at the level of the craving. It says, “If you buy this product, you’ll be beautiful. If you buy that one, you’ll be happy, or prosperous, or immortal.” S: Why couldn’t advertising be used to stimulate your craving for Essence? AH: Because they wouldn’t make much money. S: Wouldn’t that be a powerful craving, the craving for Essence? AH: It’s the most powerful one. All religious systems and churches advertise that. They appeal on a deep level. Of course, very rarely can they actually lead people to Essence.

AH: Could be. There is a mechanism of avoiding your holes by projecting them outside. You say, “Other people are needy, and I’m going to help them.” This process of filling holes is not superficial or simple; it is very deep and subtle and goes to the roots of your being. It requires very deep work to undo the process of the personality, reverse it, and return to Essence.

Three: The Diamond Approach to the Work

The purpose of the Work, however, is not primarily to eliminate suffering. The desire to return to one’s true nature is an innate impulse that is there even in the absence of suffering. The more we are in touch with ourselves, the more we feel this innate desire to know and be who we really are. We want the freedom to live as we’re supposed to live, to fulfill all our potential.

It has also been assumed that very few people, only a small part of humanity, will attempt to take the path of returning, that fewer still will get anywhere, and that even fewer will actually complete the path. The path is perilous and, because of this, very few have attempted it, and very, very few have completed it. This is how it has been seen: that the nature of the Work itself is difficult and perilous. What we are now learning, however, is that, contrary to the assumptions of the past, it is not the nature of the Work to be so difficult. The reason it has seemed so up until now is primarily due to the fact that we have not had a certain kind of knowledge—what we call psychological knowledge. It has been assumed, for instance, that a person needs tremendous will and determination to be able to do the Work. The task does require tremendous will and determination, and in the past, the failure to use sufficient will was blamed on the student.

Due to repression, his will is not available. It has been cut off because of specific unconscious fears. Because the fears are unconscious, the conscious mind has no control over them. So when you push against the fears, they get stronger. The teacher may then tell the student to “surrender.” The student may know that surrender is the best thing but not know how to do this. The idea of surrendering brings terror. What do you mean, surrender? To the unconscious, surrender means loss, giving up part of oneself, disintegration, terrible things. It has also been said that very few people do the Work because most people will not commit themselves sufficiently. People don’t want to commit to the path because they’re afraid of losing their personal freedom. The teacher then blames the student for not being committed enough. She says, “You should be more committed,” or “You just don’t know what’s good for you.”

The unconscious fears and tensions that act as barriers to the experience of Essence and to the flow of physical and subtle energies are seen through the subtle senses as a certain kind of darkness, a block in the energy flow.

To summarize, we see that the effectiveness of Work schools has been limited by a lack of knowledge of the specific unconscious barriers that prevent us from experiencing the corresponding essential states that make up our true nature. The effectiveness of psychotherapy has been limited by its ignorance of essential states; resolutions occur on the levels of ego and emotions, which are not the levels on which we are ultimately satisfied.

Although it has always been known that Essence has many facets, most schools have emphasized one quality or cluster of qualities more than others. Some schools, for instance, emphasize Love. They use techniques to develop Love. They talk about Love. They pray. They chant. They worship the guru. They worship God. They surrender to Love. Other approaches emphasize service and work. They use the belly

centers more. Others emphasize Truth or the search for Truth. Others—Gurdjieff, for example—emphasized Will, making supreme efforts.

Whichever aspects of Essence are emphasized by a given method depends on the experience and character of the teacher or the originator of the method. Often a teacher will have had to work through a certain part of himself more deeply than other parts. The quality of Essence associated with that part may be very strong. Since it is through that quality that the teacher reached the understanding and embodiment of Essence, he develops his method of teaching around that quality. Very few schools have worked with the totality of Essence. This leads to an apparent discord between the different teachings. Mohammed speaks very differently from Jesus, and the Buddha tells it his way. Present teachers say different things. Some say surrender to God. Some look for the “blue pearl.” Some say to make a conscious effort, to look for your will. Some say the answer is the Void. Since most of these people don’t know that Essence has many qualities, each thinks the others are wrong. If you believe that great efforts of will are leading you to your essence, it will seem obvious to you that love will not work. Love may imply weakness, sentimentality. So in some groups, at least for a time, the will is developed at the cost of love because they appear incompatible.

The newborn baby is mainly in the state we call “the essence of the Essence,” a nondifferentiated state of unity. At about three months, the baby is in a “merged” state which is necessary for the development of the relationship with the mother. After the merged state, Strength develops, then Value, Joy, the Personal Essence, and so on. But because of interference from, and conflict with, the environment, this development is only partial. Every time there is pain or trauma, there is a lessening of a certain quality of Essence.

When a quality of Essence is blocked from a person’s experience, what is left in place of that quality is a sense of emptiness, a deficiency, a hole, as we saw in our discussion of the Theory of Holes.

Connected with the hole are the memories of the situations that brought the hurt and also the memory of what was lost. It is all there, but repressed. Since we do not consciously remember what happened or what we lost, we are left with the sense of emptiness and the false qualities or ideas we are trying to fill the hole with. In time, these holes accumulate. They are filled by various emotions and beliefs, and this material becomes the content of our identity, our personality.

In this Work, we see how different qualities of Essence are related to specific issues from the past. The relationships between the essential state, the hole that resulted from the loss of that state, the emotions and beliefs we create to fill the holes, and the conflicts that arise from the resulting false personality are all understood. These relationships and patterns are the same for every human being. When a person is working here in the group, I can tell by what issue he is working on which essential state and which deficiency are involved.

For instance, the loss of the Will is generally related to fears about castration as we discussed earlier. The loss of Strength is related to repression of anger and also fear of separation from mother. The loss of Compassion is always due to the suppression of hurt. Each hole is generally filled by the same thing, with variations depending on childhood history and the cultural and social circumstances of the person. Compassion, for instance, might be replaced by sentimentality and belief that one is a loving person. Intuition might be replaced by excessive ideation, and Strength by a show of being tough.

We understand that there is no separation between psychological issues and Essence; they are intertwined, woven together. This is why you cannot set to work to eliminate the false personality and, when that’s done, start experiencing and developing Essence. Without the retrieval of that which the personality was created to replace, personality simply cannot be dissolved.

We can use powerful psychological techniques to help us perceive and understand these conflicts, repressions, and patterns of resistance. We don’t need to push against the resistances, the dark spots; we simply shed light on them. After a while, they disintegrate. Then the passage is easy. We can flow through those places rather than have to go around them. Going around them or pushing through them is the hard way, the long way. Our way has more to do with understanding, with the precise diamond clarity.

Each school of psychology was developed by a person working on or through the dominant deficiencies that they perceived. Take Freud, for instance. What did he emphasize? First he perceived the existence of the unconscious. He saw the repressed material of the unconscious as consisting mostly of the aggressive force and the sexual libido. The aggressive force is what we call the Strength essence, and the libido is a combination of two aspects of Essence, the Strength and the Merging Love.

Reich was basically dealing with the quality of Pleasure and the deficiency that has to do with the loss of Pleasure, especially sexual pleasure. Reichian techniques are oriented toward showing a person the ways in which he’s not in touch with his body, showing him that he cannot tolerate Pleasure. Reichian work is designed to go into and through the barriers to Pleasure. What did Fritz Perls emphasize? To learn to be in the here and now with no explanation, no past. A clue to which hole Perls’ approach dealt with is the fact that he went to Japan to study with a Zen master. Why was he interested in Zen? Because the quality the Zen Buddhists deal with is the essence of completeness—that to be completely here and now is to see the true nature of things. This is what we call the aspect of Brilliancy, and what Zen people call the Buddha nature.

He must have had some of this quality of Brilliancy pulling him toward Zen and eventually toward his development of Gestalt Therapy, which has the same goal. But Zen was too hard, too slow. Only one in ten thousand students makes it through the Zen approach, and then only after sitting and staring at a wall ten hours a day for years. No excitement, nothing. If you can tolerate sitting for maybe twenty years and let all the resistances move through you, you might end up seeing the nature of the wall.

It is necessary to see that our search for understanding and truth are the most important things, for these things will eventually lead to the possibility of experiencing and developing all aspects of our Essence. It doesn’t work to try to develop one aspect of Essence without the others. We’re not trying, for instance, to develop love alone. We don’t want you to just be loving. If you have love but you have no will, your love will not be real. Or if you have will but no love, you will be powerful and strong, but without any idea of real humanity, enjoyment, or love. If you have love and will but no objective consciousness, then your love and your will may be directed toward the wrong things. Your actions will not be exact or appropriate. Only the development of all the qualities will enable us to become true, full human beings.

AH: Yes. Cutting through means seeing, understanding. It doesn’t mean using scissors. It is diamond perception, the clear, precise perception, that cuts through. The clear, focused diamond perception will help you see exactly what the issues in your life are. By seeing and understanding them, the issues will then fall away automatically as you see what is true and what is false.

And we have this very effective Diamond knowledge to remove the barriers with no detours, no going around, but going straight through to direct and complete understanding of ourselves. You have to see through all your conflicts, your fears, your guilt, your anger, your love, everything, so that in time, more and more essential qualities will be realized in

you. If you can do this work thoroughly and completely, in time you will be complete. No holes, just solid Essence.

Faith and…

Most people think that means they have to believe in God and Christ and the doctrines of the church. So in the beginning, faith is seen as belief. “I believe there is a God, so I have faith in God. I believe that Christ died to save humanity and reduce our suffering. I believe this because somebody I trust told me.” So faith, in its crudest form, is a belief or an outcome of a belief, a feeling you have because you believe something. This is not real faith. Real faith results not from belief but from real knowledge. When you really know because you have perceived directly, then you have real faith. So real faith means the direct knowing of that which you have faith in. When you have perceived God, then you have real faith. It’s unshakable because you have seen it, felt it. You may not be seeing it right now, but you have seen it at least once. So faith is belief in the existence of something that you have experienced or perceived directly. So you have the feeling or the emotion of faith. There is belief; there is faith that results from belief; there is faith that results from knowledge; and there is knowledge. When knowledge is there all the time, there is no need for faith. I don’t need…

In many religions, faith is important because the church leaders do not have precise, direct knowledge. They emphasize belief and…

at the heart or beginning of most religions, there was actual knowledge, the direct experience. In some religions like Buddhism, you don’t hear much about faith at all. They speak of it once in a while, but it’s not a big deal. They rely more on the immediate, direct…

you really know Essence and what it does, there is no need to trust it. Trust falls short of the complete, direct perception of knowledge. If I trust that something is going to come true, for example, I don’t completely know…

AH: They increase. Both your trust in Essence and your faith increase, but after a while it’s not a question of trust or faith. You just know as a direct, common-sense fact. There is no need to trust. You know that if you light the fire, it will be warm. Do you say you have faith that…

Most people who consider themselves to be religious depend on faith. This isn’t really any better than belief. Belief is mental faith, and faith is the emotional complement to belief.

When there’s complete knowledge and complete commitment, there’s complete union with what you want. Then you become it; you are that. So commitment becomes the embodiment of what you are committed

When the knowledge is complete, there are no barriers and no need for will. You don’t need to will your essence to be there; it’s just there.

Commitment is essentially dedication, bringing yourself closer to what you want to do. You use will to push yourself closer to what you want, to your aim. We say that at the essential level there is no such thing as faith; there is only knowledge. It is the same thing with commitment: In Essence, there is no such thing as commitment. There’s just being. When you are your essence, you are not committed to yourself; you are yourself.

When it gets really scary, your faith starts getting shaky because your faith is still not the faith of direct perception. Despite this, sometimes you manage to keep going through the fear. You take what is called a “leap of faith.” You leap and find out what is there. There might be snakes in the hole or something you’ve been searching for. You don’t know. That’s the leap of faith.

That something new is to jump into the abyss. One of the main functions of the teacher or the guide is to help you make that leap. When you are experiencing a certain hole, your guide might know that at the bottom of that abyss is a profound state or quality of Essence. Actually, the guide will most often be manifesting the quality beneath the abyss, which gives you more faith.

AH: Yes. If you are with somebody who is guiding you and you come to an abyss and it’s a matter of jumping or not jumping into the abyss, you will tend to leap if the guide is compassionate. If the compassion is not there, it will be very hard for you. So, when the teacher has compassion, it helps you to take the leap. You know the teacher doesn’t want to hurt you, that she wants what is best for you, and that she isn’t trying to trick you. If you doubt the teacher, it will be much more difficult for you to take the leap.

AH: That’s true. In a sense, everybody always has a very powerful, strong commitment. But the issue here is what they are committing to. How we use the energy of the instincts depends on whether the energy is free or distorted. If it is distorted, then a person will commit himself to something that is not essential. If your sexual instinct is distorted, you’re basically committed to your boyfriend’s penis. If your self-preservation instinct is distorted, you might be committed to money. Many people are committed to making money. You hear stories of someone who starts with nothing and ends up being a millionaire; that takes tremendous commitment. Obviously, the self-preservation instinct is there, but it is directed toward an aim that does not have to do with the truth of the instinct.

AH: For you, that is very easy. Whenever you see something, just ask yourself, “Is this true?” Look, and truth arises. Since you know what truth is, you can do that. Isn’t that simple? But before someone can recognize the truth, he or she needs to do all kinds of work. Everything you do here is to become clearer and clearer, until you are certain about what you experience. To do that, you must go through all the lies.

When you experience your value, for instance, you have absolute knowledge of your value. But you don’t have absolute knowledge about truth at that moment unless you become the part of Essence that has everything—the all-knowing, omniscient part. When you are experiencing that all-knowing part, then you can experience that you have total knowledge.

Essential knowing is the same as Essence because knowing Essence is being Essence. It is direct perception, direct embodiment of Essence. When Essence is not there, you try to remember it. However, the mind cannot reach Essence; it will try to remember Essence, but it cannot. Our normal, mental memory can’t remember the state of Essence. There is no way for the mind to do it.

AH: Yes. The knowledge of the mind is not the most real knowledge. The most real knowledge is the substance, the honey that the Sarmoun Darq collect. The content of the mind is information. Information can be about real knowledge, but it is not knowledge yet. Information contains memories, theories, descriptions, images, but real

knowledge is taste. What you taste, you know. If you do not taste, you do not know. But that doesn’t mean that if you tasted it before, you know it now. Yet if you can remember that you knew, and remember exactly what you knew, if you can remember it totally, Essence will no longer be a memory; it will be there now. So memory can help us get back to real knowledge. Memory can reach toward it and come very close. Then we must leap, and the essential knowledge will be there.

Five: Nobility and Suffering

If we look at it from the perspective of the superego or the personality, it will appear very complicated. We would never find an answer, because there are no answers from the perspective of personality. From the perspective of Essence, things are much simpler and clearer. Only the perspective of essential truth will give us the understanding we need for our work here.

What is nobility usually associated with? S: Kings. AH: Kings. What else? S: Graciousness. AH: Graciousness. What else? S: Being born into it. AH: Being born into it. Right.

From the perspective of Essence, nobility is to be and act from the truth of Essence, to be a person living in accord with the truth. It is understood that a person of noble character doesn’t let social or political pressures sway him. In that respect, to be noble is to not let your superego (the part of you that’s always judging you critically) or other people’s superegos sway you, but to act according to the real truth. There can be a kind of suffering involved in this way of living. We will discuss that shortly. For now, we see that if suffering is in the service of Essence, if it is part of seeing the truth and acting according to the truth, then the suffering is noble. If the suffering is because of your superego’s demands and expectations or because of any rejection of reality, it is not noble. It is ignoble. Let us look at the nature of ignoble suffering from the perspective of Essence. Suffering always arises when you are out of contact with Essence or seeking something other than Essence. If you value anything—husbands, wives, children, girlfriends, parents, jobs, money, sports, cars, anything at all—over what is true in you, there is suffering. Automatically, that movement outwards (seeking satisfaction from external reality) wounds you. It is a wound to your heart. It is not that the factors of our external lives or our human desires are antithetical to our Work. Like everything else, they can be respected and understood for what they are. But if they come before Essence, there will be suffering, pain, frustration, and anger. It is important to understand this; it is not easy to see things this way. When we begin to work on ourselves and to know our essence, we are usually not doing it for the sake of Essence itself, but with hopes for getting this or that—to become more beautiful, more loving, more “spiritual,” to get people to like us. You might believe that if you develop your essence, you’ll get a better mate or have more money. If you’re working from that perspective, who’s doing it? Who’s acting? It’s not Essence. It’s your unconscious, so it will automatically bring suffering. The posture itself is a posture of deficiency, which is always a posture of pain. The body will automatically contract, be wounded. It will lose its joy and happiness.

Most people say they want to feel good; they want to feel happy and have a good time. They go after illusory satisfactions that only increase their suffering. If a person really wants to be happy, then she should go about it in the right way—which is to value Essence over everything else. If you do that, you are happy. If you don’t, you are not. It’s that simple. If you continually say, “My boyfriend is the most important thing in my life; I’ll do anything not to lose him,” then you prefer him to your own essence and you will suffer.

Many of us prefer not to believe the principle that preferring anything over Essence leads to suffering. We can try to change this fact, to get around it, but it won’t change. It’s a law of nature, as basic as the law that rain falls downward. We may try to cheat this law, convincing ourselves that we are living for Essence when our real motivations are different. But you cannot cheat Essence; it will not work. One reason we don’t want to see this truth is that we often believe that if we choose to live in accordance with the truth of Essence, we will lose all the goodies of life that we’re attached to. We are so accustomed to looking at our lives from the perspective of getting things from the outside, we believe that if we cease to count on this pattern, we will lose them all. This is not so. In fact, if all your actions and desires, all the aspects of your life are subordinated to the truth of Essence, you can have what you want in your life. You can be famous, rich, sexy, have a family, a career, all these things. And you can enjoy them in the fullness of Essence, rather than always trying to get more and fearing the loss of what you have. There is no conflict between living the essential life and getting what you want in the world. In fact, when we are living according to our essence, it is possible finally to love our lives and the things in our lives.

The heart of joy, what we call the yellow heart or the bright sun, becomes sunny when it is turned toward Essence. When it is turned somewhere else, it is dark. It’s that simple. This doesn’t mean that we should feel bad because we don’t always turn our hearts toward Essence. That will close our hearts even more. What we can do is to see the truth of how we turn away from ourselves.

The more we are aligned with the truth, the more joy we will find, the more happiness, love, fulfillment, and satisfaction. We can become deeply content simply by being in harmony…

When you align yourself with the truth, then beauty, majesty, nobility, fullness, pleasure, joy, and love are all available to you. The more you see your essence, the more you see that what you wanted before was nothing. When you get deeper and deeper into your essence, you enter into the universal levels of essential reality where the beauty, fulfillment, and possibility are beyond human imagination. There is no way for the mind to grasp it. As you actualize your Personal Essence, you can bring that fullness into your life. Then everything in your life—your work, your job, your relationship with your lover, children, friends—can become filled with Essence rather than substituting for Essence. The point is to realize Essence in your life; that’s why we’re here. We’re not here to suffer. We’re not here just to work or raise children. We’re here to completely fulfill our potential. We are here to learn what it’s like to be really human. It is very rare to know what it’s like to be a complete, mature human being. Fulfilling desires that arise from the unconscious is not the same…

When we look at the deepest level, what is actually there? Existence, presence. Existence and presence are not the focus of the unconscious or the ego. But Essence knows what is there; Essence knows what is real. When you feel happy, it has nothing to do with what others think of you or what you think of yourself, whether you’re good or bad, big or small, sexy, ugly, smart, stupid. If you’re happy, you’re happy—that’s it. If you’re valuable, you’re valuable. Your being is unconditional. The unconscious, on the other hand, works on the basis that in order to feel certain ways, certain things have to happen. “If you love me, then I’ll be happy. If you don’t love me, then I’ll be miserable.” Everything is conditional. When happiness is essential, it’s not like that. If you love me, I’ll feel one kind of happiness; if you don’t, I’ll feel a different kind. It’s just a variation. If I am by myself in my room reading my book, that’s a certain kind of…

Being noble, living according to the truth, will get you to this place. You need to be willing to let go of everything—everything you have, everything you believe, every idea you have about yourself and everyone else, every feeling. Without this, you are filled with ideas, desires, and attachments instead of yourself. You must be willing to let go of them in order to see the truth. At the deeper stages, you have to let go of even your…

From this discussion, we can see that there is a kind of sacrifice to be made for the essential life, and this sacrifice, this putting the truth before…

Nobility is valuing the truth even if it includes suffering, valuing the truth over the distractions and external values we try to substitute for Essence. Thus nobility might involve a kind of suffering, but when you move toward the truth, the fulfillment and joy of Essence make you see that what you valued before was nothing.

We’re deeply conditioned to expect fulfillment, nourishment, and pleasure from the outside. It is one of our deepest conditionings. Does anyone know what the first conditioning was? What first predisposed you toward believing that you can get what you want from the outside?

Six: Value

AH: Yes, glorious presence. So there are lots of truths here. I will add some things now to bring it all together. There are three components to the question, “What is the value of the Work for you?” They are value, the Work, and you. What is value? What is the Work? And what are you? I can say it in one simple sentence: Value, the Work, and you are one thing. It’s all value. The Work is value, and you are value.

Earlier, you might have valued something because of a certain unconscious deficiency you feel. If you didn’t feel beautiful, for example, you might have placed a lot of value on having more beauty. I’m not saying that beauty is not valuable, but in this case, valuing it comes from a sense of deficiency. That’s how we usually approach value. Or perhaps we value the things that gave us pleasure in childhood.

Let’s go back to what some of you said. Jeff said that he used to value cars, motorcycles, his job; then he discovered that what he valued was a state of being. This is

something we rarely realize: What we value is the state of being itself. It is being, not some idea about who we are. Usually we value ourselves only when we approve of ourselves. “If I am beautiful, I am valuable.” “If somebody loves me, I’m valuable.” “If I’m smart, I’m valuable.”

To value that you exist, that you are. To value the fact of you. It is possible to value just being who you are, at any moment, and not to value yourself because you exist, but to know that existence itself is value.

Value is an aspect of Essence. It can be experienced as absolute value. Some of you have experienced this. Your value is independent of what your mind says. It is independent of what your superego or anybody else’s superego says. It is independent of what happens. Your value is independent of whether you are married or single, whether you have one car or ten cars or a bicycle, whether someone loves you or not, whether you’re happy or unhappy, dead or alive, sick or healthy. Value, existing as value, is separate from these things.

The Work itself, beyond and behind its methods and structures, is that Value, is Essence itself, because Essence is the source of the Work. The Work is not valuable; the Work is Value. In time you will see that you are not valuable; you are Value itself.

Each is like a whole universe, reflected in a different facet of a diamond. So just as Love and Truth are both Essence, each with different flavors, Love and Value reflect the same essential reality in different flavors.

Seven: Truth and Compassion

The Land of Truth A certain man believed that the ordinary waking life, as people know it, could not possibly be complete. He sought the real Teacher of the Age. He read many books and joined many circles, and he heard the words and witnessed the deeds of one master after another. He carried out the commands and spiritual exercises which seemed to him to be most attractive. He became elated with some of his experiences. At other times he was confused; and he had no idea at all of what his stage was, or where and when his search might end. This man was reviewing his behaviour one day when he suddenly found himself near the house of a certain sage of high repute. In the garden of that house he encountered Khidr, the secret guide who shows the way to Truth. Khidr took him to a place where he saw people in great distress and woe, and he asked who they were. “We are those who did not follow real teachings, who were not true to our undertakings, who revered self-appointed teachers,” they said. Then the man was taken by Khidr to a place where everyone was attractive and full of joy. He asked who they were. “We are those who did not follow the real Signs of the Way,” they said.

“But if you have ignored the Signs, how can you be happy?” asked the traveler. “Because we chose happiness instead of Truth,” said the people, “just as those who chose the self-appointed chose also misery.” “But is happiness not the ideal of man?” asked the man. “The goal of man is Truth. Truth is more than happiness. The man who has Truth can have whatever mood he wishes, or none,” they told him. “We have pretended that Truth is happiness, and happiness Truth, and people have believed us, therefore you, too, have until now imagined that happiness must be the same as Truth. But happiness makes you its prisoner, as does woe.” Then the man found himself back in the garden, with Khidr beside him. “I will grant you one desire,” said Khidr. “I wish to know why I have failed in my search and how I can succeed in it,” said the man. “You have all but wasted your life,” said Khidr, “because you have been a liar. Your lie has been in seeking personal gratification when you could have been seeking Truth.” “And yet I came to the point where I found you,” said the man, “and that is something which happens to hardly anyone at all.” “And you met me,” said Khidr, “because you had sufficient sincerity to desire Truth for its own sake, just for an instant. It was that sincerity, in that single instant, which made me answer your call.” Now the man felt an overwhelming desire to find Truth, even if he lost himself. Khidr, however, was starting to walk away, and the man began to run after him. “You may not follow me,” said Khidr, “because I am returning to the ordinary world, the world of lies, for that is where I have to be, if I am to do my work.” And when the man looked around him again, he realized that he was no longer in the garden of the sage, but standing in the Land of Truth. (Idries Shah, Thinkers of the East, pp. 66–67)

I keep rereading this story—just as I’ve read it to you many times—because it is the single most important truth we have to work with and because it is a truth that people keep forgetting. Not only is it the single most important truth, it is also the most practical truth, the most helpful…

As Khidr said, he lives in the ordinary world, what he calls “the world of lies” where everybody embraces their lies and turns away from the truth about themselves and others. We have a tendency to regard truth as our enemy, and we usually think that lies are our friends.…

It’s important to see the attitude we usually hold, which is that truth is our enemy. That’s why there are such things as avoidance, repression, and resistance. If we didn’t think truth was our enemy, we wouldn’t resist and repress our emotions; we wouldn’t try to avoid seeing the truth. But usually we aren’t aware of the fact that we reject the truth and fight it. If you can see that you resist truth, already one layer of the lie is removed. If you look at the work you’ve done in this group so far, it’s essentially uncovering…

AH: Yes, he told the truth. And that’s the real function of compassion. The point of compassion is not to eliminate suffering, but to lead a person to the truth so that she will be able to live the life of truth. This is an important fact that we tend to not see because our ideas about compassion are not accurate. Look for yourself. What kind of compassion have you believed in and acted from? For most of us, it’s obvious where our prejudice lies. Our compassion has not been on the side of truth; it has been on the side of feeling good. This is not the compassion of Essence; it is the compassion of emotions. It is understandable that it hurts to see someone hurting. You may also feel compassionate towards yourself when you are hurting; this compassion helps. So what is the relationship between hurt, truth and compassion? Compassion is a kind of healing agent that helps us tolerate the hurt of seeing the truth. The function of compassion in the Work is not to reduce hurt; its function is to

lead to the truth. Much of the time, the truth is painful or scary. Compassion makes it possible to tolerate that hurt and fear. It helps us persist in our search for truth. Truth will ultimately dissolve the hurt, but this is a by-product and not the major purpose of compassion. In fact, it is only when compassion is present that people allow themselves to see the truth. Where there is no compassion, there is no trust. If someone is compassionate toward you, you trust him enough to allow yourself to be vulnerable, to see the truth rather than reject it. The compassion doesn’t alleviate the pain; it makes the pain meaningful, makes it part of the truth, makes it tolerable.

Generally, we protect ourselves from pain and fear and from our unconscious to protect ourselves from the truths in our unconscious. This also “protects” us from the truth of who we are, from our Essence. Believing we are acting compassionately, we try to protect others from the same. But is that compassionate? We spend our lives trying to protect the people closest to us from the truth because we think they will be hurt. We also protect ourselves from the truth because we think we will hurt. We think it will be too much for us.

To get to Essence, you must work with true compassion, the door to the truth. It is not a matter of seeking misery or seeking happiness. As the story said, the point is the truth. It is amazing to look at our lives and see how much we act from the perspective of seeking happiness rather than truth, which is the perspective of emotional compassion. We can see, for instance, how we try to protect our parents from the truth of who we are. We may ask, “How can I be happy? My mother isn’t, so how can I be without making her feel more miserable?” or “How can I be strong if my father is sitting there being weak—won’t he feel humiliated?”

So there is a reciprocal relationship between truth and compassion, and there is a connection between these things and suffering. The suffering is not the point; suffering is something in between that we go through. From the perspective of Essence, it is irrelevant. The important part is truth—the truth about who we are—no matter how much hurt, suffering, and fear it takes to get there. Sometimes the pain is there so that the person will learn the truth.

What is motivating you is your desire to see the truth. Seeing the truth becomes fulfilling in itself; it seems to bring some subtle pleasure and joy. So you want to see the truth regardless of how difficult it is. So looking at this experience can take us closer to what truth is. It is no longer a question of what is a true statement or perception. There is something more. It is, in a sense, that the truth wants itself. When the truth is manifesting, you want it. Essence wants to realize itself, and the more truth there is, the more it is realized.

You are just attracted. That’s what is called “the love of truth for its own sake.” You want it not because you want to get rid of your fear, or to achieve this or that, but simply because you want to possess the truth. The truth itself is what you want. It is such a deep, compelling desire that when it is there, nothing can stand in its way. You might be in the middle of tremendous pain, but somehow the truth makes you go through it, and it’s fine.

between truth and compassion. They go together. Compassion leads to truth, truth to compassion. What makes us avoid either or both of them is usually pain. We want to feel good. We want to protect our beliefs, our ideas about who we are. We want to protect ourselves from seeing the truth about others. We all have these cherished beliefs about who we are,

who others are, how things are, how things are supposed to be. Seeing through these can bring fear and pain. But that is because we believe the lies. We think the lies are the truth because we don’t trust the truth. But the truth itself is the point, regardless of whether or not it accords with our beliefs.

Dedicating ourselves to seeing this truth and living according to it means going all the way. All the way to the knowledge that truth is truth, regardless of your situation, regardless of whether you like it or not. The fact that it scares you won’t make it false. What is, is. Who we are, the way reality is, that’s just the way it is. If you are compassionate toward yourself, you will let yourself see that truth. The Work and life itself are a matter of seeing the truth, knowing the truth, and being the truth. There is something about the life of truth, the life of Essence, the meaningfulness of it, the significance of it, the depth of it, the subtle, intrinsic joy and satisfaction of it that when you experience it, you don’t want anything else. You are willing to see through anything to have the truth. It is closer to who you are than anything else.

Eight: Trust

When there is no trust, it is hard to be present and vulnerable. What does vulnerable mean? Vulnerable means there is a delicate kind of openness. When you trust a situation, you have no fear of the situation. As we said earlier, that allows other fears to come up from the unconscious, so in that sense, you are vulnerable. But you are also at rest on some level. So we see that trust has to do with a kind of restfulness, a lack of tension, a lack of agitation. It has to do with relaxation, with rest in the mind, rest in the heart, rest in the solar plexus. Rest in the mind is connected with rest in the heart. Rest is the lack of a need to defend or protect. It is the ability to be, to have a carefree attitude about what’s happening in the moment. You don’t have to select or censor. The experience of the heart is of security; you can actually feel the trust. Your mind is feeling safe and restful.

When it is open, it is very much connected to the center in the middle of the brain. The two can be considered one center. The chest is the green, and the head is the blue. The green gives the sense of security in the heart. The blue gives the sense of security in the mind.

This person will tend to trust other people easily. Sometimes she will trust other people even though they are not trustworthy. You know how that is—when you trust someone and it turns out you were wrong in trusting them. That happens because the green center is open, but the head center has not opened to allow for objective trust. She has the ability to trust, but there is no wisdom, no discrimination in her trusting. So it’s possible to trust completely and be wrong. Your heart is open, but you are ignorant. If, in your childhood, you trusted people and your trust was always justified, you will tend to think you can trust everybody. So someone could come along and steal all your money because you trust unrealistically.

Objective trust has to do with truth. You know that the person is objective or is dedicated to truth. When you have trust in that person, you see that the person is truthful. Because of this trust, you can let yourself feel the hurt, even though you might not see for a while that what’s happening is good for you. You perceive truth. And that’s the deepest kind of trust because what you sense is something about the truth that transcends hurt or no hurt, feeling good or not feeling good.

In the beginning, people take compassion to mean the feeling of wanting to alleviate the person’s pain or take it away from them. A deeper level of compassion is taking action whether you feel inclined to or not. The third level of compassion could include hurting somebody or not taking their pain away when you see it. Sometimes they need the pain to learn something about themselves. They may need it to learn about compassion. If you take away people’s hurt, they won’t learn how to be compassionate. We also said the most objective compassion has to do with truth. Whether the person feels hurt or doesn’t feel hurt is immaterial. The point is truth, the golden truth. The real energy of compassion toward yourself, the real attitude of trust toward yourself transcends pain and pleasure. It’s truth. What you finally trust is the truth—the truth in yourself, in somebody else, or in the situation. Truth as such. Compassion has to be according to the truth and for the truth. That’s why some actions that come from the deeper level of compassion might not look compassionate to someone else or to the external world. They might even look cruel, yet they might be the most compassionate thing. Often what people want to do in such a case—to act in a way that looks compassionate—is really not compassionate. To exercise the deeper level of compassion, you have to be in touch with the truth.

NINE Essence Is the Life

Essence is the promise. Essence is the life. Essence is the fulfillment of all our deeper longings. Essence is the answer to all our fundamental questions, absolutely—no exceptions. This is such a fundamental point, yet at the same time, such a difficult point to understand. When you understand it, it is even more difficult to accept.

To be is to be free. To be is to be fulfilled. To be is to enjoy. Everything else, if it is valued more, will be a hindrance to your fulfillment and satisfaction. As I said, this is very hard to accept.

When I say this principle is absolute, I mean just that. It is absolute in the way a physical law is absolute. It has nothing to do with your opinions or your preferences. That’s the way reality is; it is the truth. But we try to hedge that truth, try to change it, try to show that it’s not so. What stops us from understanding and accepting this truth is lack of objectivity. We don’t see things as they are. That is the main obstacle—our lack of objective perception.

Projection is one of the main defenses we use to avoid seeing the truth inside us. Projection is usually seen in terms of negative emotions—hostility, anger, fear, jealousy, things like that. For instance, a paranoid person who appears to be scared of other people is not really scared of other people. He is angry and hostile. But instead of seeing the anger and hostility in himself, he sees it outside in other people. He thinks other people want to kill him, and so he is scared of them. The truth is that he actually has murderous feelings toward them and toward himself. That is projection, displacing what is inside you to the outside. Clearly, if you see something as outside that actually exists within you, you can’t be objective. Our projections determine many of our actions, our feelings, and even our life plans.

experience them or admit that you are feeling these things. Or you say, “Look at all these weaklings around me,” when it is you who are feeling weak. Since it is hard for you to feel that, you pretend you are tough and strong. Or you can project yourself onto your child, hoping that if she fulfills your dreams, you will be fulfilled. The roots of projection are so deep that we are usually convinced that our subjective beliefs are objective truth. “Of course people are out to get me! Can’t you tell? Look at their eyes! If they’re not trying to get me, how come when I was crossing a street yesterday a car almost hit me? How come the price of eggs went up just when I needed to buy two dozen?” We can always find such confirmations.

Here in the group, what we project is mostly the superego. Instead of feeling our own self-judgment and self-criticism, we believe others feel this way toward us. We think they are doing it to us;…

Projection is one of the first defense mechanisms developed in infancy. Its basis is what is called the “merged state.” The child is in what is called the “symbiotic stage”—between the ages of three months and nine months—when he does not experience himself as separate from his environment. He feels that he and his mother are one. This is called the “dual unity.” There is no differentiation between the infant and the mother. As far as the child is concerned, what the mother experiences and what he experiences are the same thing. In the symbiotic stage, if there is anger, there is no difference between the baby feeling the anger and the…

However, that early merged state, that state of being the same as the other, remains as the basis of projection. So when you feel angry, you may feel someone else is angry. The child is feeling angry, and he doesn’t know his mother is different from him, so he thinks she is feeling angry, or vice versa. The reason it is so hard to see through projection is that in the merged state, the mind has not developed enough to be aware of what is happening. The mind and the personality have not yet developed. So when you are projecting, you are acting at the pre-verbal, pre-conscious level. Your mind isn’t…

The negative merged state is the basis of our personality. It is our personality. The positive merged state is our essence. Because of the “dual unity” that happens in infancy, we associate our essence—along with all the positive qualities of love, value, fulfillment, satisfaction—with the merged state, the positive merging with another. That starts the big search, the search for the perfect merged state with the good mother who will give you love, value, approval, pleasure, satisfaction. So we see that we not only project our superego outside, we also project our essence. We tend to see what is best in us, outside.

Why do people fall in love? People fall in love because as they begin to expand, they start to get close to their essence. Then the unconscious, the personality, gets in the way. It is threatened by getting close to Essence. So you project your essence outside onto someone else and fall in love with it. What this means is that you still cannot tolerate your own expansion. If you think back to when you fell in love, it was at the height of a time of feeling good, of expansion. Suddenly, the right person shows up, and you’re in love.

Projection, displacing something onto an object or seeing something that doesn’t exist, is obviously for the purpose of defense. There are generally three levels or three varieties of projection in relation to the merged state, depending on the depth at which you’re operating, or at which the unconscious is functioning. The first level is that of the actual merged state where you can’t tell whether it’s you or somebody else; you experience one big unity that is all wonderful. That comes when the merged state itself is activated. The other person might be participating or not. In the merged state, it doesn’t matter. The other person might be sitting there, not feeling anything, while you are full of merging and believe that the other person is experiencing the same thing. That is the most fundamental, the deepest, level.

The second level comes a little bit later with more differentiation and separation. Instead of being completely merged, you project an aspect of yourself, such as value, onto somebody else. You see that value in someone else, and you want to merge with it. You project it and then you identify with it. This is the basis of what is called projective identification. This happens for negative affects too. You can project your fears onto someone else, then identify with the person and be afraid and share the person’s fears. This is the basis for a lot of what happens when you admire someone or have an idol or ideal person in your life. You idealize someone and then bathe in their sunlight. The sunlight is actually yours, but it’s hard for you to say that it’s yours, so you say, “Oh, here’s the sunlight; let me bathe in it. It’s wonderful!” Another form of projective identification involves projecting feelings and then unconsciously manipulating the other so they actually feel what you are projecting.

The third level is just projection. You don’t identify with the projection; you just project. “This person is very angry with me. It has nothing to do with me; it’s all his own anger.” You do this whether what is projected is something you want or don’t want. So depending on what level you’re operating from, you could be just projecting, in projective identification, or in the merged state. There could be negative affect, positive affect, or Essence.

There is another, more universal, reason why you don’t value your essence. We talk about how much your suffering resulted from the lack of love in your environment. Your environment wasn’t supportive, wasn’t loving, did not respond to you according to your needs, did not see your value. This is true. But we don’t see the fundamental thing that happened. The fundamental thing that happened, and the greatest calamity, was not that there was no love or support. The greater calamity, which was caused by that first calamity, is that you lost connection to your essence. That is much more important than whether your mother or father loved you. You lost your own love because of that. Because your value wasn’t seen, wasn’t responded to, you lost your connection with your own value. Because your joy was responded to with hostility or judgment or disapproval, you had to cut it off, and you lost it. Now you believe you

will have it only if you get approval. You think you will have value if somebody sees the value in you. Why should you care whether someone else approves or not? If your essence is going to depend on the approval or perception of other people, then it is not free.

The world we live in does not support this. People around us do not support this. There are pressures everywhere against this orientation. When you experience Essence, it needs to be protected. You have to find your own citadel, your own fortress. Your citadel has to do with the true discipline; it is the true discipline. There is an actual aspect of Essence that we call the citadel, which is the protection for your essence so that it will be preserved and develop and can be used for others. This is the right way of living. It has to be there. It’s not that you’ll experience your essence and automatically get out of the swamps. You have to take action, to live your life in accordance with the truth, the truth of your essence, the truth of who you are, your situation, what your limitations

How do you find the true discipline? How do you find your citadel? Essentially, true discipline means using will in the service of truth. It is the merging of will and truth. It means that the will of Essence is in service of the truth of Essence. It means you don’t use your will in the service of personality. This might vary from one person to another. No one can tell you, “You should wake up at five o’clock in the morning, meditate for two hours, drive to work by yourself, read a book about such-and-such during your lunch hour.” You have to find out by yourself what to do. You find your truth and use whatever will you’ve got to live according to that. It’s not just going to happen. You have to take the responsibility to actualize the truth. You need to use your truth, and you need to use your will in harmony with the truth. For that to happen, the will needs to be objective, and the truth needs to be objective.

TEN The Value of Struggling

What I have in mind is what we call “the struggle”—struggling with oneself. The usual orientation of people who want to work on themselves is that they want somebody to take the struggle away and give them something easier. The end result of this would be what Gurdjieff called the “stupid saint.” Another name for it is the “happy vegetable.” If you want to be a happy vegetable, you can find someone to take away your struggle and make everything easy for you. Many people here unconsciously act out a desire to be “saved” by a teacher. But if a teacher “saved” you, you would lose something. You would lose the value of struggle. One manifestation of the failure to understand the value of struggle is those students who come to me whenever they notice something is amiss in their lives. They think they should ask me about it. They don’t think about it for themselves; they don’t persevere. Instead, they come and ask me about it. “I have this problem in my life. What should I do?” What you should do is work on it on your own. You need to do all you can on your own to work with the issue, really struggle with it, deal with it, experience it, see everything you can about it. When you’ve done everything you can about the issue, when you’ve struggled with it so much that your mind can no longer do anything about it, then you can bring that burning issue here. Then you can ask the question.

If you haven’t really struggled with a question, you cannot digest the answer even if it is handed to you. The struggling is the same thing as the process of digestion.

People sometimes complain, “How come it’s so difficult? Why do I have so much trouble, so much pain?” It’s because you’re not looking at things from the right perspective. It’s true that you have pain. You see it as bad. But it is bad only if you think the whole thing is a problem. If you look at it from the perspective that this is a situation to learn from, then it is simply a chemical reaction. In a chemical laboratory,

you have all kinds of things: many different substances, Bunsen burners, instruments that are used for the processes of heating, evaporation, condensation, and coagulation. You could say, “I really don’t like this heating up part of the process. I’m going to get rid of it.” But if you get rid of it, how can you have a chemical reaction? Can you imagine having a chemical laboratory without fire in it? Without heat, nothing would happen.

I would be cruel and uncompassionate to take your struggle away from you. And you would be doing a disservice to…

of utmost value to you. Nobody else can do that for you. Struggle is the salt of the process. Without it, your life would be bland. Your achievements would be bland. You would not be able to value them. Without the salt, without the struggle, they would not be rooted in you, and you would not be able to embody them. Struggle is a friction inside you. That friction will make certain parts of you get sweeter and sweeter. I’m not talking about indulging in suffering. I’m not talking about causing pain for yourself. I’m talking about genuinely grappling with whatever situation is at hand, taking responsibility and really confronting it, whatever it is, and being there for whatever issues, whatever problems, whatever conflicts, whatever situations you have in your life. Completely embrace them; involve yourself…

So, a central value of the struggle is that it helps you know yourself. But it has other ramifications as well. One of them is that to struggle and grapple with an issue completely and wholeheartedly is the way to develop your belly center, your Kath. It is the way to ground your realization, your attainments. Then you will be like a tree with a very deep root system—strong, healthy, with deep roots that nourish it continually. A tree with shallow, weak roots can produce pretty and tasty fruit, but a wind can topple it. Also, your struggle in the Work is a genuine, total response to the deepest longings and…

and of your reality, and you will lead a life that is superficial, a life without depth, without roots that reach deeply into your true being. The more you struggle with an issue, the deeper you will be as a human being. If your problems are taken from you or if you discharge them quickly without really exploring and understanding…

Of course, it is very hard work to struggle with the issues of your life. But that work is what differentiates a baby essence from an adult essence. The value a baby embodies is something like amber, a light amber essence. Mature value is like a deep, thick, dark amber. There is no maturity without struggle. If you remain on the level of a baby, satisfied with a tit that provides, you continue to be a baby. You don’t grow up. A baby eventually grows into an adult by confronting his life and learning about himself through the process of struggling with the difficulties that are part of his life. When you have an issue in your life, the point is not to get rid of it; the point is to grow with it. The point is not just to resolve the issue; the point is to grow through resolving it. So, in many ways, you can see that maturity has to do with this growth, this broadening, this depth.

But if you tell me to give you the enzyme and you haven’t digested anything on your own, how are you going to absorb it? It’s like trying to absorb big lumps that haven’t been thoroughly chewed. No matter how much enzyme we put in, you’ll probably only get a stomach ache.

Perceiving your deficiencies, not defending against the hole and acting out your defenses, but seeing what you are identified with and allowing what is arising in you in that moment will create the friction that melts away impurities until what remains is what is true in you. As you continue this effort, a new capacity and maturity results.

The problematic situations in your life are not chance or haphazard. They are specifically yours, designed specifically for you by a part of you that loves you more than anything else. The part of you that loves you more than anything else has created roadblocks to lead you to yourself. Without something pricking you in the side, saying, “Look here! This way!” you are not going to go the right direction. The part of you that designed this loves you so much that it doesn’t want you to lose the chance. It will go to extreme measures to wake you up, and it will make you suffer greatly if you don’t listen. What else can it do? That is its purpose.

Struggling and wrestling is the process of understanding. It requires persistence and steadfastness. You wrestle with it until it finally says “I give up.” Ultimately, you reach the final understanding of the personality. When you see through to its source, its center—which is the experience called “Black Death”—you will recognize that the heart of this death is pure compassion.

ELEVEN Truth

I want to take a popular expression, one everyone has heard but few understand, and explore it. The expression is “The truth will set you free.” Why do people say that? People also say “Seek after truth” and call themselves “seekers after truth.” People idealize being honest, sincere, truthful. Why? What’s so wonderful about being truthful? Who said that being truthful is good? Well, I’m sure your mommy said so. Right? And they told you so at school. They told you not to lie. But why should that set you free? A lot of the time, telling the truth gets people into trouble. So what is this preoccupation with truth, truthfulness, honesty, sincerity? Where did all that come from? We want to find out whether it’s true that the truth will set you free. You’ve heard it for years, and you’ve believed it. It may appear that you still believe it, but you don’t really. If you really believed that the truth would set you free, it would have done so. If you really believed it, you would have sought after truth every second of your life as intensely as possible. You would have found it, and you would be free. So, clearly you don’t really believe that the truth will set you free, though you might pay lip service to the idea.

So what? What do we get from that?

S: The whole statement from Jesus is “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.”

You could say, for instance, that by understanding yourself, knowing the truth about what you experience and the reasons why, you will be free from those emotional reactions and conflicts. Right? You will be free from the things that bother you and weigh you down, the things that make you feel miserable.

We see that the more you know about yourself, the freer you are from your false personality. You have more capacity to cope with your emotional reactions and the situations in your life if you know the truth about them.

We could go into an elaborate discussion with case histories and show that it isn’t true that psychological knowledge ultimately sets people free. Knowing the psychological truth about yourself doesn’t set you free. You arrive at a measure of truth, a measure of freedom, but that’s it.

If it is true that the truth will set you free, why doesn’t ordinary perception give that same kind of freedom? The same truth is there. The insight, “Oh, that’s why I’m disappointed—there’s no snow today!” could instead happen as a normal perception. “What a disappointing day—no skiing.” Why does one perception have a sense of satisfaction and freedom and not the other? Why does insight carry more sense of certainty? It’s the same fact, the same truth. We’re seeing something here about insight, that the truth is not just a matter of knowing a certain fact. With an insight, there is an energetic sense in your mind and body that indicates more certainty and gives you a sense of freedom that is more satisfactory. It’s a more palpable, lived sense of freedom. As further insights occur, they go deeper, and the certainty also gets deeper. When this process continues for some time, you might feel there is something in the air, almost like a taste, a fragrance. You taste, sense, smell, and feel something almost sweet, satisfying. There is a sense of an intimate kind of closeness to yourself, along with a freedom of expansion. There’s a sense of satisfaction that goes with the experience of insight. It is more than just: “I’m free from this.” Every time you have a moment of insight, it’s as if you open the perfume bottle for a second and close it again. It’s as if you have smelled something—freedom, satisfaction, whatever. Having one insight after another is like opening the bottle many times. You can smell the aroma continuously.

If you go after the facts, the true facts, these will bring you to the taste of that satisfaction and freedom. It is not a moralistic thing that truth is good, and you will be rewarded if you are truthful. The certainty that comes with truth is itself a freedom, the freedom from doubt. Sometimes the fact itself might be extremely painful. The fact might be remembering that your father didn’t really love you. But even in the pain of that, there is satisfaction because you know the truth. You’re closer to yourself; you’re more you. What gives you that sense of satisfaction is not the fact itself. We usually think that, given time, a fact will set us free and we won’t have to react one way or another.

When truth is present, it is as if you are tasting something in your heart. There is a sense of satisfaction, a sense of warmth. That is the golden thread. That’s the truth that makes a statement true and meaningful. That’s what makes you know, “When I’m feeling this, I know I’m feeling this. I know I’m hurt because my mother abandoned me.” It’s not that somebody has logically proved it to you, but truth is there. There is a part of you that is truth. Looking at the facts will set free the part of you that is truth. That part of us is not the fact, has nothing to do with facts. It is what makes the fact true, and it is there regardless of what the facts are. The facts can change; they are always changing. There is an absolute truth that makes relative truth true. You know that the relative truth—that I am disappointed because I lost my job, that I don’t like the fact that there’s no snow today—is true because there is a scent of absolute truth in it. It is what gives you the conviction, the certainty. When you follow the thread of absolute truth, you come to the whole truth, which is nothing but the truth of you. It is Essence. That’s why you feel closer to yourself. That’s why you feel more satisfaction, more intimate with yourself. So the truth will set you free. There is a simple reason why seeing the truth, especially the truth about ourselves, leads us to this intimacy and satisfaction. We are generally kept apart from our true selves by false ideas about ourselves. Seeing the truth often involves seeing through these false ideas, allowing us to recognize the deeper reality which we are. Thus knowing the facts will free you from your emotional reactions, and being free from your emotional reactions will free that part of you that is truth. When you seek truth, you seek yourself. The truth will set you free by allowing you to be yourself.

In the search for truth, you have to start with reality. Reality is what is here at this particular moment. It’s Sunday, and I’m talking to you. This is the reality. It is also the truth, but it is a certain aspect of the truth. If you feel loving as you listen to me talk about truth, that is the reality of you at this moment. The truth is more what makes you feel loving right now. It’s not enough just to see that you feel loving; to get to the truth, you must see what makes you feel loving at this moment.

We need to see the reality in order to proceed to truth. Reality is the fragrance of truth, the result of the truth. The relationship of reality to truth is like the relationship of gold dust to solid gold.

We have seen that the way to truth is through reality. Reality points to an aspect of the truth. Truth is more than reality, but reality is what we see at the beginning: Things are as they are. We need to see them as they are, not as we want them to be. We need to know exactly what’s happening right now in the present situation. Knowing exactly how it is will automatically guide you deeper into the truth.

The truth is the essence of your heart. It is the real metal of your heart, the gold of the alchemists. And it’s the truth that doesn’t depend on any statement. When you experience yourself as truth, there is no statement that is true. You just are truth. “I am the truth.” When you are asked, “Who are you?” you reply, “I am the truth.” That’s why some of the Sufis call God “Al Haq.”