Chapter One Presence And Essence
N GENERAL, PEOPLE RARELY have, and never recognize as such, the experience of essence. So we will begin by looking at a related quality of experience that is more commonly felt and talked about: the quality of presence. The expression “I am present” is often used in spiritual and psychological circles, with an assumption that its meaning is understood. We ask: what does this expression mean? What does being present actually signify? Most of the time the expression is not used in a very definite or clear way; most people, if asked, are unable to explain what they mean by “present.” But there must be an actual condition that warrants using the expression “I am present.” What is that condition? The expression literally means that there is an “I” that is present at the time. Is this literal meaning accurate?
But sometimes the rose as a rose, as a presence in itself, is felt. If that experience is deep enough, our own presence is enhanced. “I seem to be more here,” the expression goes. But what is this presence? Is there really an “I” that is more present, or what exactly is it?
We want to understand what “more of us” means. More of what? What is the element that gives our experience this taste of presence?
We are also aware that some individuals have greater presence than others. We say, “He has more presence,” or “He’s an imposing presence.” But can we say what is really being referred to here? We are not referring to the quality of presence of mind, which is greater awareness. “Presence” itself is more than that. Presence also can be sensed at times of intense and deep emotion, when a person is fully feeling an emotional state, not controlling or inhibiting it, when he is involved wholeheartedly in the feeling, totally immersed in it in a free and spontaneous way without judgment or holding back. This usually happens only when the person feels totally justified in feeling the emotions.
Presence also can be sensed at times of intense and deep emotion, when a person is fully feeling an emotional state, not controlling or inhibiting it, when he is
involved wholeheartedly in the feeling, totally immersed in it in a free and spontaneous way without judgment or holding back. This usually happens only when the person feels totally justified in feeling the emotions.
Essence is the only thing in us that is directly aware of its own existence. Awareness of its existence is an intrinsic quality of essence.
The experience of essence as existence, the experience of “I am,” is not as if there is a subject that is the actor of existence. The “I” and the “am” are not separate. The “I am” is a unitary experience. The nature of the essence, of the real self, is existence. The “I” itself is existence.
for essence is the source, the power, and the stuff of poetry.
Essence is something much more fundamental, much more real, and much more substantial than visions. If the person is content with or even enamored of his visions, then he might never recognize his essence, his true nature.
Like insight, intuition can be about anything—the mind, other people’s personalities, relationships, and even our true nature, our essence. However, intuition itself is not essence. It can help us to know essence, but it is a process or a capacity, not an ontological existence. The phenomenon of intuition can be illuminated by considering Sigmund Freud’s statement that the unconscious knows everything. Our unconscious (in the sense that Freud used the term) knows everything about us and about others, but because it is unconscious, the information is not available to us. Sometimes, however, some of the content of the unconscious enters our consciousness in a way we can’t explain. So we call this kind of awareness intuition. The feeling of not knowing where the hunch or intuition came from indicates that it came from the unconscious, a part of the mind that we are not usually in contact with. That’s why intuition feels mysterious. Knowing this, we can now understand the various kinds of intuition. According to Freud, the unconscious contains all the information about our minds, everything that has ever happened to us, and nothing that we go through escapes being recorded in the unconscious. This explains the intuition we get about our minds and the workings of our personality.
Freud also mentions that the unconscious knows everything about the other person in any relationship, including his unconscious, but he doesn’t explain how. Obviously, this means that the unconscious has some kind of capacity to perceive things in others. We are then talking about empathy, telepathy, ESP, and so on. However, let’s put it in a simple way. Every part of the mind that the individual is not consciously in contact with is still present, but it is in the unconscious part of the mind. This includes not only the repressed part of the personality but everything that is repressed, including the essence and its capacities.
There is a deeper form of intuition that is the function of a certain aspect of essence. We referred to this aspect earlier as objective consciousness or the diamond body. We also called it the body of knowledge. This aspect has the capacity to take facts and data, all of the different kinds of understanding about a particular object or situation, and consider them all together, simultaneously and instantly. The reasoning mind is linear; it cannot consider too many facts at the same time to find a solution. It is limited in its capacity to hold information simultaneously. This is why computers are so valuable. They can consider a whole array of facts, all at the same time. This aspect of essence can do just that, not in a thought form but in a more lived and felt way.
A person who is this essence does not need to use the linear mind and rack his brain over certain important situations. The direct knowledge is just there, available. There is usually a certainty with it, a clarity and precision,
and also an aliveness that is very delicate and exquisite.
Although we can see here the fundamental difference between essence and emotion, it is usually not easy, especially for the beginner, to tell the difference because they feel similar. The situation is further complicated by the condition of modern Western man, who is very alienated from his emotions. Many people do not even experience their emotions, and the ones who can do not usually experience them deeply or fully. The felt emotions are usually so distorted and dominated by negativity that it takes a lot of hard work to start feeling them both deeply and in a balanced way. The people involved in many of the new growth movements and New Age therapies think of themselves as engaged in “personal growth,” but they are usually thinking of emotional growth. This is usually true even when people think they are pursuing “spiritual development.” Emotional satisfaction and positive emotional states are what they are actually seeking. And very often it is not emotional growth that they achieve but emotional discharge.
To clarify further the difference between spiritual experience and the experience of truth, let us look at the case of a seeker after essence who is having profound, expansive experiences and revelations. Suppose this person comes to the state of the opening of the heart, with the subsequent flow of feelings of love, and of various blissful states. This happens to many seekers who practice one of various meditation techniques and spiritual exercises.
This is all beautiful and good. In fact, it is necessary for inner development. But this is not yet essence. This kind of experience is what usually happens when one of the chakras in the body is activated. Chakra is an Indian word meaning “center” or “wheel.” The chakras are different centers of certain energies; the heart chakra is one of many. They are usually located at the main plexi of the nervous system and are very much linked with the nervous system and its processes. Their function is mainly the coordination of some basic physiological and autonomic discharge processes.
The drama and the flash are mostly the result of the emotional nature of the experience. Each chakra contains so many deep and intense emotions, which have been suppressed and stored up for many years, that when the chakra is activated the energies of all these dammed up emotions are liberated and flood the person’s consciousness. The deepest emotions in the heart are those of love and joy, and they flood out in all their intensity, producing beautiful lights, sensations, and ecstatic states.
The seeker can become addicted to this dimension of experience and stop there, aborting the process of essential development. This addicting characteristic of the chakra dimension can be seen in people who are addicted to high levels of excitement. The energy of excitement is the same energy that operates at the chakra level. Some people are even addicted to fear. They seek fear by putting themselves in dangerous situations. Watching horror movies is another way people enjoy the addiction to fear.
The heart chakra, like every other opened chakra level, functions as an entrance into a deeper realm, the realm of the essence. This realm is a whole universe, the universe of essence. Taking the experience of the heart chakra as the end is like standing at the door of this universe and never entering. It is true that the door is open, but the door is not the essential universe. The door is beautiful, colorful, and fascinating, but it is only the ornamented entryway to a realm that surpasses anything else
The first deeper level beyond the heart chakra might be the first essential experience. This is one of the centers that the Sufis call lataif. These centers are sometimes called “organs of perception.” In Ibn Arabi as in Sufism in general, the heart (qalb), is the organ which produces true knowledge, comprehensive intuition, the gnosis (ma’rifa) of God and the divine mysteries, in short the organ of everything connoted by the term “esoteric science” (ilm al-Batin). It is the organ of a perception which is both experience and intimate taste (dhawq)…
In spiritual literature, the word heart is sometimes used to denote the heart chakra and sometimes to denote the heart center, the latifa that is called akhfa, “the most hidden.” Sometimes it refers to another latifa, qalb, the one on the left side of chest. “The word qalb (heart) may be considered an anatomical localization of the organ which has to be awakened. Its position is where the pulsation of the physical heart is normally to be determined on the left breast.”2 But sometimes, some teachers, mostly Sufis, use the word heart to denote essence itself, the presence of true nature, in all of its facets.
This again is very tricky, because if a person doesn’t know essence, it is impossible to tell whether his action is selfish or selfless. This is because the emotional self acts mostly according to unconscious motivations. A person might think he is serving another, or humanity, or God, but very often he is serving an idea or ideal that is mainly determined by unconscious selfish concerns. A common example is the person who is always trying to be good, supposedly to serve God, but unconsciously he is trying to propitiate his superego, which he projects on his idea of God.
In essence there is no selfishness because there is no defensive separateness between oneself and others. When an action serves one’s essence, it automatically serves the essence of everybody else.
Discipline is a basic ingredient in almost all schools of inner development. This is for several reasons. One reason is that the emotional, false personality tends to act and behave in a haphazard way, mainly in whatever way seems to help avoid any unpleasant truth. So without discipline it will tend not to do the work necessary for inner development because this work is largely a process of confronting unpleasant truths, at least at the initial stages. Discipline will force one to confront, and not avoid, the unpleasant truths and sensations necessary for the work of inner development. Discipline is necessary for developing certain attitudes and capacities needed for the work on inner development.
There are schools of yoga, martial arts, sacred dance, movement methods, body and posture alignment, and so on. We will not go into detailed consideration of each of them but will content ourselves with some general remarks. The value of most of these systems has been amply demonstrated by the people involved in them. However, this does not mean they are necessarily useful for inner development or are expressions of it. Essence is such a deep phenomenon that a person can be very healthy physically, with seemingly graceful movements and perfect
posture, and still know not an iota about how to be essentially himself. In fact, many people who are yoga experts, accomplished in martial arts, wonderful dancers, movement professionals, or body therapists are actually using their accomplishments to hide from themselves the emptiness and the lack of the presence of essence in their bodies. Some of these systems were developed by people who actually felt the absence of their essential core and tried to compensate for the sense of deficiency with a system of movement or posture. Some of these systems are such a close imitation of what would be there if essence were present that most people get fascinated and captivated by the system’s beauty, elegance, logic, and power. This close resemblance can function, unfortunately, to impede the development of the essential core because of the placebo effect.
From this perspective we see that the best conditions for the body are resilience and flexibility. It is not a matter of a certain structure, alignment, or skill but of flexibility and openness, the absence of restricting contractions. The ideal condition is that the body can freely accommodate and express in its postures the essence in its various states and conditions. This is the freedom of the body. This freedom cannot be known unless the essence is there, embodied, present in our bodies. When this happens, then our posture and our movements radiate out from the presence of essence and are not determined by any programming coming from within or from without. This is the true freedom, joy, and pleasure of the body.
The life energy is then given different names and designations, depending on the system. In the Indian tradition there is mention of prana, kundalini, and shakti. In the Chinese tradition there is chi. In the West, Freud formulated the concept of libido, and later Wilhelm Reich discovered what he called the orgone. These are just a few. And of course there are the more well known electromagnetic, chemical, and biological energies that operate in the physical organism.
Essence is something fundamentally different, more substantial, and deeper than energy, whether it is electromagnetic, chemical, chi, prana, kundalini, shakti, libido, orgone, or whatever. However, all these energies must be experienced and freed for a person to be able to move into the realm of being, our essential and true nature. Processes and systems that use energies, like chi, kundalini, shakti, or any of the other energies, are useful for freeing the superficial layers of the organism so that the freed energies can be used for the inner work that will ultimately lead to the discovery and realization of essence.
The human organism has many levels or layers of energetic functioning, some of these interpenetrating the others. Most systems focus on one particular layer and use the energies of this layer for the work of inner development. A whole system is then formulated that describes and utilizes these particular energies, their centers, and routes in the body.
The Chinese tradition, on the other hand, deals with the acupuncture meridian system and with chi, which is the energy operating at this level. This level is slightly deeper than the chakra system, although in certain parts of the body it overlaps it. The chi is experienced as a softer, cushiony kind of energy, that is less electrical and denser than kundalini or shakti. The Sufi tradition uses the lataif system. This is somewhat deeper than either of the above energy systems. In fact, at this level it becomes more difficult to speak of energy. We can still use the term energy, but the lataif really operate with the lighter, more diluted forms of essence. We can say that the lataif level is the transition from the level of energy to the deeper level of essential presence.
In the body there is an overlap in some areas between the centers connected with the lataif and the other two systems. We discussed the relation between the heart chakra and the latifa (the singular form of lataif) of the heart center in the section on emotions. Another area of overlap is at the solar plexus. At this region there is a chakra connected to social interaction and the control of anxiety. In some sense it could be considered to be the “trapdoor” to the unconscious.
Reich’s concept of the orgone is really a general blanket term for many kinds of subtle energies. Reich discovered (really rediscovered) the existence of a subtle energy that is not electrical or chemical, which he believed to be the biological aspect of libido. He then saw it as universal and not just biological.
He seems to have believed that there is one subtle energy, which he called orgone. It is a great discovery, especially because it occurred in the West. However, if we go along with Reich and assume that there is only one subtle energy, then obviously we will tend to restrict our perception and so fail to experience the greater expansion that can lead to the experience of essence. Also, not discriminating between the various forms of energy can be limiting. For instance, sometimes essence is experienced by a person doing Reichian body work, but the therapist takes it to be orgone energy, and hence it is not identified. This aborts the essential development.
By personality we mean the usual identifications of the individual, his self-concept, which is sometimes called the false personality and which is called in spiritual parlance the ego.
Ego in this sense is not the same as the ego defined by Freud. There is an overlap between the two concepts, but they are definitely two different concepts. The Freudian ego, for instance, has the functions of perception, motility, reality testing, and so on. These functions are not included in the term ego as used in spiritual and work literature. This latter ego denotes mainly the identification of the individual that gives him the sense of self or identity.
Psychoanalytic ego psychology, and specifically its object relations theory, has formulated in a very useful way how this sense of self or ego identity develops. Basically, what is called a self-representation develops through the organization of the early experiences of the individual from smaller units into larger, more comprehensive ones. This happens concurrently with the development of object representation. Self- and object-representations are schemas that are enduring organizations, or structures, within the mind, which are the outcome of the several processes subsumed under the term organization—assimilation, accommodation, generalization, differentiation, and integration. These schemas change most rapidly over the first three or four years of life along with perceptual and cognitive development in general. They continue to be modified with subsequent developmental tasks and experiences, such as the assimilation of the changes of puberty into the self-representation. However, the basic structure of the self as a cohesive, integrated, and differentiated representation is laid down in the earliest years. So the self-representation (ego identity) depends on a particular structuring of all realms of experience into a cohesive whole. This implies the structuring of the contents of the mind, heart, and body experience into a specific, very stable, rigid organization. This, of course, will organize and structure the flow of all energies in the body, because “ultimately structure within the psyche comes down to organization within the central nervous system.”7 The resultant sense of psychological identity is very much adhered to and defended by the individual as the most precious and absolutely necessary possession and attainment.
This is tantamount to the personality allowing itself to die. In fact this event, or more accurately the death of the personality’s belief in itself as the real thing, is the exact condition necessary for the realization of essence, for essence to become the center of our existence.
To preserve its cohesion and its position as the center of our life, the false personality will do all kinds of things to throw dust in our eyes. One of these maneuvers, in fact its most fundamental characteristic, is identification with the contents of our minds, hearts, and bodies. These areas are within ego’s realm, and it is master there. So it will be quick to assert, “I’ve got it—the real truth at last.” Although it may make changes within its realm, it will try to keep the particular structure of the ego, and at deeper levels it will stick to the familiar fields of experience. When we get to the pure subtle energies, it will naturally make its most vehement effort to keep us at that level of experience, for if we go beyond that level to the realm of essence, then its structure, its very foundation, and the very reason for its customary mode of existence will start crumbling. The anxieties and fears encountered at this point are enormous, all-pervasive, and subtle. The individual will want to stop, at the same time congratulating himself, of course, for having arrived.
The individual will want to stop, at the same time congratulating himself, of course, for having arrived.
we have seen, the personality is a certain structure, more or less rigid, that organizes our experience under the aegis of a sense of identity. This psychic structure is based on the process of identification. When a person believes he is an angry person, he is identified with anger. He cannot see himself as separate from the anger. The personality is nothing but a particular organization of very basic identifications of early childhood, or as Freud puts it, “The ego is formed to a great extent out of identifications which take the place of abandoned cathexes by the id.”8
The final outcome of the process of disidentification is the experience of the dissolution of the psychic structure or self-image. This is the experience of space, of what is sometimes called the void—when self-image is dissolved, the person will experience the loss of boundaries, both physical and mental. The nature of the mind is then revealed as an emptiness, a void, an immaculately empty space. The void and the absence of the identifications that form the psychic structure are the same thing. There are various depths and levels of empty space. We can say that the beginning of the void is the absence of identification with the self-image. There is self-image but there is no identification with it. What results is the inner sense of expansion and spaciousness. Then, at a deeper level, the self-image is gone, dissolved. There is only the experience of empty open space, which is boundless, clear, and crisp. The focus is not on the content of the mind but on the spacious emptiness that is its nature. However, this is not yet the deepest level. There might still be identification with an image, but unconsciously. Parts of the self-image might remain in the unconscious. These will surface, in time, and the experience of space will be lost. Disidentifying with these aspects of the self-image until they dissolve will deepen the experience of space.
The nature of the mind is then revealed as an emptiness, a void, an immaculately empty space.
Many authors on inner development write about the void, or ego death, as if it were one definite experience that ends the ego identity once and for all. This is false and misleading. Ego death is a repeated, and in time a continual, experience. The void is a repeated and deepening perception. Writing about it as if it were one definitive experience that will completely end the individual’s identification, and the accompanying suffering, in one shot is not only inaccurate, it is irresponsible and cruel. It will prejudice the student of inner development to seek a perfection or a kind of completeness that is unrealistic and will only add to the attachment to the identifications and to the already existing suffering.
Ego death is a repeated, and in time a continual, experience. The void is a repeated and deepening perception.
Every realized human being continues to work on inner development. There is no end to the development and unfolding of essence.
In the same book, quoting a Tibetan Buddhist treatise, he says: “All sentient beings possess the nature of Buddhahood, continuously present since its beginningless beginning. What is this nature of Buddhahood? It is the existential fact and presence of mind; since it is intrinsically pure [it is] the beginningless time-encompassing dimension of Being (Dharmadhatu) unbroken, impartial, radiant in itself, as the pristine existential experience of Being (Dharmakaya).”11
When we say essence is within us, we do not mean it is contained within our body the way a liquid is contained in a bowl. This will make essence and the body of the same nature, physical matter. However, we can come close to understanding the relation between our organism and essence by seeing the relationship between our body and space. It is in the nature of physical space that it can coexist with the body. The body occupies a region of space, but this is not like the liquid in the bowl. The body does not displace space. The body and space overlap and occupy the same place. This is because they exist in different dimensions. Physical space and physical matter can occupy the same location because they are two different dimensions of existence. It is the same with essence and the body. Essence is within us just as space is within us. It is on a different dimension from the body. Essence is a different order of existence from the body, and it is in this sense that it is within us. Yet this analogy fails to do justice to the actual relationship between essence and the body. Because we usually think of space as a nonexistence, we find it easy to imagine space and the body coexisting in the same location. However, essence is not a nonexistence. It is not empty the way physical space is. It is, on the contrary, a fullness. It is something much more substantial than space. It has a substantiality similar to the physical body but in a different dimension. In fact, essence is experienced as a kind of a substance but on a different order of existence from physical matter. Idries Shah, the Sufi author, describing the essential aspect of spirit, states: “According to Sufism, what is generally referred to in religious terminology as the Spirit (el ruh) is a substance, with physical characteristics, a subtle body (jism-i-latif).”16
Essence is experienced as a substance, a material. It has characteristics such as density, viscosity, texture, taste, and so on, but at the same time it
is not a physical substance. It belongs to a different realm of existence. That is why it is called subtle. Some authors call it subtle matter, to distinguish it from the ordinary physical matter. “Here the importance is felt (as we have been reminded many times) of the world of subtle matter, mundus imaginalis (alam al-mithal), in the cosmology professed by all our Spiritual seekers. ‘Subtle matter’ is the esoteric Heavens of the heart, its ‘astral mass’ and so forth.”17 It is not subtle in the sense that a thought is subtle compared to the body. It can be just as substantial as the body, as dense as solid gold. It is this truth of essence, its substantiality, that is unexpected by the ordinary person. This is the unlikelihood that makes it mysterious and hidden. El-Ghazali, the famous Sufi of the Middle Ages, using the words heart, spirit, and soul…
Why is the word substance used? The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines it as “la: essential nature: ESSENCE b: fundamental or characteristic part or quality, c: Christian Science: SPIRIT. 2a: ultimate reality…
Most likely, the origin of the expression “He has substance” is the actual knowledge of the nature of a human being as a kind of substance that gives depth and significance. When an individual is in touch with his essence, he literally has substance. The expression here is not figurative, although it is usually used…
This perception and understanding of essence as substance is so significant and so fundamental that in most instances it makes the whole difference between self-realization and its absence. It is of utmost importance to remember that the word substance is used here literally and not figuratively or metaphorically. This understanding has monumental significance for self-realization and enlightenment. For the individual who recognizes essence as a substance with physical characteristics, self-realization will happen naturally and spontaneously. When essence is recognized, it starts to live and function, and this will bring about the whole essential development because it is the nature of essence to move to deeper and deeper realms. That is why Sufism, for instance, is understood as the gathering and collection of a certain baraka (blessing) or substance. “In neutral phraseology it could be said that the Sufis believe that Sufic activity in producing a Complete Man accumulates a force (substance) which itself is capable of alchemicalizing a lesser individual.”19
Idries Shah puts it in the words of Israil of Bokhara: “The teaching is like air.
“Man dwells in it, but cannot realize by real feeling that but for it he would be dead… “He may become aware of it, and profit more from it, by realizing that it is a common substance treated with such heedlessness that nobody observes its presence.”20 The substance of essence is equated here with the teaching, for any real teaching is nothing but the exterior manifestation of essence.
The fact of essence as substance, of the knowledge as substance, is the basis of the Sarmoun brotherhood, which some people regard as the heart and inner source of the Sufi orders. “There are many legends about the Sarmoun Darqauh (‘Court of the Bees’) and one of them is this. True Knowledge, it is asserted, exists as a positive commodity, like the honey of a bee. Like honey, it can be accumulated.”22 The knowledge that is collected like honey is the substance of essence itself. It is the source of true knowledge, and it is the knowledge itself. Or we can say it is the body of knowledge.
The body has many substances and fluids flowing in it; thus, when essence is experienced, it might not be recognized as having a different nature. It can be mistaken for just another substance of the physical organism, such as the blood or the cerebrospinal fluid, for instance. But most commonly it is mistaken for a feeling or a flow of sensations or energy, or “streaming” as the Reichians say. Of course, this error is supported by the already existing preconception that there is no such thing as a substance that is not physical matter.
We believe it is time to make this truth as clear, as precise, and as available as possible. It can save many people much hardship and waste of time and effort. There is no need for this knowledge to continue to be secret and esoteric, especially now that there is a tremendous need and thirst for it. We can use understanding and clarity to safeguard against misusing it.
Each essential aspect or
facet has a psychological constellation associated with it. This association is universal to all people.
Sri Aurobindo, who was born in Calcutta on August 15, 1872. He very clearly understood that this substance is the essence, the agent of transformation, and the truth. He saw it as a force with a mass, which descends from the head at the first encounter. That is why he called it the descending force: To begin with, when peace is relatively established in the mind, failing absolute silence, and when our aspiration or our need has grown, has become constant, piercing, like a hole within, we observe a first phenomena which has incalculable consequences for all the rest of our yoga. We feel around the head and more particularly in the nape of the neck, an unusual pressure which may give the sensation of a false headache. At the beginning we can scarcely endure it for long and shake it off, we seek distraction, we “think of something else.” Gradually this pressure takes a more distinct form and we feel a veritable current which descends—a current of force not like an unpleasant electric current but rather like a fluid mass. We find then that the “pressure” or the false headache at the start was caused simply by our resistance to the descent of the Force, and that the only thing to do is not to
obstruct the passage (that is, block the current in the head) but to let it descend into the strata of our being from top to bottom. This current at first is quite spasmodic, irregular, and a slight conscious effort is necessary to get reconnected with it when it is blurred; then it becomes continuous, natural, automatic, and it gives the very pleasant sensation of a fresh energy, like another breath more ample than that of our lungs, which envelops us, bathes us, lightens us and at the same time fills us with solidity.
This aspect of essence, which the Dalai Lama calls subtle consciousness, subtle air, subtle energy, subtle mind, subtle body, and clear light is an aspect of essence connected with the state of awakening. We call it clear essence or the awake essence. This quality of clarity and awakeness is characteristic of Buddhism in general. This is contrasted with the blue consciousness of Muktananda, which is more characteristic of samadhi or absorption. This shows the main difference of emphasis between Buddhism and Hinduism: Buddhism emphasizes awakening, and Hinduism emphasizes samadhi (absorption), as ways toward enlightenment. Both of these qualities are seen
as consciousness because they are aspects of essence corresponding to the centers of the head. The heart centers will manifest essence in different aspects, which are those of love. Buddhism is aware of the heart qualities as essential substances. This knowledge is used in some of their tantric practices, as when they mention amrita, or nectar, the nectar of the gods.
In Tibetan Yoga, Evans-Wentz describes many of the Tibetan Buddhist practices. In one of the practices, the yoga of non-ego, he describes how all manifestations are transmuted into amrita, the drink of the gods. After giving certain mantras, he gives the instructions to the yogin: “Repeat the above mantras several times and think that thereby the impurities [of the body offered in the mystic sacrifice] have been purged away and the offering as a whole hath been transmuted into the amrita and that the amrita has been enclosed into universe-filling quantities [for the good of all beings].”33
A large part of Tibetan Buddhism is formulated in an alchemical language, indicating that it deals with subtle substances. The word for essential substance, bodhi-citta, is translated sometimes as the elixir of enlightenment and sometimes as the mind of enlightenment, or the thought of enlightenment. Although Buddhism does not single out the substantial nature of bodhi-citta, it is usually described as a substance with physical characteristics. The following passage, describing the final phase of the
famous yoga of the inner fire (Tum-mo), illustrates the substantial nature of bodhi-citta: This is demonstrated by the notion that in the moment in which the “A” and the “HAM” unite in the word-symbol “AHAM,” it dissolves; because in the heat of the flaming “A” the “HAM” is melted and flows down as the Elixir of Enlightenment (skt: bodhi-citta; Tib: byan-chub-sems) into all psychic centers of the body, “until not even the smallest part of it remains unpervaded.”35 This practice is specifically for the realization of the essential substance. The substantiality of bodhi-citta is not emphasized, probably so as not to encourage attachment, which would inhibit the movement to enlightenment.
Describing the symbols of alchemy, Lama Govinda writes: The “Philosopher’s Stone” is one of these invisible symbols, and perhaps one of the most interesting and mysterious, because it has given rise to many visible symbols, great thoughts and discoveries in the realms of philosophy and science. The eternal
vision behind it, is that of the prima materia, the original substance, the ultimate principle of the world. According to this idea, all existing elements or phenomena are only variations of the same force or substance, which can be restored to its purity by reducing and dissolving the manifold qualities which have imposed themselves upon it through differentiation and subsequent specialization. Therefore, he who succeeds in penetrating to the purity of its undifferentiated primordial form, has gained the key to the secret of all creative power, which is based on the mutability of all elements and phenomena.
Discussing the philosopher’s stone of Buddhism as mani, he writes: He who possesses this shining jewel overcomes death and rebirth, and gains immortality and liberation. But this jewel cannot be found anywhere except in the lotus (padma) of one’s own heart. Here mani is indeed the philosopher’s stone, the cinta-mani, the wish-granting jewel of innumerable Buddhist legends, which in Tibet until the present day stands in the centre of folklore and religious poetry. In later forms of Buddhism the idea of the jewel took the form of the Diamond Sceptre, the Vajra, and became as such the most important symbol for the transcendental qualities of Buddhism. The vajra is regarded as the symbol of highest spiritual power which is irresistible and invincible. It is therefore compared to the diamond, which is capable of cutting asunder any other substance; but which itself cannot be cut by anything. Likewise the properties of preciousness—nay, of supreme value—of changelessness, purity and clarity, were further reasons why in Buddhism the vajra was equated with the diamond. This is expressed in such terms as “Diamond Throne” (vajrasana), for the place on which the Buddha attained enlightenment, “Diamond Saw” (vajrac-chedika) for one of the most profound philosophical scriptures of the Mahayana, which ends with the words: “This sacred exposition shall be known as Vajracchedika-prajna-paramita-sutra—because it is hard and sharp like a diamond, cutting off all arbitrary conceptions and leading to the other shore of “Enlightenment.” The schools of Buddhism which placed this teaching in the centre of their religious life and thought are therefore known under the collective term “Vajrayana,” the Diamond Vehicle.
We see here Lama Govinda speaking of essence, the prima materia, in terms of the elixir of life, or the philosopher’s stone of alchemy. He refers to the vajra, the wish-fulfilling gem, as what leads to enlightenment.
The deep truth of substantiality is kept secret, yet the terms plainly describe what is experienced.
The diamond (vajra) is another dimension of essence, just as the pearl is a dimension of essence. It reflects the Buddhist emphasis on the mind. It is the essence in the objective, impersonal aspects, whereas the pearl expresses the essence in its personal (in contrast to impersonal) aspects. This is another of the main differences between Buddhism and Hinduism.
exists in the physical universe has its inner counterpart, and the physical object is not necessarily taken to be more real than the inner one. This is expressed in the Emerald Tablet, ascribed to Hermes, the Father of Western alchemy, which says, “What is above is like what is below. What is below is like what is above.”
The human organism is a miniature universe. This is true in so many ways that most people would be completely astounded if they were to see this reality for themselves. The outsider can think of alchemical language only as symbolic, because this is easier to accept than the actual truth of alchemy.
This makes most books about alchemy full of contradictions, which in turn makes it almost useless, if not completely misleading,
I can only stand in deepest awe and admiration before the depths and heights of the soul whose world beyond space hides an immeasurable richness of images, which millions of years of living have stored up and condensed into organic material. My conscious mind is like an eye which perceives the furthermost spaces; but the psychic non-ego is that which fills this space in a sense beyond space. These images are not pale shadows, but powerful and effective conditions of the soul which we can only misunderstand but can never rob of their power by denying them.
So the difficulty with language in terms of essence is not in describing it but in communicating it. This is important to understand, so that the interested person will not be oriented toward something vague, general, imprecise, and inaccessible. The experience of essence is very clear, very precise, and very definite. In fact, it is much more definite and precise an experience than that of a thought or an emotion. Of course, language cannot capture everything about essence. We cannot describe essence in all of its characteristics and nuances. But its experience can be communicated to somebody who is familiar with it or close to the experience.
In certain experiences, especially in those that do not involve the presence of the discriminating consciousness, description becomes impossible because there is no conceptual activity going on.
Still another reason is that some systems are based on only one aspect of essence, which is emphasized and seen as the real truth or the only reality, ignoring other aspects.
This development is seen as a transformation of essential substance from one aspect to another, until they are all realized. Essential transformation is, in other words, transubstantiation:
In Buddhism, the Tibetan Vajrayana schools acknowledge and use this fact, for instance, in their concept of the Buddha families, called the “Dhyani-Buddhas”: The forms in which the Dhyani-Buddhas appear in the creative phase of inner vision in the process of meditation, have been compared by us with the different colors into which the rays of the sun are separated, when passing through a prism, thus revealing in each color a particular quality of light. This comparison is all the more adequate, as colors play an important role in the appearances of the Dhyani-Buddhas. Their colors indicate certain properties and spiritual associations, which to the initiate are as significant and meaningful as notes to the musically trained. They convey the particular vibration characteristic for each aspect of transcendental knowledge or Wisdom, which in the realm of sound is expressed by the corresponding vibration of the mantra, in the realm of corporeality by the corresponding gesture or mudra, and in the innermost realm by the corresponding spiritual attitude. Other systems, for instance those originating from the Judeo-Christian traditions, use the idea of angels to denote essential aspects.
Their colors indicate certain properties and spiritual associations, which to the initiate are as significant and meaningful as notes to the musically trained.
use the idea of angels to denote essential aspects.
These essential aspects are absolute in the sense that they cannot be reduced to anything else. Truth is always truth and always feels the same. In other words, regardless of how much the person changes, truth still retains its specific substantial characteristics. This permanently absolute aspect of truth remains the same for every human being. Whenever it is experienced by anyone, it is experienced as the same thing. It is universal truth. In other words, its substantial characteristics of texture, taste, color, density, and so on are invariant for…
Take clear water, for example. Imagine that this water is self-aware, that each molecule is aware of itself and of its own energy and excitation. Imagine now that you are this aware substance, the water. This is close to an experience of essential substance. Of course, this is hard to imagine for someone who does not know essence. And the essential experience is much more than this. Essence is not alive; it is aliveness. It is not aware; it is awareness. It does not have the…
Essence is not alive; it is aliveness. It is not aware; it is awareness. It does not have the quality of existence; it is existence. It is not loving; it is love. It is not joyful; it is joy. It is not true; it is truth.
Essence is like packed, condensed, concentrated, completely pure life. It is…
The experience of essential substance can have such a depth, such a richness, such a realness, such a meaningfulness, and such an impact on our minds that some people actually get dizzy, unable to take the impact directly. It is not experienced as something alien, distant, or neutral, like a physical object or an idea. No, we experience it as that which is most intimately ourselves. It is most deeply our nature, and it is the most precious and most beautiful center of us. It is our significance, our meaning, our nature, our identity. It…
No, we experience it as that which is most intimately ourselves.
Essential substance is so beautiful and magnificent that no imagination can conceive of its beauty, and no poetry can convey its magnificence. The way it moves us and teaches us is beyond the wildest dreams and imaginations of humanity. Its potentialities are staggering, its creativity is boundless, its depth is endless, and its intelligence is limitless. It…
It is actually our human essence. It is who we are: our very beingness. We are to be this essence, to…
Essence is gradually lost or covered up (veiled from our perception) as the personality develops. We tend to identify more and more with the personality that develops in response to our environment. By the end we forget that we even had essence. We end with the experience that there is only our personality, and that we are that personality, as if it always had been thus.
There is an interplay, a dance, between the various aspects, depending on the situation, the activity, the time, and so on.
Because essence has various aspects, and different aspects dominate at different times and have different functions, essence is lost aspect by aspect. It is true that essence as a whole is gradually lost as the personality develops, but we see within this overall process many specific processes, when various aspects of essence go through varying vicissitudes until they are finally lost. Each aspect has its own process and goes through its own vicissitudes, until it is finally buried. The total of all of these smaller processes make up the whole bigger process of the loss of essence.
The point we want to make here, which no other system or tradition has emphasized, is that although essence as a whole goes through a process of dimming and eventual loss, specific essential aspects have different processes of development and varying vicissitudes. The environment affects essence as a whole, but it affects the different aspects differently. The aspect of the child’s environment that finally shuts down the will might be different from the aspect that shuts down joy, for instance. This understanding of the loss of essence is of paramount importance when it comes to the question of techniques for retrieval of essence, as we will show in the next chapter. Of course, ultimately, all aspects of essence must be veiled for some of them to be unconscious. If some aspects remain in the consciousness, they will tend to bring out other aspects spontaneously, except perhaps in instances of severe dissociation and splitting, which are the causes of severe mental pathologies.
The ego still needs the experience of gratifying symbiotic union for its wavering and fragile cohesion. To let itself feel fully the experience of loss of the merging essence, which is to the child’s mind the complete loss of the “good mother,” will be too shattering. The child still experiences the need for the “good mother” for his very survival, both physical and psychological, so really feeling the loss will bring in a great anxiety: the fear of total annihilation and dissolution. Thus, the child learns not to feel the loss and the consequent emptiness. He learns to fill the emptiness, to cover it up, to bury it. He not only relegates it to the unconscious, he actually fills it with all kinds of emotions, beliefs, dreams, and fantasies. There are two main ways a child can fill this hole, the absence of the merging essence. He either denies its existence completely and fantasizes the presence of the absent quality (here seen as the presence of the gratifying symbiotic union with mother), or he adopts attitudes, traits, mannerisms, dreams, and fantasies that are designed to regain the lost part. These are really attempts to regain the gratifying symbiotic unity with the mother. In the first case, he manufactures a false quality; in the second, he tries to get the merging by developing certain parts of his personality. Usually a child combines both strategies in differing proportions. These attempts are designed to fill the hole, the lack resulting from the loss of the merging essence. The filler is nothing but parts of the personality. It is what the ego
psychologists call self-representations.
We are not saying that all self-representations that make up the ego identity are attempts to fill this hole; some of the self-representations do not perform this function. But we are saying that what fills the hole becomes part of the self-representations. In fact, we assert that they form the most vital self-representations.
We are only adding the understanding that the main islands of self-representations, besides forming the sense of identity, function to fill the holes of essential losses.
Everybody fills the hole by developing parts of the personality, either by false merging or attempts at getting their merged state. Variations will all be on the same theme.
This happens, of course, because individuals deeply feel and believe that their incompleteness will be eliminated and their longing will be satisfied by regaining the gratifying merged relationship with the mother, now displaced to a person of the opposite sex. This is probably the origin of the idea that a partner of the opposite sex is our “second half,” or our complement.
What the person really wants and misses is part of his essence, the merging love, and is not the love partner or the relation with him or
That is why this personality is considered a false personality by people aware of essence. The individual, however, honestly believes that what he is aware of is himself, not knowing that it is only a filling, layers of veils over the original experiences of loss. What is usually left of the experience of essence and its loss is a vague feeling of incompleteness, a gnawing sense of lack, that increases and deepens with age.
This state of taking the personality as the true identity and master of our life is what the Sufis call the state of sleep. The Sufi master Sanai of Afghanistan puts it this way: “Humanity is asleep, concerned only with what is useless, living in a wrong world.”6
It is not possible for the average person who is identified with his personality to understand or appreciate the significance and the far-reaching consequences of this subversion. The average person actually, albeit mistakenly, believes that his personality is he himself. He has no context for comparing the experience of his personality with what he lost. He can only compare the experiences of his personality. The beauty and the wonder of essence is completely lost to him. Repressing the various holes and the painful emotions around the losses necessitate that essence in its various aspects be repressed and cut off completely and efficiently. For if essence emerges into consciousness, it will ultimately bring to consciousness the deficiencies and the painful memories around it.
Essence is what animates them. It is their life and light. This is what is hinted at in the Quranic light verse: “Allah is the light of heaven and earth. His light is like a lamp within a colored niche. The lamp is within a crystal, which is like a pearly heavenly body. It is lit from a blessed olive tree, not of the East or the West, whose oil itself nearly shines, without it being touched by any fire. Light upon light” (author’s translation).
The organs of perception are, in fact, parts of essence; they are its organs and capacities. So when essence is cut off, the fuel of these capacities is gone, their light is dimmed, and most often goes out. The person loses not only his essence, but also his various subtle capacities and organs of perception and inner action.
These organs or capacities are connected to various energetic centers in the body that animate both the body and the mind. There are many and various centers as we discussed in Chapter Two, operating at different depths of the organism. There is the level of the chakras, which are centers connected to the various plexi of the nervous system.…
There is the level that Gurdjieff used, the three centers in the belly, heart, and head. And there are other deeper levels of centers, which are invisible except to essence. To repress the essence completely and efficiently, these energetic and subtle centers have to be shut off, or at most allowed to operate…
The loss of essence, the repression of the subtle organs and capacities, the shutting off and distortion of the subtle and energetic centers, and the overall resulting insensitivity, all lead to a general but devastating loss of perspective. The individual no more knows the point of life, of being, of existence. He no longer knows why he is living, what…
It is no more the life of being; it is only the life of the personality, and in its very nature it is false and full of suffering. There is tension, contraction, restriction. There is no freedom to be and to enjoy. The true orientation toward the life of essence, the orientation that will…
This loss of perspective and orientation leads to the loss of reality. The individual sees only illusions, follows only illusions, for he takes these illusions to be the reality. We are not talking here only about the neurotic or the pathological individual. Such a person, it is true, does not see the reality of the average and adjusted citizen of society. But this means he does…
In a very real sense, an individual who is not connected to his essence is not a human being because the human element is one’s essence. He is still a potential, a human in the seed stage. That is why some of the sages of the past have said that only the wise are human, “the wise” being those who are capable of knowing and being essence. El-Ghazali, the eleventh-century Sufi, puts it…
That is why some of the sages of the past have said that only the wise are human, “the wise” being those who are capable of knowing and being essence. El-Ghazali, the eleventh-century Sufi, puts it this way: “Wisdom is so important that it might be said that mankind is composed solely of the Wise.”8
Not only is it true that humanity consists solely of the wise, but also, in the most fundamental sense, only the wise exist.
One way to see this is to observe how resilient children are in their emotional health, their aliveness, their joy, and their passionate involvement in their activities. We see them bouncing back after many disappointments, many failures, and many discouragements. They bounce back to their aliveness and joy over and over for years before the aliveness and joy are slowly suppressed and lost. The fact is that it takes a hostile and contrary environment, continually and mercilessly rejecting, ignoring, and hurting the being of the child, for years on end, before it succumbs to suppression. The power, resilience, and strength of essence are enormous. It is the force of life itself, the mainspring of vitality and vigor.
This is because the environment is ruled by the personality, normal and pathological. All institutions of society, except for isolated instances, are formed, run, and populated by the personality, the usurper of the place of essence. And the personality by its very nature, by its existence, is contrary to the essence and lacks the understanding of its nature. Not only that, its very life is threatened by essence.
Adults are mostly personality, and no matter how much they try, they will misunderstand and hurt the child’s essence. They see reality from the perspective of the personality, and this perspective is based on the absence, not the existence, let alone the importance or the value, of essence. The negative influences on the child’s development resulting from the parents’ lack of love, warmth, and positive regard are pretty much understood and appreciated by now.
A parent who is loving, caring, and supportive of the child helps the personality to grow more balanced and healthy and is less opposed to the beingness of the child. But this is still a far cry from actually seeing the essence, understanding it, and encouraging it to grow according to its own truth. Regardless of how loving the parents are toward their children, if the personality is the center of their life, the same will happen to the children. They will end up with the personality as the center, essence being buried.
So the problem is not a lack of good intentions and good will. It is a lack of something much more fundamental than that; it is the lack of the right orientation, the right perspective, and the right understanding.
For the individual operating on a subtler level of existence, self-esteem rises as a result of living and acting according to one’s own principles and convictions. At still deeper levels, self-esteem accrues as a result of being true to one’s deepest feelings and stirrings.
Value, according to this perspective, is not something we gain; value is our nature. Essence is value. And if we try to get value as a result of something, then this value is not genuine. It is just filling a certain hole, the hole that resulted from the loss of our true value, an important aspect of our essence. In fact, any attempt to get value by excelling in any endeavor, inner or outer, will just cut us off from the true value, the absolute value of essence, where we are value, without this value being attributed to anything.
The correct relation is that excellence results from value and not the other way around.
The tremendous and omnipresent forces and influences that suppress essence are the same ones that work against retrieving it. Thus it is extremely difficult for most people to extricate themselves enough to taste essence or to know life from its perspective. In childhood, the forces were all external. But for the adult, these external forces have extended inward and have taken over the mind and the body. The individual in the process of ego development actually has imbibed his personality from the environment, and now he is the personality. The enemy of the essence is no more only in the environment. The greatest adversary now is one’s own personality.
This endeavor, called the Work by most teachings oriented toward essence, becomes for the people who understand it the most worthy undertaking for man because without it man remains a potential, and the true human life is not realized. Without the realization of essence, every other undertaking is bound to be pointless, a waste. It is like an apple tree that is not allowed to bear apples. In fact, it is worse—it is like a larva that never becomes a butterfly.
This is a matter of skillful means to transmit the teachings of essence and its liberation in the most efficient way.
However, they are not expected to be as effective as they once were in their original homes at the times they were formulated. For instance, the old teachings of the Jewish cabbalists and the esoteric Christians were cast in the form of heaven and hell, populated by hierarchies of angels and devils.
It is true that the Buddhists had a good knowledge of how the mind operates phenomenologically, as attested by the texts of the Abhidharma. The Sufis understood conditioning, the functions of the emotions, and many other things. But it remained for Western depth psychology to discover and formulate in a very useful fashion the concepts of the unconscious, of repression, transference, psychodynamics, of the mental structure, and so on.
Let’s look at a concrete example of how this can be done. In the chapter about the loss of essence, we discussed in some detail the vicissitudes of the essential aspect of merging love. This merging or melting essence, the clear, sweet, and golden essence, was obviously known by the teachers of the ancient schools, although understood by some and not by others. It is the force and the energy behind the desire for union with the universe, with God, with the primal intelligence, whatever. It was understood to be behind the longing for the disappearance into the Beloved. It is the love that melts the mind and the heart. Some probably understood its specific action of melting and dissolving ego boundaries and attempted to invoke it to facilitate surrender.
So ego identity is seen to originate in this time of undifferentiated dual unity. In fact, the deepest aspects of the personality are seen to go back to this undifferentiated state of the ego. The personality began to be absorbed particularly at that time, between two and ten months of age. In fact, undifferentiation, or merging, is necessary for this absorption of the qualities of the personality. Personality, then, begins with the child’s identification with the qualities that the child experiences through merging with the environment. During the merged condition of the symbiotic stage, the child has no conception of what is his and what belongs to the environment represented by the mother.
Personality, then, begins with the child’s identification with the qualities that the child experiences through merging with the environment. During the merged condition of the symbiotic stage, the child has no conception of what is his and what belongs to the environment represented by the mother.
essence, we can understand this development in relation to the various aspects of essence. This understanding is specific enough to trace the vicissitudes of essential qualities or aspects throughout the stages of ego development. This understanding of how the personality develops as essence is lost is the outcome of integrating the ancient wisdom with modern depth psychology.
This way of seeing the matter produces a methodology for the return to essence that is understandable by and congruent with modern human mentality.
Because this aspect of essence has the effect on the nervous system of producing feelings of sweetness and love and the attitude of humility, and because at the same time it affects the ego by melting its structural boundaries, some of the ancient approaches were emotional and devotional in nature. Prayer, supplication, devotional singing and dance, all directed toward a beloved deity or reality, served to melt the heart and put the mind in a set receptive to this essential aspect.
According to the Diamond Approach, the barriers of the personality to the merging love aspect (and to all others), these dark spots and knots that clog the flow of energies, are nothing but certain specific mental and emotional contents relating to the loss of the essential aspect and the subsequent attempts at compensation. In other words, the dark spots are areas of darkness in our personality: certain emotions, memories, and ideas that are cut off from consciousness and repressed. What the yogis see is the repressed unconscious content, but they understand it only energetically and not psychologically. In our approach, we use psychodynamic understanding to see through these dark spots and dissolve them. The spots are dark because they are repressed material; the light of awareness and understanding does not reach them. So we open each knot, and shed the light of awareness on its content. This will bring out to consciousness the relevant repressed memories and affects. The discharge, the actual experiencing and understanding of this content, usually dissolves the dark spots. In this way we go on dissolving one barrier after another until the whole channel is clean. There is no need here for the extreme caution that the yogis require because we can shed light on and open any dark spot that confronts us. We don’t need to go around or avoid anything. This method is a direct confrontation with the personality, understanding any part of it that comes within the field of our awareness. Of course we don’t need to see the actual dark spots in the nervous system, although it is possible. They manifest to us psychologically, usually as resistances, emotional defenses, and their corresponding repressed material. By applying our awareness and understanding, barrier after barrier will surface and be dismantled, until finally the merging love aspect of essence will be released.
In the Diamond Approach, there is now a knowledge of which essential aspect is connected with each of these spots. The actual content of the dark areas is now known specifically for each aspect. Let’s continue the example of the merging essence.
This emptiness will actually be experienced as a cavity, an absence of fullness, if the person succeeds in not defending against it. The person will experience a hole, a cavity in the energy system of the organism, usually centered in the lower part of the chest. This particular hole, specific to the merging essence, is connected with a subtle center located in this area at the place where the diaphragm meets the sternum. At this point the person might go on to experience himself as an empty space, devoid of any fullness or quality. If he deals with the associations he has to this emptiness—such as those of dependency and need—and the fears produced by them—probably the fears of disintegration, disappearing, and so on—then he will remember the old hurt that cut off the essence. This is another big dark spot. The person will unearth the painful situation or situations that ultimately led to the loss of this particular aspect of essence. Besides the memories and affects, the individual will experience the emotional hurt as a wound. It will feel physically like a wound in the chest, but it is a wound in the energy system that corresponds to the emotional hurt and the loss of the essence. When one allows oneself quietly to experience the hurtful wound and the memories connected with it, the golden elixir will flow out of it, healing it, and filling the emptiness with the beautiful sweet fullness that will melt the heart, erase the mind, and bring about the contentment that the individual has been thirsting for.
borderline and psychotic syndromes. It is believed that normal or neurotic people don’t usually need to deal deeply with issues of the symbiotic stage.
However, these tendencies, termed the psychotic core, are buried very deeply in the unconscious, and the normal person never really deals squarely with these underpinnings of his character. Neither, of course, does he come to live the life of essence, unless he sincerely embarks on doing the work.
The work on essential development involves actually confronting and softening this same structure. It does not only modify it but in some sense actually dismantles the ego identity and reinstitutes the lost identity, the true, high self of the essence. This is bound to bring to consciousness all the conflicts, fears, distortions and deficiencies in the structure.
But the person who is interested in regaining essence and who undergoes psychotherapy must understand this distinction clearly. Confusion arises these days because of the proliferation of growth systems, and the attitude of looking at therapy as “growth process.” Therapy can function for growth, but we must remember that the Work is for the growth of the essence, not the personality.
There is a subtle gray area between the two orientations that is at present confusing many people. This confusion involves the experience of emotional discharge or energetic release. This discharge, or release—whether it is called expression, streaming, or whatever—produces a momentary sense of relief and freedom. Because of this sense of freedom, it is considered by some as work on freeing the essence. However, it is not necessarily, and most often it in fact is not, a freeing of the essence. Usually, it is a release from the restricting tensions of the personality. Such experiences typically involve some release of bodily tensions and a freer flow (sometimes temporary, sometimes more stable) of physical energies. This can be useful for the Work if it is seen in its correct perspective as a preparation, a prelude for the emerging of essence. Freedom is first a freedom from—from the personality. Later it is a freedom for—for the essence to be.
As Idries Shah puts it, “It is impossible, from this point of view, to attempt to restore a mere equilibrium without a dynamic forward movement. The psychologist tries to make a warped wheel turn smoothly. The dervish is trying to make the wheel turn in order that it may propel a carriage.”3
Psychotherapy’s goal is to resolve the conflicts only on the psychological level. It attempts this by working on understanding the conflicts and their origins in childhood. It believes that through this understanding and the discharge of repressed emotions, the conflicts will be resolved. But how can that be, when the most fundamental point in the conflict is the loss of the essence? The individual knows, although unconsciously, what he has lost. His personality is always subtly irritated by the hole in his chest.
The deepest cause of all conflicts of the personality is the loss of essence. It is not childhood programming; childhood programming leads to the loss of essence.
In the Diamond Approach there is no room for experimentation. The method itself is not mechanical, is not an exercise. It requires sincerity and a willingness to confront one’s personality and to deal with conflicts before essence or the lataif can be released. In other words, in this method, essence is released by using understanding. And this understanding concerns exactly the sectors of the personality that will usually arise and create trouble for the amateur using quasi-mechanical methods. So it has its own safeguards built in as part of its structure.
Psychodynamic understanding continues to be applied, to discover and resolve the surfacing issues. This process, which is analogous to what in psychoanalysis is called the process of working through, will eventually establish the relevant essential aspect. This is the process referred to by the Sufis as the changing of a state into a “station,” that is, a permanently available condition. This process also will reach other threads in the structure of the personality and so will lead to other essential aspects, until they are all established. This is the process of the development of essence, which takes us to the next chapter.
Chapter Five The Development Of Essence
essence can never be totally, literally lost. What happens is that it gets buried, covered over by layers of the personality—essence becomes repressed, relegated to the unconscious. That is precisely why a psychodynamic approach can be effective.
the job of retrieving essence becomes simple and obvious: to make the unconscious conscious. This will, however, alter the structure of the personality itself and will change its position in the overall economy of the human organism.
This simple dictum, to make the unconscious conscious, is the most fundamental, basic, and necessary aspect of the Diamond Approach and of all other genuine methods of the Work.
We must point out here that by consciousness we mean awareness, because the word consciousness is sometimes used to denote other concepts.
However, awareness can exist on its own. In other words, an individual can experience himself as awareness, as just pure, naked awareness.
Awareness occupies a very special place among essential aspects. In a sense, inner development as a whole—the work on both personality and essence—can be seen as the freeing and the expansion of awareness. The reason behind this is that the most basic function of the personality is the reduction of awareness. In fact, the deepest aspect of the personality is a restriction of awareness. The ego identity, which normally is called the self, exists on the deepest level as a contraction of awareness, a restriction of consciousness. To say it more accurately, the ego identity (the I) as a structure is on the deepest level a hole of awareness, or a deficiency of awareness, because of the loss of intrinsic and basic awakeness. This is the deepest and most defended hole in the personality. This deepest hole in the personality, around which its identity is structured, is the avoidance (the loss) of the awareness of death. More accurately, the personality does not understand death, and it avoids the perception of its possibility and its existence. It is terrified of death because it means its own annihilation.
The personality’s fear and avoidance of death creates a gap (a hole) in awareness around which the personality is structured. This gap is the kernel of the unconscious. Unconsciousness develops as the personality develops and is structured around this hole. Unconsciousness is ultimately unconsciousness of death, which is necessitated by the lack of understanding of what death is.
The Work is the expansion of awareness until the personality becomes aware of its most hidden secret, death. When this is revealed, there will be no fear in the personality; fears start dropping away. And then the deepest contraction and tension in the personality, which is the avoidance of the awareness of death, is loosened. This
This deepest secret in the unconscious of the personality, like the rest of its deep and repressed sectors, is so inaccessible to the ordinary consciousness and so defended against that it is practically impossible to reach. Relying solely on the direct cultivation of awareness is in most instances not sufficient to penetrate these deepest recesses of the mind. This is one reason the systems that work only on cultivating awareness turn out not to be so efficient in inner development.
no need to wait for the experience of ego death before one understands essence. A person can traverse the path by going through small “deaths,” which will bring out the aspects of essence, which will in turn lead to the final experience of ego death.
Sensitivity And The Subtle Perceptions
This point was emphasized by Wilhelm Reich in his formulation of the concept of character armor and muscular armor. His main insight was that the defensive functions of the
character are identical with muscular rigidities in the body: “In character-analytic practice, we discover the armor functioning in the form of a chronic, frozen, muscular-like bearing. First and foremost, the identity of these various functions stands out; they can be comprehended on the basis of one principle only, namely of the armoring of the periphery of the biopsychic system.”1 Emotions and feelings are primarily sensations, and these are sensations of the body. If the body is insensitive, there will be no awareness of these sensations and hence no awareness of feelings. This will preclude the possibility of understanding. So sensitization of the body is required via the dissolution of muscular armor and its tension patterns. But the sensitization of the body is not just for the awareness of sensations and feelings. These are the first to be encountered by the expanding awareness. But the sensitivity, in time, needs to get deeper, and the perceptions need to get finer so that the organism can be aware of the subtler presence of essence itself. Essence is an embodied existence and will be experienced in the body, not somewhere else or abstractly.
This will preclude the possibility of understanding. So sensitization of the body is required via the dissolution of muscular armor and its tension patterns. But the sensitization of the body is not just for the awareness of sensations and feelings. These are the first to be encountered by the expanding awareness. But the sensitivity, in time, needs to get deeper, and the perceptions need to get finer so that the organism can be aware of the subtler presence of essence itself. Essence is an embodied existence and will be experienced in the body, not somewhere else or abstractly.
center of sensing, the belly center, can be activated. The belly center, or what Gurdjieff called the physical center, is the center of sensing for all parts of the body. Its deepest function is the subtle sensing, the sensing of essential presence, that the Sufis call the organ for touch. Touch is, in a sense, the most intimate of the physical senses. The skin must be directly against an object to touch it. There is no intermediary medium, like sound for hearing or light for seeing. So this subtle capacity is a very intimate one. Accurately speaking, it is sensing essence by being essence. It is the most direct way of perception. This capacity of touch, connected with the belly center, is very intimately connected with the embodiment of essence. It is the body center; its mode of perception is embodiment. Here, perception as touch, and being, are the same act. So this capacity is the most important one. Also, touch gives us information about the physical characteristics of texture, density, temperature, viscosity, and the like. The term touch is used because, in fact, it is more accurate than the term sensing when it comes to essential experience. Sensing is used by the ordinary person to gain information about feelings and sensations. These usually do not have characteristics of texture, density, and viscosity. But essence does have these characteristics because it is a substance, although it is in a subtle dimension.
The Sequence Of Development
As awareness expands and sensitivity deepens, the individual undergoes successive experiences and transformations that necessitate dealing with various sectors of the personality and the life situations connected to them. There is a general sequence of inner events that will transform the person. In the Diamond Approach, this sequence is not rigid, and students often do not follow it exactly. Since the Approach works with the personality, there are many variations in sequence because personality differs in character, type, rigidity, level of organization, and history, from one person to another.
This characteristic of the Approach has the advantage of being geared to individual needs and situations instead of being a technique that has to be applied to all, the same way, regardless of character or extent of development. Each student works specifically with the material he comes with: his own personality, his actual life, at the time he starts the journey. This contributes to efficiency and economy in time and energy. This characteristic of the Approach also guards it from becoming a mechanical device that can be applied without understanding. Mechanicalness robs any method of the life element and in time renders it useless.
Still, there is a general sequence of events and realizations that people generally follow spontaneously. There are primary and universal signposts. The variations exist within an overall pattern. This pattern is dictated by the basic general structure of personality. The work starts from the surface layers of the personality and moves deeper and deeper. The structure of the personality determines the sequence of inner experiences and transformations. Because most people have a similar general structure, the developmental work follows a general sequence.
The id forms the instinctual, mostly psychophysiological basis of the whole structure. The ego, which is mostly based on the id, is the part that comes in contact with the external world. It is formed by the process of contact with and adaptation to the environment, mostly the parents. The superego is a structure that forms the apex of the psychic structure and includes the ideals of the personality and the principles of judgment. It is the seat of what is customarily called the conscience. It develops mainly by internalizing and identifying with the prohibitions, rules, values, and preferences of the parents and society at large.
The Superego
ways of dealing with his superego. This is the first important task. Without this ability, the individual will find it extremely difficult to expand his awareness and deal with his unconscious. The reason is that the status quo of the personality is maintained by the superego. In particular, the status quo is continued by keeping the unconscious unconscious, by enforcing the defensive mechanisms of the ego. The agent that enforces these defensive functions is the superego. We need to understand the process of repression in order to understand this mechanism more fully: awareness of unconscious material causes anxiety to the ego. The ego responds to anxiety with repression; it cuts off awareness from the arising unconscious material. In this way it avoids experiencing the anxiety and thus avoids the disintegrating effect of the anxiety on the ego structure. Originally, the anxiety was the fear of the coercive agencies in childhood, mostly represented by the parents. Whenever the parents disapprove of a certain action or feeling of the child—and this happens repeatedly—the child learns, out of fear of this disapproval and also out of love for the parents, to suppress and finally repress this particular action or feeling. However, the disapproval becomes internalized in time as part of the child’s own superego. So eventually, whenever a situation provokes this particular action or emotional state, the child’s own superego disapproves and, in fact, punishes the child with guilt, shame, and other painful affects. The fear becomes a fear of one’s own superego. The child, out of this fear of the superego and the punishment, learns to defend himself the way he did with his parents. He represses the particular action or feeling. He cuts off his awareness from his own impulses, feelings, and actions.
The unconscious remains unconscious out of fear of the superego and to defend against its attacks. Thus, the superego becomes the inner coercive agency that guards the status quo of the personality. This means that in developing awareness and becoming aware of some parts of the unconscious, the individual will run into the fear of the superego and into its painful attacks themselves if he goes beyond the fear. Besides causing much pain and suffering, this confrontation with the superego will inhibit awareness and its expansion unless the person finds a solution for this situation.
The possibility of the complete dissolution of the superego is not envisioned in psychotherapy nor is it seen as a desirable end.
The best approach is to decrease the power and influence of the superego and to replace it with awareness as much as possible, all the way to the final and complete dethronement of the superego. This establishes, in turn, some important aspects of essence. The ego automatically and unconsciously responds to the superego with repression of parts of the personality, to defend itself against its painful attacks.
The method has to be conscious and intentional, in contrast to the habitual automatic ways that can only foster unconsciousness. Learning how to defend consciously and intentionally against the superego and its attacks is learning a whole understanding and a whole inner technology. It is taking into consideration the understanding of what the superego is and using one’s own intelligence to deal with it and defend against its attacks.
THE CHAKRAS The work on the superego, on expanding the awareness and deepening the sensitivity of the body, involves the activation and freeing the chakra level of energetic functioning. This does not necessarily mean direct work on the physical location of the chakras. It is basically clearing the mind and opening the body, which inevitably involves the clearing of the chakra system. The chakra system is basically the level of emotions, thinking processes, and physiological functioning. Freeing these functions from the unconscious, defending against the superego, and clearing the conflicts in the mind, is itself the work on clearing the chakras.
The chakras do not function properly because of the body armor and its patterns of psychophysical tensions. The work on the superego, especially if coupled with somatic-energetic techniques, such as those that employ breathing, is a powerful and efficient method for clearing this level. It also guards against the fascination and the excitement characteristic of direct work on the chakras.
Clearing this level of the personality leads at some point to the regaining of the pure emotional energy, and culminates in the experience of the void.
The work on the superego ultimately will expose one of its cornerstones: castration anxiety.
By learning to defend consciously against the superego, the individual is really rejecting, or rather separating from, this identification with the parent of the same sex, which will ultimately bring out to consciousness the basis of the identification.
So we see that dealing with the superego will at some point expose the identifications that repress the castration complex. Dealing with this issue brings out the specific hole connected with castration, which is a distortion in the body image aspect of the self-image. The hole or deficiency is simply an unconscious body image of having no genitals or no sexuality. Accepting and understanding this feeling and belief of deficiency will bring forth its corresponding essential aspect, which turns out to be the void (space). This essential aspect is the correction of the distortion in the body image. This distortion is really a distortion of space. The void is the experience of oneself, one’s essence, as empty space. It is an experience of expansion, spaciousness, openness, and boundlessness. The mind is not bound by the rigid boundaries of the personality’s self-image. Its effect on perception is to see things as they are, without distortion. The experience of the genital hole is a distortion of how things are because there is really no hole there. The emerging space erases this distortion.
The void is really nothing but the absence of the personality and its various distortions. The mind is empty then, completely empty of the personality. It is as if the inner space is cleaned out, emptied, of the personality and its patterns, mental or physical. The person feels free, fresh,…
It is this experience that many people call ego death, contending that it is necessary for the birth of essence. In reality, it is the beginning of ego death. The personality must go through many transformations, called deaths, before it relinquishes its hold. But this experience of space does lead to the rebirth, the emergence of essence. This condition of openness and spaciousness usually leads, by itself, to the activation of the centers of the subtle physiology, called the lataif. We let the foremost representative of Sufism in the West, Seyyid Idries Shah, discuss the lataif: “The human being is stated, in Sufi representation, to contain five elements of the ‘relative’ and five of the ‘absolute’… There are said to be five centers of spiritual perception, corresponding to these ranges of experience. They are conceived of as having physical locations…
The one at the left side of the body is usually called qalb, meaning “heart.” The color yellow is associated with it. The state of consciousness here is that of true joy and delight in which essence exists in the condition of unadulterated joy. Its activation and realization also are connected with the transformation of a certain sector of the personality, a process that is sometimes referred to as the yellow death. The latifa on the right side of the body is usually called rouh, meaning “spirit” or “soul.” The color is red, and the consciousness is of true and real strength. It is like the fire of essence and requires the transformation of the personality referred to as the red death, or the freedom from fear of people. The third latifa is located at the solar plexus and is associated with the color white, or silver. The consciousness is that of true will, which is the support for essence and its life. The white death is the transformation of the personality relevant here, which is death into God. The name of this latifa is sirr, which means “secret.” In fact, the activation of this center is seen often as the initial step or the transition from the world of the personality to the dimension of essence. The fourth latifa is at the forehead between and just above the eyebrows. It is called khafi, meaning “hidden,” and the color is a shining black. The consciousness is a state of peace and absolute stillness, related to the activity of intuition and objective understanding. It is connected to the black death, which is the state of annihilation of the sense of identity of the ego, which is the false self. The fifth latifa is at the center of the chest, called akhfa, meaning “more hidden,” and the color is emerald green. The consciousness is that of…
The Buddhist counterpart to the realm of the lataif is what is called the realm of the five Dhyani-Buddhas, the peaceful deities of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. At the center of all bardo visions stand the five Tathgastas (TrGyal-ba rigs Inga). They form a first pentad in Buddhist mandala, and in their comprehensive multiplicity of meaning they constitute a many-leveled background for the development of most of the esoteric teachings of Vajrayana Buddhism. For the various versions of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which has its own tradition, they are the essence and the foundation for statements about the nature of man and his psychological structure, and they are at the same time the primordial images for the spiritual path to transcendence and liberation. The doctrine of the five Tathagatas concerns possibilities of clarification of awareness in this earthly life as well as the possibility of attaining the illuminated path of wisdom of the Buddhas in the bardo.
However, space must be realized at some point; otherwise the personality will come back and clamp down strongly against the emerging essence. This will make it difficult for the essence to be present permanently, and techniques and practices will have to be employed all the time in order to stay in touch with it. The Sufi method of
Each one of the lataif has a sector of the personality connected to it that acts as a substitute for it and has the memory of the situations that led to its burial. All of these phenomena must be understood, precisely and exactly, for the centers to be permanently active. Each of the subtle forms of the consciousness is then understood, experienced, and embodied. The effects of the lataif on the person’s consciousness are understood and integrated. This has a permanent influence on the personality; the personality is in fact transformed by accommodating the impact of the lataif on its structure and consciousness.
Beyond that, each of the lataif functions, so to speak, as a door or entry into a whole universe, a whole dimension of essence. Each is an entry into a realm of the being that has in it many essential aspects. For instance, the yellow latifa leads to the essential aspects of pleasure, fulfillment, satisfaction, contentment, and various forms of love. The situation can be looked at either as each of the lataif developing and expanding into deeper and deeper dimensions of essence, or as each of the lataif as a door leading into different realms of essence.
As we have said, the relation of the lataif to essence is like the perfume to the oil of the perfume. By following the scent, the perfume, we will be led to the substance of the perfume—the concentrated perfume, the essence—provided we have a good nose, that is, well-developed capacities of perception.
Psychological constellations will present themselves both inside—as emotional conflicts and physical tension—and outside—as difficulties, conflicts, issues, dissatisfactions, and lack of understanding of the environment and the people in it. Since at this stage it is easy to deal with the superego, now the unconscious material is more available. The teacher will be able to see the large patterns, the specific psychological constellations that form sectors of the personality, each related to an essential aspect.
The psychological constellation, when understood exactly for what it is, will lead spontaneously to a related hole of the personality, which the individual will experience emotionally as a certain lack or deficiency, usually defended against by various antics. Acceptance of this hole leads to experiencing the personality as an emptiness. This emptiness, this void, is like a death for the personality. It is actually a death of the particular sector of the personality but is experienced psychologically as an overall death of the personality. When this “death” is completely understood and accepted, the corresponding aspect of essence emerges and fills the emptiness left by the personality.
When this “death” is completely understood and accepted, the corresponding aspect of essence emerges and fills the emptiness left by the personality. The essential aspect that emerges will be exactly what was lacking and will be precisely what the individual has been attempting to get from the outside, through the related personality patterns. The exactness, the fitness, is usually difficult to believe. It is completely precise. The individual realizes that he had known unconsciously exactly what he was missing and that his thoughts, emotions, and actions were motivated by this unconscious knowing, without his even suspecting it. The experience can be termed “mind-blowing.” It is usually, however, a quiet and peaceful experience, mostly invisible to the outside observer; but its exactness and its meaningfulness are staggering. This emergence of essence is what is usually referred to in Work literature as a “rebirth.” The essence is born again, having been buried for years. The birth is a completion of a cycle, preceding the beginning of another cycle. The whole process repeats itself; understanding a new constellation or sector of the personality leads to its specific deficient hole (emptiness) and ends with the emergence of the corresponding essential aspect. There is awakening, death, and rebirth for each aspect of the essence—awakening to a certain sector of the personality, the death of this sector in the experience of emptiness, and then the rebirth as the emerging of the aspect of essence. This cycle is repeated as many times as there are holes in the personality.
The individual realizes that he had known unconsciously exactly what he was missing and that his thoughts, emotions, and actions were motivated by this unconscious knowing, without his even suspecting it. The experience can be termed “mind-blowing.” It is usually, however, a quiet and peaceful experience, mostly invisible to the outside observer; but its exactness and its meaningfulness are staggering. This emergence of essence is what is usually referred to in Work literature as a “rebirth.” The essence is born again, having been buried for years. The birth is a completion of a cycle, preceding the beginning of another cycle. The whole process repeats itself; understanding a new constellation or sector of the personality leads to its specific deficient hole (emptiness) and ends with the emergence of the corresponding essential aspect. There is awakening, death, and rebirth for each aspect of the essence—awakening to a certain sector of the personality, the death of this sector in the experience of emptiness, and then the rebirth as the emerging of the aspect of essence. This cycle is repeated as many times as there are holes in the personality.
Gurdjieff puts it this way: “When a man awakes he can die; when he dies he can be born.”
“To awake,” “to die,” “to be born.” These are three successive stages. If you study the Gospels attentively you will see that references are often made to the possibility of being born, several references are made to the necessity of “dying,” and there are very many references to the necessity of…
The Diamond Approach adds precision and lawfulness to this process. This precision is responsible for the effectiveness and efficiency of the Diamond Approach. The vague, metaphoric, or poetic ways of describing the process of rebirth often add more confusion than clarification. The metaphoric and poetic formulations are aesthetically appealing and often powerfully inspiring, but for a person who is thirsting—even dying—a beautiful way of describing the road that leads to the well is not as important as a clear, precise,…
The vague, metaphoric, or poetic ways of describing the process of rebirth often add more confusion than clarification.
often powerfully inspiring, but for a person who is thirsting—even dying—a beautiful way of describing the road that leads to the well is not as important as a clear, precise, and succinct way.
Essential…
They are all essence, all substantial, but different in qualitative experience, function, and influence on the personality. It is as if they are different organs of the same organism, and this organism is one’s being. They are all…
They are absolute in the sense that they cannot be reduced further to something else or analyzed into simpler constituents. Love is love and is always love. And love is not the same as will. Will is always will, although it is essence, just as love is essence. These absolute aspects of essence are…
In fact, Socrates knew that these absolute forms of the human essence are within us, because he asserted and proved logically (for example, in Plato’s Meno) that they cannot be learned. He thought that a person can only remember them, that nobody can learn them from somebody else or through deduction or experience. A person can know them only by remembering them. This is a deep truth that Socrates knew without having the knowledge about the…
We also saw that this sector of the personality is related to its particular aspect of essence by the unconscious memories of the experiences and situations that led to the loss and…
In fact, this sector of the personality has in it the memory of the essential aspect itself, and so it is intimately connected to this aspect of essence. Its beginning and development contain the memory of the lost aspect, but the memory is mostly repressed. To remember it consciously…
Socrates is right. Essential aspects or absolute forms can be known only by being remembered, by being dredged up from the deepest recesses of the unconscious and experienced consciously.
An object relations psychologist might object to this assertion by saying that the individual is not remembering the merging love of essence but is rather remembering the symbiotic relationship with the mother. It is true that the individual is remembering the symbiotic relationship, the dual unity, in this instance; but this does not explain all the facts. It does not explain the utterances and the fantasies, many of which seem not to involve the mother, that some people have when they are deeply feeling this desire. It does not explain why they think this desired contact is sweet, that it has a melting quality to it, that it has a golden glow—all characteristics of the…
The personality not only has the memory of the essential aspects but in fact uses this unconscious memory in its attempt to fill the particular hole, by filling it with a fake quality or with hopes of getting it from outside. The final picture is that this sector of the personality takes the place of the essential aspect. It acts as a substitute for it. The servant of the house behaves after a while as the master of the house. All sectors of the personality, all qualities of the personality, all characteristics of the personality are substitutes for the essential ones. The personality, in fact, is an exact replica of the essence, but it is false. It is made up, a reaction, an outcome, and does not have the reality of essence. It is a plastic substitute that lacks the aliveness, freshness, realness, and luminous clarity of the real thing. This is a painful and difficult situation, but in this situation resides the key to its resolution. Because all sectors of the personality are substitutes for and imitations of the aspects of essence, they are really faithful pointers to these aspects. By understanding these sectors we…
This is a painful and difficult situation, but in this situation resides the key to its resolution. Because all sectors of the personality are substitutes for and imitations of the aspects of essence, they are really faithful pointers to these aspects.
The personality is seen not only as the barrier but also as containing the keys. It brings out in the student an attitude of acceptance, compassion, and a genuine desire to understand the truth of the personality. This is exactly…
This quality of wanting more and more, of never having enough, has always been observed in the personality and has been criticized and condemned by almost all systems and teachers. Greed has generally been viewed from a materialistic perspective and not much attempt has been made to understand it objectively. Let’s apply to this example our perspective that each characteristic of the personality is a false substitute for a characteristic of the essence. The personality usually wants what the essence…
The characteristic of essence that is connected to greed in the personality has a sense of “more and more,” of limitlessness and endlessness. In fact, this quality of endlessness is a profound characteristic of essence. Each aspect of essence exists in an unlimited way or extent. The substance of essence is not limited in extent; it is infinite, limitless. In other words, we can say that each aspect of essence is really a boundless ocean of this quality. Merging essence, for example, does not exist in a certain amount. When the individual is open to this aspect, he is in fact connected to a limitless ocean of merging essence, to a whole infinite dimension of this sweet quality. The personality has a memory of the endlessness of essence and its inexhaustability. But this abundance is projected outward, and then the personality wants more and more from the outside. So the hole filled by greed is the hole (deficiency) resulting from the loss of the characteristic of essence of abundance and infinity. In this characteristic of greed we find the pointer to the expansion, endlessness, and inexhaustability of essence. The personality wants what was lost, and what was lost is endless. The personality is not going to be stopped by moralistically accusing it of being greedy. It knows better. Its knowledge is deep. The characteristic of greed will not disappear unless its hole is experienced and filled with the actual abundance of essence. There is another kind of greed, a greed for variety, of wanting many things, more and more things, all different. “I want this, and this, and that, and that, this one too; how about that one and that one…” We see this quality of greed with children most clearly and straightforwardly. But this characteristic of the personality reflects another characteristic of essence, which is the endlessness of its forms, aspects, characteristics, and dimensions. This is a deep truth of essence; essence has no end. There is no end of learning, no end of expansion. New qualities and aspects, new characteristics and different dimensions keep coming to the correctly oriented individual. The development keeps going; different dimensions, different qualities, different realms.
There is another kind of greed, a greed for variety, of wanting many things, more and more things, all different. “I want this, and this, and that, and that, this one too; how about that one and that one…” We see this quality of greed with children most clearly and straightforwardly. But this characteristic of the personality reflects another characteristic of essence, which is the endlessness of its forms, aspects, characteristics, and dimensions. This is a deep truth of essence; essence has no end. There is no end of learning, no end of expansion.
The individual might want to experience the same aspect over and over. He might try to hold onto it and become afraid of losing it. He might develop the attitude of hoarding, of collecting more and more substance, or collecting various kinds of aspects. Essence is then being treated like any material possession. In other words, the objectification of the aspects can and does lead to spiritual materialism. This materialism, this attachment can then strengthen, instead of weakening, the rigid grip of the personality.
Systems that are aware of this fact are usually very cautious—in fact, paranoid—about the possibility of spiritual materialism. Essence is referred to very vaguely. The aspects are not mentioned nor even conceived of. The whole thing is left formless, vague, and even referred to as unknowable.
But the belief that experiencing and naming the aspects of essence must lead to spiritual materialism is not completely accurate. It reflects a lack of complete trust in the nature of essence. When we talk about essence as the elixir, as the agent of transformation, we mean it literally. It is what catalyzes the inner transformation. It is true that objectivizing the aspects can lead to attachment and spiritual materialism. But this is not a negative development. In fact, we can see it in a positive light.
As long as an individual can be attached, then nothing will stop him from being so. Trying to avoid this attachment, as some systems do, will only keep it and its possibility repressed, still living in the unconscious. The personality will find any object to be attached to, if it still needs to. So the best approach, if the individual is interested in pursuing the truth all the way, is to bring this attachment to the surface so that it can be observed, understood, and truly resolved.
Trusting essence has to be complete. No experience can be shied away from if there is this total trust. It is the trust that essence will act in the best way, the most intelligent way, and the most compassionate way. It will strengthen parts of our personality only to expose them, so that there will be only freedom, a genuine freedom that is based on truth, not on control.
States And Stations
The disciples come to the presence of the teacher or guru, merge with his consciousness, and experience the essence, but they cannot take it with them. They leave it with the teacher because it is still his. This usually leads to a condition of dependency on and idealization of the teacher, which is contrary to the whole point of inner development. Those teaching systems become supply sources: the kids come to their mother, nurse at her breast, then go away, to return when their bellies are empty. The kids never grow, because they do not have the means to learn how to nurse themselves.
The condition of having isolated experiences of an essential aspect is termed by the Sufis the stage of the hal; the experience is still a state. A state is contrasted with a station (maqam) when the essential aspect is made one’s own, when it is attained by one’s own efforts and established permanently by such efforts.
This process of turning a state into a station can be seen in a way that sheds a different light on it. The process is that of working on having the essence, in whatever aspect it happens to be, present in all of an individual’s life situations. He might experience essence in a certain situation but find it difficult to be essentially present when he is in a different situation. It is time then to turn one’s attention to that situation to understand what exactly is causing the difficulty. The individual will then confront his anxiety and attempt to understand the unconscious material causing it, until it becomes possible for essence to be present in this situation. A person does not usually need to look for these situations; they are usually presented to him by his own personality functioning in his life. The culmination of this process is that the individual will be able to embody the essential aspect in all relevant situations; it becomes a station.
In the course of this chapter’s discussion of essential development, the reader might have noted that the process has been more of uncovering buried aspects of essence than any actual development. This brings us to the issue of development versus uncovering.
Although it is possible to make this hierarchical arrangement, we find that experience does not correspond with it. We find that, at least to some extent, different aspects are discovered in different orders by different individuals. We also find it misleading and confusing for the student to think of essential aspects in a hierarchical order. We prefer to look at the different aspects as different parts of essence, all important and necessary, although some are more central than others. The closest analogy is the human body. All organs are necessary, and it is possible but misleading to think of them in an order. It is true that the brain is more central than the lungs, but the brain cannot function without the lungs.
From this perspective, it is immaterial whether we look at the process as a development or an uncovering.
However, seeing the process as a development applies more accurately to a certain aspect of essence, an aspect that is in a sense more central or that occupies more of a central place in the process of inner realization. Let’s try to understand this.
The separation-individuation process leads ultimately to the development of the ego as a structure. Its final phase is that of object constancy, when the ego is formed and established as a permanent existence, separate from the environment (mother), and other people are seen to have separate existences.
The ego structure as a whole is a substitute for a central aspect of essence, which has a central position similar to that of the ego. This central aspect of essence is what we call the personal essence; in Work literature it is usually called “the pearl beyond price.” Some authors, such as the Sufi Alaoddawleh Semnani, have called it the “True Ego”: “The seventh and last subtle organ is related to the divine center of your being, to the eternal seal of your person (latifa haqqiya). It is the Mohammed of your being. This subtle divine center conceals the ”rare Mohammedan pearl, “that is to say, the subtle organ which is the True Ego.”10
It is actually the true essential personality. It is the person. It is experienced as oneself. When the individual finally perceives it, the contented expression often is “But this is me!” The sense is of oneself as a precious being. There is then a fullness, a completeness, and a contentment. It is as if the individual feels full and complete, realized. Nothing is lacking. No more search, no desire or wanting anything else. The person…
The experience of completeness and contentment is ineffable, so precious and so amazing in its effect on the mind. All agitation suddenly subsides.…
It is the experience of being oneself and not a response or reaction to something. It is not being something for somebody. It is in a sense…
Many people talk about wanting to be themselves, to have their personal freedom. But usually people are referring to their personality. Being free to be one’s personality is not freedom, although it might seem so. In fact, it is the prison. But to be the pearl beyond price is truly to be, completely and finally, free to be…
We must remember that the ego is a structure, or a structured process, whereas the pearl is essence, which means the…
Some people interested in inner development try to become objective and impersonal, to move away from identifying with the personality. The personality is personal, and so…
However, the pearl beyond price feels personal without being the personality. It has the capacity to make a personal contact with another human being and still be free, totally unconditioned, free from the past and its influences.
The personality is based on deficiency, and this is the source of its selfishness. But the pearl is based on true value and true…
All of essential development is ultimately the development of the pearl. All of the essential aspects are for the pearl, for the life, use, enjoyment, and fulfillment of the pearl. That is why in the stories it is represented as a princess of unsurpassable beauty. The joy of the essence is its joy. The love is its love. The pleasure of the essence is…
The whole quest—its meaning, purpose, and completion—can be understood as the realization of the pearl beyond price. Many stories have been written about it. We include…
The Hymn of the Pearl Also known as the Hymn of the robe of Glory, or the Hymn of the Soul. The most immediately charming of all GNOSTIC writing, perhaps dating from the early third century A.D. It begins: When I was a little child and dwelt in the kingdom of my…
my parents gave me provisions and sent me out from our homeland in the East. They take off his glorious robes and send him down to Egypt to fetch the Pearl, which is guarded by a snake. On his arrival there, he puts on the Egyptian’s clothes, but they drug him into forgetting his past and his mission. His father sends him a letter to awaken him. He charms the snake, seizes the Pearl, puts off the filthy and impure clothes he is wearing. His parents send his robe to greet him. Suddenly, as I looked straight at it, the robe seemed like a mirror-image of myself. I saw myself entire in it In looking at it I was looking at myself. So he returns, and does obeisance to his Father, who promises him that he shall enter with his pearl the presence of the King of Kings.
Unlike other aspects of essence, this personal aspect (the pearl) goes through a process of development, growth, and expansion.
This true personality of the being is born, fed, and nourished. It grows, expands, and develops in a very specific sense. It is really the development of essence from being impersonal to being personal. Others might call it God becoming a human person, an individual. Let’s try to understand this.
One way of understanding the various aspects of essence is to see them as the differentiation of the source. It is like the Gnostic story called the King of Kings. What we call the essence of the essence is the white light, and the aspects of essence are the different colors of the rainbow. The aspect of the essence of the essence, the source, and the various other aspects differentiating from it are all impersonal. When all of these differentiated aspects are realized, they are then integrated in a new synthesis, a synthesis that has a personal characteristic. This integration of all aspects of essence into a new and personal synthesis is the pearl beyond price. So from the undifferentiated source, finally there emerges a synthesis, a rounded personality that is essential.
What we call the essence of the essence is the white light, and the aspects of essence are the different colors of the rainbow. The aspect of the essence of the essence, the source, and the various other aspects differentiating from it are all impersonal. When all of these differentiated aspects are realized, they are then integrated in a new synthesis, a synthesis that has a personal characteristic. This integration of all aspects of essence into a new and personal synthesis is the pearl
beyond price. So from the undifferentiated source, finally there emerges a synthesis, a rounded personality that is essential.
The process of the development of the pearl is the gradual integration of all of the aspects of essence into a new form, a new substance. When the pearl is firstborn, it is usually not complete; it is the essential child. It is born as a personal kernel. Then it integrates all of the aspects of essence into its very substance by spontaneous synthesis, until it is all complete, forming a harmonious human being.
and establish one or a few essential aspects, to the exclusion of others. This will establish a true essential presence, with the power and beauty of essence, but that presence will be incomplete and unbalanced. This limited essential development is also an effective way of avoiding having to deal with some conflict-laden sectors of the personality.
This limited essential development is also an effective way of avoiding having to deal with some conflict-laden sectors of the personality.
The systems built around awareness, for instance, will not understand and might even oppose the systems built around the merging essence. Each believes he has the truth, and both actually have the truth. But neither has the whole truth.
However, if the precious pearl becomes the objective of the system, then there is an innate and built-in safeguard.
To really develop and establish the pearl, all sectors of the personality have to be explored and understood. For the pearl to develop, all aspects of essence have to be freed, which will expose all sectors of the personality. Freeing it and establishing its life enables it to displace the totality of the ego structure. Then there is balance, completeness, totality, harmony, fullness, and contentment. There is then no reason to oppose someone or to convert anyone. All inner compulsion will be gone, for the person is realized, and the realization is based on fullness, richness, and value. The individual is then a mature human being, a complete person.
Freeing it and establishing its life enables it to displace the totality of the ego structure. Then there is balance, completeness, totality, harmony, fullness, and contentment. There is then no reason to oppose someone or to convert anyone. All inner compulsion will be gone, for the person is realized, and the realization is based on fullness, richness, and value. The individual is then a mature human being, a complete person.
price. It turns out that the halwa is nothing but the remains of the cosmetic materials that a prisoner, princess Incomparable Pearl, uses for her daily baths.
The station of the pearl beyond price is so significant because it is not a matter of a state of consciousness or a state of being; it is rather the condition of the actualization of one’s realization in one’s life. Being becomes personal being, a complete human being living fully the life of objective truth.
We now come to the last and deepest structure of the personality, which Freud called the id. The id is the sector of the personality that is most primitive, closest to the biological roots, and that contains the instincts and their energies and drives. The instincts and their drives are still the least understood part of depth psychology.
This is a big gap in ego and self psychology that is not yet even formulated. To assume that the sense of identity develops gradually as the various self-representations coalesce does not really answer the question. What do they coalesce around, and why do they always coalesce into a very definite experiential sense, always a sense of identity?
Ego identity is an imitation of the identity of essence, the true self. The Hindus call it the Atman. The sense of identity of the personality exists because there is an unconscious memory of this true self. The personality’s sense of identity develops through the loss of the true self. The child had it to start with, but its loss led to the development, through internalizations and identifications, of the ego sense of identity coalesced around the vague memory of the true identity. A self-representation is felt as relating to self because of this vague memory of self. This is the reason for the vagueness about identity in everybody’s experience. This true self, the spark of our life, the most alive and most brilliant aspect of essence, is, so to speak, the source of all essential aspects. It is like the star of Bethlehem, witnessing the birth of essence.
This true identity, this aspect of I-ness, is what Ramana Maharshi, for instance, wanted his disciples to reach when he exhorted them to contemplate the question Who am I? To free this aspect means finally to shift the identity from the ego to the essence. This is the most difficult part of the process. Even after essence in its various aspects is uncovered and freed, the…
For this final shift to occur, the deepest aspects of the structure of the ego identity have to be understood. Here the deep experience of ego death happens. The experience of the annihilation of the personality deepens and becomes very profound. This is because the sense of self is very much related to the functioning of instincts and in particular to survival. In fact, the whole development of the personality is primarily for survival. To understand completely the deepest truth of the ego identity is to understand the necessity of the ego and its identity for the purposes of physical survival. This is a profound question, and answering it leads to a knowledge of the relationship between essence, the…
Many systems of teaching focus on the true self, concentrate on it, identify with it, and glorify it. This will naturally bring attachment, and attachment is personality,…
Therefore, all of the issues around identity and selfhood must be seen and understood, including the need for or attachment to identity. The true self exposes all misunderstanding and conflicts around identity and selfhood. Resolving the issues around the essential self eliminates all…
As the organism grows, the other two instincts develop concurrently with the development of the ego. The ego brings about autonomy and independence from the caretaking support of the mother. The ego then functions to provide these caretaking ministrations and to complete the cycle of autonomic regulation, independently of the mother. It is here that the other two instincts come into full operation.
That sexuality functions for the elimination of extra energy and tension (autonomic regulation) has been understood and formulated by Wilhelm Reich,
This means that for the personality to let go and for its identity to dissolve, the individual must deal with the issue of survival because it is underneath the functioning of all instincts. Dealing with the survival instinct will lead to understanding death and its relation to the personality and to essence. There is an inner consistency and order for the process of essential development. There is no need for the mind to direct the process. In fact, directing the process by the mind can only lead to difficulty, for the mind does not know. Commitment to the truth is sufficient for the process to unfold. When the essential aspects are discovered and freed, when the incomparable pearl is realized, the process spontaneously unfolds in the direction of the instincts and ultimately of the survival issue. Here it is not a matter of discovering new aspects of essence. It is a matter of letting go of the ego identity and living from the essence that is already present. In this phase of the work, everything becomes an object of study and understanding. It is no more an inner process. One’s life, with all its situations, comes into focus. One’s style of life—how one leads one’s life in all its aspects—becomes understood and modified accordingly. The individual becomes aware of his environment and ascertains whether it supports or inhibits the life of essence.
Everything, every part of one’s life, inner or outer, becomes conscious, no longer under the sway of the unconscious. This is a very deep and involved work. It leads to responsibility and maturity. It would be almost impossible to carry out this deep work if it were not for the presence of essence, with its penetrating power. Most of the unconscious material at this phase relates to the early months of life and even before that. It is material that is considered preverbal and, in fact, pre-personality. The mind cannot function at such depth. Only penetrating intuition and direct perception can be used effectively at such a level of work. Essence does penetrate to these deep strata of the personality. It exposes them to the light of understanding.
This knowledge needed at these very deep levels of work cannot come from outside. External knowledge is only information and is not effective at these levels where the mind does not have a structure yet. Only one’s own essence can provide the necessary knowledge. Essence itself is the experiential knowledge. Also, essence is what takes the place of these abandoned sectors of the personality.
It means he becomes objective about society and its functions. He no longer looks at society as if it were his mother, nor relates to it the way he did to his father or mother. He does not see it as a source of emotional support or emotional protection or nourishment. He does not look to it for admiration, approval, self-esteem, respect, position, fame, identity, and the like. The issues of friendship, trust, and power become clear. His social relations become objective, rather than clouded by the personality’s assumptions and hopes about society. Society is seen for what it is, and all social interactions are seen for what they are. Society is neither rejected nor accepted but understood for what it is, what it offers, what it demands, and what it needs. Society’s relation to essence and its life becomes conscious.
On the sexual level, the work is primarily to understand pleasure and to reveal all the illusions and unconsciousness about it. Not only sexual pleasure but all the kinds of pleasure, inner and outer, become understood and seen in their relation to essence and its life. This clarifies the issues of intimate relations between the sexes and their place in essential life and development. All essential aspects rise to a new dimension, where they are all seen and experienced as pleasure, as all kinds of joys and delights. The pearl reaches a new integration, and its relation to this dimension of pleasure is clarified. Both outer and inner pleasures are understood objectively and harmonized with each other and with the rest of one’s life.
On the preservation or survival level, the issues encountered are those of protection, security, safety, survival, and death. The deepest sectors of the personality are encountered and understood at this point. The necessity of the personality for physical survival is comprehended and appreciated. The ego function of defense as a whole is understood and seen in its rightful place, as a substitute for some part of essence related to protection. The real protection and defense for…
On the surface, it appears that personality wants to displace essence. This is partially true, but on the deeper levels, it was formed and developed ultimately for the protection and the survival of the organism and hence for the protection and the survival of the whole essential…
Therefore, it is extremely difficult for the personality, and especially for the ego identity (self-concept), to loosen its grip and let go when it believes that only lack and emptiness will result. It knows, although vaguely and unconsciously, that richness and fulfillment are possible, and it continues to hold out for them. However, if the essential aspects are uncovered and the various functions of essence realized, it is much easier for the personality to let go.…
The personality will realize that it itself is the barrier to the life of fullness and abundance. It will see the necessity of its own death. It will long for it. And then it will not only disintegrate into emptiness, it will…
CREATIVE DISCOVERY The moment essence is recognized as one’s being and experienced as such, a radical transformation occurs. One’s life will never be the same. Although the transformation can be total, it is usually partial. Nevertheless, it is a radical transformation: the person…
Life is no longer the exclusive domain of the personality. As essence unfolds and expands, it exposes deeper and more basic sectors of the personality, bringing about knowledge and objectivity. And these in turn allow essence…
Life stops being the life of strife and frustration, the wish for success and the fear of failure. More than anything else, life becomes a process of creative discovery. Discovery itself becomes the heart of life. Life becomes a continual creation because essence is the creative element in us. Suffering and problems become less important, and creative discovery becomes the actual process of living. The unfolding of essence becomes the process of living. Life is no longer a string of disconnected experiences of pleasure and pain but a flow, a stream of aliveness. One aspect manifests after…
Every new insight or knowledge is preceded by its absence. This absence is seen from the perspective of the ego as a conflict or a problem. However, if the individual is interested in the truth, the conflict is seen…
However, the center of all this understanding, insight, knowledge, discovery, creativity, conflict, and tension is the unfolding of essential presence. This flow of essential presence becomes the true experience of…
Experiences of ego death occur here. Inner aloneness is accepted. Personal boundaries dissolve. Essence begins to be experienced from the perspective of essence itself. One starts to understand and experience boundlessness, timelessness, not
doing, innocence, and purity. Essence and mind start becoming one. This manifests either as complete absence of thoughts, or the thoughts themselves are experienced as the spontaneous outpouring of insight.
Life continues to be a process of creative discovery. The process of learning, unfolding, and expansion never stops. Essence continues to unfold, new dimensions arise, new modes of experience and insight emerge, new capacities manifest.
The process of understanding continues; however, it is not seen as a necessity, as work, but rather as the process of creative discovery itself.
The shift of identity from personality to essence is nothing but the realization of the true self, the high self of essence. This experience of timelessness, spacelessness, and no-mind is also the entrance to the Beyond, to the Universal Impersonal, the Absolute that is the ground of all existence. This is the Ultimate that is beyond personality, mind, time, and even essence.
EPILOGUE THE DESIRE FOR FREEDOM, liberation, enlightenment, self-realization, inner development, or whatever it is called is not a response to a call from outside you. It is not that you hear of enlightenment, and then you want to be enlightened. It is not embarking on the journey because others, people you know, are on it. It is not a fad. It is not a desire for self-improvement. It is not an attempt to be some kind of an ideal model you have in your mind. It is not doing something according to some beliefs and opinions you have picked up someplace, recently or in the far past. The search is a very personal concern, an intimately personal interest in your situation. It is a response to a call deep within you. The call at the beginning is a vague, almost imperceptible and mysterious flame. It shows itself as a questioning of the disharmony you live in. It is your disharmony, as you experience it. It is your own questioning. And it is your personal yearning. If you want to be enlightened or realized like somebody else, who you heard was able to attain, then the search is not yours yet. It is somebody else’s, Buddha’s or Mohammed’s. The stirring must come from you, from your depths. The questioning must be of your situation, your mind, not of some system that somebody else has set up. You can use the system to help you, but ultimately it is your life, your mind, your quest. Enlightenment cannot be according to any system. It has to resolve and clarify your own situation. The realization must satisfy and fulfill your heart, not the standards of some system. The liberation must be of you, you personally. The path is you, your mind and your heart. The call is your call, relevant to your life, and it speaks intimately to you. The call, the path, and the realization are all a very intimately personal concern. Everything else is not yours, and you cannot use it for yourself or for others. But the complete resolution of your personal situation is yours, and that you can use for others too. The quest does not bring about improvement or perfection. It brings about a maturity, a humanity, and a wisdom.
Chapter One The Situation
curious predicament faces human beings—a dilemma which is a predicament we usually consider part of being human, part of what characterizes humanity, and is the intimate personal experience of almost every individual. This predicament is the paradoxical situation of every person: that we desire happiness, freedom, and release, and yet continue to suffer—physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually. We want happiness; we want release from our suffering and anguish. We are always seeking liberation from emotional and mental bondage, but we continue to suffer. Meaningless suffering abounds everywhere. In fact, it keeps accumulating. Even when our pain is diminished, the relief is small and transitory. Some people manage to accept suffering to some degree. This helps, but does not resolve the predicament. Happiness keeps eluding us. Suffering and running from suffering are the permanent central preoccupation of the majority of people. In every person there lies buried deep in the heart, perhaps only faintly experienced, a desire for a certain sort of life: a life that is desired at the depth of man’s heart, a life that is free and unencumbered, a life that is full of beauty, joy and fulfillment. But this life remains a dream, an inaccessable and distant ideal. When we feel joy, fulfillment and beauty, these experiences usually pass through us briefly, and leave behind them a deep longing and a sense of lack. Permanent and abiding fulfillment, a life of continuing beauty and expanding freedom, is rarely realized.
Our longing for the fulfilled life is increased by the fact that throughout the centuries, there have always been a few individuals who have made the ideal into a beautiful and living reality for themselves, and by the example of their own lives, have shown that it is possible, it is attainable.
Throughout history, realized men have given humanity this hope, that liberation is possible and attainable. Buddha, for instance, emphasized enlightenment as the solution to man’s suffering, and Christ taught freedom through truth and love. Many others have contributed to this hope, men who freed themselves and sought, out of compassion and love, to guide their fellow humans in their search for release from suffering. Since the beginning of man’s experience as a separate ego, and his resulting alienation from his true being, there have been teachers and religions whose purpose was to help people maintain a connection with or return to the essential Being.
Many of us have benefited from these efforts, have felt our suffering decrease, and even found some peace and fulfillment. And humanity as a whole has benefited. However, this predicament—that man wishes to be free from suffering and yet continues to suffer—is very much present in the lives of all but a few unique individuals. Suffering abounds and is still the primary experience and the day-to-day reality of most people.
We find that very few individuals actually respond to these teachings. Many people are aware of their presence and their promise; still, only a few respond, and fewer still embark on the various paths. Many hear or read about the teachings; many believe in them, and see much truth in them, but few actually respond in terms of taking any action. Teachers and religious leaders will explain this by saying that the people who don’t respond are being blinded and held back by their greed, selfishness, attachments, fear, worldly concerns or desires, egotism, ignorance, and so on. This is obviously true, but does not say anything useful. This attitude of blaming the student for the very thing which causes his suffering does not lead to any useful change. Why has there been no significant advance in solving this impasse? A teaching is useful only if it can reach people, only if it can reach them in a way that will enable them to respond effectively.
A teaching is useful if it can help the individual attain liberation, but this is irrelevant if the individual does not take the initial steps toward liberation. So, much of the message of the teachings has been seen as irrelevant or actively discouraging to most people. There seems to be little connection between the actual
problems of one’s life and the religious and spiritual teachings one encounters. There is, for example, the common idea that only those who leave their worldly problems, and become monks, nuns, yogis or saints, can attain a deep knowledge of true Being. So for most of human history, these teachings have failed to reach the common person.
We are interested in understanding why so few achieve the freedom they seek. Perhaps we can find some neglected gaps in the teachings, in their methods or their formulations, or in the way these are communicated. This may give us clues in dealing with this dilemma.
It is usually asserted then, as we have pointed out, that the student has failed, that his dedication or surrender was not complete or deep enough. This is true. But the responsibility does not end there. For it is also true that the teacher has failed: the teacher has not been able to penetrate the student’s mind and heart.
Both teacher and student work together. When the endeavor fails the two of them have failed. And so has the teaching.
But we ask: Is it really the nature of this endeavor that it be so difficult and nearly impossible to complete? Is it the nature of the endeavor, or could it be that our understanding is not developed enough to make the achievement of liberation more within reach? And, aside from the question of complete liberation, is it possible for a greater number of people to arrive at a partial liberation, where their lives are governed by truth, love and joy?
It is our view that although the difficulty does lie somewhat in the nature of the task, it is also due to other factors—and these other factors can be recognized, isolated and dealt with. This will bring about a certain understanding that will lead to ways of dealing more effectively with the dilemma.
Chapter Two The Problem
The paths to man’s liberation have been known since ancient times. They have been formulated in various ways depending on the era and on the teacher. We are not offering fundamentally new solutions here. Nor are we opposing the already existing solutions or the already existing teachings. The major teachings, like those of Buddha, Christ and Mohammed, are timeless and universal, and have done much to serve mankind. Our attempt is to bring to light some of the considerations that hinder both teacher and student.
We will not go into much detail about the factors already known and generally accepted, such as the influence of the environment, society, the economy, childhood conditioning, and the paucity of real teachers.
It is interesting to note that these causes not only account for our failure to relieve our suffering, but also account for the suffering itself. The existence of suffering, the lack of freedom and contentment, is seen as caused by ignorance, selfishness, greed, attachment and the like. These factors are, in fact, an explanation of the lack of
enlightenment and fulfillment. And solutions found usually involve elimination of these factors.
Let us for a moment turn our attention to one of the commonly known factors contributing to man’s suffering: desire. Many teachings have stressed that if man indulges in fulfilling his usual desires, this will contribute to his suffering, and, more particularly, will make it difficult for him to traverse any path of liberation. Desire for pleasure, for love, for security, for anything, is seen as a major barrier to realization. Most religions and most teachers have given this message to humanity. But the response to this message is minimal. People might admire and love a teaching, but do not usually respond to this insight about desire.
The student believes that desire is the root of suffering as the Buddha, and his teacher or guru have told him. But does he really believe it? If he does, he believes with his mind, with his intellect. But his heart does not completely believe, neither does his body. Although he says he believes, and might understand on some level that desire is the root of suffering, he continues desiring pleasure, love, recognition, security, material possessions, fame and so on. And more than that, he strongly believes in the rightness of this desiring. He does not question these desires at a deep level. His life is constructed of them, in all ways shaped by them. More than anything else, he believes in his desires, especially in the depths of his unconscious.
And because at this deep level he does not believe in the teachings and unconsciously actually rejects it, he cannot be touched by it and he cannot follow the teaching in his life, or finds it difficult to follow because in the deepest part of his unconscious he cannot relate to it. If he really looks at his experience, he will not find any reason why he should believe it. He has not experienced the truth that desire is the root of suffering. Believing the teaching does not make it a knowing for him.
But whatever new desires arise to replace the old ones, including the desire to end his suffering by becoming “enlightened,” entail precisely the same suffering as did the original “naive” ones. A student’s belief in the teaching regarding desire is undermined by the deeper unbelief and rejection of the teaching, and he rejects the teaching because he believes himself. He believes his experience. His teacher can see very clearly that the student’s trouble is due to his desires, but he cannot see that himself.
His everyday preoccupations, where his attention and interest lie, are not on a level where the question of desire is relevant. Maybe he is concerned with certain difficult life situations, and his real interest is in learning how to deal with them. Maybe he is concerned with some emotional conflicts that need first to be resolved in order to even have the energy to think about desires. Maybe he is primarily concerned with issues of self-image that are difficult for him to disengage from. Of course, at the root of these concerns lies the issue of desire, but his awareness cannot go to that depth.
It is easier to understand this point if we consider something simpler than desire. Let’s consider a person who is habitually critical and judgmental of other people. This person can be quite aware of his bent of mind. He can also be aware of how badly he feels when he is critical. But this does not necessarily mean he will stop. He might continue being critical in a very righteous way, regardless of his perception of the situation. He still does not see his criticalness as something undesirable. This is a very common situation. The criticalness is seen as “ego-syntonic” for this individual; that is, it is in accord with his personality and does not feel alien or undesirable to him. It goes along with, and is part of, the person’s conception of himself. It is not felt as disharmonious with his wellbeing. A trait, like criticalness, has to become “ego-alien” for a person to do something about it, or even to see it as an issue to be understood. “Ego-alien” means that it is experienced as being alien to the ego, as not consistent with the person’s interests, as conflicting with the rest of him. So no trait or part of the personality can become an object for understanding and dissolution as long as it is ego-syntonic. When it becomes ego-alien, then the person will become uncomfortable in such a way that he will be concerned about looking at this part of the personality and doing something about it.
No wonder then, that so few individuals respond to such teachings. To say to the average man that he must eradicate desire in order to be happy is absurd. For one thing, this has no meaning for him; but more importantly, desire is still ego-syntonic. The form that the teaching is presented in is experienced as ego-alien by most people. The teaching itself is experienced as ego- alien. It will have to be experienced as ego-syntonic for there to be a response. This means it will have to be presented in a way that is ego-syntonic. The teaching must take into account that the student must experience in his own life that desire is an obstacle, that it thwarts him in his purpose. So the issue here is not just a matter of accuracy in stating the teaching. If the teaching is to be broadly and comprehensively effective, it must be presented in a way that is digestable to the average person, and digestable to the student. This is a matter of communication, of appropriateness, of tact, of skill, of understanding. The
individual’s mind and state of consciousness need to be taken into consideration for the communication to…
This is what makes a teacher a good and effective one. An effective teacher will handle a situation in a very personal way for the student, taking into consideration the unique situation of the student and his state of consciousness. He will see that the issue of desire, for instance, will have…
What we are finding here is that the inner work is a very intimate and personal thing. General teachings, regardless of how deep and universal, do not work. The teaching will have to be formulated and communicated in a way that will effect the particular student in the most intimate and personal manner. The teaching must speak to the student’s heart. He has to be able to relate the teaching to his own life in a very personal way. He has to see that it deals with…
There are teachers who do take into full consideration their students’ state of consciousness and particular life situation. But they are rare, and most teachers, at least most well-known teachers, do not operate this way. They offer the general principles of the teaching without discrimination to all their students, and their systems have set principles and set practices which all students have to abide by, irrespective of their individual differences.…
For instance, the teacher might be trying to focus the student on the issue of having or not having a self. And although the student’s issue is certainly at the deepest level that of self or no-self, the student might be far more concerned and far more in conflict over the issue of having or not having value. The student might be so concerned about his lack of self-value that he cannot relate to the question of self. And as a result, the teacher might tell the student—albeit lovingly and compassionately—that he is too concerned with himself, that he is self-centered and that is why he is suffering. Although this is true, the issue of self is still ego-syntonic. Regardless of how much the student loves and respects his teacher, he cannot make the issue of self his personal concern. He is concerned with the issue that he feels he has no value. He says, “I feel and believe that I have no true value.” The teacher says, “You are too concerned with yourself. Maybe you need to disidentify with your sense of self.” The…
too concerned with yourself. Maybe you need to disidentify with your sense of self.” The student, although he might outwardly agree, will feel deep inside, “This guy is not talking to me. I am suffering because I feel worthless, I feel my self has no value. I need to deal with this before I can even think of having or not having a sense of self.” Both teacher and student are right, but they are communicating at different levels, and the teacher has not understood what is more crucial for the student to deal with at that time. The fact is that if the student deals with the issue of value, and understands it, he will be able to move from it, and eventually will see that the issue of self is at the root of it. He will arrive at this deeper level in his own time, but not until this other more urgent layer, value, has been recognized and worked through. We might tend to think that because he feels that his self has no value, it will be easier for him to let go of it. But the conditioning of the personality does not work that way. It is likely that if the individual feels a lack of value he will not let go of his attachment to self, because this is supposed to bring liberation and fulfillment, and he feels too worthless to deserve such an attainment We are seeing more and more that the teaching cannot be done in a general way. Universal teaching, regardless of how deep and true, must be tailored to the specific needs of the particular individual. Otherwise, the teaching will be ineffective, and it is no fault of the student
Both teacher and student are right, but they are communicating at different levels, and the teacher has not understood what is more crucial for the student to deal with at that time. The fact is that if the student deals with the issue of value, and understands it, he will be able to move from it, and eventually will see that the issue of self is at the root of it. He will arrive at this deeper level in…
We might tend to think that because he feels that his self has no value, it will be easier for him to let go of it. But the conditioning of the personality does not work that way. It is likely that if the individual feels a lack of value he will not let go of his attachment to self, because this is supposed to bring…
In his discourses, Krishnamurti brilliantly describes this aspect of reality, the aspect of emptiness-awareness. His elucidation of this way of experiencing reality is possibly the best there is. He is speaking of a very deep truth, one of the deepest possible for a human mind. It is a truth that actually points to a necessary condition of enlightenment and liberation. However, how effective has Krishnamurti been? Thousands and thousands listen to the truth of his discourses. His followers love him, can see and appreciate him as a free man, but how many understand this deep and universal teaching, and have attained the realization that Krishnamurti has attained? There is not one single instance known. Why is this? He embodies the state he speaks of. His teaching comes directly from his personal experience. Still, nobody understands completely. Nobody understands in a way that is real, a way that will make a difference, a permanent difference. He has been unable to communicate his perspective in its most important aspects.
Krishnamurti’s teaching, although it is simple, elegant and true, proves to be not relevant to most of the people who listen to him. They cannot understand him, because they need to understand many other things about themselves and their minds before they can even relate to what he says. His words do not penetrate them, his teaching does not relate to their personal lives. Many of them understand him intellectually, but that is not a real understanding, and they believe what he says, but it does not transform them. Krishnamurti says his teaching is simple and direct. He has said that a person can listen to him and understand him, and be transformed right there, before leaving the lecture hall. This is all very true, but it is simple and direct only to Krishnamurti’s own perception. The state he is describing is experienced as simple. It is simple, and ordinary, and very near to the individual. It is, in fact, the very nature of awareness: simple, empty, clear. But his teaching does not take into account the state of consciousness of most of his…
Powerful forces operate in the depths of the mind, forces which must be understood first, or they will always prevent the individual from seeing the simple truth in Krishnamurti’s teaching. He might appreciate the simple and elegant truth of Krishnamurti’s teaching, but his ego is usually not able to tolerate such simplicity. So, he ends up believing it only intellectually. The depths of his unconscious do not get touched. In fact, Krishnamurti’s teaching is experienced by such an individual as alien to his best interests. This is true for most people if they are really honest with themselves.
There is nothing in the person’s experience that will make him really and truly believe Krishnamurti. Emptiness and passive awareness—regardless of how many enlightened masters have attested to its power and freedom—are only words for the listener. At most he can associate a vacuity with it. And why should he value this sense of vacuity or nothingness? No part of his experience tells him he should, so in his unconscious he rejects emptiness regardless of how much he believes in it consciously. Krishnamurti’s teaching about the necessity of understanding the search so that the search will end, is cogent and useful. However, regardless of how much sense it makes to the mind of the listener, his heart most likely will not respond to such a teaching.
So why do people continue for many years following Krishnamurti, pursuing this state which he embodies and speaks about? The answer might be that there is in the students attracted to such a teacher, some inkling, some hint of the state of clarity and pure awareness. Krishnamurti’s discourses bring this clarity more strongly into his listener’s presence. The student is seeking his own clarity, so to speak, and since Krishnamurti is clear, the student believes that Krishnamurti can show him the way to it. But as we have noted, nothing is done for or about the enormous baggage of mind, emotion, self-image, etc, which the student believes to be his identity. Furthermore, Krishnamurti’s teaching is not merely about clarity, which is desirable to many. His concern is about selfless or centerless awareness, which is usually unfathomable to most of his listeners.
A master’s teaching is always an expression of himself. If he embodies freedom, then he speaks of freedom.
Bhagwan Rajneesh, for example, seems to understand Krishnamurti’s predicament, and tries to take the levels of consciousness into consideration. He knows the state that Krishnamurti teaches, but he knows that most people cannot relate to it. So he gives many different practices, and different kinds of discourses relevant to the different personalities and the various states of consciousness, and in this way tries to remedy the situation we are discussing. However, we observe here too it is difficult for him to disengage completely from his own state of consciousness. Although he discourses on all kinds of topics, his main emphasis is always the loss of ego boundaries or the loss of the sense of ego and its separateness. He connects all practices and all teachings ultimately to the state of ego death.
Ultimately, it is true, the student needs to arrive at this state of egoless cosmic consciousness, for this is a stage on the way to liberation. But, this state might be irrelevant for him at the time regardless of how beautiful it looks on his guru. The student might need to see and learn a state of solid will, for example, because he happens to be in need of resolving his issues, his life situations, that are centered around the aspect of will. It is true the individual will have to learn to let his ego boundaries dissolve and let go of his sense of individuality. But how can he let go of his sense of individuality until he knows he has one? First he will need to see that he has individuality; he has to see and understand what individuality is before he can let go of it. He also needs to see how his ideas about individuality and his holding onto them lead to suffering.
The fact that a student intellectually believes that he needs to lose his ego, does not mean that he does believe it in the depths of his heart. In the depths of his heart he does not understand why he needs to let go of ego boundaries. The issue does not seem relevant to his mind, to his heart to his life situation. In fact, ego death is a meaningless thing unless a very high and refined level of inner realization is reached. Ego is not seen as the issue until the individual is close to the state of cosmic consciousness.
Buddhist, Sufi and Christian teachings often enumerate qualities considered as desirable to embody—love, humility, truth, for example. Here of course the same problem we have been addressing again arises: the student cannot voluntarily choose at an arbitrary moment to manifest humility, for example, until it is appropriate for his development, and until pride is experienced as ego-alien. (This matter is more fully discussed in Chapter Three.)
To put the matter conversely, the lack of such qualities, capacities and virtues constitutes a barrier to a person’s realization. This is because their presence is actually normal in an optimally developed person, and their absence is always felt (often unconsciously) as a deficiency. In virtually every case, then, a significant part of one’s motivation for spiritual seeking is to fill those felt deficiencies. Thus a teacher who is able to support a student in developing the specific capacities he needs to confront both ordinary human and spiritual challenges on the path, will be more effective than one who perceives and teaches only from a more “sublime” perspective.
This is because surrender is a state of consciousness that requires much understanding and much preparation. Not only that, surrender can become ego-syntonic at one time, and not at another. The individual who is learning to assert himself because he was always weak and submissive should not be expected to view surrender as something syntonic to his best interests. In fact, his problem is that he surrenders too easily, out of self-deficiency, in a superficial way which is neither true nor real. As Rajneesh has said, an individual first needs to have a sense of self that is precious and for which he worked long and hard before he can surrender it; otherwise, what is he going to surrender? If he has no self, then he cannot give anything, to guru or to God. And, if he has a weak sense of self, then his surrender is vacuous. He is not really surrendering. A weak ego cannot surrender; it can only submit
As children, people had the capacity for surrendering to their experience. Their hearts were open. But that openness did not bring about fullness and pleasure. The child, without defenses, was repeatedly hurt in that openness. Therefore openness of heart and surrender of defenses are usually equated in the unconscious with vulnerability, and this brings up the memory and fears of deep hurt. These fears, these associations with surrender, need to be understood and resolved before the individual can experience surrender as syntonic; otherwise surrender is seen as threatening, as contrary to what is best for him. It is an unskillful tactic for a teacher to insist that a student surrender. The student may then try to surrender—but he is simply submitting to a superego demand. A more useful and compassionate approach is to help the student understand his fear of surrender and his resistance to it. Also, when a student is expected to surrender to God or to reality, the question arises, why should he do this? He does not know what God or reality is. He hears that it is good and wonderful. His guru tells him that surrendering will bring about the experience of pure love and benevolence, but he has no personal knowledge of this. What he does know through personal experience is that surrender means pain.
Most Christians have no experiential basis for believing in selfless love. Why should they be selfless? They do not know, do not understand why this is a good thing. Such a Christian’s mind and heart neither understand nor believe in selfless love. He does not believe it because he has no personal evidence that it is desirable. He cannot see that selflessness leads to freedom. Instead he sees selflessness as loss, loss of what he cherishes and desires.
The development and realization of selfless love, of Christ-consciousness, will liberate the individual, will bring about fulfillment. Christ’s understanding of human suffering is very deep and true; his solution is universal. But it is not an easy thing to understand, to learn or to embody. Many things have to be learned first. Many things have to be developed in the soul before Christ-consciousness becomes possible to see. And then more inner work and refinement is needed before selfless love arises. The issue of self or no-self does not become a personal issue for the student until he is near the end of his inner development and spiritual growth. Before that point, the question of self and no-self will be experienced as irrelevant.
If we do not make the teaching our own, if we cannot apply it to our lives, then the teaching cannot work for us, regardless of how deep, true or sublime it is.
CHAPTER THREE THE SOLUTION t would be difficult for us to find a satisfactory solution for our predicament if we restrict ourselves to the commonly accepted domains of experience, the realm of the mind and the realm of the emotions. We must extend our perceptions to the finer and deeper capacities that are locked within humanity. We must go deeper, to the realm of being, to our true essential nature, with its fine but unexpected capacities for perception and action.
Many a time a teacher will tell his disciple, “You need to jump into the abyss. You need to trust and jump.” But for the disciple, what the teacher is saying has no meaning. The disciple, if he is allowed to be sincere, will most likely respond: “What do you mean, ‘Jump into the abyss?’ What abyss? Where is this abyss I’m supposed to jump into? Also, who or what is supposed to jump?” For the disciple this is a real dilemma, and it is not just a matter of trust. The fact is that there is an abyss. It can be seen and felt. There is an individual who can jump. This individual can be identified in a very specific way. So the teacher
Essence, in the strict sense of the word, is our being. It is the very substance of existence. Essential aspects exist on the being level and not on the energy level.
(Kundalini is usually known as the ascending force, distinguishing it from the descending force. The descending force through which people like Aurobindo attained their realization, is nothing but essence itself.)
When the openness of space is realized, it has an allowing influence on the other aspects of essence. Space becomes the emptiness that can be filled by any aspect of essence. Very shortly an essential aspect starts approaching consciousness, or descending into consciousness as some prefer to say. But as we have seen, in the diamond perspective, each aspect is connected to, and actively resisted by, a certain sector of the personality. This sector of the personality surfaces to consciousness and a particular set of conflicts and issues starts to dominate the individual’s consciousness.
Essence makes us face parts of ourselves that we usually do not face, that we do not choose to face. When an aspect of essence begins to manifest, it changes our perception of the related sector of the personality from ego-syntonic to ego-alien. Sectors of the personality that were never questioned before, start being experienced as an imbalance in our equilibrium, as suffering or causing suffering.
The very existence of the personality depends on unconsciousness, on maintaining its established patterns and conditioning. The personality does not want to change. As essence emerges, the conflict between essence and personality will be magnified and become more obvious.
Here, essence acts as a perfect teacher. It does not, like most systems of teaching, try to make us deal with sectors of the personality that we personally experience as syntonic to our wellbeing. It actually disrupts our habitual equilibrium. Forcefully but gently, and in a balanced way, it reveals each sector of the personality as alien and contradictory to our best interests. No human teacher can be so exact, so effective, and so appropriate.
Now we are not only infused by the desireless state of samadhi, we are the very state of desirelessness itself. The essential aspect becomes the consciousness, becomes our being and our presence.
Most teachers assert that the mind first needs to understand and see its many ways of going about things, and then the mind will stop, and essence will manifest. The interesting thing is that these teachers assert at the same time that the mind cannot free itself. What we see in the examples we have given so far, is that the mind cannot reach the necessary understanding on its own. It is truly incapable of freeing itself. Only the presence of essence enables the mind to see and understand. When the appropriate aspect of essence is present (although the individual might not be conscious of it), it infuses the consciousness with its own reality. Only then is the mind able to see. The reality to be understood must be there, and it has to touch the mind, for it to see and understand.
Essence is then the teacher. Essence is then the taught. Essence is then the freedom. Essence is then the realization. Essence is then the fulfillment. Essence is then the being. Essence is then the very nature and substance of the individual. Essence is then the experience, the experienced and the experiencer. Essence is then the truth. Essence is then the nature of all reality.
This ultimately leads to the understanding of enlightenment, and the emergence of the Supreme aspect.
Ego cannot but shatter at the recognition of the sheer beauty of essence and all of existence.
Essence—the teacher, the tempter—becomes ultimately the very stuff of our consciousness, the very substance of our beingness, the beauty of all existence.