The mystical and transcendental point of this doctrine is that we know the eternal Ideas prenatally and that we can re-discover them only by tracing our mind back to its natural origin, which is unborn and whose supreme quality is its ability to reflect itself in the eternal Ideas or Platonic Forms.
In my system the transformative power of the Holy Ideas receives the technical name of Psycho-catalyzers that function in the same way as simple chemical elements, known as catalyzers, which produce chemical alterations by their presence without being altered themselves. The Holy Ideas have to be envisioned as nine rays projected by the Divine One and Holy Mind, and when they are present together, the pleroma is produced and their original, natural, unborn, and immortal state is unveiled and realized.
This attitude underlies the popular conviction that “growth work,” including psychological work, can lead to spiritual transformation. That conviction reflects a lack of understanding that the basic paradigms of our world view, which determine our everyday experience, are an intrinsic part of the web of ignorance that binds us tightly within egoic experience.
That conviction reflects a lack of understanding that the basic paradigms of our world view, which determine our everyday experience, are an intrinsic part of the web of ignorance that binds us tightly within egoic experience.
What goes through a radical transformation is specifically our view of what truly exists, and the mode of this existence. In other words, spiritual liberation is a matter of one’s experience and perception moving to another dimension of existence that has its own perspective, and further, of this dimension becoming the center and foundation of experience.
Reaching the fullness of our potential entails resuming our development, which leads beyond the psychological to the realm of Being or spirit.
These Ideas are objective views of reality; their realization brings freedom from the deluded views of egoic experience and therefore, from the realm of the fixations. Our approach to the Enneagram of Holy Ideas is grounded in our perspective and methodology of spiritual development, the Diamond Approach.
The personal level involves the actualization of Being as the essence of the individual soul; the latter involves recognizing Being as the true nature of the cosmos as a whole. This transition, then, is the shifting of the identity from the personal to the universal.
The nine-pointed symbol of the Enneagram first made a significant appearance in the modern West through the teachings of G.I. Gurdjieff, an Armenian mystic, around the turn of the century. Gurdjieff appears to have learned it from a secret school in the Middle East, a school steeped in a spiritual tradition that is at least two thousand years old.
According to Naranjo, the idea that the figure of the Enneagram embodies an objective map of reality in its various manifestations and dimensions originated in this ancient school. Using the map of the Enneagram, one can acquire detailed understanding of any dimension of experience. Two categories of Enneagrams
Using the map of the Enneagram, one can acquire detailed understanding of any dimension of experience. Two categories of Enneagrams refer to inner experience: one pertaining to egoic experience (reflecting fundamental spiritual ignorance), such as the Enneagrams of Fixations and Passions, and the other pertaining to essential experience (reflecting spiritual enlightenment), such as the Enneagrams of the Virtues and the Holy Ideas.
inner experience: one pertaining to egoic experience (reflecting fundamental spiritual ignorance), such as the Enneagrams of Fixations and Passions, and the other pertaining to essential experience (reflecting spiritual enlightenment), such as the Enneagrams of the Virtues and the Holy Ideas. Not only are there inner connections within each Enneagram, but there are also very specific relationships between the various Enneagrams.
He elaborates upon how the personality characteristics of the nine ego-types (which Naranjo calls “ennea-types”1) are expressions of the loss of contact with Being, our essential nature, and in so doing, shows that the true value of this knowledge is to help us to reestablish this contact.
Naranjo states that they “… arise out of a background of ontic obscuration; that the loss of a sense of I-am-ness sustains a craving-for-being that is manifested in the differentiated form of the ego’s nine emotions.”
“Every person develops a style of compensating for the lack, the ontological emptiness which is at the center of the ego. We say there are nine basic styles or points of ego fixation.” (Bleibtreu, 1982, p. 13)
Naranjo’s work, as well as Helen Palmer’s work connecting the types to modes of intuition, and Don Riso and Russ Hudson’s discrimination of the psychological structuring of the
The transmitted view is that the Enneagram knowledge is an objective knowledge of reality. We find this to be true. We understand the objectivity of the Enneagram to mean, among other things, that it can be perceived directly by anyone with the necessary capacity, who inquires effectively into the nature of reality. And since it is a true model of reality, one cannot exhaust its knowledge. Knowledge of reality is both unlimited and inexhaustible:
And since it is a true model of reality, one cannot exhaust its knowledge. Knowledge of reality is both unlimited and inexhaustible: Each teaching has a specific way of describing reality and none of these ways exhausts all possible experience.
Each Holy Idea represents a particular direct perception of reality as a specific characteristic or facet of the unobscured perception of what is. The nine Ideas, then, provide us with a comprehensive view of objective reality. The transmitted view of the Enneagram is that each ennea-type fixation is the expression of a limited mental perspective on reality, and that each of the nine egoic perspectives is the direct result of the loss or absence of the enlightened perception of one of the Holy Ideas.
The notion that each fixation is the result of the loss of a particular unconditioned perception of Being implies that ultimate freedom from this fixation is possible only through the experiential realization of the corresponding Holy Idea.
Working with the Enneagram only on the psychological level leaves us stuck on the psychological level. Working with the Enneagram as part of a larger spiritual work, however, leads to a much deeper realization of truth and thus, a freedom from personality patterns that is literally unimaginable from the perspective of ego.
Ichazo views the work on the Enneagram of Holy Ideas as necessary for freedom from the fixations. He calls the Holy Ideas the “psycho-catalyzers” needed for the work of “psycho-alchemy.” He believes that the ego develops because of the loss of contact with Being: “When we turn away from our primal perfection, our completeness, our unity with the world and God, we create the illusion that we need something exterior to ourselves for our completion. This dependency on what is exterior is what makes man’s ego.” (Bleibtreu, 1982, pp. 9–10)
He calls the Holy Ideas the “psycho-catalyzers” needed for the work of “psycho-alchemy.” He believes that the ego develops because of the loss of contact with Being: “When we turn away from our primal perfection, our completeness, our unity with the world and God, we create the illusion that we need something exterior to ourselves for our completion. This dependency on what is exterior is what makes man’s ego.” (Bleibtreu, 1982, pp. 9–10)
For example, from the perspective of one Holy Idea, reality is experienced as a nondual unity of Being, and the loss or absence of this Holy Idea leads to the delusion of duality, which manifests in the conviction that there are ultimately discrete objects in reality.
His notion is stated succinctly by the Jungian analyst Nathan Schwartz-Salant: “Complex: An emotionally charged group of ideas or images. At the ‘center’ of a complex is an archetype or archetypal image.” (Schwartz-Salant, 1982, p. 180) The Holy Idea can be seen as the archetype at the center of each type.
The Holy Idea can be seen as the archetype at the center of each type. Jung, of course, did not discuss the Holy Ideas as archetypes, but his definition of archetypes would include the Holy Ideas:… the archetype represents the authentic element of spirit, but a spirit which is not to be identified with the human intellect, since it is the latter’s spiritus rector. The essential content of all mythologies and all religions and all isms is archetypal. (Jung, 1959a, p. 76)
the core of each ennea-type functions as its central psychological constellation, forming the nucleus of the fixation.
The various characteristics of each ennea-type are simply the naturally arising manifestations of these core complexes, constituted by various self-images, object relations, ego defenses, psychological patterns, modes of behavior and cognition, and so on. So these cores determine the differentiating characteristics separating each ennea-type qualitatively from the others.
More accurately, the characteristics of each ennea-type reflect its inner core, and the different characteristics of the nine types reflect the different complexes of the cores.
In the Diamond Approach, we find several dimensions of Being which involve a perception of nonduality.
this perception, the emphasis is on the awareness that everything is made of one something, one substance, and discrimination of different aspects of manifestation is not part of the experience. This is what we call unity. Another level that involves a perception of nonduality is the nonconceptual, that is, direct awareness of reality more fundamental than or prior to conceptual thinking. Here, too, there is a sense that there is “one thing” which constitutes all of reality, and from this perspective it is clear that there are no separate objects. Reality on this level can appear as one solid “block” which cannot be separated even conceptually.
Another level that involves a perception of nonduality is the nonconceptual, that is, direct awareness of reality more fundamental than or prior to conceptual thinking. Here, too, there is a sense that there is “one thing” which constitutes all of reality, and from this perspective it is clear that there are no separate objects. Reality on this level can appear as one solid “block” which cannot be separated even conceptually.
Another level of perception which includes awareness of nonduality is what we call oneness. In this perception, the awareness of nonseparateness is clear, but within that whole, unified reality, discrimination is present. One sees the different colors, forms, and movements within manifestation, without those differences appearing as separating boundaries. It is clear that the whole of the universe is one living, harmonious manifestation. Discriminated form and movement are seen as occurring within a whole, not as the movement of separate parts.
the Holy Ideas is the idea that the principles or laws governing manifestation can be understood, and that this understanding can lead us to a realization of unity.
The Holy Ideas address the objective understanding of the relationship of the individual to the greater whole.
As will become clear in the course of this volume, the method of the Diamond Approach is based from the outset on the perspective of unity, as revealed by the Holy Ideas. At the same time, the student is not expected at the beginning to understand or appreciate this view; on the contrary, students begin by working with the actual, limited egoic identifications they find themselves in. Truthfulness about, and openness to, the limitations of the deluded ego state are central to the method.
Truthfulness about, and openness to, the limitations of the deluded ego state are central to the method. Thus, for example, a central attitude encouraged in the student’s exploration into her character is the attitude of allowing, that is, attempting to take a nonjudgmental, noncontrolling position with respect to whatever arises in her inner experience.
The understanding of Holy Will is that the functioning of the whole of reality is proceeding in one’s process of unfoldment, and the easiest path is to surrender one’s personal effort or will to this functioning. Another way that the perspective of the Holy Ideas is reflected in the method of the Diamond Approach is the systematic exploration of the particular patterns governing one’s egoic character. This method contrasts with various others that encourage the student to meditate directly on the ground of Being or awareness, ignoring or putting aside the distracting content of thoughts and feelings, which are seen to be relatively unreal. The Diamond Approach differs, also, from methods that attempt to make specific changes in a particular belief or character trait of students.
This delusion renders completely impossible the true transformation of one’s view of self and world, since the root of ego suffering is that sense of separation.
It is part of the transmitted theory of the Enneagram that each person is born with the capacity to recognize all the Holy Ideas, but with one of them particularly sensitive, strong, or dominant. This is the one that is most strongly affected by the inadequacy of early experience. This means that one’s ennea-type is determined at birth, and hence is independent of one’s early life circumstances. This is bound to be a controversial notion. We have no data to prove or disprove it, and for our understanding, it does not particularly matter.
The inadequacy of the early holding environment leads not only to the loss of contact with Being, as reflected in the loss of a particular Holy Idea, but also to the loss of basic trust, which is an innate, unquestioned, and preverbal confidence in reality. This loss leads to specific distrustful reactions determined not only by the inadequacy of the holding environment, but by the particular delusion that results from the loss of the particular Holy Idea.
The specific delusion, the specific reaction of distrust, and the particular way in which the self experiences the inadequacy of the holding environment (the specific difficulty, which is again qualitatively determined by the particular delusion), form the elements of each fixation’s particular core.
Our integration of elements of the Enneagram knowledge into the perspective of the Diamond Approach is similar, for instance, to our integration of Margaret Mahler’s theory of separation-individuation, which extends her theory to encompass the essential realm, as described in our book, The Pearl Beyond Price, Integration of Personality into Being: An Object Relations Approach (Almaas, 1988). It is also similar to our integration of elements of the Sufi knowledge of the lataif, the inner subtleties, as well as the five awarenesses of the Buddha from Mahayana Buddhism.
Helen Palmer focuses on using the Enneagram as a tool for developing intuition, or inner wisdom, while Dr. Naranjo seems to view it as a tool for psychological observations and processing as part of the work of spiritual transformation. Don Riso’s books add a lot of discrimination about Enneagram types and their psychological sources and manifestations. We use the Enneagram as a tool and a map at specific junctures in our work of spiritual unfoldment. Initially, we use it as a psychological map that aids self-observation and study.
For example, work on the Passions and Virtues helps students in the process of purification of the soul.
Freedom from the Fixations While it is useful to know and to have explored one’s ennea-type, this is not the basic orientation of this study. Our orientation is that the nine Holy Ideas are representations of one reality, each highlighting a different facet of its direct perception. The nine delusions are principles inherent in all egoic structures; they underlie the totality of egoic existence.
The nine delusions are principles inherent in all egoic structures; they underlie the totality of egoic existence.
All nine delusions make up the obscured or conditioned experience of egoic existence, and all need to be recognized and seen through if one is going to transcend that existence. One’s work on oneself must lead to accessing the realm of Being, for it is the alienation from Being that is the fundamental cause underlying egoic experience. While psychological processing is a necessary part of the work, no amount of psychological processing can release the soul from the ego fixation. Ultimately, Essence must emerge and transform the consciousness. For this reason, work on the Enneagrams of the egoic dimensions, like those of the Fixations and Passions, cannot be fully completed except by penetrating to the delusions underlying them, and these delusions cannot be penetrated except by direct experience of the Holy Ideas.
The initial enthusiasm that one experiences through learning the Enneagrams of the Fixations and Passions, and the clarity it adds to one’s experience, must not be allowed to obscure the fact that freedom from the Fixations and Passions is not an easy matter.
It cannot be attained by leisurely engaging in some kind of path that feels comfortable and nonthreatening to one’s view of reality. Deep commitment, total dedication, and an ever-expanding openness to what is possible are some of the necessary ingredients if one’s path is going to lead to transformation. Hopefully, this gives us an appreciation of the immensity of the task of true spiritual realization, without which any notion of liberation is mere daydreaming.
Deep commitment, total dedication, and an ever-expanding openness
to what is possible are some of the necessary ingredients if one’s path is going to lead to transformation.
The relative presence or absence of this condition in our individual consciousness, or soul, has a significant effect on our orientation toward or away from Being. When this state is present, the development of the soul moves toward Being; when it is relatively absent, the soul develops more toward ego. The soul always develops an ego and an identification with it, due to the nature of infant helplessness, physical embodiment, and conceptual development (see Chapter 22 in The Pearl Beyond Price, Almaas, 1988); however, the degree of fixedness and completeness of that identification will be greatly influenced by the degree to which this state is present.
The ego is a psychic structure that is based on crystallized beliefs about who we are and what the world is. We experience ourselves and the world through the filter of this structure. Spiritual awakening involves connecting with those dimensions of experience obscured by ego structure.
The Importance of Basic Trust The first step of this process in dealing with any sector of the ego has two parts. The first is becoming aware of—actually perceiving and experiencing—the particular belief or identification that constitutes the structure. The second is the dissolution of that facet of the ego structure. The latter is the most difficult one in the process of transformation, since it means letting go of part of one’s identity, and this surrendering can be experienced as a dissolution, a disintegration, a fragmentation, or a sense that you are falling apart.
What you’ve held on to has felt real to you, and now you’re letting it go and heading into what feels like unknown and uncharted territory. It feels like jumping into an abyss and it can be terrifying.
Basic trust is a nonconceptual confidence in the goodness of the universe, an unquestioned implicit trust that there is something about the universe and human nature and life that is inherently and fundamentally good, loving, and wishing us the best. This innate and unformulated trust in life and reality manifests as a willingness to take that plunge into the abyss.
Basic trust is experienced as an unquestioned sense of safety and security that is intrinsic to the way you act and live. When deeply present, this trust is so much a part of the fabric of your soul that it is not something you think about—it is preconceptual, preverbal, pre-differentiation. Furthermore, it is so basic that events and circumstances in your life cannot disrupt it.
Basic trust, on the other hand, is not a trust in some thing, some person, or some situation, and so is not readily diminished by life circumstances. Instead, it gives you an implicit orientation toward all…
Consequently, you live your life in such a way that you naturally jump into the abyss without even conceptualizing that you will be okay, since you have the implicit sense that the universe will take care of you. Your life itself becomes a spiritual journey, in which you know that if you stop trying, stop efforting, stop grasping, stop holding on to…
Even if it doesn’t feel good, even if you are frightened, you somehow know that this dissolution will be okay. The capacity to accept the most problematic phase of spiritual transformation—the dissolution of familiar structures and…
The capacity to accept the most problematic phase of spiritual transformation—the dissolution of familiar structures and identities—arises from this innate sense of safety and security.
Only when you have lost it and go through consciously developing it again, do you understand what…
The Presence or Absence of Basic Trust Basic trust is the soul’s way of attuning to a fundamental law of reality, the fact that our sense of existing as a separate and isolated entity is false, that our ego experience of isolation and helplessness is an…
Knowing that we are all part of one reality means that our true nature is not defined by ego experience or the physical body and cannot…
Even to the conscious mind of the first person, her own actions may appear mysterious if she is not in touch with the experience of nonseparateness. For this reason, she can only feel that she simply trusts things will work out, but trusts so implicity that she almost feels she knows. When the soul’s experience is consciously that of being a separate individual, it can only experience…
When the soul’s experience is consciously that of being a separate individual, it can only experience the contact with implicit nonseparateness as the sense of the benevolence of life, as basic trust.
Most people do not have a lot of basic trust; they feel that it’s okay to trust in some situations and not in others. Certain conditions have to be met in order for them to trust. This is not an inherent trust in life. This is conditional trust.…
When you go to sleep at night, you take it for granted that you will wake up the next morning. You don’t have to tell yourself, “I trust that it will be okay if I fall…
Basic trust gives us the capacity to surrender, the capacity to let go, the capacity to jump into the unknown. With it, you don’t need assurances that things are going to be okay because you implicitly know things are going to be okay. It isn’t a trust in something in particular since it is preconceptual—it is prior to your differentiated ideas about what you trust. So basic trust is even beyond…
The relative presence or absence of basic trust is a belly quality, something one’s whole being is either grounded in or not. The disturbance of basic trust is a significant factor in ego development because the perspective of ego is diametrically opposed to the sense of basic trust. The ego’s perspective arises out of a lack of this trust. It is based on distrust, on paranoia, on fear, on the conviction that you’re not going to be adequately taken care of and that the universe is not there to hold and take care of you in the ways that you need. This…
Basic trust gives you the capacity and the willingness to let go of the images, identifications, structures, beliefs, ideas, and concepts—the…
If you don’t have basic trust, you will react to what arises in accordance with your conditioning and will want your process to go one way or another. You won’t let yourself just be present; you’ll be tense and contracted. So basic trust is needed for you to be able to allow the…
The third step is to allow things to develop spontaneously and naturally the way they want to develop, without trying to channel them in…
It is beyond nonconceptual; it is not even an experience. Rather, it gives our experience a sense of ease, of safety and security, with a carefree state in the mind.
Development here does not mean building up some new experience of self. It means experiencing the factors which brought about the original profound disconnection from reality and, in particular, experiencing repeatedly the fundamental truth of nonseparateness to the point where the soul can again rest in the knowledge of that truth.
If basic trust is present, our lives have a sense of freedom. Then the desire to know where things are going arises, not out of wanting to control the unfoldment, but out of simple curiosity.
Basic trust manifests through our actions rather than through our thoughts or feelings, since it is knowledge in the belly and belly knowledge shows through action.
To understand basic trust in action, we need to distinguish it from the ego’s tendency toward inertia and inactivity. To have basic trust does not imply that you don’t act. It does not mean that if someone is pointing a gun at you, you don’t do anything to defend yourself.
It means that you trust your impulse to run—you trust your inherent intelligent functioning. Likewise, trusting that the universe will take care of you does not mean that you stay in bed all day. The universe will take care of you by making you get up and tend to your business. The universe unfolds in an optimal way, and part of that unfoldment happens through you and your actions. When you have a lot of basic trust, you are courageous and authentic. You take risks. You don’t sit on your capacities. You engage in life wholeheartedly, doing what feels appropriate to you with the confidence that it will work out. Without much basic trust, you are paralyzed with fear of failure and fear of rejection. If you’re looking for a mate, basic trust means taking the risk of talking with someone you’re attracted to. You may be a little frightened, but the fear is not a big deal and you act anyway. If she rejects you, so what? You feel resilient. After all, there are millions of people in the world.
You see that everything that exists in the world is just right and that whatever happens is just right, that what is can’t be added to or subtracted from. This is the Idea of Holy Perfection. To see this truth, you have to trust the universe. When there is a depth of basic trust, you perceive the universe through the Holy Ideas. If there is little basic trust, you see the universe through a closed mind, through the filter of the fixated structure of the ego.
If you don’t have this trust, you are constantly scared, constantly tense, constantly fighting reality—inner and outer.
it were, you would feel completely relaxed and you would spontaneously grow to become what you are supposed to be.
Since our basic trust is not complete, we fight, resist, and struggle; and then we need practices and teachings to see that our struggle is fruitless and is actually the problem. We all want to be at peace with ourselves, with our lives, with whatever situation we find ourselves in.
But all we need to do is to quit struggling with ourselves and with reality. When it is said that suffering ceases when one is realized or enlightened, what is meant is that the struggling ceases. Enlightenment is not a matter of not feeling pain, but of not fighting it.
This doesn’t mean that you don’t need to make efforts. If you need to chop wood, you chop wood, but you don’t hesitate and wonder if it is the right thing to do or judge yourself for how you do it. You simply chop the wood.
We don’t trust that reality as it is is fundamentally fine and will work for us and support us without any interference on our part.
So basic trust means trusting enough to let your mind stop, to be silent within, knowing that if there is something you need to know, the knowing will come. It means trusting that if you need to do something, you will be able to do it. It means accepting and trusting the silence, the stillness, the Beingness. If we don’t trust, we can’t let our minds be silent and we can’t let ourselves be still. We think we always have to be on the go, always making one thing or another happen or not happen, so we don’t let our minds or our bodies rest. We believe that if our minds are quiet, when we need certain information, it is not going to be there. We believe that if our bodies are still, when we need to act, we won’t be able to.
and relax into what is, is not simple because our minds have become so complex in our attempt to deal with our ignorance and distrust. Our minds are split into so many fragments that are constantly fighting with reality and with each other. Because our minds are so complicated and disharmonious, it takes a lot of work, intelligence, and energy to penetrate the thick complexity and darkness, to discover what the actual truth of reality is. Reality itself is very simple and straightforward, but we can’t see that simplicity, we can’t see the normality of our natural state. Let’s look at some examples to understand what we mean by simplicity and complexity. How often is it that you feel hungry and eat a meal and are really at peace and not in some kind of conflict with yourself about it, worrying about whether it is the right time to eat or not, whether you are eating too much or too little, whether you are eating only because your stomach is empty and you want a little food? The mind complicates the experience by thinking about it, reflecting on it, judging it, telling you that you shouldn’t eat now or you’re bad for eating what you want. Or you are tired, for instance, and you want to just relax and maybe read the newspaper or watch a little TV, but does your mind leave you alone? “How can I rest when there are things I haven’t done? How about my responsibilities? Am I wasting my time or not? Am I being indulgent? I should have rested before—I’m tired because I don’t give myself time to rest.”
If you observe yourself, you will see an almost continuous commentary going on inside. One part of you is always critiquing what you are doing, feeling, and thinking, telling you that you are wrong for what you’re feeling or thinking, you aren’t doing it right and you never will, you’re basically a bad person anyway, you
When you start working on yourself, the situation gets even more complicated. You are sitting there watching TV, and you start thinking, “I shouldn’t be watching television—I should be meditating or reading some holy book instead of wasting my time watching this dumb television program.” You bother yourself, criticizing your state: “I should be more cosmic, not enjoying this stupid sit-com.”
“Am I doing it right? Nothing is happening. I’m wasting my time.” Seldom do we just sit and allow whatever happens to happen. This is what we mean by the discord that arises because we have no trust.
If basic trust informs your experience, your psyche is relaxed. Your soul is at peace with itself and with your situation, resting in the unquestioned confidence that the universe provides, that you have, and will receive, what you really need, and that things are workable. If we really have this trust, this deep inner relaxation, it becomes possible to live our lives out of love, out of an appreciation of life, out of enjoyment in what the universe provides for us, and out of compassion and kindness for others and ourselves. Without it, we live our lives defensively, in conflict with others and with ourselves, becoming self-centered and egoistic. To find our basic trust is to reconnect with our natural state that we have become separated from. When we are innately infused by reality, our soul or consciousness is completely transparent to the truth that we and the universe are one, that we are supported by reality and that that reality is by its very…
If we really have this trust, this deep inner relaxation, it becomes possible to live our lives out of love, out of an appreciation of life, out of enjoyment in what the universe provides for us, and out of compassion and kindness for others and ourselves.
What determines whether a soul has basic trust? Basic trust is the effect on the soul of a particular aspect or quality of…
The first level of experiencing it is to perceive that it is everywhere; the second level is to see that everything comes out of it; and the deepest level is to know that everything is made of it. At this deepest level, everything in the universe is seen to…
When it is experienced through the mind, it is experienced as light and consciousness. When it is experienced through the heart, it is experienced as universal boundless love. When it is experienced through the belly, it is experienced as a pervading conscious presence. When you feel it in the belly, you feel that you are held, contained,…
Living Daylight is the first of these boundless or universal dimensions, meaning that it is the beginning of seeing that the whole universe is animate and…
The other boundless dimensions are each progressively a step closer to, or a subtler differentiation out of, what we call the Absolute, the ultimate reality, which is the farthest dimension from ordinary human consciousness. Because of their increasing closeness to the Absolute, the other boundless dimensions become more difficult to discuss and to relate to, while Living Daylight is the boundless dimension most available to human consciousness and most easily understood. The boundless dimensions are coemergent and…
Because of their increasing closeness to the Absolute, the other boundless dimensions become more difficult to discuss and to relate to, while Living Daylight is the boundless dimension most available to human consciousness and most easily understood. The boundless dimensions are coemergent and inseparable, structuring the unity of Being. The Living Daylight dimension expresses Being’s goodness, abundance, beauty, and loving quality.
In the Hermetic tradition of ancient Egypt, for example, the universe, or cosmos as they called it,…
It is only since the scientific revolution of the last two hundred years that we have seen the universe…
So the experience of this alive consciousness at the level of Living Daylight is that the universe is pervaded by love, that it is love, and that…
If someone wishes you well or feels positively about you, we say that that person likes and loves you, and…
Basic trust is the implicit confidence in reality that results from experiencing this quality, this dimension of Being. It is the trust that even if you fall, you will be held. If you let go, things will be okay. If you let yourself not know, you will be guided. If you do not manipulate, you will be taken care of in a way that is appropriate for you. And as we have said, it manifests in the way we live, the way we conduct ourselves, the way we relate to our lives and to the universe in general. It colors our relationship to everything. If you are really feeling trusting, you are relaxed and all your energies are flowing; you can become very creative, you can become courageous, you can initiate all kinds of things, and you can live fully. There is surrender, relaxation, a carefree attitude about being and about life, a sense that the way things are is fine and the way they will progress will be okay. This allows things to unfold appropriately for a human being, without the interference of the mind, which really doesn’t know how we are supposed to unfold. If your basic trust is deep, you trust that you will unfold to be what you ought to be without having to direct that unfoldment.
It is the trust that even if you fall, you will be held. If you let go, things will be okay. If you let yourself not know, you will be guided. If you do not manipulate, you will be taken care of in a way that is appropriate for you. And as we have said, it manifests in the way we live, the way we conduct ourselves, the way we relate to our lives and to the universe in general. It colors our relationship to everything. If you are really feeling trusting, you are relaxed and all your energies are flowing; you can become very creative, you can become courageous, you can initiate all kinds of things, and you can live fully. There is surrender, relaxation, a carefree attitude about being and about life, a sense that the way things are is fine and the way they will progress will be okay.
If you are really feeling trusting, you are relaxed and all your energies are flowing; you can become very creative, you can become courageous, you can initiate all kinds of things, and you can live fully. There is surrender, relaxation, a carefree attitude about being and about life, a sense that the way things are is fine and the way they will progress will be okay.
When you become aware of the quality of Living Daylight that gives rise to the sense of basic trust, the feeling is that everything is okay in a deep, intrinsic way—not that there aren’t difficulties or pain, but that things are workable.
So “holding environment” here means the totality of the surroundings and the general feel of it through the formative years.
A good holding environment is not just a matter of the mother loving and providing physically for her child; the emotional climate in the family is a part of the holding of the environment as well. If there is tension between the parents, for example, the child will feel it and the sense of holding will be somewhat disrupted.
If impingements continue, the child will keep reacting in an attempt to deal with the situation, trying to make things work such that she feels held. The reactivity in response to the impingements or disruptions in the environment is the child’s attempt to bring about what she needs so that she can survive and develop. If the holding isn’t there or isn’t dependable, the child will try to manipulate herself, her parents, and/or the environment to bring it about.
The reactivity in response to the impingements or disruptions in the environment is the child’s attempt to bring about what she needs so that she can survive and develop. If the holding isn’t there or isn’t dependable, the child will try to manipulate herself, her parents, and/or the environment to bring it about.
The reaction for Point One is to try to make the holding happen by improving oneself.
For Point Three, it is to deny the need for it but pretend to oneself, “I can do it on my own. I know how reality can be and how I’m going to develop and I’ll make it happen.”
To have absolute basic trust is to be completely realized.
In order to develop basic trust, and consequently more contact and identification with Being, we need to experience the lack of holding imprinted on our souls. As with any other aspect or dimension of Being, we must first work through the resistance to experiencing the absence or “hole” of it, and then when we fully experience this hole, the missing quality will arise.
Emotionally, it will be felt as the need for holding and the sense that no one and nothing is holding you. The feeling of the need itself might be defended against by a lack of trust that anyone will be there for you. This need for holding might be experienced as the desire to be taken care of, the need to be actually physically held, the need for someone to see you and support you.
Allowing ourselves to experience the hole of holding is a crucial step in reclaiming contact with the holding dimension of Being, Living Daylight. Your sense of basic trust is also increased each time you experience the environment responding to you in a supportive way and each time you experience yourself being held in one way or another. In the process of spiritual work, each time you move beyond your usual sense of reality and of who you are—each time you jump into the abyss with its sense of disintegration or fragmentation and accompanying fear—and you experience Being coming through, giving you a sense of support, a sense of relief, of satisfaction, of meaning, your basic trust is strengthened. The more experiences you have that involve dealing with painful states and memories, and resolving them, allowing you to connect with various aspects of your fundamental nature, the more that sense of trust is created. The more your soul is held and the more basic trust is developed, the more you will unfold. Providing this holding for who you really are is one of the functions of a spiritual teaching and a teacher. So the whole of the Work ultimately builds basic trust.
The barrier is a kind of resistance that often takes the form of a profound skepticism about the existence of such a loving intelligence: “This sounds like a lot of new age bullshit to me!” Or it may take the form of anger: “If there is such an intelligence, where has it been all my life? Where was it when I needed it?”
If your mind is more impersonally oriented, you’ll think of it as your reactions to whatever intelligence or presence infuses the universe—which is functionally the same thing as the concept of God.
The soul experiences itself as cut off, alone, separate, isolated, and it feels that it has to fend for itself and help itself in order to survive. This is how the fixations develop.
The distrust that is fundamental to the egoic perspective is based on not experiencing the goodness of the universe. From this distrust arises what we call the Beast, the part of the ego that is not only frustrated and angry, but also hates what is good and positive.
“I believe in you—I know you’re there, so where are you? Paying attention to other people?” These feelings need to be brought to consciousness and worked through before we can consistently experience this loving presence as a force in our lives.
Love is action in the now, while hope is for the future. So, as the love arises, it affects the egoic hope, and the more you let go of the hope, the more ego activity ceases.
However, the Loving Light provokes the Beast, the structure of hatred which originated in reaction to the loss of this Christ love. The Beast is felt as a resistance and opposition to Loving Light. It is not surprising that the Beast or the devil is a starring character in many mythological stories.
But most people—unless they have difficulty knowing what behavior is appropriate—tend to resist acting out the hatred even as they begin to directly experience the Beast.
If you are able to feel the hatred without resistance or acting out, the hatred will transform into essential Power. This Power can penetrate the delusions that keep the ego’s reactivity in place and it can allow the soul to become still enough so that the quality of love can affect its state and its perception.
The Jackal state is a more animal-like sense in which the quality of the soul is deep suffering, burning frustration, and aggression. When this is happening, you are experiencing the actual negativity in the soul that appeared partly in response to frustration and also in response to being merged with mother in the symbiotic stage when she was in a negative state. These structures of negativity become illuminated when the deeply relaxing and opening effect of Loving Light touches the soul. In this way, the structures can be seen and understood, although they are not easy to work through because they have such early, primitive roots.
Our experience in the Diamond Approach is that when these structures are not hidden or rejected, but are illuminated and understood, the actual truth of the loving nature of the universe becomes accessible and can be integrated into the ongoing experience of the soul.
As the ego develops, a self-image associated with a sense of identity takes shape. This sense of self forms relative to, and in conjunction with, your internalized images of your parents—of the most important people in your life—and your image of the world. You know yourself and the world around you through your internal representations. (See The Pearl Beyond Price, Almaas, 1988, for a detailed discussion of this process.)
You know yourself and the world around you through your internal representations. (See The Pearl Beyond Price, Almaas, 1988, for a detailed discussion of this process.)
So we form a God-representation, a self-representation, and a relationship between the two. In psychological language, this is our “object relation” with God.
While we are by nature spirit manifesting in a body, as our ego develops, we become blind to that reality. It is analogous to becoming color-blind, seeing only part of the spectrum.
But because we don’t see the spiritual dimension in ourselves either—in fact, our ego is built on this sense of lack—we don’t see that we actually have the capacity to take care of ourselves. This sense of deficiency is the psychological manifestation of our lack of contact with our spiritual depths.
We are not something separate from the world—the sense of separation is only a mental construct—and so it is impossible to recognize the fundamental nature of one without seeing that of the other.
When we see through this dichotomy, when we perceive beyond our world representation, we see that the physical world has a reality that is similar to our essential nature in the sense of its presence and consciousness, and we perceive that world to be perfect and good. We see, in other words, that the physical world is made out of conscious, loving presence, and this recognition underlies the sense of basic trust.
All are seen as manifestations of that loving, conscious presence. If we really see this, we are already in heaven. Wherever you turn, there is harmony, beauty, and love. Regardless of whether something looks ugly or beautiful, its intrinsic loving quality transcends all appearances.
This consciousness can be experienced at different levels and dimensions like other essential qualities, but its central characteristic is an aliveness, a reality, a truth, a profundity.
This is why spiritual teachers rarely get involved with social reform. They aren’t against it, but they recognize that it will not solve the world’s problems since those problems are based on cognitive distortions.
From the standpoint of the Kabbalist path and the Sufi path, working on oneself is not a matter of liberating oneself; rather, it is a matter of helping God live, helping God manifest in the world.
Enlightened Mind The perspective of the Holy Ideas is the view that arises when there is freedom from any fixed position. This is what we mean when we speak of liberation and enlightenment. Enlightenment is not seen as a specific experience, but rather as an experience and understanding of how things are. This includes basic trust, that is, the condition of the soul when it is in contact with Being in its various dimensions, including the quality of Living Daylight. The view of the enlightened mind also does not imply being in any particular state; rather, it is what is perceived when one is free from the need to be in any particular state. It is the perspective of what is sometimes called the “natural condition”—how reality appears before the ego clouds one’s perception.
It means discovering how we can live in a natural condition without even thinking about what our state is or whether we are enlightened or not. It is to see reality as it objectively is—a reality independent of your experience of it.
The fruit of the path is the capacity to live in objective reality. With the understanding of the view of objective reality, you can discriminate how each of your experiences is a reflection of this reality, a distortion of it, or an approximation of it.
The Holy Ideas, then, are objective views of reality, reality seen through the eyes of our natural condition. We call them Ideas because they are the perspective of the awakened center in the head, the higher intellectual center. They are nine different perspectives of reality seen without the subjective filter of the ego, and these views are only possible if basic trust is deeply integrated in one’s soul.
When basic trust is dominant, the head center opens and we perceive the fact of reality. We see that the universe in its totality—all levels, including the physical—exists in a fundamental way and that that existence is the true reality.
Being is seen to have a rightness about it, and the way it functions is also seen as right. So the presence of basic trust makes possible not only the acceptance of what is, but also a sense of the perfection of what is.
The Holy Idea for Point Three is Holy Hope, Holy Law, or Holy Harmony. Holy Hope is the perception that because all that happens is the functioning of a benevolent reality, things naturally move in the right direction. There is trust that the natural unfoldment of the universe functions according to inherently optimizing laws, and so things evolve correctly; therefore, you don’t need to take matters into your own hands to make them happen. There is an implicit hope, rather than a hoping that the right things will happen. Holy Origin is the Holy Idea for Point Four. This is the perception that we as individual souls, as well as all that exists, come from and are part of the loving presence of Being. Being is our origin, our substance, our nature. From this perspective, we see that implicit in basic trust is the sense of connection with our Source.
unfolding. We have a sense of what the evolution of a human being toward completeness is about, what the natural, spontaneous evolution of the human soul looks like. The Holy Plan, then, is God’s plan—the perception of the direction of the soul’s unfoldment when it is in contact with Being—the blueprint of what a human being is meant to become.
human being becomes complete when God is fully replicated in that human life, when the macrocosm is replicated in the microcosm. This is what is meant in some spiritual traditions by man becoming the image of God. Holy Work is the actual evolution, the process of that unfoldment itself. Holy Work is God’s work, which is the unfoldment of the consciousness of the soul into the perception of the whole universe and whatever efforts we make in that direction.
This is probably why the Holy Ideas are referred to as “psycho-catalyzers” by Ichazo; they catalyze the process of transformation in the soul from identification with ego to identification
Basic trust opens the higher intellectual center, allowing us the view of the Holy Ideas, which liberates us from the delusions of ego and helps us to establish our consciousness in the unity of Being.
not a matter of confronting a lack within oneself, but rather of exposing one’s delusions.
So working through this perceptual distortion is a matter of changing your mind, changing your perspective, changing your philosophy about reality, life, and yourself.
They might be willing to experience difficult emotional states, provided there is the promise of some wonderful state at the end of the tunnel. But to actually change one’s frame of mind might not seem so desirable.
To understand them on an experiential level is to open the head center. The perspective of the Holy Ideas that we are going to be working with is the view of reality that arises when the head center is open, active, and functioning.
So our work with the ennea-types is not a matter of going into the details of how each one operates, but rather of seeing how their cores are the result of basic delusions about reality, which can be corrected through truly understanding and perceiving the corresponding Holy Idea.
For instance, you might believe that there is something wrong with you. This belief can’t be relieved by the presence of any essential aspect because it is not the result of an inner lack of contact with Being. It is, rather, a delusion that arises from not understanding the Idea of Holy Perfection, and as long as you don’t understand it—that you are, by your very nature, just right—that sense of wrongness will remain. It is not a matter of some aspect of your True Nature being unavailable to your consciousness; it is that there is a particular distortion, a particular twist in how you think, how you perceive your-self and reality, that needs to be untwisted.
The outcome is a letting-go of a fixed cognitive position about reality.
In the system of the Enneagram, the ego is symbolized as a nine-headed dragon, meaning that although each fixation is a specific delusion, each is part of the same creature.
We have seen that the sense of holding in the environment allows the integration of, and uninterrupted contact with, Living Daylight in the soul, and that when this dimension is part of one’s experience, the sense of nonconceptual, nonverbal basic trust arises.
The embodiment of basic trust is more important than understanding the Holy Ideas because it transcends our perception of what is and what is not reality. The Holy Ideas serve as nine doorways to basic trust because if they are understood, the head center opens, Living Daylight descends into the body, and as it reaches the belly, it is integrated into the belly center as a fundamental trust in reality. While working on the Holy Ideas is a way of developing basic trust, from another perspective the Holy Ideas are basic trust maturing in the process of human development and growth.
These three Ideas are the most important for basic trust. Holy Truth, Holy Love, and Holy Perfection are the three ways that, when combined, tell us how reality is in its wholeness, whether you call that totality God, Divine Being, the Divine Mind, or Oneness.
This understanding of what the total reality is, and what a human being is from the perspective of this total reality, gives us an understanding of what doing is, what functioning is, what living is, and that is what the
We will make three triangles, each formed by one Holy Idea from each of the three corners, thus representing a view of the universe, a corresponding view of man, and a view of functioning.
the truth of Reality most completely when he views each moment fresh, without preconceptions about what should be happening. —Ichazo, 1972
For example, the relative truth right now is that you are sitting reading this book, and a while ago the truth was that you were doing something else. The relative truth depends on the situation, and tells us the facts of what is happening now.
For example, let’s say that you find yourself fantasizing about eating some ice cream. The relative truth is that this is what is going on in your mind. If you inquire into the desire for the ice cream, you might realize that you are feeling alone, and that this brings up a sense of missing a particular kind of contact. Then, as you stay with that, you see that you’re wanting a certain kind of love that reminds you of your mother. You realize that your mother’s love tastes a little like ice cream. This might lead you into experiencing a quality of love that is sweet and soft, and that makes you feel cared for and loved. As you contact this quality of love, you are in touch with the actual essential aspect that you long ago identified with your mother. This level of the truth of the situation is the essential truth. That truth is a quality of love that is present in you but is only felt on a relative level as the desire for ice cream. On this essential level, the facts of your situation take on a sense of meaning, of richness and of depth, because they usher you into the realm of what truly exists, beyond the surface of things. An essential truth is not a thought, an idea, a reaction, or an action; its most important characteristic is that it is an ontological presence—it has a substantive existence. Although the relative truth of a situation can take us to the essential truth of it, the essential level is not dependent upon the situation. It is self-existing; it is its own realm existing independently of who we are and what we are doing.
An essential truth is not a thought, an idea, a reaction, or an action; its most important characteristic is that it is an ontological presence—it has a substantive existence. Although the relative truth of a situation can take us to the essential truth of it, the essential level is not dependent upon the situation. It is…
The essential truth helps us understand what is really happening and what exists beneath the appearance of things. A fantasy of eating ice cream is simply an image in your mind, and even real ice cream disappears or changes form after it is eaten. The love that it may evoke or reflect, however, has an intrinsic and unchanging existence, although your awareness of it may come…
When we first encounter Essence, we experience it in the dimension of form, contained within us, in other words, “There is love in my heart, will in my belly, clarity in my head,” and so on. At a deeper level, the presence of Essence expands and loses its boundaries, and we realize that it is actually boundless. This is the beginning of experiencing the formless or boundless dimensions. The first formless dimension that we usually encounter, as discussed in Part Two, is that of…
“There is love in my heart, will in my belly, clarity in my head,”
As our experience deepens, the boundless dimensions keep revealing themselves in continuing depth, one after the other, as we penetrate deeper and deeper concepts within our mind, and these dimensions will lead us eventually to the deepest, innermost truth—absolute truth. This dimension of the…
creates a dichotomy that does not exist. It is not as though there is me and there…
The formless dimensions bring in another kind of perception, which is of Being as a formless, boundless, real existence, a substantial presence…
We see here that the universe is ultimately pure Being, and that this pure Being not only supports us, infuses us, and is our nature, but more fundamentally, that it constitutes us.…
This understanding that there is no universe separate from this pure boundless self-existing Beingness is a more…
On the level of the Supreme (the dimension of Pure Presence or Pure Being), for example, you realize that everything is a translucent Beingness.
You see that it is not as though translucent
On this level of the Supreme, there is no separation between what we call appearance and reality, the form and the meaning. They are all one thing; there is a unity.
The perception of this unity arises through merely seeking to understand the truth of the situation. It is not a matter of generating a particular experience; you just open your eyes to what is here.
Dimensions of formless Being reveal themselves until we come to the origin and source of all dimensions, the Absolute. Initially, you might experience the Absolute as the source of everything, but as your experience matures, you realize that everything is the Absolute—there is no separation.
Initially, you might experience the Absolute as the source of everything, but as your experience matures, you realize that everything is the Absolute—there is no separation.
So as our understanding of the nature of reality deepens, it becomes more and more mysterious and nonconceptual, until it arrives at this dimension of the Absolute in which the nature of reality reveals itself as a profound mystery.
So although we experience ourselves moving progressively into deeper and deeper dimensions of reality as our inquiry becomes increasingly subtle, Holy Truth is the perception that all these dimensions exist simultaneously. They are all facets of the same reality, so the sense of a hierarchy is ultimately illusory.
Holy Truth, therefore, negates duality. It tells us that there is no such thing as discrete, separate existence. However, we know that for the consciousness of the ego-self, the sense of separateness is fundamental. So Holy Truth challenges and ultimately dissolves the ego’s sense of separateness. While one does experience the sense of unity when experiencing any of the formless dimensions, the perception here is of the unity of the dimensions themselves. The Buddhists call this “total completeness,” while the Sufis call it the “all-inclusive state,” or the “Divine Being,” whose all-inclusive name is Allah. Allah, then, does not refer to any particular dimension or state, but refers to all that exists—at any time, on all its levels and in all its dimensions—as a unity. So you could call the perception of Holy Truth objective truth, reality, the universe in its totality, Divine Being, unity of existence, or total completeness.
All experiences and life-forms cannot be proven to exist independently of their being a presence before your mind, just like a lucid dream.
In some traditions there is a debate about what the ultimate reality is:
In my view, there is no need to decide, since freedom has nothing to do with what state you experience or take to be ultimate. So the question is largely a matter of how you define “ultimate truth.”
If you define the ultimate truth as that which is left when everything that can be removed is removed, you are describing the Absolute. It is the state most devoid of any creation or concept, reality reduced to its simplest minimum. If you define ultimate truth as the actual state that is experienced if there is no manipulation or conceptualization of your experience, you recognize it as the state of total completeness, because there is no duality present in it. The state of total completeness is all-inclusive, with the manifest and the unmanifest existing in nonduality. Everything is present, including the Absolute, which is seen as its inner nature.
This is the reality beyond egoic reality, true existence independent of the personal mind. It includes everything without any separations, and it does not matter whether you call it God, the One Mind, the state of the Buddha, the Tao, or the Divine Being.
If your perceptual capacities are clear, you recognize that other dimensions exist in addition to physical reality, such as love, Beingness, and awareness.
Physical Reality and Nonduality Surprisingly, this perception of unity makes physical reality itself appear more concrete, not less. It appears more three-dimensional, with more sense of depth. Ordinarily, when experiencing the state of Oneness, physical reality is seen as the surface, with the boundless dimensions as the underlying depths. But when the boundless dimensions are perceived as interpenetrating the physical, the three-dimensionality is enhanced. Everything stands out, feels more real, more present, and more itself, in a sense.
But when the boundless dimensions are perceived as interpenetrating the physical, the three-dimensionality is enhanced. Everything stands out, feels more real, more present, and more itself, in a sense.
The physical and the essential become one. It is not that the physical is filled by the essential, but rather that the physical is the essential.
There is no separation at all, no division at all, no distance between the surface and the depth—in fact, there is no surface and no depth. There is no inside and no outside. They are the same thing. The unity is the complete interpenetration, the complete intermixing of inner and outer. It becomes all of one quality, all of the same thing.
From the perspective of unity, there is no such thing as dying, nor of being reborn. There is no such thing as ego death, and no such thing as enlightenment either, since you are already the unity. This is the state of affairs all the time and always—before you develop an ego, when it is dissolving, and after you are dissolved. All those parts are the unity itself, and so you are not going anywhere.
Even if you are experiencing suffering, that suffering itself is the reality, and absolutely nothing needs to be done about
This is the foundation for the practice of Dzogchen, which is taught by the Nyingmapa sect of Tibetan Buddhism. It is a tradition that works in the nondual only, and is said to be for people possessing superior capacity.
If you think that there is something to be attained, you are creating a duality, since you are implicitly saying that there is a natural state and an unnatural state. From the Dzogchen perspective, the natural state is always the state that is occurring; you are just not always recognizing it as such.
When you don’t like some manifestation and you want things to be different, all it means is that you have not surrendered to the Holy Will. You have your own prejudices and ideas about how things should be, and these could form the basis of your own personal religion!
The Idea of Holy Truth is that nothing is excluded. The ego is not excluded, thinking is not excluded, reactivity is not excluded, neurosis is not excluded, and the physical realm is not excluded.
When you demarcate one area of physical space and then another, can you say that there is more than one space? Both are subsets of, and included in, the all-encompassing space.
Egoic consciousness is, by its very nature, based on division. If there is no duality in your perception, the ego is non-existent. The study of the Holy Ideas is not the study of the building blocks of ego—these are elucidated when exploring the essential aspects and the formless dimensions. Here, we are studying the principles that hold the building blocks of ego together.
Because of the way the mind functions, the loss of an Idea leads to a deluded idea about reality. You cannot just not have a principle of reality, because the mind can’t function without one. So if there is no perception of the fundamental unity of all of existence, then there is the perception of duality. If there is duality, there is the loss of unity. The loss of unity is the loss of the condition of the natural state of total completeness. Basically, it is the loss of God Consciousness.
We are, metaphorically speaking, always pointing north, and so we think that this is how reality is. Letting go of the magnet would mean realizing that that orientation is not reality, and that things are actually much more free-flowing than we thought.
Holy means objective, how things really are beyond the cloud of egoic experience. So here, holy means objective truth. When you are experiencing the state of Holy Truth, everything becomes hallowed, filled with a sense of wonder, beauty, and grace. There is a sense of holiness to the experience, and those who live in this state are called “holy” in the spiritual traditions.
The moment you place blame on yourself or others, you are not only experiencing the loss of the preciousness of the state of unity, but you are also reaffirming the sense of duality—of there being a you and an other. Blame, then, whether of self or other, indicates that the ego is already operating within the delusion of duality. If you are in touch with the inherent unity of all of existence, if it is all one thing, blame simply does not make any sense.
Ultimately, all self-blame comes down to blaming oneself for not being enlightened. Universally, there is a core place within all ego structures where one feels guilty for not being a realized Being.
Revenge is really the ego’s attempt to regain the original state of unity. It is a way of trying to get rid of the guilt and the pain through a convoluted line of reasoning that goes something like this: Someone hurts you, and the pain involves loss of the sense of unity. So you retaliate by hurting him or her in exactly the same way, in the belief that doing so will enable you to rid yourself of your own pain and restore the sense of unity.
Here, it is the reaction of self-blame, which, as we have seen, is based upon the sense of duality and opposition, and which ultimately blossoms into the attempt to get revenge that is characteristic of ennea-type Eight.
The Holy Truth itself manifests as the seeker looking for the Holy Truth. So the journey is a matter of the seeker finding out that he or she is what is sought. When we know this, we realize that there is no need for seeking.
With Holy Omniscience, the emphasis is on the differentiations and discriminations within that unity.
So the emphasis in the perception of Holy Omniscience is on the differentiation in the unity of all that exists, on the various aspects and dimensions of existence—yet this diversity does not negate the fact of unity.
In the experience of Holy Transparency, you can see that you are an inseparable part of the whole because your boundaries are transparent.
You experience yourself as an individual, distinct from other things, with a consciousness localized in a certain place, yet you also experience yourself as continuous with everything else.
Envision the universe as a living being that, through its differentiations and developments, evolves increasingly sophisticated life-forms which are capable of ever-subtler and more inclusive levels of experience. Each form is a manifestation of this being, and as such, each provides it with different experiences of itself. So each life-form is a way that this living being, the universe, experiences itself.
To know the truth of Holy Omniscience is to know that you are the eyes of the universe. When you understand this, you know that your job (as the Holy Idea of ennea-type Seven, Holy Work, will tell us) is to make that eye completely transparent and completely open so that you can give the universe an experience of itself in all its dimensionality, in all its variety, in all its colors and flavors.
And a complete human being is a way the universe experiences itself completely.
Each spiritual tradition has a different story to explain why we are here. Some say that the unmanifest manifests the universe out of compassion, or out of love, or even out of playfulness. We don’t claim to know the purpose of human life. In fact, we admit the possibility that it may not even be possible to know why we are here. All we really know is that the unmanifest manifests the universe—and we know this from our own experience, which provides the perception of the human being as both an individual and an organ of experience for the whole universe. Experientially, the sense is that the whole universe is behind you, and you are like a window through which it sees.
Experientially, the sense is that the whole universe is behind you, and you are like a window through which it sees.
From this vantage point, we see that it is not to free ourselves from our suffering, but to become a clear window for the universe. Now, becoming such a window does result in freeing oneself, but if you conceive of it that way, you remain a self-centered and isolated individual who is working at becoming free.
Reorienting your approach to the Work does not mean you should try to control your motivation (which is impossible anyway), or judge yourself when you see that you are being self-centered. Rather, it means that every time you recognize yourself operating from selfish motivations, you try to identify the barrier that is interfering with seeing things objectively.
Then you have a relationship with the rest of the universe, thereby creating the mental construct of this fundamental object relation. By “object relation,” here, we mean the construction in the mind of a concept of one’s self in relation to the concept of other or of the world. From the perspective of Holy Truth, we see that there are no discrete objects; from the perspective of Holy Omniscience we see that there is no separate self. So with these two perspectives we can see that both ends of any object relation—self and other—cease to be experienced as real.
As we experience more objectively, we see that true independence is being independent from the mind that separates us from the universe. True independence, then, is independence from falsehood.
But actually, our interdependence is much deeper and far more profound. We are not only dependent on each other, but we are actually inseparable from each other, since we are all made out of the same substance.
This conviction is based on assuming that the boundaries of our bodies define the boundaries of our consciousness, of our souls.
On the physical level, it is true that each of us has physical boundaries and that this body is separate from that body, but on the level of consciousness these boundaries are permeable. The edges of our bodies do not define where we end and others begin, although if we have this conviction it will feel that way. When we recognize that this experience is a delusion, we see that the ego boundaries we have used to define ourselves are only mental constructs. We realize that we have been holding onto an image of our bodies in order to define ourselves as entities.
not. It is more accurate to talk about a soul current or soul flow than to call it a soul, since that makes it sound like a separate entity. It is more like a wave being formed by the constant movement of the currents, inseparable from the ocean out of which it arises.
So I am different from you, but I am not separate from you; people are different from each other, but they are not separate from each other.
Real separation means particularization out of the unity or, for human beings, individuation. It means recognizing that your true nature is not determined by external influences. At a deep unconscious level, it involves separating from your mother—separating in the sense that who you take yourself to be is not determined by her. This is not isolating yourself, but rather recognizing your uniqueness and individuating.
A truck is nothing but differentiating outlines and boundaries—the Universal Mind heading toward you with a certain density and at a certain speed!
Abiding in Holy Omniscience is a very beautiful condition in which you retain your humanity without losing your divinity. The totality of the living universe is present as your support, your ground, and your inner nature, but you are still a person, functioning and living the life of a human being.
The specific reaction in response to this painful sense of deficient isolation is to withdraw in an attempt to hide from reality. If you feel small, deficient, and isolated, it means that you feel inadequate to deal with reality, so the reaction of this ennea-type is to want to avoid dealing with reality, to hide from it, to try to separate, withdraw, run away from it, to break off contact—basically to not stay in touch with whatever reality is presenting.
What you most want to get away from is the state of deficiency itself.
As we have said, we each have all the ennea-types within us since they are the nine differentiated manifestations of ego, although one type will be more pronounced in each of us.
The issue of the extension object relation makes it very difficult to experience and integrate the Holy Idea of Transparency. Because of it, one either resists the experience or becomes attached to being an extension in a way that continues to support the personality. Holy Transparency means experiencing things without your personal mind. Then, as an individual, you are an extension of the universe, an extension of the Holy Truth—and not as a mental construct, not with an image in your mind that you are an extension of the universe.
relief. Needing to be the center of the extension object relation is a big job, since you are holding yourself as God. In the pure experience of direct union with the living universe, you know yourself to be completely supported, completely loved, completely held, and completely taken care of as a human being. The living consciousness of the universe is above you, surrounding you, within you, and you know that you are a part of it. This brings a wonderful sense of relaxation and joy. A sense of tremendous preciousness and value arises as you see that not only do you need the living universe to exist and support you, but that without you, that living universe would be blind. You are not expendable.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN Point Two HOLY WILL, HOLY FREEDOM
The awareness that Reality, moving with direction and according to fixed natural laws, flows with a certain force. The easiest way to deal with this force is to move with it. This is true freedom. —Ichazo, 1972
If you perceive reality as it is, which is to say, objectively, the perception, the awareness, and the understanding that arises are that everything is truth and that truth is the existence of the universe.
when we say that the truth is everything, we are describing the perception from a deep state of consciousness in which everything is seen devoid of the projections of the personality, and is therefore a unity that is imperceptible to the soul informed by the ego.
Will is: “The awareness that Reality, moving with direction and according to fixed natural laws, flows with a certain force. The easiest way to deal with this force is to move with it. This is true freedom.”
For example, if you react to your experience, you get disconnected from your Being. We take this understanding a little further, saying that if you really surrender to the Holy Will, you will realize that you are actually part of this force of the flow of reality. It is not, then, a matter of flowing with it, but rather of realizing that there is no separation, that it is all one unfoldment.
Transparency, and we know that you are not separate from the stars, why do we call shifts in the relative position of the sun and stars “change,” while we call scratching one’s head an “action”? We cannot make this distinction unless we believe that the universe is an inanimate object full of other inanimate objects, and that we human beings are living things, having our own will and ability to do this or that. From the perspective of Holy Truth, the universe is one infinite, multi-level organism. Therefore, what we call “action” is nothing but the changes and transformation that this organism experiences. So, if you perceive and experience the totality of the universe as one living Beingness, then scratching your head and the movement of the earth around the sun are both manifestations of the universe changing its appearance.
you believe you are ultimately separate, your doing and functioning seem independent of the rest of the universe.
Because what happens is the functioning of the organism that is the universe, there is no randomness to the changes that occur within it. Events may appear random to our subjective point of view, but from an objective perspective, an inherent intelligence is seen to be operating, moving things in a particular direction. As Albert Einstein is reputed to have said, “God does not play dice with the universe.”
If there is no sense of identity, no “I” in the experience, then rather than experiencing from the perspective of God, there is just the existence of the universe which is seen to be “doing” all of it, moving everything.
So Holy Will is nothing mysterious, but very few people actually come to know it directly. It is a very subtle and deep perception of the operation of Holy Truth. At the same time, we can experience it as whatever is happening at any moment, whether it is a supernova exploding or your superego attacking you. All of it is Holy Will.
Holy Freedom, then, means that your action is not separate from the action of the universe, so your will is not separate from the will of the universe. There is, therefore, no conflict between your will and the will of the universe; your will is not opposed to that of the universe or disharmonious with it.
“When there is disharmony, I don’t see it because I am seeing God.” What Rabia meant is that there is complete forget-fulness of the chastisement because you are seeing the Holy Truth. So whatever you see or experience, even the chastisement, is the Holy Truth. The Holy Truth is everything, including all that happens—what we call good, what we call bad, what is painful or pleasurable to us—all is part of the Holy Truth.
The moment you say that you don’t like this or that, you separate yourself from, and set yourself in opposition to, the universe.
Buddhism and Taoism have the perspective that freedom is choicelessness, which is the realization that there is no choice. You, the separate individual, have no choice about what happens. Even the choice to surrender indicates that there is still a trace of separateness, because even surrender is the action of Holy Will. It is not your action; it is divine intervention—meaning that whatever happens to you at any moment is not your doing.
When you experience yourself as a separate self, you experience your self as doing, as functioning. The moment you transcend this perspective, you realize that all this time you thought you were making things happen, while in reality, things were being done.
When this is the case, one needs to practice surrendering to what is happening, practice complete being with, saying neither yes nor no to what is happening. To really understand what action is, the best place to begin is with your inner experience. You neither accept it nor reject it; you don’t push it away, you don’t hold onto it. It is what is happening, and that’s it. You take no position, nor do you hold any attitude about it.
The ego is always trying to change things, and if you observe your inner experience, you will see that you are in constant turmoil trying to change one thing or another. You try to relax, you try to quiet your mind, you try to make yourself feel better or make yourself feel worse. You are always interfering, trying to make something happen other than what is actually happening.
You try to relax, you try to quiet your mind, you try to make yourself feel better or make yourself feel worse. You are always interfering, trying to make something happen other than what is actually happening.
If you experience anger today, it’s because the universe chooses to. If you experience love today, it’s because the universe decides to.
Here, we are talking about a universe that is intelligent and creative, where what is going to happen in the next moment cannot have been planned because it’s going to come out of this moment, rather than out of some plan written at the time of creation. So from this perspective there is no predestination, but there is also no free will.
This is a very limited idea of God. Maybe God is so intelligent that He can create the universe moment to moment without any blueprint!
This intelligence, which we call the essential aspect of Brilliancy, doesn’t need to rely on the past in order to act. This intelligence is so bright that it can respond immediately and spontaneously in the most optimal way possible without having to refer to what has happened in the past.
The universe manifests at each moment completely spontaneously, and this spontaneous action is the action of intelligence, the action of creativity. So the best way for us to open ourselves to this realization is to go along with it.
We stay with what is, and allow it to unfold. The only doing that is necessary is understanding our situation enough to see how we believe we are choosing what happens, when in reality, we are not.
This is the teaching of no acceptance or rejection.
Longchenpa calls “creativity” the action that we are calling Holy Will, and “the state of sameness” is the state of Holy Truth. Dzogchen, the highest yana in the Nyingmapa of Vajrayana Buddhism, is the practice of self-liberation, meaning that everything is seen to always be liberating itself.
In the Diamond Approach, this attitude of non-interference leads to what we call nonconceptual freedom, which is not striving after anything—not even the ultimate state of Holy Truth. One’s practice, then, is to cultivate an orientation of not interfering with what arises inwardly and outwardly, of just letting be what is. To illustrate this, let’s say that you are feeling angry. If you reject your anger because you judge it as not being ultimate truth, you are reinforcing the egoic perspective by imposing your separatist will upon what is arising. Preferring one state or feeling over another one, deciding that what is arising in you is not right and should be different, even wanting to be enlightened instead of where you are right now, all indicate identification with the ego which keeps you imprisoned in your ideas about how things should be.
You will see that freedom is not determined by what state you are in; rather, it is complete surrender to whatever state you find yourself in. Only then can you be really free, because then everything that happens is okay.
Surrendering to the Holy Will is freedom because then you are not placing any constraints, preferences, or conditions upon reality. Everything that happens is fine with you. This degree of surrender must happen at all levels. It cannot be a superficial surrender based on an idea of what is spiritually correct. You can’t simply say to yourself, “I surrender to this,” while in your heart you wish something else were happening, thereby rejecting your present experience. True surrender means not seeking or efforting.
Everything that happens is fine with you. This degree of surrender must happen at all levels. It cannot be a superficial surrender based on an idea of what is spiritually correct. You can’t simply say to yourself, “I surrender to this,” while in your heart you wish something else were happening, thereby rejecting your present experience. True surrender means not seeking or efforting.
To completely surrender to it means accepting reality unconditionally, including our own states and our own actions. This does not mean resignation; it means acceptance and response out of that acceptance.
Learning to discriminate between ego reactivity and appropriate response to whatever life presents is a subtle and complex process. The Dzogchen practice is to go with whatever happens, without even trying to understand it.
Surrendering to Holy Will does not mean buying a car that you cannot afford or eating a piece of chocolate every time you feel like it. So an understanding of your motivations and the level of reality you are grounded in is necessary for appropriate action. If you are feeling inseparably connected with the whole of the universe, your actions will be quite different than when you are taking yourself to be isolated and self-generated. Because it is difficult initially to discriminate the orientation from which your actions arise, it is important to concentrate on surrendering to whatever arises internally. At the beginning of your work on yourself, your inner experience is not free of judgments and preferences, and your actions will not be either. When you free your innerexperience, you will understand Holy Truth, and out of that understanding you will perceive Holy Will and experience Holy Freedom. Then your actions will flow out of that understanding; they will cease being reactions and will become spontaneous responses. But even though your actions are initially reactive, they are still the actions of Holy Will, so while they must not be trusted or indulged, they also must not be rejected. This is a subtle and tricky discrimination.
Rather than being oriented toward achieving a certain state of consciousness, a practice that makes sense must be oriented toward freedom from wanting certain states. True freedom is not the realization of a certain dimension; true liberation is to be free from all dimensions.
an individual, your task is not to choose what happens, but to comply to the extent of recognizing that it is not even possible to choose. This is a complete reversal of the position of the ego.
This means having no judgment of your experience or of anything else that happens in the universe, and in time, this means having no preferences. You actually get to a place where you don’t prefer the Absolute over your body identity. If there is a preference, there is still a separateness.
This is the Idea of Holy Freedom: Your will and the will of the universe are completely merged and unified, so there is no inner discord. One part is not trying to change another part. There is complete inner unification.
Separate Will
At any moment, there is the possibility of completely letting go of trying to control things and letting the universe be, instead of believing that you can and should rearrange it. Egoic pride is the belief that you have your own will and can have your own way, and can change things in the universe. It is the belief that, “I’m going to do it my way; I’m going to have things be the way I want them.” This pride manifests in the body as a constriction of the fontanel at the top of the head which blocks Living Daylight, and thus, blocks the whole perspective of Holy Will.
The specific delusion that arises due to the loss of Holy Will is the conviction that there are such things as separate entities who have their own wills—it is the delusion that there is a separate you who can have things go the way you want them
We are not saying that you don’t have free will, but that you don’t have a free will separate from the whole. You want your way instead of seeing that the universe has its way, manifesting through you. We have seen that the best approach is to surrender to the universe, thereby actualizing yourself. Then you become who you really are, because you are whatever the universe happens to be unfolding within your consciousness at any moment.
If you accept or reject any part of your experience, even what is delusional, you are identifying with the belief that you are a separate entity. This is a very subtle teaching in which the way one practices affects what one believes, and what one believes affects the way one practices.
What happens is what happens, period. This includes all of your actions, your feelings, your thoughts, your inner states. Otherwise, the delusion arises that there is a “way that is yours,” different from what is happening.
This manifests externally as manipulating other people to make them conform to how you think they need to be for you, and internally as constantly evaluating your experience to see whether it is “right” or not, and trying to change it if it doesn’t match your ideas of how you think it should be. “What state am I in? Oh, no! I’m being reactive—that’s no good—I should be just being. Now I’m being. Good, good. I should stabilize that,” and so on, as if it were up to you to make your state become this or that. If you contemplate your experience, you will see this constant activity. The moment you are identified with your ego, you are involved in this activity of trying to make yourself feel better, and not scared or unhappy or empty. All ego defenses are based on this principle of changing your experience to make it conform to how you think it should be.
Whether you are experiencing yourself as a separate entity, or as the Holy Truth, or as transparency, or as a frustrated mother, or as a stressed-out businessman, or whatever, that is what the universe is creating right now. It’s pure magic, so who are you to say to God, “I don’t like what I’m experiencing. Why don’t you change it?”
a stressed-out businessman, or whatever, that is what the universe is creating right now. It’s pure magic, so who are you to say to God, “I don’t like what I’m experiencing. Why don’t you change it?”
Holy Freedom means the end of struggling.
You discover that it is a huge relief not to feel that the territory you are crossing should be different than exactly how it is for you.
When we think of surrendering to God’s will, we tend to think of it as a capitulation to some greater force, rather than just completely surrendering to what is happening. Thus, all the loss of autonomy and wounded pride that we experienced as children gets reactivated. This is the only way that the ego can understand what surrender is: “God tells me to do such and such, so I’ll do it.” This comes from an identification with the belief—usually unconscious and deep within our souls—that we are children who are being ordered about by our parents.
the ego decides that something is wrong with reality, what follows is the idea that you can do something about it, which indicates the absence of Holy Will.
This is very different from true surrender, which is neither acceptance nor rejection, but ceasing to separate one’s own will from reality. To learn to surrender means to expose your willfulness—the belief that you have a will separate from reality’s, and that you can have it your way.
We call this false will in our work, and when we inquire fully into it and begin to disidentify from it, a sense of deficiency is exposed that carries with it a feeling of castration. We feel that something is missing, that we are inadequate, that we have no inner support or capacity to persevere. This painful sense of deficiency often manifests as the actual sensation of an emptiness where we know our genitals to be, and they may feel devoid of feeling as we are working through this “hole” or sense of absence.
As you stay with this hole, essential Will begins to arise in your consciousness, and is experienced at first as a sense of determination—“I…
On the essential level, it feels like a sense of inner support that imparts the capacity to persevere effortlessly because one is confident in one’s capacity to do so. Effort, the hallmark of fake will, becomes meaningless on this level because we see that real will means “going with the flow” of one’s Being. If efforting is still present, it means that you are still identified to some extent with the personality. So essential Will is an…
Effort, the hallmark of fake will, becomes meaningless on this level because we see that real will means “going with the flow” of one’s Being. If efforting is still present, it means that you are still identified to some extent with the personality. So essential Will is an effortless steadfastness in carrying out the task at hand, resulting from a sense of inner support and confidence.
Because you feel supported by the universe when you are in contact with Being, you don’t need to try to make things happen in a premeditated kind of way, and so your…
As we have said, actualizing the Will requires practice in being present with whatever is arising without rejection, without acceptance, without attachment, and without preference. This practice constitutes the foundation of the Diamond Approach. The Diamond Approach is basically a matter of going along with the unfoldment…
However, when shaped by the ego, our inner process flows in a very limited way that is constrained and made to conform to our conditioned beliefs…
Then our experience ceases to be a predictable revisiting of familiar territory, and becomes truly an exploration and an adventure taking us into depths and dimensions of reality that reveal more and more of the richness and profundity of what is here. The acceptance we are discussing is not a matter of saying, “Okay, I can allow this to be going on.” It is not the stance of being someone who takes a positive position relative to something else. Perhaps calling it non-rejection is more accurate, although it is the lack of any reaction to what one is…
Perhaps calling it non-rejection is more accurate, although it is the lack of any reaction to what one is experiencing—positive or negative. It is just letting things be exactly as they are, with no inner sense of self that is feeling one way or another about them.
So there is a place for effort, and the deeper your practice becomes, the less effort there will be.
Castration and Willfulness
The implicit belief that there is a separate you who can have your own way creates this sense, and the emotional state that accompanies it is one of humiliated castration. This state is the specific difficulty for ennea-type Two. Because of the belief that you can make things go the way you want them to, the loss of holding is experienced as an enormous blow to your pride, a deflating and humiliating slap in the face.
This stance, which characterizes ennea-type Two, is one filled with pride and stubbornness in which you assert, “I am going to get my own way.” People of this ennea-type have a strong willfulness; it is important to them that things go their way and that what they make happen is important because otherwise, they feel castrated and humiliated.
So instead of feeling that whatever is happening is just what’s going on, you feel that your will is ineffective and hasn’t worked if things aren’t happening the way you want them to or think they should.
This whole constellation of the sense of deficiency (the specific difficulty of humiliated castration) and the reaction to it (the specific reaction of willful action) forms the core of this ennea-type. Out of this core, all of the characteristic manifestations of manipulation, seductiveness, and physical, emotional, and mental influence arise. Through understanding this ennea-type, we can see how the ego is an imitation of the universe. The ego, here, is basically saying, “I am the truth, I exist as myself independent of everyone else, and I can do what I want.” Only God can say that, but the egoic self is implicitly asserting this all the time.
What we see is of our own making; it is reality seen through the filter of our distortions. When that filter isn’t there, you see the same things as before—you see the same people, the same places, the same situations; but your perception shifts so you see the beauty of their existence. This reflects what we discussed in Part One: how the fixations of the ennea-types are not ego structures, but rather, are nine different twists in the soul, distortions in the perceptual system of one’s consciousness.
This is the basic tendency of ego, whatever one’s ennea-type, and it remains deeply entrenched despite the fact that you can see from outside of this perceptual twist that you obviously can’t gain your freedom by willfully pitting yourself against what is; you just get entrenched in the struggle to free yourself, which is not freedom at all.
Spiritual Practice
This also means that a true spiritual practice that will ultimately bring about transformation is one that entails a surrender of your own will, prejudices, preferences, choices, and rejections.
To the ego, freedom means being able to do whatever you want whenever you want to do it. Because this isn’t often possible, you come to see the universe as constraining you and limiting your freedom. But from the perspective of Holy Freedom, freedom is wanting whatever the universe wants. When you are aligned with the universe, what you want and what is happening are the same thing. This is true freedom. This is why the Idea of Holy Freedom is fundamental to the methodology of the Diamond Approach, in which a basic part of the practice is to be present with whatever happens to be your state. If you react to it, interfere with it, or try to change it, then you can’t see it objectively but only through the screen of your projections.
This is true freedom. This is why the Idea of Holy Freedom is fundamental to the methodology of the Diamond Approach, in which a basic part of the practice is to be present with whatever happens to be your state.
Fundamental to our understanding is that while you might have projections upon whatever you are experiencing initially, if you don’t interfere with it, the tendency of the universe is to reveal its own nature through your experience. This, of course, requires basic trust.
There, the understanding is that if you are present with an object of perception without interference, it will naturally liberate itself, meaning that it will spontaneously reveal its true nature; or, using the language of the Enneagram, it will reveal itself as nothing but Holy Truth. The difference between Dzogchen and the Diamond Approach is that we see that this revelation of true nature does not usually happen spontaneously and instantaneously. Rather, there is a process of unfoldment involving various states and dimensions before one arrives at the ultimate one of Holy Truth. So another conceptual basis of the Diamond Approach is Holy Work, the Holy Idea of ennea-type Seven, which is the fact that a natural process of unfoldment occurs and that there are many dimensions to that unfoldment. Dzogchen is, in some sense, a purer practice, but a more difficult one because it assumes that there is only one true state, that of Holy Truth.
So for example, Dzogchen would say that if you are angry, and you stay with that, it will spontaneously reveal itself as the Holy Truth. In our work, we see that if you stay with the anger, it spontaneously will reveal the hurt underneath it; and if you stay with the hurt, it will reveal the emptiness underlying that; and if you stay with the emptiness, an aspect of Being will arise; and if you stay with that, it will take you through deeper and deeper dimensions of reality. If you stay with this process and understand everything that arises, you will, in time, realize that everything is the Holy Truth.
Using the understanding of Holy Will, our method in the Diamond Approach is to welcome whatever happens and whatever it is that you are experiencing. You stay present with it and you become curious about it, wanting to understand it in an experiential way, out of love for truth. The orientation is not toward a certain state, because the moment that you orient your practice toward a certain state, you have left Holy Freedom. Even if the state that you are trying to cultivate is Holy Freedom or Holy Truth, if that is not what is unfolding in your experience, you are imposing your egoic will onto your process to direct it toward the Holy Idea. Our orientation, then, is toward freedom: complete and total independence from any state or dimension. We see that any state is fine if it is completely surrendered to.
This will happen on its own because it is the nature of reality to progressively reveal itself, taking you closer and closer to its ultimate nature, so there is no need to direct your process toward it.
Either way, you end up in the specific suffering of ego: being locked in inner combat with one part of yourself pitted against another. Only after chasing one state and then another over and over, to the point of realizing you truly cannot will what happens, only then does the deep longing for the end of suffering bring true surrender to what is.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN Point One HOLY PERFECTION
The awareness that Reality is a process, moving with direction and purpose. Within this movement each moment is connected by the process with the one goal, and thus is perfect. —Ichazo, 1972
We cannot add or delete anything to make that reality more perfect; nothing needs to be done with
The perfection of reality can be seen only if our consciousness is like a clear mirror which reflects everything as it is, without projection or distortion. When we perceive with this clarity, we recognize that reality has a sense of purity, neatness, immaculateness, and beauty inherent in it. The experience is both outwardly and inwardly perfect and luminous.
The Rightness of What Is
This makes our work very obvious: to find out what is in the way of perceiving reality as it is—to find out what our obscurations are, where our perception is deluded.
Seeing things objectively means that it doesn’t matter whether we think what we’re looking at is good or bad—it means just seeing it as it is.
To see reality from the perspective of Holy Perfection means to see that reality is just right as it is; it does not need changes or corrections. This is a very radical notion. If you really took it seriously, you would stop doing many of the things that you do. The moment you see that everything, at every moment, is perfect, you see that your effort to make things better is pointless. You see that what really needs to be done is to observe your mind, your consciousness, in order to see why it is obscured, why it does not see things clearly, and what is making your mirror so cloudy.
Perfection, as the ego understands it, is determined by measuring reality, inner and outer, against some ideal or standard of how things are supposed to be. The criteria for this judgment may vary from person to person, but for everyone, this quest for perfection is the cause of much of our internal striving. This is not perfection at all but rather, perfectionism. The perfection we are talking about here is independent of these ideas; it is true for everything that exists by the mere fact of its existence. Holy Perfection is difficult to define exactly, because like all the Holy Ideas, it is a universal concept, a Platonic Form. As such, the perfection we are discussing cannot be analyzed or reduced to simpler elements; it is a pure form of manifestation.
We know this with certainty, without necessarily knowing what makes everything perfect. This sense of the intrinsic rightness of the reality that is inside and outside everyone is a feeling, a recognition, an action, of intelligence. It involves no conceptualizing about perfection. Holy Perfection reflects the intactness, the completeness, and the glory, of what is. It is the perception of the perfection of all phenomena from every angle, on all levels, all the way through.
If you experience things in the moment, without thinking in terms of the past and the future, just right here in the now, and see the isness of what is here, you will recognize the perfection we’re talking about. You won’t be looking at what is here through the filter of your ideas, which are the result of what you heard or saw in the past or what you think is going to happen in the future. Holy Perfection is the perfection of what is, and reality exists only now, only in this moment—without the concept of time, without your ideas about what’s going to happen tomorrow or what’s not going to happen tomorrow, without your ideas about what should or shouldn’t happen, without judgments of good and bad—just…
When you experience an essential state fully, you can recognize that it has a quality of perfection. You can’t say that it needs…
Holy Perfection tells us that everything has that quality of rightness, and not only certain essential states. We saw that from the perspective of Holy Truth, everything is one, an undivided wholeness. Your body, your essence, the world, God, are not separate things; they are all one thing, and that one thing, which is not a thing, is the presence of Essence. Because everything is ultimately essential, it follows that everything is inherently perfect. We don’t normally see reality this way because we are busy looking at it from the perspective of our own delusion. Holy Perfection cannot be perceived from the point of view of ego, because ego wants to change reality to fit how it thinks it is supposed to be. Holy Perfection is a transcendence of that point of view. Realizing Holy Perfection is not a matter of intellectually asserting that everything is perfect so that you can go on being lazy…
Holy Truth and Holy Will are relatively acceptable to people, but Holy Perfection is one of the Holy Ideas that many have difficulty with. If we really accept what Holy Perfection tells us about the objective state of things, we can’t…
we really accept what Holy Perfection tells us about the objective state of things, we can’t complain about how anything is, or about anything that happens.
The Fundamental Nature of Things If there is an earthquake somewhere, for instance, that is the action of Holy Will. It’s difficult for many of us to see perfection in it if hundreds of people die. But perfection does not exist on that level of discourse; it does not exist on the level of someone being killed by a falling rock during the earthquake. Holy Perfection recognizes that there is no separate rock and no person…
So, from the perspective of Holy Perfection, an inseparable piece of the essence of God falls on another inseparable piece of the essence of God, and it is very graceful, because it is all the movement of the essence of God. The egoic point of view is that there are rocks falling on people’s heads, and that is terrible. And it is terrible from that vantage point. But Holy Perfection is not a matter of seeing what happens from the egoic point of view and then trying to change it to make it conform to what we think is right. If we did that, we would have to control…
Perceiving Holy Perfection means seeing beyond that level. It means seeing reality from a transcendent point of view, which implies seeing it…
This does not mean that you have the license to do whatever you want, justifying it with “all action is perfect.” Only one who is established in Holy Perfection, who continuously perceives it, can act totally spontaneously. This action will…
Whether the form of H2O is water or ice at a particular moment, for instance, doesn’t change its fundamental nature. Death is just…
you recognize that the now is not time; it is not a point between the past and the future. The now is this book, is the chair you’re sitting in, is you. These are made out of now, they are the now, they are the present. They are presence, and they are Being. When you see the beingness, the thereness of everything, you recognize the intrinsic perfection and rightness of it all. The moment your mind wanders to the past or the future, your focus is not on the intrinsic reality of things. Your mind is focusing on the changing of the forms, and the implications you believe these changes have. Then you lose the perception of what truly exists right at this moment.
The moment your mind wanders to the past or the future, your focus is not on the intrinsic reality of things. Your mind is focusing on the changing of the forms, and the implications you believe these changes have. Then you lose the perception of what truly exists right at this moment.
If you really let yourself be here in this moment, you will find that everything begins to glow. Everything is radiant, luminous, clear, and transparent. That glowing luminous awareness has within it all kinds of wonderful qualities: love, harmony, beauty, and grace. And you will see that there is a sense of perfectness, a rightness about how things are.
The more we are present in the now, the more we recognize that the now has nothing to do with time and that the now is everything. When we see that, there is a certainty, and innate knowingness, that this is how things are.
Comparative Judgment
The belief arises that there is really and absolutely such a thing as good and bad, or right and wrong, that some things are intrinsically better than others, and that you can make comparative judgments about what exists. There must be at least two things to be able to make a comparison, and this is the delusion of duality of Point Eight.
So we’re not saying that because everything is perfect, you should eat food even if it is rotten. We’re also not saying that if you are sick, you shouldn’t go to a doctor. Obviously, if you want to be healthy, you take care of yourself, and there is comparative judgment involved in that. Holy Perfection does not negate this level of things, but when we talk about our beingness, our innate existence, we are discussing a level of reality beyond the particulars of whether our bodies are healthy or not, or even whether we are living or not. From this perspective, even the cancer that kills us is part of the perfection of all that
Obviously, if you want to be healthy, you take care of yourself, and there is comparative judgment involved in that. Holy Perfection does not negate this level of things, but when we talk about our beingness, our innate existence, we are discussing a level of reality beyond the particulars of whether our bodies are healthy or not, or even whether we are living or not.
We usually adhere to the egoic point of view of reality because we believe that that is the way we will survive. But when we perceive from the objective point of view, we recognize that this point of view will not only help us survive, but that it will help us survive with harmony. The objective point of view does not eliminate the egoic point of view; it underlies and contains it. The body, for example, has a circulatory system and an immune system; these inner features are not apparent on the surface, and if you don’t take these into consideration, you are not being objective about the body, and your chances of survival will be lower. So taking into account the objective point of view does not eliminate the surface—yes, there is a face, skin, feet—but adds much more to the situation.
As we have seen, the loss of the Holy Idea of each ennea-type leads to its specific delusion. The loss of the holding environment leads to the specific difficulty, and the loss of basic trust leads to the specific reaction. The delusion is what determines the characteristics of both the difficulty and the reaction.
Idea of each ennea-type leads to its specific delusion. The loss of the holding environment leads to the specific difficulty, and the loss of basic trust leads to the specific reaction. The delusion is what determines the characteristics of both the difficulty and the reaction.
Wrongness
With ennea-type One, the specific difficulty is the feeling or conviction that something is wrong with you, that you are imperfect in an intrinsic way, that you are fundamentally flawed.
You experience something painful about the holding—not being taken care of adequately or not feeling held—and you experience it as a wrongness, a flaw. Because you don’t understand or perceive the Holy Idea of Perfection, you interpret the absence of holding as meaning that something is wrong with you.
This is universal to the nature of ego, and we are all usually busy trying to find out what is wrong with us so that we can correct it. As with any other point on the Enneagram, this conviction cannot be remedied by the experience of an essential state, because it is not due to the loss of an essential aspect or quality of Being, like love or joy. It is not a hole. When the Holy Idea of Perfection is not present, it does not matter which differentiated aspect of Being you are experiencing; the delusion that some things are perfect and others are not, and the feeling or conviction that you are inherently flawed, remains.
This judgment about what is not right about yourself is based on comparisons according to a subjective standard. This standard becomes elaborated later by your superego, your social environment, or your spiritual values. It changes, depending on what you are involved in and what is influencing you most deeply, and there is a righteousness about clinging to it.
Self-Improvement
You compare your current state to what it was when you thought you were more enlightened. You measure yourself against your standard of how a truly evolved person is supposed to be, and where in your spiritual development you should be now. There is incessant mental activity. You cannot leave yourself alone. You are always picking on yourself, believing that if you were different, then you could rest. But rest will never come this way, because there is really nothing at all fundamentally wrong with you.
You are always picking on yourself, believing that if you were different, then you could rest. But rest will never come this way, because there is really nothing at all fundamentally wrong with you.
Have you noticed that even when you are having fun, you don’t leave yourself alone? Even when things actually feel fine, you still check to see whether this is what is supposed to be happening. “Is this okay to feel? If I were enlightened, would feeling pleasure be all right? Maybe I should be feeling something different.” You always find a way to disturb it.
The resentment is not always felt, but it is implicit in the ego activity. When you try to improve yourself and it doesn’t work, you might become aware of feeling resentful, but you are really just feeling the resentment that was already there.
Most of us approach spiritual work with the belief that if we work on ourselves hard enough, we will finally hit upon the right state, and then we will be able to leave ourselves alone. We believe that something will happen to us—we will be hit by a bolt of lightning and be transformed—and then we won’t have to improve ourselves anymore.
believe that something will happen to us—we will be hit by a bolt of lightning and be transformed—and then we won’t have to improve ourselves anymore. Trying to find the right state or the right trick to get into the enlightened state does not work because from the enlightened state we see that everything, including ourselves, is already perfect and needs no changes. Enlightenment is our innate nature; we don’t need to be hit by anything and we can leave ourselves alone right now.
Enlightenment is our innate nature; we don’t need to be hit by anything and we can leave ourselves alone right now.
Then we would be able to see that our perfection does not depend on what state we are in. It is objective truth about all states at all times.
Some people, for instance, always need to be right, regardless of what the situation is. This attitude of always proving to ourselves or to other people that we are perfect and right is a way to cover up the belief or feeling that there is something wrong with us. It’s a reaction formation, doing just the opposite of what we consciously or unconsciously believe about ourselves. If we really feel we are okay, why do we have to prove it? Why do we need to compulsively prove that we are right? If we really felt okay about ourselves, we wouldn’t need to confirm it. The activity of the specific reaction, then, can vary between always trying to make yourself better, and always trying to prove that you are good and right.
If we really feel we are okay, why do we have to prove it? Why do we need to compulsively prove that we are right? If we really felt okay about ourselves, we wouldn’t need to confirm it. The activity of the specific reaction, then, can vary between always trying to make yourself better, and always trying to prove that you are good and right.
So now we see the whole constellation: You are always busy watching yourself, comparing yourself, and judging yourself. You don’t just see the state you are experiencing as it is. You have to compare it to something else: another state, or a similar state you experienced at another time, or with some idea in your mind. You are not just with your experience. It is always viewed from another perspective, from another place, in a comparative way, instead of just seeing it for what it is, just as it is. And if you look at your experience or someone else or anything in the world in that way, and compare whether it is good or better or less than something else, you do that because you want to make it better. This means that you believe that there is something wrong, which means that you don’t see Holy Perfection.
Real activity is not a matter of comparing and judging; it is a matter of experiencing things as they are and responding from the dynamic intelligence of Being. The underlying motivation in it is that you are curious to know about what you are observing because you love experiencing reality. This is a very different attitude from that of looking at things with the underlying belief that they need to be improved.
The underlying motivation in it is that you are curious to know about what you are observing because you love experiencing reality.
If what arises feels sublime, or if it doesn’t, these are just the specifics; its perfection is something much deeper than that.
Being operates without the guidance of the mind.
You simply perceive the world and the whole universe changing. There is no discrimination of who is doing what. The whole universe is acting as one body, flowing this way or that according to its own natural laws, without even the discrimination that that is what is happening. But because we usually operate from the position of believing that we are separate and that there are discrete entities, it appears as if we are making things happen and that comparisons are real. So if you are operating according to comparative judgment, it means that you believe you are a separate entity with your own separate world, and that duality is real. But these are delusions.
So the moment you become free from one delusion, you are free from all of them because each one implies the other. The Holy Ideas are all connected, and the delusions are all connected.
This is not a little change; it is a great upheaval.
Relative Perfection
To do this, we will use the metaphor of gold. From pure twenty-four-carat gold, you can make all sorts of things, such as jewelry or scientific instruments. Imagine that you don’t know that gold is precious and that you cannot tell the difference between something made out of brass or out of gold. A ring made out of the gold might be perfectly or imperfectly made, it might fit you or it might not. If it fit you and you liked the way it was made, you would think that it was perfect. If it didn’t fit or if it was sloppily made, you would think that it was imperfect. This is an example of looking at its relative perfection. But from the perspective of Holy Perfection, whatever you make out of the gold is still gold. The fact that it is gold doesn’t change depending upon whether the jewelry is well-made or not, or whether it fits anyone or not, or whether you perceive its preciousness or not. Whatever form it takes is incidental to the fact that it is still fundamentally gold. So seeing the gold of it and seeing that that gold is perfect and pure and luminous is analogous to seeing the perfection of reality. Everything that exists is gold. The gold is Being, and all of reality is Being. The forms that reality takes, such as having the form of a ring or that of a bracelet are incidental. But the ego identifies itself with the shape the gold has taken and says, “That’s me—I’m a ring.” Then it decides whether the ring is good or bad, beautiful or ugly, and so on. By saying that you are the ring, you forget the fact that you are gold.
Seeing the gold does not mean that you do not see the ring. It does not eliminate the level of form, the relative level. Just because you realize that it is gold and it is precious and perfect does not mean that if the ring is too small for you, it will feel comfortable. It won’t. The relative judgments don’t just disappear. They are there for practical reasons. But underlying them is something much more fundamental, which is that this ring is precious regardless of whether it fits or not. What is precious about it is not how it fits, but that it is gold.
This is the perception we are trying to penetrate: to see the goldhood of things rather than the ringhood of things, which the ego is focused on. The ego is always seeing rings, and deciding whether they are perfect or not, and this has become a habit. You have become so focused on the shape of the ring that you cannot see what it is made out of any more. You see its form rather than its nature. And you define yourself by that form. Then, regardless of how wonderful that form is, you always feel that there is something wrong, something is missing, because you are not experiencing the actual quality of your true nature.
The ego is always seeing rings, and deciding whether they are perfect or not, and this has become a habit. You have become so focused on the shape of the ring that you cannot see what it is made out of any more. You see its form rather than its nature. And you define yourself by that form. Then, regardless of how wonderful that form is, you always feel that there is something wrong, something is missing, because you are not experiencing the actual quality of your true nature.
So basically, the state of objective existence—Nirvana, enlightenment, or unity—is seeing the goldhood of all of existence. It is seeing that everything is gold all
the time; it never changes. We are usually looking at the incidental forms and the changes of those forms, which are not fundamental to their reality.
Working with the Fixation Core As we have seen, our usual response to the belief that there is something wrong with us is to try to find out what is wrong so that we can correct it.
There is actually nothing wrong with you, there is just the feeling that there is something wrong with you. What you need to do here is to get in touch with the belief or the feeling that there is something wrong, and see what it feels like. You want to identify and explore this deficient state of the soul that constantly impels you to better yourself.
The point here is not that you are a flawed ring; it is that you are not fundamentally a ring at all. You believe that your real nature is flawed because you do not see that it is gold. You probably think that it is tin. If you saw that it was gold, you would see that it is not flawed and that in an intrinsic way, it is perfect. As you penetrate the feeling of wrongness and recognize that it is just a feeling and has nothing to do with reality, then that can become a channel to reveal your actual perfection.
you penetrate the feeling of wrongness and recognize that it is just a feeling and has nothing to do with reality, then that can become a channel to reveal your actual perfection. As long as you believe that you can find something wrong with yourself, you can hate yourself for it. If you investigate the ego activity of judging and comparing yourself, you will recognize the hatred in it. But if you explore the actual feeling of wrongness, you will see that you cannot really find anything that you can put your finger on that is wrong. What’s wrong keeps changing. It is a belief that is arising because you do not have a certain perception of yourself.
But if you explore the actual feeling of wrongness, you will see that you cannot really find anything that you can put your finger on that is wrong. What’s wrong keeps changing.
This is what a delusion is: You believe something about reality that is not true. It is a hallucination.
You begin to leave yourself alone more, and at some point, you don’t even think about whether what you experience is good or bad. There is a sense of settledness, lightness, or softness.
It is a matter of trusting that letting go into reality is the Work, and that understanding means both seeing the delusions that stop you from surrendering, and the process of unfoldment itself.
You are not comparing your experience against some kind of standard. You are present with it because you are curious about it and want to find out what it is about.
judgmental and comparative attitude blocks the flow of reality, and the energy and consciousness become stagnant. What is needed is a surrender to the unfoldment of your reality, and this means not going along with your comparisons and judgments. The surrender, then, is to let understanding do its job instead of trying to make things go a certain way so that you can make yourself into a better person.
understanding becomes nothing but the revelation of the perfection of reality in its isness and in its unfoldment.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN Point Seven HOLY WISDOM, HOLY WORK, HOLY PLAN
The awareness that Reality exists as a succession of moments, each experienced as ‘the present,’ and that it is only by existing in the present that the constant unfolding of the Cosmos [can] be experienced. Only by working in the present can real work be done and real results achieved, —Ichazo, 1972
you have basic trust and you are being present, you realize that there is an evolution, a transformation that happens, and that there is a specific design to this evolution and transformation.
The Unfolding Design This evolution happens according to a certain design—a design that is true for all human beings. This design is called the Holy Plan or the Holy Work. It’s a Holy Plan in the sense that there is a specific universal design—which is the same thing as the process of the cosmos or the macrocosm replicating itself in the microcosm. Holy Work is the actual evolution itself, the actual transformation, so it is seeing that there is an actual transformation progressing from one step to another, from one stage to another, and going in a certain direction.
If you have this perspective, obviously you will have basic trust. Knowing that things are unfolding according to a certain design, you do not need to have your own plans. You don’t need to fantasize about how things should be. So we can see how the loss or the absence of this Idea leads you to fantasize about how things should be, how you are going to be, to make plans, to plan for the future.
So one definition of Holy Work is work that is done completely in the present. When you are in the present, moment to moment, whatever work you do is Holy Work. This is because if you are truly in the present, you are not in your planning mind, so things are spontaneous; they are going to move according to the Holy Plan, the natural design, rather than haphazardly. That is why doing the Work on ourselves is doing the Holy Work. What are we doing? The Holy Work is nothing but getting into the Plan itself; letting go of our own plans, letting go of our own manipulation, and doing the Work in the process, flowing with it.
going to move according to the Holy Plan, the natural design, rather than haphazardly. That is why doing the Work on ourselves is doing the Holy Work. What are we doing? The Holy Work is nothing but getting into the Plan itself; letting go of our own plans, letting go of our own manipulation, and doing the Work in the process, flowing with it.
We’re not saying that regular planning is contradictory to the universal plan, but if planning is disconnected from what is actually happening, from the sense of Being, the sense of reality, then it becomes a fixation of ennea-type Seven. The basic thing about this fixation is planning, not just vacations, but planning how you are going to be. It’s about planning for your identity, for your life, for the universe, for the whole thing. It is much more basic.
actually happening, from the sense of Being, the sense of reality, then it becomes a fixation of ennea-type Seven. The basic thing about this fixation is planning, not just vacations, but planning how you are going to be. It’s about planning for your identity, for your life, for the universe, for the whole thing. It is much more basic.
We are using the Enneagram of Holy Ideas as an organizing map, but what we are connecting with is a reality that the Enneagram only points to.
To elucidate the Holy Idea for Point Seven—Holy Plan, Holy Wisdom, or Holy Work—we will use the language of another teaching, that of the Yaqui shamans, as introduced to us by the enigmatic author, Carlos Castaneda, in his various books. The fundamental nature of reality, which we call the Absolute, is referred
to in that tradition as “pure spirit.” The Absolute or pure spirit is unmanifest, in the sense that it cannot be experienced or discerned through ordinary perceptions or processes. It is the fundamental nature of everything, and it is ultimately the only thing that exists. But if it is unmanifest, what is it that we are perceiving all the time? From the Yaqui perspective, we perceive what is called “emanations of spirit,” of which there are an infinite number. These emanations are nothing but the manifestations of the infinite potential of pure spirit through differentiation and discrimination. So everything that can be seen, experienced, and known is an emanation of pure spirit. This includes not only the physical dimensions, but also what we call the essential aspects and dimensions.
So everything that can be seen, experienced, and known is an emanation of pure spirit. This includes not only the physical dimensions, but also what we call the essential aspects and dimensions.
While the emanations of spirit appear in many dimensions, forms, and subtleties, our ordinary consciousness limits those we actually perceive to a restricted band. The band we perceive is determined by our focus of attention, which is called, in the Yaqui tradition according to Castaneda, our “assemblage point.” When this point is present in a certain emanation or dimension of reality, it lights up that dimension and you see it. What is spotlighted, then, is what you see and experience, and if a particular set of emanations is continually illuminated in this way, you will take this band to be reality. So the…
The Yaqui term for this band is the “place of reason,” which I take to mean the place of thought: It is the reality that is determined by our thoughts, and our thoughts are predominantly conditioned by physical reality. We have the potential to experience the totality of all bands and emanations, but we are stuck at a relatively small, restricted place, and we call this place of thought “reality”. This band is real, it is part of the emanations, but it is a very small band; and because it is all we see, our overall perception and our understanding of what we are is limited and distorted. As a result, we end up not accessing the other bands of reality, which contain much greater possibilities for perception, experience, and action. The objective of the Work is to access the totality of your potential, so that your world will include all the emanations and bands, instead of being focused on, determined…
Freeing the Assemblage Point In the Diamond Approach, there are three stages in the process of freeing the assemblage point. In the first stage, the teacher moves your assemblage point because you don’t know how to move it. You can’t move it because you haven’t got the energy, the consciousness, or the understanding to move it, or because you don’t even know that it is possible for it to move. At this beginning stage of the Work, you believe…
So the work on the aspects and dimensions is very direct work on moving the assemblage point, and in this way you become familiar with the other bands and emanations, and the…
In the second stage of the Work, you learn how to move your own assemblage point. This means that through your work, you become able to shift your assemblage point to a different band or emanation, and in this way, more of your potential becomes available to you without relying on someone else to do it for you. For example, you might learn to be open and curious when you feel a particular emotion. You might learn through your practices of self-remembering and inquiry to stay present and not run away externally or internally when you are afraid—instead,…
and world view was invoking the fear to a state of more spaciousness or of some…
The third stage is neither your teacher moving your assemblage point nor you moving it. It is completely freeing the movement of the assemblage point. Freeing your assemblage point requires having the trust to surrender so that spirit will move your assemblage point. In that way, you are not standing in the way of spirit nor directing it, but letting it move your consciousness. When this happens, you don’t have to do anything—you just relax, surrender, be, and spirit moves you. This freedom of the assemblage point means that your perception of reality is no longer determined by your fixation in one particular band of reality. It means freedom from fixation in the place of thought, the place of ego. In other traditions, this freedom is called “ego death.” Ego death means, in this context, that you are not fixated in any particular band, but that your assemblage point is moved spontaneously by pure spirit. This work of freeing the assemblage point does not depend on any particular aspect or dimension. If this…
In that way, you are not standing in the way of spirit nor directing it, but letting it move your consciousness. When this happens, you don’t have to do anything—you just relax, surrender, be, and spirit moves you. This freedom of the assemblage point means that your perception of reality is no longer determined by your fixation in one particular band of reality. It means freedom from fixation in the place of thought, the place of ego. In other traditions, this freedom is called “ego death.” Ego death means, in this context, that you are not fixated in any particular band, but that your assemblage point is moved spontaneously by pure spirit. This work of freeing the assemblage point does not depend on any particular aspect or dimension. If this perspective and understanding is integrated, you will see that you really don’t need to do anything except to let go and allow yourself to be moved. Holy Freedom, you will recall, means surrendering to the Holy Will, and the Holy Will is nothing but the will of spirit.
Ichazo defines Holy Wisdom as, “The awareness that Reality exists as a succession of moments, each experienced as ‘the present,’ and that it is only by existing in the present that the constant unfolding of the Cosmos [can] be experienced. Only by working in the present can real work be done and real results achieved.”
is a way of seeing reality in relation to the passage of time, since living includes the concept of time.
The Unfolding Now
It is like perceiving only the skin of an onion and eliminating the rest of it, so you take an onion to be brittle and stiff and believe that it has no soft and juicy part. It is interesting that presence or Being is experienced as a nowness, but that this nowness is not a moment of time. The nowness is more of a medium, more of the actual presence, the actual consicousness, the actual substance, of Being.
Eternity here does not mean “everlastingness,” since everlastingness is a relationship to time. Eternity is outside of time; it is infinity of presence. It is as though all time is concentrated in the now, not in terms of events, but in terms of feeling. So there is no concept of linear or measured time in the now. Therefore, to talk about unfoldment is to talk about reality experienced as successive moments of now, in which these moments are not disconnected but are always now.
The whole universe is like a fountain, always unfolding, always pouring out in different forms—but always remaining water, that is, remaining Being or presence. This is the understanding of unfoldment as the unfoldment of Being. This unfoldment of Being, this flow of presence, is sometimes called “real time,” as opposed to linear or clock time.
This is the understanding of unfoldment as the unfoldment of Being. This unfoldment of Being, this flow of presence, is sometimes called “real time,” as opposed to linear or clock time. The fourth insight is that this unfoldment is the Holy Work of God or of Being or spirit. This Work is what is called “creation,” or sometimes “new creation,” in the sense that the world is created minute-by-minute, like the fountain of water in our metaphor. The water that pours from the fountain in one moment is not the same water that pours from it in the next. The creation is new in the sense that it is renewed every second. This moment is not the product of the last moment, but is completely new and fresh. So there is an emerging, flowing effulgence of Being, an arising manifestation of Being. This flow is nothing less than the very transformation and evolution of the universe, including everything contained within it.
Cosmic Laws
Holy Plan is the perception that this unfoldment is not chaotic, accidental, or haphazard. It occurs according to its own laws; there is a meaningful pattern to its unfoldment. This pattern of unfoldment is the Holy Plan, although the word plan here is not used in the usual sense.
This pattern, with its meaningfulness and harmony, is always explained by the dominant science of each era. Hence, it has been explained as the work of spirits, as a function of gravity, and as a consequence of random events. But when you see manifestation through the perspective of the Holy Work—that it is Beingness in constant flow—you see it as harmony, as beauty, as an ordered unfoldment. This is one way we recognize the presence of laws in the universe. Laws are simply ways we describe certain patterns that the universe manifests. For example, when clouds become dark in a particular way, and reach a certain temperature, rain falls. This is a pattern. The scientific laws explain this through evaporation, condensation, humidity, and so on. So you can look at the phenomenon of rain as a consequence of a set of laws, or from the perspective of Holy Work, you can see it as simply a patterned or harmonious unfoldment, which we call Holy Plan.
We can read specific meanings and purposes into this pattern, but when I use the word meaning here, I mean a felt sense that this unfoldment has its own flow, its own movement in a particular direction, that is determined by its own intelligence. The prism through which Being moves as it goes through its transformations is the dimension that we call the Logos. It patterns the movements and gives the unfoldment its differentiations and variations.
This absence of premeditation indicates that the universe is intelligent. Its intelligence keeps it from being completely predictable and mechanical; if this were not so, we could discover all of its laws and plot its movement, as science attempts to do. But we cannot do this because Being is intelligence, and thus is responsive, and this responsiveness is completely spontaneous.
The universe is so intelligent that it does not need a blueprint; its intelligence is spontaneously
self-revealing, expressing pure spirit through its unfoldment. We call this Holy Plan.
You could say that the purpose of the universe is to reveal its hidden spirit, but such a formulation implies a goal toward which reality moves. This is teleological, and that is not how reality functions.
The Soul’s Unfolding Design
- The soul is a presence in the now, part of the fabric of the now. 2. One’s life is a succession of moments of this presence. It is a continuity of this presence. 3. This continuity of presence is the unfoldment of the soul. Since it is a succession of moments of presence in the present, this unfoldment can only be experienced and understood in the present by being present in the now. This is the “real time” of the individual, the real life. All other time, when one is not present, is a waste in terms of life, for there is no presence in it. Wasted time occurs when there is no unfoldment, when you are fixated and stuck, existing in linear time; basically you are just walking in place, getting nowhere in terms of development of the soul. How much one has been in real time indicates one’s true age, since it determines the development and maturity of the soul. Most people have spent a year or two in their entire lives being truly present, so that is how old they really are from the perspective of the soul. 4. This unfoldment of the soul has a pattern, since its unfoldment is part of the Holy Plan. It is a lawful and intelligent unfoldment, which is the growth, development, and maturation of the soul. The Holy Plan for the soul is like the Holy Plan for any living organism, in that it is intrinsic to the soul’s nature and potential. This means that there is a specific pattern to the development of the human soul that is different from the pattern that trees, for instance, follow in their development. While there are variations among human beings, there is an overall pattern to the unfoldment of the soul.
This is the “real time” of the individual, the real life. All other time, when one is not present, is a waste in terms of life, for there is no presence in it. Wasted time occurs when there is no unfoldment, when you are fixated and stuck, existing in linear time; basically you are just walking in place, getting nowhere in terms of development of the soul. How much one has been in real time indicates one’s true age, since it determines the development and maturity of the soul. Most people have spent a year or two in their entire lives being truly present, so that is how old they really are from the perspective of the soul.
- The Holy Work for the soul is obviously, then, nothing but its lawful unfoldment, becoming what it can be and maturing to its full potential. 6. The method of real Work must be oriented toward the actualization of this unfoldment and maturation. Since this can be done only in real time, the central element must be presence. Holy Work can be done only in the present. It cannot, then, be about trying to actualize something that one envisions in the mind. (We will come back to this point after discussing Holy Wisdom.)
The mandala is the whole universe. Your consciousness, your soul, is the center of this mandala, and the rest of the universe is the environment surrounding it. The totality of the mandala is unfolding according to an intelligent pattern; it is a dynamic mandala.
The mandala is a symbol for your experience, in which you are the center. The center of the mandala is a point, and the point is the center of the soul.
There is no such thing as being independent of the universe, since you are part of it. You affect it and it affects you. Taking this perspective into consideration is wisdom. If the universe is unfolding and you are part of that unfoldment, what to do becomes clear—you just go with it. Ramana Maharshi tells an interesting story about why people don’t surrender to their experience: A man who is used to traveling on foot and carrying his suitcase everywhere he goes, is given a ticket and put on a train. On the train, he is still carrying his suitcase, not trusting that if he puts it down, the train will carry it. That’s how most people are—they are always carrying their bag, even when you tell them to relax and let it go; they do not trust that the train will take them and their bag wherever they’re supposed to go. We usually don’t see life from the perspective of Holy Work, which is that things are unfolding on their own and we can relax.
the universe is unfolding and you are part of that unfoldment, what to do becomes clear—you just go with it. Ramana Maharshi tells an interesting story about why people don’t surrender to their experience: A man who is used to traveling on foot and carrying his suitcase everywhere he goes, is given a ticket and put on a train. On the train, he is still carrying his suitcase, not trusting that if he puts it down, the train will carry it. That’s how most people are—they are always carrying their bag, even when you tell them to relax and let it go; they do not trust that the train will take them and their bag wherever they’re supposed to go. We usually don’t see life from the perspective of Holy Work, which is that things are unfolding on their own and we can relax.
Here, you see that freedom is a matter of surrendering to the spirit that is moving you. When this happens, you recognize that when the teacher moves your assemblage point, it is not the teacher doing it—it is spirit; and when you move your assemblage point, it isn’t you doing it—it is spirit. It was and always is spirit moving it; the Holy Work does it. This understanding brings the perspective of freedom.
If we are to allow ourselves to unfold, the only thing we can do is to be completely where we are, to be present in exactly the spot that is manifesting in this moment; and if we are genuinely present, the next movement will unfold and we will find out what it is.
The moment you say, “I don’t want to go that way,” or “It would be better this way,” you are separating yourself from the presence that is unfolding. When you do that, your action does not have a sense of exactness or of appropriateness; it does not feel “on.”
This attitude is described very well in the following quotation of don Juan Matias from Carlos Castaneda’s The Power of Silence: He advised me to get used to the idea of recurrent attacks of the same type of anxiety, because my assemblage point was going to keep moving. “Any movement of the assemblage point is like dying,” he said. “Everything in us gets disconnected, then reconnected again to a source of much greater power. That amplification of energy is felt as a killing anxiety.” “What am I to do when this happens?” I asked. “Nothing,” he said. “Just wait. The outburst of energy will pass. What’s dangerous is not knowing what is happening to you. Once you know, there is no real danger.”
That amplification of energy is felt as a killing anxiety.” “What am I to do when this happens?” I asked. “Nothing,” he said. “Just wait. The outburst of energy will pass. What’s dangerous is not knowing what is happening to you. Once you know, there is no real danger.”
The Holy Work will happen whether you know it or not. But part of the pattern is that when a person becomes aware of not directing the unfoldment—that the Holy Work is proceeding on its own—the life of that person becomes transformed. Without realizing this, one’s life cannot transform; very little change can happen. The assemblage point just makes little shifts here and there around the same spot, even though one may have the illusion that one is moving. Holy Work is the transformation of everything that exists, the movement, the changes in all of existence—a person walking down the street, another being hit by a car, someone giving birth, someone dying, people being together, people separating—they are all part of the transformation of the unfolding of the universe. It only appears to you that you are making these things happen because you do not see from the deeper perspective of objective reality.
Without realizing this, one’s life cannot transform; very little change can happen. The assemblage point just makes little shifts here and there around the same spot, even though one may have the illusion that one is moving.
For this ennea-type, the specific difficulty, the experience of the absence of holding seen through the filter of the specific delusion, is the loss of the capacity to know what to do. The feeling state is one of disorientation and a sense of being lost, the sense that, “I don’t know what to do,” or “I don’t know which way to go.” Knowing what to do implies that you know which way to go, which in turn implies that you know what is optimally supposed to happen next. In the absence of the sense of holding, a state of deficiency arises in which you feel that you should be able to know what to do, based on the delusion that you can direct your own process, but that you don’t know because something is lacking in you.
The feeling state is one of disorientation and a sense of being lost, the sense that, “I don’t know what to do,” or “I don’t know which way to go.” Knowing what to do implies that you know which way to go, which in turn implies that you know what is optimally supposed to happen next. In the absence of the sense of holding, a state of deficiency arises in which you feel that you should be able to know what to do, based on the delusion that you can direct your own process, but that you don’t know because something is lacking in you.
The feeling of being lost or disoriented arises when you lose your sense of identity, your sense of who you are. Every time your assemblage point shifts from its customary place, you are letting go of who you have taken yourself to be. As don Juan says, this brings with it a sense of difficulty and anxiety, and there are many ways that this is experienced. For Point Seven, it is experienced as the sense that, “I am lost. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know which way to go. I don’t know which direction to take and I feel disoriented and unoriented.” Orientation is being in touch with the flow of presence. In disorientation, what is really lost is this sense of presence, of being who you are; but the way this loss is experienced—since it is filtered through the delusion—is that what is lost is knowing what to do and which direction to take.
For Point Seven, it is experienced as the sense that, “I am lost. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know which way to go. I don’t know which direction to take and I feel disoriented and unoriented.” Orientation is being in touch with the flow of presence. In disorientation, what is really lost is this sense of presence, of being who you are; but the way this loss is experienced—since it is filtered through the delusion—is that what is lost is knowing what to do and which direction to take.
Knowing what is supposed to happen in a concrete situation, such as needing a certain amount of income to cover your monthly expenses and doing what it takes to get it, seems obvious. But when you are dealing with the unfoldment of your soul and your spiritual evolution, you need to remember don Juan’s response to the question, “What should I do?” He said, “Nothing.” We need to understand the significance of the insight that nothing needs to be done in order to facilitate our unfoldment, which helps us to comprehend the methodology of the Diamond Approach as well. We have seen that the specific reaction of each ennea-type is the expression of the lack of basic trust as it is filtered through that type’s specific delusion.
We have seen that the specific reaction of each ennea-type is the expression of the lack of basic trust as it is filtered through that type’s specific delusion. Here, the resulting distrust is filtered through not perceiving the Holy Plan and the delusion that one can know which direction to take. The reaction is to try to create orientation. This is the specific reaction of planning. Planning is nothing but creating direction for your future actions. It implies the absence of trust that there is already an inherent plan that is oriented toward the actualization of your potential.
This means that your orientation is coming from your mind, and that it is determined by a goal that you are attempting to arrive at in the future. It’s coming from your lower intellectual center, instead of your higher intellectual center, the source of the Holy Ideas.
You planning your development is analogous to a child planning its development into adulthood. Just as a child does not know—and does not need to know—what it is like to be an adult, you cannot know what it is like to have a grown-up soul. So how can you plan your unfoldment? Since the child cannot know what it’s like to be forty years old, the child cannot plan his or her growth—it will have to just happen on its own. Likewise, if you trust and don’t interfere with the process, you will become an adult.
The moment you try to direct your inner process—“I should not feel that way, I should feel this way; I want to feel this instead of that”—you are acting on your belief that you know what you are supposed to experience in the next moment. All ego activity involves this principle.
Whenever you attempt to change what you are experiencing, you are assuming that you know what ought to be happening, which indicates that you have a plan in mind. This plan is not necessarily conscious, but it is an implicit part of your inner activity whenever you manipulate, judge, or criticize what you are experiencing. Even when you tell yourself to relax, you have a plan. For most people, this inner planning is incessant, compulsive, and obsessive.
The unfoldment is nothing but the spirit moving your assemblage point from one band to another, revealing all of your potential.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN Point Four HOLY ORIGIN The awareness that all individuals are born as the result of natural, objective laws; that these laws continue to operate within them throughout their lives. Because all the laws are interconnected, each individual always has an intimate physical connection with the Totality of Reality—the Cosmos. From this springs true originality. —Ichazo, 1972
The awareness that all individuals are born as the result of natural, objective laws; that these laws continue to operate within them throughout their lives. Because all the laws are interconnected, each individual always has an intimate physical connection with the Totality of Reality—the Cosmos. From this springs true originality. —Ichazo, 1972
Ichazo also gives a shorter definition: “Everything starts in Him Himself, in God, and everything is going to return again to Him Himself.”
What does this mean? Each Holy Idea, as we have seen, presents a particular implicit truth about reality, a certain facet of how reality is and how it appears. If we perceive reality as it is without any filters, we will see these nine Ideas as different manifestations of it. They are inseparable, since they are nine different aspects, expressions, or elements of the same experience. The
We see that everything we experience is nothing but Being itself appearing to us in various forms.
This inseparability of appearance from its Source is the perception elucidated by Holy Origin. This is a very deep understanding which is not easy to apprehend. Without it, we can have experiences of our essential nature which actually feel separate from who we are. For instance, we might have a profound experience of the presence of boundless compassion or of indestructible strength, but actually feel that we are having an experience of something other than who and what we are. Essence can feel like something that comes and goes, rather than seeing that our perception of our inner nature is what comes and goes because that perception is not clear. Holy Origin is the knowledge that you and your essence are not two distinct things. Essence is the nature of the soul.
This is the experience of seeing that there is a Source from which you come and to which you return, and that all of reality comes from and returns to this same Source. It is like perceiving that the waves arise out of the ocean and return back into it. This is how reality is, whether you perceive it or not. When you are not perceiving this truth, you are asleep.
The Logos, the boundless dimension of manifestation, is seen here to arise out of Being rather than being it. The third level of perception of Holy Origin is seeing that everything is nothing but Being itself differentiating, discriminating, and articulating itself into the particular phenomena of experience. So there is no separation between appearance and Source, nor is there connection between them since there are not two things that can be disconnected. This third level, that of coemergence, in which one recognizes that everything is always the Source that is appearing in various ways, is the deepest possible way of seeing Holy Origin.
This third level, that of coemergence, in which one recognizes that everything is always the Source that is appearing in various ways, is the deepest possible way of seeing Holy Origin.
Levels of Source
We call the progressively deeper experiences of Being the boundless dimensions. We see that, as our experience of it deepens, Being is perceived as having fewer and fewer qualities, until in time, it becomes completely quality-less. Many spiritual teachings do not talk about the succession of qualities or structures of Being nor of the progression of experience of Being to its ultimate depth.
Only at the third level of understanding Holy Origin can one perceive that everything is the Absolute—this is what I call the quintessential dimension. Everything here is seen to be coemergent with the ultimate Source.
Our sense of this source or center changes, as we have said, according to the dimension we are experiencing. On the individual dimension, this center is the Point, the Essential Self. Then it becomes Universal Love, then the Supreme, which is pure Being, then the Nameless, which is nonconceptual Being, and finally the Absolute, which is absolute Being.
This belief is due to the lack of understanding of Holy Origin. In reality, the center of everything is always the Absolute, but we take it to be whatever the Absolute is manifesting Itself as in that moment. You might take your center to be your body, which is how the Absolute is manifesting at the time, or you might take your center to be pure Being, for instance. What you perceive the center as is dependent upon your level of perception.
When the mind defines what is “I,” we have a fake center, a superficial center, a fabricated center, which we refer to as the pea. That is the normal identity, the identity of the personality, which functions as the center of our lives, of our actions, of our experience. We may feel that we are at the center of our experience, but for most people, that center is the ego identity. When we see through this, we initially realize our center to be the Point, the Essential Self. (See Almaas, 1996.) Then we see that the Point is nothing but the reflection of Being in the mandala of appearance. To put it another way, the Essential Self is nothing but the appearance of Being when you see it in everyday life. When we see this, we become more awakened to the nature of Being, and progressively let go of our subtle concepts until we realize Being’s absolute nature. Then we know that we are not connected to the Origin; we are the Origin.
When we see through this, we initially realize our center to be the Point, the Essential Self. (See Almaas, 1996.) Then we see that the Point is nothing but the reflection of Being in the mandala of appearance. To put it another way, the Essential Self is nothing but the appearance of Being when you see it in everyday life. When we see this, we become more awakened to the nature of Being, and progressively let go of our subtle concepts until we realize Being’s absolute nature. Then we know that we are not connected to the Origin; we are the Origin.
Functioning as Self-Arising
The Absolute in its absoluteness is called the “truth of non-arising,” since it does not originate from anywhere and is constant and unchanging. So manifestation is an arising of the Absolute which appears as everything without ever ceasing to be the Absolute. In reality, then, the truth of Holy Origin is that there is simultaneous arising and non-arising. When we focus on the arising quality of the transformation, we say that there is functioning and that is the appearance; when we see the fact that there is an unchangeability in it, that the Absolute is always present, we call that non-arising.
Seeing that these two phenomena happen simultaneously is seeing Holy Origin. You are looking at two faces of the same thing. If you see two separate processes, you are seeing a disconnection which is the absence of Holy Origin.
As your sense of identity goes deeper, when your sense of yourself is located at levels above what you have realized yourself to be, you feel disconnected. Once you have recognized yourself as Essence, for instance, being in touch with your emotions feels like you are not completely in touch with yourself. At the beginning, however, if you are someone who has been out of touch with your emotions, feeling them feels like a big revelation and that you are really in touch with yourself.
For most people, being in touch with themselves feels like a radical departure from their ordinary experience, and a profound sense of connection with something deeper. While this is how Holy Origin manifests on the surface, the deeper you go, the more expanded your sense of that connection becomes. You also see that the moment you use an image to be your center, that becomes the ego identity which disconnects you from what your sense of origin is at that moment. The deepening of your experience of what your origin is, is the same thing as your images and concepts thinning or becoming more transparent or progressively being let go of.
When most people experience the Absolute, they still see it as a source that they come from and return to. To see that it is everything—that even physical matter is the Absolute—is a much more radical experience and a further integration of reality.
At this level, it is not as though the forms disappear; rather, our understanding of them changes. We ordinarily think of physical reality as solid matter, of objects existing on their own. In terms of objective reality, there is no such thing, but this does not mean that there is nothing there. The forms exist, but in a different way than we had thought. They exist as articulations that are expressions of the creativity of Being. That creativity is what we see as the world. So there is no question of whether physical reality ultimately exists or not; the question is: What is the nature of what we are perceiving? If you consider your hand and the atoms that constitute it, you cannot ask which one is ultimately real, since they are two elements of the same thing. If you look at your hand under a microscope, you will only see the atoms, but does this mean that the hand has ceased existing? This is analogous to the idea of ego death: It is not that your personality dies, but that you are experiencing yourself at a deeper level. All that has ceased is the idea that your ego identity is all that you are. Nothing dies; you are just seeing things at a different level. The Idea of Holy Origin means that you are seeing both levels at the same time—you’re looking at your hand with two lenses: One sees the hand and one sees the atoms, both at the same time.
So a characteristic of the delusion of Point Four is an obsession about originality and uniqueness, which will color even one’s understanding of the experience of self-realization—the Essential Self, the Point. In reality, the Point is a reflection of the Origin, the ultimate Source.
The Point is really nothing but what connects the soul to the Absolute. This is one reason we call it the Point—it is a point of connection between the soul and its Origin.
It is the ego activity of control—the attempt to control one’s experience so as not to experience the feeling of disconnection. This activity of controlling basically supports the identification with the ego, which creates a fake center, to avoid experiencing the absence of a real center.
Whenever there is any difficulty in life, one’s tendency is to try to control oneself and one’s environment.
Control is an expression of distrust, so if you allow yourself to lose the control, the distrust will be exposed. This distrust then needs to be explored, because its absence makes you feel frightened and therefore, having to control.
Without it, life is deadened in all its aspects and becomes meaningless. We don’t simply lose a sense of peace or contentment, or the intimacy of feeling at home with ourselves, but we also lose the source of all of our real capacities that we need to deal with and live our lives fully and correctly. So this is not a small loss or simply a philosophical one—it is a very practical and immediate one.
Not to do it is like trying to live your life without your insides, your bodily organs—what kind of life can you live? Without the connection with your Source, in which your life is lived as a continuity of Being, life becomes a prolongation of hollowness.
Disconnection from the Source
regain the Origin is, in a sense, the process of annihilating oneself, because the very way that we think and the way that we perceive ourselves is what disconnects us.
are letting go of the very fabric of who you believe you are, so the process is very difficult, very subtle, and very radical. We can fight or complain or kick and scream in protest about our predicament, but all of these are simply the expressions of the belief in a separate identity and do nothing to change the situation.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Point Nine HOLY LOVE
The awareness that though the laws which govern reality are objective, they are not cold, because these cosmic laws inevitably lead to the creation of organic life, and Life itself, like all natural phenomena, fulfills a cosmic purpose. As soon as the mind’s word mechanism is destroyed, love, the natural condition of the mind, appears. Love begins the moment man contemplates the Creation and says “Thank you, God.” All men feel this somewhat, no animal can feel this at all. Man alone can know that all comes from God. —Ichazo, 1972
We are using the term objective reality in contrast to subjective reality, which is reality seen through our inner mental filters that are shaped by our past conditioning. Objective reality is how things really are.
The Heart of Truth
The Idea of Holy Love is in some sense the most fundamental of the Ideas. The other Ideas cannot be established without established Holy Love. Likewise, the core of each ennea-type cannot be resolved with out resolving the core of Point Nine.
Holy Love is at the center of the three Ideas at the top corner of the Enneagram. These three ideas pertain to the intrinsic characteristics of the cosmic truth, the living Cosmos, or Universal Being. Points Eight, Nine, and One are, as we have seen, elaborations on what this cosmic reality is, what its characteristics are, and how we perceive it in terms of its existence, its truth, and its experience.
Holy Love would then be like the heart of truth. When we use the word truth here, we mean the most all-encompassing truth, the truth of the totality of the wholeness of all of existence as one. This level of truth, Holy Truth, is of course, the ultimate truth sought in any spiritual search and in any spiritual tradition.
His definition implies that reality has heart, that there is some warmth in the way reality functions. This sense of heart is not actually something that reality has, like a physical heart or a specific attribute. This heartfulness is rather, a quality inherent and implicit in the very existence of truth. So when we refer here to the heart of truth, or the heart of the universe, we are referring to a certain way in which the universe can be experienced as heart. This sense of the heart of truth cannot be separated from the mind of truth or from the body of truth, since all of the Holy Ideas are perceptions of the same existence.
This heartfulness is rather, a quality inherent and implicit in the very existence of truth. So when we refer here to the heart of truth, or the heart of the universe, we are referring to a certain way in which the universe can be experienced as heart.
The body of truth is reality’s very existence—the fact of this existence, its presence, its thereness, its factness.
The heart of truth, then, is the aesthetic or appreciative mode that is always an intrinsic and inseparable quality of the perception and knowing of truth.
Nonconceptual Positivity
So we are talking about the quality of lovableness of reality when it is seen without distortion, rather than through the filter of the ego.
When reality is fully perceived, one cannot help but enjoy and appreciate it. One cannot but respond with awe when the Holy Truth is fully apprehended, and one cannot but be full of wonder when Holy Perfection is realized. One cannot but melt in appreciative sweetness when beholding Holy Love. Holy Love brings you the experience of love, but it is not the love itself; it is something much more comprehensive. It is a quality of reality as a whole and is very difficult to fully define.
We could say that Holy Love is the intrinsic quality of the reality of Being that is nonconceptual positivity. It is pure and unalloyed blissfulness. It is the value-saturated quality of truth. It is pure goodness, the Good of Plato.
In Hinduism, the true reality is called satchitananda. Sat refers to its truth or existence, chit is its consciousness or intelligence, and ananda its bliss, joy, or love. Ananda refers to this intrinsic positivity of reality. It is God’s intrinsic beauty, His intoxicating quality. It is goodness or positivity through and through: sheer value, sheer goodness, sheer beauty. This quality is intrinsic in that it is an inseparable part of reality, an inseparable quality of the fact of its existence.
bliss, joy, or love. Ananda refers to this intrinsic positivity of reality. It is God’s intrinsic beauty, His intoxicating quality. It is goodness or positivity through and through: sheer value, sheer goodness, sheer beauty. This quality is intrinsic in that it is an inseparable part of reality, an inseparable quality of the fact of its existence.
The nonconceptual positivity that is Holy Love is not just a feeling. It is how reality looks, how it feels, how it smells, what touching it feels like. In terms of seeing, it is beauty. In terms of hearing, it is harmony. In terms of tasting, it is sweet. In terms of smelling, it has a quality of perfume. In terms of feeling, it is positive affect. It is what truly turns on all your senses, what stimulates and is pure pleasure to them, making you feel happy and loving. So Holy Love invokes descriptions like positive, blissful, ecstatic, pleasurable, uplifting, wonderful, delicious, enjoyable, warm, delightful, and so on.
To understand what we mean by Holy Love and to not restrict it to one conceptual quality or another, it might be helpful to see how it manifests in some of the essential aspects; or to put it another way, to see what the Holy Love is in them. Holy Love is a clear and distinct quality of the very substance and consciousness of each essential aspect. Holy Love is seen in the positive, uplifting, and blissful affect and effect of each aspect. It is the sweetness and softness in Love. It is the lightness and playfulness in Joy. It is the preciousness and the exquisiteness of Intelligence and Brilliancy. It is the purity and the confidence of Will. It is the aliveness, excitement, and glamour of the Red or Strength aspect. It is the mysteriousness and silkiness in the Black or Peace aspect. It is the wholeness and integrity in the Pearl or Personal Essence. It is the freshness and the newness of Space. It is the depth, the deep warmth, and the satisfying realness of Truth.
We can see from these examples that when we use the word positivity, we don’t mean any particular quality, but rather the positive nature that all manifestations of reality—all the aspects and dimensions—share, and which is expressed differently in each. If you experience the clear aspect, for instance, it has a freshness, a transparency, and a clarity; and not only does it make you clear, but there is an intrinsically pleasurable quality to that sense of clarity. This inherent positivity in all the aspects of Being is why it is impossible for any of them not to be good.
The kindness of the Green aspect, for instance, is not only warm and soft, but it is also light and scintillating and pure.
To understand Holy Love is to be in touch with the blissful beauty of existence which is its intrinsic goodness. When the Sufis refer to God as love, they mean Holy Love rather than the affect of love, or any of the forms of love on the essential level. So when the great Sufi mystic, Rumi, describes everything in reality as good, with a loving and a lovely quality, he is speaking from Holy Love. This intrinsic goodness of reality is part and parcel of its Being and its functioning. So to understand Holy Love means to be attuned, to be aware, to be in touch with the fact that reality has an intrinsic goodness, an inherent beauty, a delight, a blissfulness, an ecstasy that is completely inseparable from its existence and from its unfoldment. Holy Love is so inseparably a quality of existence that if you truly experience existence, you are bound to experience its intrinsic goodness.
If reality feels painful to us or if we experience it as negative, these perceptions are layered over it, extrinsic to it, incidental to it, and are therefore transitory rather than abiding. They are the veils of reactivity, of the mind distorting what we see and experience. Suffering, then, is nothing but reality experienced through our subjectivity. When a person is not perceiving the Holy Ideas, he or she is experiencing some degree of suffering.
They are the veils of reactivity, of the mind distorting what we see and experience. Suffering, then, is nothing but reality experienced through our subjectivity.
So the one seeing objectively will naturally have compassion and a desire to help, not by alleviating the suffering, but by helping the other see correctly, because when we see correctly, our suffering disappears. Even physical pain becomes less painful if you are perceiving Holy Love, which means being in a state of bliss, because the psychological suffering that contributes so profoundly to the pain is gone. It is possible to realize Holy Love so completely that nothing can make it disappear.
Absolute Goodness
The way you look at reality determines how you experience it. If you look at it from a subjective point of view, a mental construct, it will appear dark, and will for the most part feel painful. If you look at it with a fresh mind and a fresh heart, you see that it is good and feels wonderful. The sense of goodness is more real and fundamental since its existence is not dependent upon your point of view.
You don’t have to do anything to make it that way; it is like that on its own. All you need to do is relax. If we tighten up and get scared, things look negative and become painful. That’s how reality works. Eventually, we learn that it is more skillful to see reality as it is because doing so makes our lives easier.
Reality always has the quality of goodness about it; goodness is its nature. It cannot be taken away from it, just as you can’t take the quality of roundness away from an orange.
This blissfulness is nothing but nonconceptual pleasure, nonconceptual goodness, nonconceptual positivity. While it is easy to see this quality in the essential aspects—the blissfulness of Peace or of Compassion, for instance—which is why we used them as examples earlier, Holy Love says that this blissful quality is inherent in everything.
We usually have the sense that, “Oh, it is like this all the time and I didn’t even realize it!” This is a deep insight into the nature of reality, and is different from an uplifting experience.
After a while you realize that you have been experiencing Essence through subjective filters, which made it appear as an emotional state. You see that Essence is not only wonderful, but that it is you, and this insight has transformative power.
As we have seen, each Holy Idea is a characteristic of reality at all locations, at all times, and at all levels.
The truth, then, is loving and lovable, which is why we say in the Diamond Approach that you must love truth for its own sake. If your orientation is that you love truth so that it will change you and make you a happier person, your orientation is out of sync with how things objectively are; if you see reality as it is, you can’t help but love it.
It follows, then, that objectively there is no evil. We see evil only when we perceive reality through a filter. A person who behaves in what we consider evil ways is a person acting through a distortion. In spiritual work, concepts of a devil, of dark forces, of some evil that exists on its own outside of the goodness of reality are considered manifestations of ignorance, both in terms of believing in such concepts and in terms of the manifestations attributed to such forces. All spiritual work would be pointless if there were such a thing as ultimate evil.
Localized Love
We can call the presence of Being love, and its unfoldment the loving action of Being.
If you can localize it in time or space, you are not seeing it as an inherent quality of reality, so understanding its nonlocatedness is an essential part of understanding Holy Love.
Holy Love is the heart of existence, and to really experience the whole of existence as heart necessitates having nothing held back in your own heart. If there is a particular emotion that you don’t let yourself feel, whether it is love or hatred or any other emotion, that repression will act as a barrier to perceiving the Holy Love in the universe.
This is why understanding Holy Love is necessary in order to integrate the other Ideas. It is a foundation, without which a person cannot really work through his or her specific difficulty.
Nonconceptual positivity means that it affects the soul directly, regardless of what your mind thinks of it, and the heart responds by feeling happy, released, and uplifted.
This delusion is not the belief that there is no such lovingness in existence—human beings can’t survive without some sense of love—but rather, that this lovingness is a local phenomenon, occurring at particular points of time and space. This delusion results in the belief that love is conditional, which explains to us why we perceive it at one place and time and not at another.
The Inferiority Complex
In other words, when the loving holding in the environment is lost or inadequate, a belief arises that love and lovableness are conditional. When you don’t feel held, you feel that you are not loved because you don’t have what is lovable.
the soul feels diminished, minimized, denuded of its good qualities, and ends up feeling like an inferior soul, lacking what makes the soul good. This feeling of deficiency is a sense of being intrinsically lacking in qualities that others have.
This sense of deficiency is not a sense of emptiness, the sense that a particular quality of Being is missing. It is more a deficient feeling, tone, or affect, that shapes the whole soul. This deficient tone is the sense of worthlessness, of not being good enough, or of just not being enough, along with the sense that something is not right, and a consequent loss of self-esteem.
You can fill all your holes and still feel inferior, because the actual substance of the soul—what is experiencing the holes—feels bereft of its positive quality. Ego intrinsically feels inferior. No matter what it owns, what it has, what it does, or what it can do, it will continue feeling itself to be inferior.
If you are identified with the ego and anything goes wrong, you immediately assume that it happened because what is good is not inside you. The slightest criticism, the slightest negativity, and right away you believe what is good is located somewhere other than inside you. This is why all children begin to believe that there is something wrong with them as they come to identify with the ego.
The issue here is not disconnection from Being—that is the particular difficulty of Point Four—it is, rather, that you are not in touch with its blissfulness even as you experience it.
You can be in touch with Being, but cannot feel or see its loveliness, as though the essential presence were covered by a membrane or a veil shading its ecstatic luster. This is why when many people experience Essence or Being, their reaction is something along the lines of, “This is nice, but what’s it good for? Will it help me at my job? Will I have better sex from now on?”
Often people have essential experiences, but because they don’t see that it is themselves that they are perceiving, they think that their teacher is transmitting the state to them, or that God is visiting them, since they feel their own nature is sinful or not holy. In these cases, they are projecting their true nature outside themselves. Sometimes, even if you do see that the Being you are experiencing is you, the lack of integration of Holy Love prevents you from experiencing this revelation as wonderful, as precious.
Instead of feeling love for yourself and enjoyment of your life, you feel low in spirit, or bored with yourself. You feel that you are not good enough. When you deeply and clearly feel this state, you feel a sense of inferiority that feels as though your very soul is inherently ugly or deformed. Like a creature frequently seen in mythology, you might even feel like a twisted animal living underground—like a troll or like Gollum in J.R.R. Tolkien’s series, Lord of the Rings—that is utterly without any redeeming qualities. Just as inferiority is always associated with ugliness and deformity, beauty and the sense of being lovable always go hand in hand.
When you deeply and clearly feel this state, you feel a sense of inferiority that feels as though your very soul is inherently ugly or deformed. Like a creature frequently seen in mythology, you might even feel like a twisted animal living underground—like a troll or like Gollum in J.R.R. Tolkien’s series, Lord of the Rings—that is utterly without any redeeming qualities. Just as inferiority is always associated with ugliness and deformity, beauty and the sense of being lovable always go hand in hand.
Everyone has this sense of inferiority, but most people keep it to themselves because it is accompanied by a feeling of deep shame. You feel deeply ashamed of yourself because you really believe that there is something fundamentally wrong with you, and you don’t want other people to know about
Teenagers, again, especially suffer with this sense of inferiority, and are continuously comparing themselves to others, showing themselves exactly how inferior they are, and feeling deeply ashamed of themselves but not saying anything about it.
The difficulties of all three points at the top of the Enneagram are different sides of the same thing: the sinfulness of Point Eight, the inferiority of Point Nine, and the wrongness of Point One.
Falling Asleep to Reality
The specific reaction here is the expression of distrust filtered through the delusion that lovableness and hence, love, are conditional. The soul goes unconscious or “falls asleep” to its true reality and the reality of existence. This falling asleep to one’s true nature is true of all egos—you can feel this quality in everyone whose soul is not awake. It is a particular state of the soul that feels groggy, barely aware of what’s happening, heavy, thick, and dull. The falling asleep is basically a giving up, a resignation, forgetting and going unconscious. Even if you had an essential experience yesterday, you don’t remember it today—it is as though it made no impression on your soul. It didn’t wake you up or change you. So regardless of what experiences you’ve had, your soul is still asleep, not awake to the objective reality of things. The soul informed by the ego is asleep. This is why enlightenment is called awakening—your soul wakes up to what is really here. Many people believe that this awakening happens automatically the moment you have an experience of Being. Some parts of your soul may wake up, but the soul is very deeply imprinted by the egoic sense of inferiority, and this depth of the soul does not awaken easily or rapidly. When your awakening does approach this level, the first thing you wake up to is this sense of inferiority.
This falling asleep to one’s true nature is true of all egos—you can feel this quality in everyone whose soul is not awake. It is a particular state of the soul that feels groggy, barely aware of what’s happening, heavy, thick, and dull. The falling asleep is basically a giving up, a resignation, forgetting and going unconscious. Even if you had an essential experience yesterday, you don’t remember it today—it is as though it made no impression on your soul. It didn’t wake you up or change you. So regardless of what experiences you’ve had, your soul is still asleep, not awake to the objective reality of things. The soul informed by the ego is asleep. This is why enlightenment is called awakening—your soul wakes up to what is really here. Many people believe that this awakening happens automatically the moment you have an experience of Being. Some parts of your soul may wake up, but the soul is very deeply imprinted by the egoic sense of inferiority, and this depth of the soul does not awaken easily or rapidly. When your awakening does approach this level, the first thing you wake up to is this sense of inferiority.
Regardless of what profound experiences of Being you may have had and how objectively you may have seen reality, when you get up off your meditation cushion or leave a meeting with your teacher, you act, feel, and behave as if reality is the world you learned from your mother. When you do this, you are
expressing the asleepness of your soul. Even when they have had the experience that everything is love, most people go on acting as though it’s not true. We can talk about Essence and the realm of Being, but for most of us, when we really get down to it, that is not reality. Reality is our experience of the world filtered through our conditioning; our bedrock is consensus reality. This conviction that the egoic perspective is how things really are is what the Sufis are referring to when they say that man is asleep. They mean that you take conventional reality, which is just the superficial layer, to be the ultimate truth. Not seeing what is real or not believing it to be reality, and consequently adhering to the status quo of conventional reality, reveals a laziness in the soul in relation to the truth and to reality.
At advanced stages of the Work, after you have extensive understanding of Being, this reaction of being asleep manifests in not acknowledging oneself as Being itself. You continue to think and believe that you are not realized; you already know who you really are, yet you continue behaving as if you don’t know. It is as if you are not the one who is having all these experiences of realization and understanding. Identifying with the delusion of Point Nine manifests in not seeing, realizing, or believing that you are really who you are; that you are not really Essence and Being, or even a soul.
When you do not treasure your existence, your life becomes a matter of merely surviving and subsisting. Life, then, is dead, superficial, mechanical, and boring because the magic of truth is not present.
If there is anything valuable and good, it will be outside yourself, so why look inside? So, unlike the other ennea-types who may respond to their disconnection from Being with anger or sadness,
Nines respond with apathy, resignation, laziness, inertia, and a sense of stuckness.
Underlying this is the fear that if you wake up and find out who you really are, what you will find is that you are even more ugly than you had imagined, so it is better not to look.
However, the moment you recognize that true nature is such a beauty, such a preciousness, you will do anything for it. No sacrifice is too great to realize that beauty, that radiant, lustrous preciousness. It is difficult to convey verbally the sense of this preciousness, this beauty, and the wonder and magic of it. Physical beauty is a very pale reflection of the beauty of Being, which is the nature of your soul. If you really recognized that the truth of who you are is so beautiful, so precious, so full of value, and so magnificent, you would devote the totality of your life to it. Everything in the universe, from beginning to end, is like dust compared to this magnificence, and every action and situation is expendable for this preciousness.
You cannot separate Holy Love from Being any more than you can separate the wetness from water.
The Superficial Life Now we will explore the specific difficulty in more depth. The felt conviction of being not lovable is the opposite, in a sense, of the quality of Holy Love. Holy Love is a quality of beauty, magnificence, preciousness, and complete, intrinsic, radiant, pure, immaculate loveliness, while the state of inferiority is a feeling of ugliness and twistedness, the sense that one is a deficient and impoverished soul. This is not what is called “mystical poverty,” which is a state of feeling and emptiness that allows God to descend into you.
With the ego crystallized around inferiority, believing that your soul doesn’t have this richness and preciousness, it naturally follows that you wouldn’t see any point in working on yourself, and this creates the deep inertia that confronts us until advanced stages of the path. The surface becomes all of life to egoic consciousness, and you get lost in the particulars and activities of everyday life as if they have intrinsic value in themselves.
“Well, at least I’m surviving.” Some comfort, some little bit of excitement, some stimulation or titillation, is available here and there. Basically, these superficial pleasures are distractions from being present with, and sensing yourself, and appear to be a better alternative than feeling as if you are a cursed soul. Therefore, distracting oneself with externals is a central and omnipresent characteristic of the ego.
Holy Love is not just a perception; it imbues all of one’s experience with sweetness, delight, lightness, blissfulness, and ecstasy. This quality of consciousness is something most people are not even aware of as a possibility. Most people’s experience of themselves is dull and thick, filled with the insensitivity and darkness of the sleep of unconsciousness, and they are not even aware of this. They don’t realize how thick-skinned they are, how primitive, undeveloped, and unrefined their nervous systems are. Because of this, it is not possible to understand how feeling can be so fine, so delicate, so exquisite, so fresh and clean, so wonderfully uplifting, as though there were sunsets and sunrises in one’s very atoms. Most of the time, the feel of ego in the soul is like drab, gray, cold, winter days. It has a depressed quality, because its consciousness of itself is depressed or muted. This depressiveness or thickness is the antithesis of the awake soul, and, as I have said, most of us can’t imagine what awakeness would feel like.
The moment you really let yourself know that this quality of consciousness is possible for you and is, in fact, your natural state, why would you strive for anything else? What does it mean to have a “good life,” if you’re not working on allowing that wonderful exquisiteness to inform your consciousness? That is the essence of the spiritual quest: bringing this quality to our consciousness. And the specific reaction of sleep, apathy, and laziness is about just this task. With this reaction, it becomes more important to watch a football game than to work on oneself. It seems more exciting to watch one person bash into another one—this is a way to make us feel something through the thick skin of our consciousness. Or we want to go on a roller-coaster ride in order to feel some aliveness, or get involved in all sorts of activities and entertainments as a way of distracting ourselves from feeling what we believe is our inferiority, and from the deadness of our experience. We really don’t need to do anything external to feel alive; all we need to do is turn away from these distractions and be committed to our true nature, and worship it totally.
What does it mean to have a “good life,” if you’re not working on allowing that wonderful exquisiteness to inform your consciousness? That is the essence of the spiritual quest: bringing this quality to our consciousness.
With this reaction, it becomes more important to watch a football game than to work on oneself. It seems more exciting to watch one person bash into another one—this is a way to make us feel something through the thick skin of our consciousness. Or we want to go on a roller-coaster ride in order to feel some aliveness, or get involved in all sorts of activities and entertainments as a way of distracting ourselves from feeling what we believe is our inferiority, and from the deadness of our experience. We really don’t need to do anything external to feel alive; all we need to do is turn away from these distractions and be committed to our true nature, and worship it totally.
Its radiant glory feels like a sunrise. Inferiority is the negation of this glory, and the specific reaction is an attempt to get away from that diminished sense of self. What is needed is to confront that part of our psyche rather than to…
Its origin stems from the fact of not recognizing the precious quality of your Beingness, and this lack of recognition is universal, with very few exceptions. Even if you felt loved by your parents, for instance, they didn’t necessarily love you because they could see the preciousness of your Being; they loved you for what you did, how you behaved, whether you were smart or cute or pretty, and so on.…
As long as we look for causes and solutions on this superficial level, we cannot resolve our inferiority complex. A sense of mastery and accomplishment will not
resolve the issue.
Without seeing this, you are operating on the unconscious belief that you are inferior and taking this belief to be reality. In this case, there is no point in becoming more conscious, so distracting oneself is the only sensible thing to do.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN Point Six HOLY STRENGTH, HOLY FAITH
The awareness that the Cosmos is a self-regulating mechanism, existing in a state of balance, and as long as the objective laws which govern this balance are respected, an individual can exist in a state of harmony with Reality, moving toward his own personal fulfillment. Faith is a Holy Idea, not a belief. It is the certitude that each of us has an Essence and that this Essence coming from God, belongs to God. —Ichazo, 1972
Holy Work: The soul’s development and unfoldment is inseparable from the unfoldment of the totality of existence. So not only is the human being inseparable from the rest of creation, but his evolution—both personal and collective—is also inseparable from it. The soul’s unfoldment, then, is part of the unfoldment of the totality of the universe.
The Essence of the Soul
Holy Origin is the objective view that you are never disconnected from your center, which is Essence, at whatever level it is operating on; that this Origin is the Source of the soul and its final home; and that this Origin is characterized by the Ideas of truth, perfection, and intrinsic goodness, the Holy Ideas at the top of the Enneagram.
Regardless of whether or not one feels connected to one’s essential origin, one knows from experience that it does actually exist. This is Holy Faith.
The fact that Essence is the fundamental nature of the soul is its objective strength, and is what gives the soul its feeling of strength. To perceive this truth is to know one’s reality through the lens of Holy Strength. Holy Faith, then, is the effect of this realization or recognition upon the soul.
Essential Faith
The recognition of Essence is not yet faith, but it is a necessary element for faith. Faith is an objective experience rather than a mental belief, as I have explained, and refers to a transformation of the soul. When faith is present, the consciousness is changed in a fundamental way, changed in its very substance.
Faith is an objective experience rather than a mental belief, as I have explained, and refers to a transformation of the soul. When faith is present, the consciousness is changed in a fundamental way, changed in its very substance.
It is really a transformation that takes place in the soul, in which Essence as one’s nature becomes a certainty, a given, and not something that you need to remember or remind yourself of. This knowing has become integrated and has transformed your consciousness itself. As long as one’s faith is only mental, doubt can creep in, and since doubt itself is mental, something that is only a memory is an easy target for it. When real faith is present, a transformation has taken place and there is no going back. Things might arise that weaken or challenge your faith, but it is there, regardless of what happens.
The first is the experience that there is a truth that exists in a fundamental and genuine way, a truth not constructed from beliefs and ideals.
The second insight is the recognition that this truth of Essence is the inner reality of the soul, including your soul, and not merely something that exists somewhere.
All of these are implicit characteristics of what we call “faith,” but they don’t actually convey the felt sense of it. It is an actual feeling, a particular state of the soul. It is similar to the feeling you have when you genuinely say to someone, “I have faith in you,” or “I believe in you,” but here, you are feeling it in terms of your inner reality.
To have faith in that person means that you have an implicit certainty that he or she is dependable and will come through. You can have such faith in a person, in a situation, in a teaching or a teacher, but with Holy Faith, we are talking about faith in the inner reality itself. It is the certainty that arises from the direct experience that there is a true existence that is beautiful and loving; the feeling of security and support that arises because of the recognition of it as our inner reality; and the trust in it that arises from the recognition of its qualities.
This faith is a tremendous help on the path because when…
and you’re scared or unhappy, when you are not experiencing Essence and there is no one around to help you connect with it, what keeps you going besides faith? Without faith, it becomes very difficult to continue. The faith has to be real faith, because when you’re terrified, feeling disintegrated, or deeply hurt, a mental belief will not get you through. The true transformation that we call faith gives the soul courage which makes it persevere, because it has the unquestioned certainty that there is true reality and support even though it is not explicitly obvious at that moment. The Spanish Christian mystic, St. John of the Cross, discusses this faith in his writings about the “dark night of the soul.” When you…
This faith is a knowing in the heart rather than mental knowledge. It is one of the developments of the heart represented by the Holy Ideas of the central triangle, which are called the “three theological virtues.” This faith makes it possible to persevere and not lose heart when there…
It arises in degrees, depending upon the duration and extent of one’s direct experience and recognition of Essence. Our experiences of Essence are different, varying in degree, depth, and extent of completeness. The more one experiences Essence, the more fully one experiences it; and the more one recognizes its various qualities and perfections, the more one’s faith grows and deepens. Faith, then, is something that can develop, deepen, and expand. When Essence is experienced from the perspective…
There are three levels of experiencing faith. The first level results from experiencing Essence as your inner nature; this is the individual level of faith. The second is the boundless level, in which you recognize Essence as the nature of everything. At this level, you have faith in God or reality. The third level is from the perspective of reality, the…
perceiving and understanding its dynamics—what it is and how it works. The faith of this level is the most complete and total, since it arises from…
At the beginning of the Work, we can talk about the goal being the realization of the truth, understanding what reality really is. The path is the process by which the soul comes into harmony with that reality, and faith is a by-product of that harmonization. When the soul is in complete harmony with reality, the experience is beyond faith; it is then simply the direct experience of the strength of Essence, which we call Holy Strength. In Holy Faith, the heart is completely convinced and certain of Essence…
the beginning of the Work, we can talk about the goal being the realization of the truth, understanding what reality really is. The path is the process by which the soul comes into harmony with that reality, and faith is a by-product of that harmonization. When the soul is in complete harmony with reality, the experience is beyond faith; it is then simply the direct experience of the strength of Essence, which we call Holy Strength. In Holy Faith, the heart is completely convinced and certain of Essence…
The very substance of the soul becomes purified, developed, and matured, until its complete fruition, in which the soul is completely transparent to, and in harmony with,…
Holy Faith is enduring because it is based on the recognition of our…
So reflecting the immutability of Essence, the faith that develops is no passing state, although it can…
The absence of the Holy Idea leads to a specific delusion; the loss or inadequacy of the holding environment is reflected in the specific difficulty; and the absence of basic trust is reflected in the specific reaction. So when the triad of Holy Idea, basic trust, and holding, are lost, they are replaced by the egoic triad that forms the core of each ennea-type.
Cynicism
For ennea type Six, when Holy Faith is lost, there is no faith, knowledge, or certainty that our inner nature, that of others, and of the universe, is an essence that is a true, perfect, and intrinsically good existence. This lack of faith is not exactly the absence of belief in God, which is what many people think, since you can be an atheist and still believe in the intrinsic goodness of humanity. The absence of Holy Faith is reflected more in the absence of faith in human nature or in the nature of the universe.
This means that one does not believe in and trust human nature, including one’s own. This manifests in believing that how people are and act is purely electro-chemical in origin, that we are only physical entities, and that there is no intrinsic, intelligent essential nature that can be present and can operate. It also manifests in believing that whatever goodness human beings manifest is only the result of an adaptation to ensure survival.
essential nature that can be present and can operate. It also manifests in believing that whatever goodness human beings manifest is only the result of an adaptation to ensure survival.
This lack can manifest on three levels: You could believe that there is no such thing as Essence; you might believe that while some goodness might exist, it is definitely not your nature or human nature since man is basically corrupt, and goodness or Essence exists in some god-like entity somewhere else; or you might believe that while Essence is your inner nature, it comes and goes randomly.
Are they being loving because they are expressing an inner goodness, or is there some ulterior motive? Such constant questioning indicates the lack of faith in human nature.
“Was it really me? Did it really happen, or did I make it up?
This is not an attitude of exploring one’s experience to find out what is true, but an expression of having already made up one’s mind about what one is going to find. It is not an open questioning that invites exploration to find out the truth for oneself, but an attitude of debunking, of questioning something to eliminate it, to cut it down and cut it away.
Insecurity and Suspicion
either case, the feeling-state that results, the specific difficulty,
is a fearful kind of insecurity. You feel insecure and scared at the same time.
This fearful insecurity reflects the belief and the feeling or sense that the world is a dangerous place inhabited by self-seeking people, and that there is no inner essence to support and guide you in this frightening world. Your soul feels insecure because the world appears as a scary jungle and you don’t have inner strength to deal with it.
This is a very sensitive and delicate place in the soul where one feels touchy, scared, paranoid, alone, unsupported, abandoned, and vulnerable. It is quite a difficult emotional state to tolerate, and so you readily resort to defensiveness (inner, outer, or both) to evade it. On the one hand, you feel alone and unsupported externally, and on the other, you feel that you don’t have inner strength or support. So there is no faith that if you just relax, what you need will be present. This is what gives rise to the fear that is part of the specific difficulty. This painful and difficult state is more than fear, however, since you can feel frightened without necessarily feeling insecure, and you can feel insecure without necessarily being afraid. Here, the fear and insecurity together form one state, and create a very touchy, scared place inside. Because it is such a sensitive place, when you’re dealing with it in yourself or in others, you need to be quite attuned, empathic, and responsive.
Here, the fear and insecurity together form one state, and create a very touchy, scared place inside. Because it is such a sensitive place, when you’re dealing with it in yourself or in others, you need to be quite attuned, empathic, and responsive.
This defensive suspiciousness has fear and paranoia in it, as well as aggression and hostility. You are suspicious of others, questioning their motives and intentions; you are alert in a paranoid manner; at the same time, you are edgy, reactive, on the defensive, hostile, and ready to strike in self-defense. It
This attitude or style of behavior is different from the counterphobic style of some ennea-type Sixes, which is to deny the specific difficulty. That style is a way of saying, “No, I’m not scared—the world is a safe place, and
I’ll prove it by climbing a mountain. You’ll see—nothing will happen to me.” Such people take risks and put themselves in dangerous situations to prove that they are not afraid or insecure. So, in spite of the opposite styles, both a phobic and a counterphobic Six have the specific reaction of defensive suspiciousness. The former will withdraw and overtly display a suspicious stance, while the latter will charge ahead in order to override the defensive reaction.
The defensive suspiciousness can be directed not only outward, but also toward yourself. This could take the form of being suspicious of your own motives or not letting yourself go deep inside yourself, because you fear what you’re going to find there, and you suspect it won’t be good.
When you are identified with this defensive and aggressive suspiciousness, you are not usually aware of the vulnerable and fearful insecurity.
Because this constellation is present in the unconscious, it needs to be exposed and dissolved, and to do that, we need to experience the specific reaction and the specific difficulty, and then see how both are based upon the specific delusion of cynicism. In this way, we can diffuse the core and clear the way for our essential experiences to give rise to faith.
Barriers to Essential Faith
An example of the latter is in the ongoing debate about what to do with criminals: Should we punish them or educate them?
What ultimately needs to happen is for each of us to develop faith in ourselves, which means having faith in human nature. When we have that, we can’t help but have faith in all human beings. This does not mean blind trust. It means that you know for sure that every human being has an essential nature, even though it might be buried and a person might be acting out of ignorance or cynicism. It means that you give the other person a chance, that you allow the possibility that she can be kind and selfless, even though she doesn’t always act that way. It means that you know that such a quality exists in her and in you.
The real battle is not with other people but within yourself. You don’t need to trust other people as much as you need to trust yourself. The meaning of faith is the certainty that your innate nature is good and supportive—it does not imply trusting other people or even trusting yourself all the time.
We are discussing these difficult and painful states at the core of the fixations because they are in all of us, and we need to become aware of them in order to be free from them.
The Importance of the View of Reality
This view is, in some sense, not one experience, but what unifies all experiences. It is the over-arching picture that makes all experiences intelligible and meaningful. The more we understand the view of objective reality, the more we know where we are in our journey. The more we understand the view, the more we know how distorted or how objective our experience is.
It is the over-arching picture that makes all experiences intelligible and meaningful. The more we understand the view of objective reality, the more we know where we are in our journey. The more we understand the view, the more we know how distorted or how objective our experience is.
Holy Faith is the transformation that occurs in the soul consequent to the experience of Holy Strength.
This faith is a heartfelt certainty, an unquestioned conviction that Essence is one’s innate nature. Along with this knowing comes the perception that it is constant and reliable, and you—rather than it—come and go.
The presence of Essence with its truth, its intrinsic blissfulness, and its intelligence, is there all the time—it cannot go. If Essence is gone, you are dead. You can’t be conscious or aware without Essence.
also means that we have not yet fully understood that Essence is our essence, as fundamental to us as atoms are to the physical body. It is not something detachable from the soul that can come and go. It is the actual substance of the soul.
Each of the theological virtues, in contrast, includes a specific and distinct experience of objective reality, as well as an understanding of the transformative effect of this experience on the soul. As we discussed at the beginning of this book, the Holy Ideas are views of reality that are perceived when the higher intellectual senses are open, when the mind experiences reality without the veil of ego.
Basic trust, as we have seen, is an integration of trust on a nonconceptual and pre-verbal level. It is not an idea or a feeling, but a lived knowing, implicit in how one functions, and so is related to the belly center, the kath. The three theological virtues have to do with the heart center, the oth. They are attitudes and feelings engendered by the perception of the Holy Ideas.
The Transforming Effect of the Ideas
These three Holy Ideas are also distinguished from the others in that they are qualities that are specifically needed to travel the path, while the other Ideas are more accurately the fruits of the path—the realization itself, since they are facets of the view of objective reality. Love, faith, and hope, then, are the elements that the soul needs to make its journey home. Love of the truth motivates the soul to want to set out on the journey; faith sustains and supports it as it proceeds; and hope gives it the optimism that things will unfold in the right way.
They are not really separate; they are all one reality. They are like snapshots of reality from three different directions.
At deeper levels, as the soul develops and experiences deeper dimensions, especially the boundless dimensions of Being, we can no longer accurately speak of Essence as the soul’s inner nature. This is because, on the boundless level, we are experiencing the inner nature of everything, and all of reality is experienced as one thing. At this level, Essence, the nature of the soul, is superseded by Being, the nature of all of reality. Being is then experienced as the ground of the soul which makes it feel held and supported.
The more we see through the delusions, the more that sense of the ego dissolves. Without the delusions, the ego cannot maintain itself; the presence of the ego and the delusion are, in some sense, the same thing. As we allow ourselves to see through the specific reaction and the specific difficulty to the specific delusion implicit in them, the specific delusion becomes conscious and cannot be maintained. As the specific delusion dissolves, the state of Holy Strength arises, which is the recognition of your essential nature and the faith in it.
As we allow ourselves to see through the specific reaction and the specific difficulty to the specific delusion implicit in them, the specific delusion becomes conscious and cannot be maintained.
specific delusion dissolves, the state of Holy Strength arises, which is the recognition of your essential nature and the faith in it.
This state of fearful insecurity is painful, not in the sense that it hurts, but painful in that it is difficult to tolerate. It is a frightening state of groundlessness that can be very hard to remain present with, but staying with it is necessary if the egoic view is to be dissolved. The more we can experience and inquire into this scared and shaky place within, the more it can be transformed into a pillar of strength and faith inside us.
If you experience yourself as your real presence, you just see one thing dissolving into another in the middle of your presence. If you are identified with the structure, it will feel as if you are disintegrating, and then there is emptiness, and then presence arises. This impression is only because your attention is focused on a certain part of you, and so you are not experiencing your totality. You do not fall apart or disappear, although it feels that way if your ego is the part of you that you are identified with.
presence arises. This impression is only because your attention is focused on a certain part of you, and so you are not experiencing your totality. You do not fall apart or disappear, although it feels that way if your ego is the part of you that you are identified with.
People who work on themselves develop their inner vision so that they can perceive their essential nature. This is analogous to looking at matter in a microscope:
If you look through the microscope, you will see the molecular structure of the material; if you don’t look, you will not see what it is made of. The more people see the essential nature they are made of, the more the actions in their lives are informed by that perception. If you don’t perceive your essence, it does not affect you or your life very much. A lot of work is required to refine one’s perception to become aware of Essence at all, much less to become aware of it as the essence of one’s consciousness itself.
Those who do perceive it usually think of the experience as a bit of grace that God throws you once in awhile, like a blessing that happens to hit you occasionally. To conceive of Essence in this way is not to see objectively.
Holy Faith is a specific condition or state, a specific development of this sense of purity and implicit confidence or trust. It is needed to embark on, and to continue traveling the path, because as we journey on our path, we do not have full knowledge of reality. We do not have complete access to this view, and so most of the way along the path, we don’t know what’s happening. We don’t know where we are or where we are going, except for occasional glimpses. Because of this inevitable ignorance, faith is very important; in fact, it is necessary to keep you going when you can’t see the road clearly. When we have complete understanding and perception of reality, faith is no longer necessary.
But as long as we are passing through what St. John of the Cross calls “the dark night” of not seeing reality clearly, we need faith. At times, the journey is easy, at times it is difficult, and at other times it feels down-right impossible; and for the most part, we don’t know why, nor do we understand what it is that is happening to us. In the face of this not knowing, our faith keeps us going; and when there is faith, we don’t need to know where we are going or how to feel secure. If we knew exactly where we were heading, there would be no discovery, no adventure, no magic. Holy Faith sustains us on our journey into the unknown.
CHAPTER NINETEEN Point Three HOLY HARMONY, HOLY LAW, HOLY HOPE
The awareness that there are no exceptions to the natural laws which govern the Cosmos, and that these laws are completely objective, operating as an inter-connected unity. The highest law is the totality of Reality itself. Certitude in the objectivity and total applicability of those laws is true hope. —Ichazo, 1972
Understanding what we have been calling the “view of reality” can and usually does make the difference between getting bogged down somewhere on the path, or continuously opening and progressing.
It is an understanding of how reality is, and how it functions, regardless of which state of consciousness one is experiencing. So the focus in this study is not on the specific content of experience, whether the experience is of the ego self, of emotions, of emptiness, of the essential self, of the body, or even of hearing celestial music, seeing angels, or being healed.
So the focus in this study is not on the specific content of experience, whether the experience is of the ego self, of emotions, of emptiness, of the essential self, of the body, or even of hearing celestial music, seeing angels, or being healed.
When you apprehend the content of your experience from the perspective of this transcendent view, you see that all your experience is part of the greater reality illuminated by this view. Without this perspective, your experience will be grounded in the egoic view, regardless of how exalted, sublime, or subtle, the state.
The Holy Idea of ennea-type Three, which we are about to explore, is particularly germane to this issue of stuckness versus continual unfoldment and realization.
Understanding the objective view means understanding experience when there is no ego informing it. It shows us how any experience or dimension of reality will be perceived when seen objectively, in contrast to how it will be perceived when seen through the egoic filter of the nine delusions. For example, you might have a very profound experience of divine love and perceive it as being particular to one time, place, or person, and not to another—which is the egoic view—or you might perceive it as the nature of everything—which is the objective view. The objective…
It shows us how any experience or dimension of reality will be perceived when seen objectively, in contrast to how it will be perceived when seen through the egoic filter of the nine delusions. For example, you might have a very profound experience of divine love and perceive it as being particular to one time, place, or person, and not to another—which is the egoic view—or you might perceive it as the nature of everything—which is the objective view.
Trusting the reality of Being is of primary importance in facilitating our experience…
It does not matter whether you like the view of reality or not. It is how things are. If you like it or don’t like it, that’s your business—it’s not the business of reality. If you don’t like how things are, the best you can do is to find out why, so that you can begin to harmonize yourself with it. Otherwise, you will suffer. This doesn’t mean reality is punishing you. It simply means that if you harmonize yourself with reality, you will experience a sense of peace and freedom, and if you don’t, you will experience discord. There are…
If you don’t like how things are, the best you can do is to find out why, so that you can begin to harmonize yourself with it. Otherwise, you will suffer. This doesn’t mean reality is punishing you. It simply means that if you harmonize yourself with reality, you will experience a sense of peace and freedom, and if you don’t, you will experience discord. There are three ways in which we can understand the Holy Idea of ennea-type Three, and so it has three names: Holy Harmony, Holy Law, and Holy Hope.
To understand what this means, we need to see that this Holy Idea is about functioning, meaning that it deals with activity, events, changes, transformations, movements, processes, the passage of time, and so on. In other words, this is the main Idea on the Enneagram…
Holy Hope is the specific transformation in the soul that is the consequence of Holy…
Holy Law is the completely egoless perception and understanding of functioning and activity, which means the dynamic characteristics of Being. It roughly corresponds to the Fifth Awareness or Buddha in the Vajrayana Buddhist system of the Five Buddhas: the “…
It roughly corresponds to the Fifth Awareness or Buddha in the Vajrayana Buddhist system of the Five Buddhas: the “all-accomplishing wisdom,” which is related to the action of compassion.
Dynamic Oneness Understanding the energetic, dynamic, and creative element of Being is vitally important as we travel the path, because many people become frightened when they experience presence, and realize that it involves non-doing, a state of deep rest. We become concerned about who is going to take care of things and how things will be accomplished if the truth of who we are is this non-doing. How will the rent get paid? Who will do the laundry? Who will get the groceries and how will dinner be prepared? If you don’t understand how functioning actually happens objectively, you will believe that if you abide in this presence, nothing will happen. You will have no trust that things will be taken care of. When people first recognize the profound stillness that manifests in being deeply present, and they become afraid about whether things will be taken care of, they try to use their experience to support their egoic view of functioning. They ask,…
When people first recognize the profound stillness that manifests in being deeply present, and they become afraid about whether things will be taken care of, they try to use their experience to support their egoic view of functioning. They ask, “How is this useful for my daily life?” This is analogous to someone having a vision of Jesus Christ, and then asking his priest, “How can I apply this to my life?” These concerns indicate a lack of understanding about objective functioning.
Holy Law shows the unity of existence when seen in its functioning, dynamic mode. This Idea is a formulation of the dimension that we call the Logos in the Diamond Approach, which is the dynamic and…
This oneness takes the form of a multiplicity of appearance and experience, just as in ordinary perception, but there is no true separateness between one thing and another. In reality, there is no duality, no isolating boundaries or partitions. The separateness of various phenomena is only apparent, and discrimination only differentiates, rather than partitions. When we see this unity in…
The ordinary view is that we live in a universe of physical objects made up of physical matter that obey physical laws of various kinds, such as the law of gravity, chemical and biochemical laws, electro-mechanical laws, and so on. Inhabiting this inanimate universe are beings who do things and make things. This perspective completely ignores the fact of oneness and the unity of existence. If reality is one, if there are no separating boundaries between one thing and another, then there are no objects in the usual sense of the word, nor are there separate individuals. Believing that changes occur because one thing acts upon another—like the sun acts on the earth and the earth in turn acts on the moon, or you are doing something that affects someone else—assumes a belief in separateness. But if separateness is not ultimately real, how do these things happen? Exploring this question can bring about an understanding of Holy Law. From its perspective, we perceive a progressive unfoldment of the unity of existence, all of existence changing and transforming in unity, since everything makes up a boundless oneness. Changes are not seen as separate…
So Holy Law means that the whole universe changes and transforms as a unity, like one ocean whose surface is in a constant state of change and transformation, continuously rippling as one. It is not that things are changing in unison, but that one completely unified mass is moving without the possibility of any part going its own way or changing, independent…
Clearly, this view is a radical departure from our usual way of perceiving things. It challenges all kinds of assumptions. For example, we see that the so-called law of cause and effect does not exist, since causality means that one thing causes something else to happen. According to Holy Law, there are no isolated objects or events, so to experience one thing as causing another is not accurate. From this perspective, for instance, the experience that you are turning the pages of this book is not what is really happening—there is no separate book with a separate you turning the pages. There is actually a wholeness, a whole movement of reality in which the pages turn. You cannot walk from one place to another, since there is no separate you and there are really no distances to be traversed. The whole picture changes from one instant to the next. What we think of as walking from here to there is more like the changing…
For example, we see that the so-called law of cause and effect does not exist, since causality means that one thing causes something else to happen. According to Holy Law, there are no isolated objects or events, so to experience one thing as causing another is not accurate. From this perspective, for instance, the experience that you are turning the pages of this book is not what is really happening—there is no separate book with a separate you turning the pages. There is actually a wholeness, a whole movement of reality in which the…
What we think of as walking from here to there is more like the changing arrangements of dots on a television screen; at one moment, they’re arranged so that you are here, the next, you are there, and so on. So there are no actual distances crossed. If…
From this perspective, we realize that the universe does not exist in time. It is continuously and instantaneously being created second by second. This is not the same thing as saying that God creates or moves everything, which is the traditional religious point of view that sets God apart from the rest of the universe, an indication that one is not seeing or understanding the unity of existence. Understanding Holy Law renders meaningless the religious belief that the universe was created by God at some moment in the distant past. The entire universe is being…
Understanding Holy Law renders meaningless the religious belief that the universe was created by God at some moment in the distant past. The entire universe is being created anew in every instant, so it is not true that a creator created the…
This Holy Idea confronts some of our very basic convictions about reality, but if we don’t understand it, we cannot really understand what unfoldment means. This is because the unfoldment of the soul is Holy Law operating in one location, so when we perceive it, we are seeing in microcosm what is happening everywhere all the time. Holy Law is not an easy thing to swallow, since in the process of perceiving it, you—as you have known yourself—get swallowed up.
This is because the unfoldment of the soul is Holy Law operating in one location, so when we perceive it, we are seeing in microcosm what is happening everywhere all the time.
Holy Law is not
an easy thing to swallow, since in the process of perceiving it, you—as you have known yourself—get swallowed up.
Perceptions of the Dynamic Flow
So, the unfoldment or flow of Being manifests as the changing of the pattern of the unity, continuously changing the patterns of how things appear. It is like seeing the whole universe as one river that is constantly changing as it flows. We not only perceive this change as changes, transformations, movements, and evolutions in the cosmic pattern, but we also see that these changes and movements include what we ordinarily perceive as our actions and the actions of other living beings.
It is like seeing the whole universe as one river that is constantly changing as it flows.
So Being is not only presence, but the flow of presence. It is a flow of nowness in continuous transformation of the universal pattern. This flow is what we usually perceive as the passage of time. In other words, what we call time is a limited way of intuiting the flow of Being. Since we ordinarily don’t perceive the unity of existence, and so don’t experience change as the flow of Being, we think of change as due to the passage of time.
The flow itself is what I call real time. When we perceive all of reality in constant flow, then we are perceiving real time; otherwise, we see the situation in a distorted way, as separate changes happening in time. So the flow, the experience of Holy Law, is in a sense the source of time, since time is a concept arising from a…
So the flow, the experience of Holy Law, is in a sense the source of time, since time is a concept arising from a distorted perception of Being or the totality of the universe in a constant state of flow.
Being is very fluid, continuously arranging and rearranging the pattern of appearance. The contemporary Buddhist teacher, Tarthang Tulku, describes this in his book, Time, Space and Knowledge: A New Vision of Reality, in which he calls this dynamic flow, “Great Time.” “When fully appreciated, Great Time is seen to be a kind of perfectly liquid, lubricious dimension—it is quintessentially ‘slippery’” (Tulku, 1977, p.…
The contemporary Buddhist teacher, Tarthang Tulku, describes this in his book, Time, Space and Knowledge: A New Vision of Reality, in which he calls this dynamic flow, “Great Time.”
“When fully appreciated, Great Time is seen to be a kind of perfectly liquid, lubricious dimension—it is quintessentially ‘slippery’” (Tulku, 1977, p. 161). When you feel the flow, you realize that Being is not static, but constantly moving like quicksilver.
In contrast to the Biblical creation story, this is the idea of continual creation, of the universe being continually created instant by instant, always new. The focus in this perception is not on the fact of the flow and process of change, but on the fact that the flow is not in time, not coming from the past through the present and into the future. The perception of the flow as creation reveals that it is from non-existence to existence, a flow that is continuously being renewed. When we think of water flowing, we usually think of the same water moving, but here, it is more the sense of a fountain of newly-arising water, constantly being created. Seeing that the flow is always in the now, you realize that it is a new creation. Everything is constantly manifesting, as in a magic show when a rabbit is pulled out of an empty hat. So when we talk about creation, we see that it is not a…
The perception of the flow as creation reveals that it is from non-existence to existence, a flow that is continuously being renewed. When we think of water flowing, we usually think of the same water moving, but here, it is more the sense of a fountain of newly-arising water, constantly being created. Seeing that the flow is always in the now, you realize that it is a new creation. Everything is constantly manifesting, as in a magic show when a rabbit is pulled out of an empty hat. So when we talk about creation, we see that it is not a flow from the past to the future, but rather, a flow from non-manifestation to manifestation.
Everything is constantly manifesting, as in a magic show when a rabbit is pulled out of an empty hat. So when we talk about creation, we see that it is not a flow from the past to the future, but rather, a flow from non-manifestation to manifestation.
Being and what is being created are the same thing. It is Being outflowing, creating how it appears from instant to instant. This idea is prevalent in Sufism, and according to the Sufi philosopher, Ibn Arabi: Creation as the “rule of being” is the pre-eternal and continuous movement by which being is manifested at every instant in a new cloak. The Creative Being is the pre-eternal and post-eternal essence or substance which is manifested at every instant in the innumerable forms of beings; when He hides in one, He manifests Himself in another. Created Being is the manifested, diversified, successive, and…
So God is not something that creates the world; God is the world when we recognize it in its unity.…
And His Creation springs, not from nothingness, from something other than Himself, from a not-Him, but from His fundamental being, from the potencies and virtualities latent in His own unrevealed being… The Creation is essentially the revelation of the Divine Being, first to himself, a luminescence…
So everything that we see is nothing but the revelation of Being, the true…
From this angle, all movements and transformations are seen as the spontaneous self-revealing creativity of Being. The focus here, then, is on the spontaneous magical unfolding and flowering, which is pure appearing. More exactly, creation or the flow of Being is basically replacement: One unified appearance is replaced by another unified appearance. The word creation might make you think that something new and different is being created, but from the perspective of self-revelation, Being is simply revealing itself through the innumerable manifestations of objects, beings, and events that we experience. So by seeing this flow as a self-revelation, we see that there is no distinction between what is created and what is creating. Here, then, the continuity of Being is its self-revelation, through which we are able to perceive it. As long as there is perception of Being, it is always perceived through the forms it manifests. When you perceive Being without any form, there is no…
One unified appearance is replaced by another unified appearance. The word creation might make you think that something new and different is being created, but from the perspective of self-revelation, Being is simply revealing itself through the innumerable manifestations of objects, beings, and events that we experience.
As long as there is perception of Being, it is always perceived through the forms it manifests. When you perceive Being without any form, there is no perception. This is the divine coma, the cessation of experience.
So we have seen Holy Law as a flow of Being, a creativity, and a self-revelation. Experientially, there is a different flavor to each of these perceptions, and they are progressively more subtle. The self-revelation has more of a magical quality: The whole of reality is Being, magically displaying its qualities and potentialities by making them appear…
The whole of reality is Being, magically displaying its qualities and potentialities by making them appear just like that, out of nothing. But that appearance is Being itself, not something separate.
This perception is described by Longchenpa, in the following quote: All that is has me—universal creativity, pure and total presence—as its root. How things appear is my being. How things arise is my manifestation. (Longchenpa, 1987, p. 32)
“How things appear” points to the Beingness, and “how things arise” points to the unfoldment, to the flow, the manifestation. So Holy Law here is the magical manifestation of the mystery. It is the spontaneous self-arising of all appearance. Everything, then, is seen as spontaneously arising, with no creator and no created. What is arising is nothing but the presence itself manifesting itself.
In self-revelation, Being is revealing whatever is in it, while in manifestation, Being is the unending spontaneous manifestation. This subtlety has a very different feel experientially.
whatever is in it, while in manifestation, Being is the unending spontaneous manifestation. This subtlety has a very different feel experientially.
In addition to this inseparability, there is the sense of one unified will moving everything, the sense that Beingness with its own will is transforming itself. Through the sixth way of experiencing Holy Law, we gain a more complete understanding of it. Here, we experience Being as an inherently dynamic presence.
It is always transforming its appearance, without there being a transformed one and a transforming one. So Being is a living, seething, dynamic, energetic presence, whose dynamism and movement never detract from its stillness. To see the aspect of self-revelation of Being is to appreciate intimately the depth of awareness that appears as the…
There is no distinction between the witness and the revelation or the manifestation. Witnessing itself is part of the dynamism. The dynamism, then, is inherently self-aware. To understand that the totality of the universe is constantly renewing itself radically changes our notion of death. Personal death is simply Being manifesting at one moment with a particular person as part of the picture, and in the next moment without that person. From this perspective,…
Harmonious…
Holy Harmony, the second name or nuance of this Holy Idea, points to two primary…
So all movements, changes, and actions form a unified and harmonious patterned flow. This flow is aesthetically and absolutely appealing and satisfying, and on a practical level, is totally fulfilling. There are no incongruities, no inconsistencies, no contradictions between the various local changes and occurrences because they are not separate from each other. Contradictions can only exist from the perspective of an individual who sees one thing happen and then sees another thing happen, which she thinks is contradictory to the first thing. But if there is only one unified unfolding, how can there be inconsistencies? What we call disharmonies and inconsistencies are part of the harmony when seen from this larger perspective. Another insight that Holy Harmony reveals is the perception that this unified functioning has an inherent intelligence which gives it an optimizing thrust. In other words, this dynamic flow and creativity is not haphazard, erratic, or accidental, but rather, is a harmony that reveals an intrinsic intelligence. This intelligence manifests in the fact that the thrust of this flow and creativity is optimizing, in the…
What we call disharmonies and inconsistencies are part of the harmony when seen from this larger perspective. Another insight that Holy Harmony reveals is the perception that this unified functioning has an inherent intelligence which gives it an optimizing thrust. In other words, this dynamic flow and creativity is not haphazard, erratic, or accidental, but rather, is a harmony that reveals an intrinsic intelligence.
It is optimizing in the sense that it is always moving in such a way that it reveals its truth. So the dynamism of Being is like a gravitational pull that always tends to pull our perception toward the…
That is, if we let reality unfold without interfering with it, we see that our experience of it evolves spontaneously toward…
The dynamism of Being is seen as our true hope. Whether you recognize it or not, this dynamism is the hope for any human being of living in the truth, in harmony with objective reality.
Objective Optimism
It is the realization that Reality “does itself,” independent of our imaginary autonomy,
Here, it is a feeling of optimism, an attitude of joyous openness and trusting receptivity to what the unfolding of Being presents to us. A trust in the dynamics of Being naturally makes us feel optimistic.
You will have an openness to whatever happens; whatever God or the universe presents you with, you will welcome happily because you know that everything is moving naturally toward harmony. This is not something that you conceptualize, nor is it about anything in particular that occurs.
The difference between Holy Faith and Holy Hope is that faith is a trust in the fact of the presence of Being, while hope is trust in the creative flow of the functioning of that presence. So faith gives you the sense of being supported and taken care of by the universe, while hope gives you the sense that as things unfold, everything is and will be fine.
So faith gives you the sense of being supported and taken care of by the universe, while hope gives you the sense that as things unfold, everything is and will be fine.
it is needed to allow the unfoldment of the soul to progress without feeling the need to interfere with it or direct it. We know that it is inherently guided, and this knowing is not an idea in our minds, nor the result of reasoning, nor a logical certainty. It is an experiential transformation of the soul that makes the soul progressively more open and happily optimistic, trusting that everything will transpire in the best way, beyond our preconceived ideas of what we think is best.
Many of us have had experiences in which we felt a sense of unfoldment that has happened naturally, without manipulation, or have had a sense of being guided. These experiences can help us understand this Holy Idea, in that this Idea is a larger, non-specific version of these experiences. To understand this connection will also confront our egoic view about functioning and unfoldment, which is necessary to expose our ego-based convictions.
There is nothing in the Holy Ideas that judges whether you are experiencing it that way or not. From the perspective of the view of reality that the Holy Ideas describe, there is no judgment and there are no comparisons. In fact, because it is the dynamism of Being, Holy Law includes and allows egoic experience. This, also, is the functioning of Being. You are not creating it, even though it might seem that way.
The Separate Doer The absence of the Holy Idea that we have been discussing leads to the specific delusion of ennea-type Three. It is the belief in a separate and independent doer.
The absence of the Holy Idea that we have been discussing leads to the specific delusion of ennea-type Three. It is the belief in a separate and independent doer.
Here, it is the belief in separate functioning. It is the conviction that one can act independently from the rest of the universe, operating as a separate functional unity.
it is not that you don’t feel you are moving your arms or talking, nor is it the sense that someone or something else is moving you. It is a different perception in which you see that all functioning, all doing, all activity is happening as one thing. What you are doing and what everyone else is doing is all part of the same movement, so there is no isolated functioning separate from that one flow of activity.
you see that all functioning, all doing, all activity is happening as one thing.
When you are driving your car and you see others driving their cars,
you would see that you and everyone else you pass on the road are all manifestations of the same thing. There are not separate…
deeper level, you realize that not only are you and everyone else manifestations of the same reality, but the cars are also manifestations of that reality, and the road itself. The car and you and the driving itself are all the…
When you watch a movie and see someone in it driving a car, is that person really driving a car from one place to another? If you forget that you are sitting in a theater, watching an image on a…
So in our analogy, the delusion of ennea-type Three is that the movie is reality and our actions are not part of a larger picture beyond the movie. It is said that ennea-type Three is trying to take God’s place by…
In the old theological language, this belief that you are like a little god, functioning according to your own independent…
The loss or inadequacy of holding in childhood, reflected through this delusion of vanity, leads to the specific difficulty of ennea-type Three. The specific difficulty, as we have seen with each ennea-type, is how the environmental inadequacy in holding in early childhood is reflected in one’s personal experience. Here, there is the belief that one is a separate and independent doer, and at the same time, the experience that the environment is inadequate and unsupportive. You feel abandoned, rather than held and supported, and you have the sense that no one is taking care of you…
You feel abandoned, rather than held and supported, and you have the sense that no one is taking care of you adequately. While feeling the deficiency, difficulty, and suffering of your experience, there is the growing conviction that you are a doer, that you can act.
In other words, the inadequacy of the environment cuts you off from the experience that everything is occurring harmoniously without having to do anything yourself, while at the…
You take the inadequacy in the environment on yourself, believing that you should be able to take care of yourself, since through the delusion, you take yourself to be a center of action. So instead of seeing that the inadequacy is in the environment, you come to believe that it is within yourself. Since you aren’t able to provide for and take care of yourself, you not only take it to mean that you can’t do these things on your own, but you also take it as a failure, and feel unable, inadequate, and incompetent…
separate…
Ego Helplessness and…
So the painful emotional state of abandonment and isolation is compounded by feelings of inadequacy, incompetence, ineptness, and failure, all of which crystallizes…
The core of this complex of painful emotions is the specific difficulty itself, the very difficult feeling of helplessness. The sense of incompetence and failure is the helplessness characterized by self-judgment. Without this characterization, the helplessness is simply the existential predicament resulting from inadequate holding, filtered…
This helplessness is not specific to one incident, but is inherent in egoic experience. It is true of any ego, whether one is aware of it or not, and is the felt sense of oneself when one is subscribing to the delusion of independent doership. It is a deep inner feeling of helplessness that arises not because the situation is not right, but…
However, this helplessness is nonsensical if one does not believe that one is…
The loss of basic trust is reflected in the mirror of vanity as the specific reaction of ennea-type Three. You feel abandoned, no one is taking care of you, and you feel that it is all up to you. Since you believe that you are an independent doer, the specific reaction is activity—the activity of the ego, both inner and outer. This activity is agitated, desperate, reactive, and also defensive, since it serves to cover up the specific difficulty of helplessness as well as its derivatives: the sense of inadequacy, ineptness, and failure. A good name for this reactive and agitated activity is striving. It manifests as an efforting, a pushing, a constant, obsessive and compulsive need to be active, achieving, doing, and succeeding. This striving is a reaction formation to the sense of helplessness, and at the same time, it is an imitation of the energetic dynamism of Being. Rather than being intimately connected to Being, however, it is an expression of, and a defense against, the deep sense of helplessness and emptiness experienced as inadequacy. So the striving is both an expression of the disconnection from Being and an activity that cuts one off from Being. It is the activity of the ego which does not trust that Being or God is doing everything, will do everything, and, if one surrenders…
care of you, and you feel that it is all up to you. Since you believe that you are an independent doer, the specific reaction is activity—the activity of the ego, both inner and outer. This activity is agitated, desperate, reactive, and also defensive, since it serves to cover up the specific difficulty of helplessness as well as its derivatives: the sense of inadequacy, ineptness, and failure. A good name for this reactive and agitated activity is striving. It manifests as an efforting, a pushing, a constant, obsessive and compulsive need to be active, achieving, doing, and succeeding.
So the striving is both an expression of the disconnection from Being and an activity that cuts one off from Being.
In the course of our development, the early environment becomes projected onto the totality of existence, so we tend to believe that all of existence is characterized by the lack of holding we experienced in childhood. This makes it difficult for us to see how Being, which is the totality of all of existence, can actually function to hold us.
The more we have the experience of being held by reality, the more the sense of inadequacy will be healed. Such experiences generate more trust and help us understand more completely what holding is about. Initially, such experiences might expose previously unconscious memories of inadequate holding, which is part of the process of working through, and letting go of, those memories. In a sense, we have to re-experience the difficulties in the holding that we had—and feel their impact on us—in order to let them go.
The more you understand the view of reality as seen through the Holy Ideas, the more you realize that the whole universe is holding you. The more you see that, the more you will trust, which in turn allows you to let go of more of your positions of deficiency. To really experience fundamental basic trust is not easy. Each of us already has some trust, so it is a matter…
If you stop striving, you have to give up the delusion that you are a separate and independent doer. So, to prove to yourself that you are an independent doer, you have to always be engaged in activity, regardless of what it is about. Many people think that the most important thing to people of this…
They don’t rest. So while success is important, it is not as fundamental as the striving itself. They are always generating their identity through activity. This striving is true of everyone living from the egoic perspective—it takes the form of control (ennea-type Four) and willfulness (ennea-type Two), for example—but is exemplified most clearly by those of this ennea-type. Ego activity always has a goal, whether the activity is internal or external. At some point, you see that even when the goals disappear, the striving continues, finding another goal to…
They are always generating their identity through activity. This striving is true of everyone living from the egoic perspective—it takes the form of control (ennea-type Four) and willfulness (ennea-type Two), for example—but…
Eventually, when we see that the goals keep changing, we might recognize that the point was always the striving, not the goal. But the solution is not to try to stop striving, as this simply becomes another act of striving. To stop striving, we need only to fully realize the truth of the situation. This means we must first see how striving is constantly manifesting in our life and then see the reactive and defensive quality of it, how it is a response to our sense of helplessness. Ceasing to strive happens through accepting your helplessness. This helplessness is existential because in reality, you are not one who can do. This is the innate helplessness of the human being. In traditional religious terminology, awareness of this helplessness is described as “humility,” the recognition that only God is almighty. So recognizing your…
In traditional religious terminology, awareness of this helplessness is described as “humility,” the…
This is why many spiritual traditions emphasize recognizing, feeling, and accepting your…
To see that everything is being done regardless of you, and that things are happening in a harmonious…
So accepting your helplessness is really a spiritual surrender. If you truly accept it, you know that it is really not up to you, and you are free. But if you believe it is all up to you, you will always be busy…
It might be alarming to begin to glimpse how things really are, but it is more alarming to realize that you have not been seeing reality as it is. You see that you have been interpreting what you perceive through various beliefs and concepts, and that these are delusions. If you do not interpret things through the filter of the delusions, you recognize that the world described by the Holy Ideas is the same world, but now without those limiting lenses. When you see that you have not had the vaguest idea about what reality is really like, you experience what is called “the fear of God.” Beyond this point,…
You see that you have been interpreting what you perceive through various beliefs and concepts, and that these are delusions. If you do not interpret things through the filter of the delusions, you recognize that the world described by the Holy Ideas is the same world, but now without those limiting lenses. When you see that you have not had the vaguest idea about what reality is really like, you experience what is called “the fear of God.” Beyond this point, when you see the objective view in operation and let go of who you have taken yourself to be, the view is not only comforting, but very beautiful as well.
Freedom from the…
For example, you might experience it when you are in the midst of doing something and you realize that there is no striving—there is a sense of ease, a smoothness…
But when observing your inner experience, it is easier to see that there is always an unfolding occurring that you are not making happen. Your sensations, thoughts, and feelings are unfolding and manifesting constantly. In fact, they are unfolding regardless of what you do. Can you stop your thoughts? There is a continual renewal of inner experience going on all the time. It is easy to see that it is not as though our inner experience…
When you realize that you don’t have to do it all, there is a sense of release and relief, and you can allow things to unfold by themselves.
This separate and individual self, in its attempts to support, protect, and enhance itself, accounts for all emotional suffering.
It is all too possible to have all kinds of spiritual experiences and realizations that are contained within, and therefore do not fundamentally challenge, the perspective of the egoic self. The view of reality shows how reality is when there is no egoic self; it shows how reality looks when it is free from that self-centeredness.
It might take us a very long time to realize that this self-centeredness is really the cause of all suffering, and we might continue to believe for a very long time that we will be happier if we support that self, and enhance and protect it. If we don’t see that we need to be free of that self, we might use all of our understanding and experience in the spiritual realm to feed that self, which will only add to our problems. These problems are the problems of the self. If there is no self, we don’t have problems.
The striving which supports that identity is pure suffering—there is no peace in it. We are usually not aware of the painful agitation of the striving as we are busily acting it out in our lives, believing that it will bring us something good. If we really saw the inner nature of this agitated, compulsive activity, we might not be so convinced that it will lead us to any sort of peace, happiness, or fulfillment.
Working with Helplessness
the specific difficulty of helplessness, which as we have seen, may appear as a sense of inability or inadequacy to do what is needed on one’s own.
a result, you don’t have available to you the strength, the power, the will, the intelligence, and all of the other capacities that are inherent in Being. In this sense, the ego not only feels inadequate, but is indeed inadequate.
For a long time in spiritual work, when someone tells you that you need to look into your belief that you are a separate identity, you might feel that the person is trying to take away from you your most valued possession. In time, you see that it is really the other way around, that the person is acting compassionately, trying to release you from your suffering. It is an illusion that your sense of self is a good thing, and hopefully, your work will help you see that.
is an illusion that your sense of self is a good thing, and hopefully, your work will help you see that.
When you feel the helplessness fully, without resisting it, you might feel that you are so helpless that you can’t even raise a finger. This experience is getting down to the truth of the delusion. It does not mean that you are an individual who is feeling inadequate when you could be feeling adequate, nor is there a judgment about the fact that you feel that way. If you experience the helplessness as a failure, it is because you believe that you should be able to be adequate, and since you’re not, you are ashamed and have a self-judgment about feeling that way. However, if you see that the helplessness is just an existential fact that is part and parcel of being an ordinary egoic human being, you realize that it is not something to judge and reject yourself for. Rather, it is something to accept with humility and surrender. It is a chance for you to finally see your condition accurately.
So to experience the helplessness without judgment and rejection is to accept our existential situation when we are not in the condition of enlightenment. It is the acceptance that, by the mere fact of being a human individual, you are helpless. This is analogous to the religious notion that it is only God who is mighty and capable, and the experience is similar to being genuinely immersed in prayer. If you really pray, you are acknowledging that there is a much larger force than you as a separate individual.
The acceptance of your helplessness has the same sense of surrender and humility, and is in this sense a kind of prayer. Accepting and feeling your helplessness is seeing that you cannot free yourself, nor can you take away anyone else’s suffering. As long as you take yourself to be a separate doer, whatever you do…
The attitude of humility and helplessness is accurate as long as there is…
Striving for happiness or striving to attain any other goal is taking matters into your own hands instead of allowing the optimizing thrust of Being to make things happen. So accepting your helplessness is, in a sense…
So accepting your helplessness is, in a sense, an invitation for the action of the optimizing thrust.
Often, when we initially contact our sense of helplessness, it is the emotional helplessness that is the result of limitations in the environment—past, present, and imagined. This is the sense of helplessness we have when we are ill and feel helpless to move, or when we want a day off but have to work. It is also a regressive helplessness, shaped by memories of infancy when our capacity to do and to act were indeed limited and dependent. As we have said, this emotional helplessness is not the existential one that comes from merely having a sense of self. As long as you can find a reason for your helplessness, it is still not the fundamental helplessness. When you finally feel that your helplessness is not caused by someone holding you back, or by your lack of strength, or your smallness, or by any other specific circumstance, you will feel the existential helplessness that is present simply as part of the situation of being human. When we first feel it, this helplessness is a very painful state, one of profound vulnerability, fragility, inadequacy, and weakness. Allowing this level of vulnerability can be scary, especially in the harsh world we live in these days. But whether society supports it or not, those…
When you are by yourself, you need to find your own safe time and place to explore yourself. The concern about safety also reflects our early experiences when the environment was not empathic,…
This existential helplessness does not make sense unless you believe yourself to be a separate doer, or believe you…
As we feel this sense of helplessness and accept it, we are no longer trying to uphold the delusion that we can do. If we stay with the experience, we can penetrate this delusion. It may seem difficult to stay with because the state may initially be filled with pain and the fear that no one is going to take care of you and you are helpless. We have to remember not to completely believe these fears because believing them might cause us to react by defending against the sense of helplessness. Although it is painful, at some point we see that feeling the helplessness has a sincerity and truthfulness because we are no longer lying to ourselves. We are being…
But when you recognize that the helplessness is not about you personally, but is just the human condition, and that if you completely accept it, it becomes a positive state since it ushers you into Being, then you will welcome it whenever it arises. When you accept the helplessness, it means that you have stopped the efforting. When you see through the striving, you might become aware of how tired your heart is, how tired your mind is, how tired your body is, how tired your soul is. You feel a…
The more you get in touch with the helplessness, the more you might also get in touch with a specific physical blockage against it, which is the same thing as holding on to the delusion of vanity, of separate doership. This blockage is a specific holding at the anterior fontanel…
This loving light expresses the action of Being as it melts the rigidities and…
This last Holy Idea is important in the Diamond Approach for two reasons. First, it is important because our approach recognizes and relies on the truth of the optimizing thrust of reality. This optimizing thrust is seen in our approach to spiritual work as the conjunction of understanding and unfoldment, which is a guided flow.
The attitude of openness that the view of reality creates does not involve a judgment about the egoic view, since the moment you become judgmental and rejecting, you are again stuck in delusion.
The more you develop this attitude, and the more the attitude is itself informed and supported by the view, the less concerned you will be about trying to change your state or fixing this or that inside or outside of you. You will become less concerned about tinkering with your mind or body, about doing this or that technique or method. There are many kinds of techniques and methods, and it is not that they are not useful, but the more you understand the objective view, the less you will rely on them. You will see more clearly what you really need, and will rely less on this or that method to open yourself up, amuse yourself, or change your state. People whose perception is very close to the view of reality don’t really do much. They just relax. This does not mean that they do anything to relax, since the moment you do something in order to relax, that becomes striving. But the more you simply relax, the more you find that you are open to what happens and have less judgment about whether it is good or bad. Over time, there will be less and less reflection of any kind on your experience.
When experiencing Living Daylight or Loving Light and the basic trust it evokes, the soul naturally begins to perceive the unity of the universe manifesting in one of nine different forms called the Holy Ideas. The loss or absence of this experience disrupts the perception of unity, particularly the unity of the human and the divine. Without this perception, the soul is impacted in very specific ways that can be delineated for each of the nine Points. This impact consists of a core complex made up of a specific delusion, a specific difficulty, and a specific reaction, all related to a specific Holy Idea. By looking at these elements, we have defined very precisely the issues regarding basic trust for each type.
Traditionally, Point Nine is seen as the seminal Point in the Enneagram map, in that the other eight Points can be seen as different variations growing out of the experience of Point Nine.
The nine delusions are universal principles of ego, out of which the difficulties and reactions arise.
The Enneagram of Specific Delusions is grounded in the delusion of Point Nine: that love and goodness are local phenomena.
The other delusions are Point One, reality is split between good and bad; Point Two, I have a separate personal will; Point Three, I am a separate doer; Point Four, I have a separate identity; Point Five, I am a separate self; Point Six, I have no true nature; Point Seven, I have a separate personal unfoldment; Point Eight, reality is dual and conflictual. Each of these delusions is an expression of the loss of the unity of goodness.
In some sense, your specific difficulty cannot be completely understood or resolved until you resolve the specific difficulty of Point Nine: feeling a sense of inferiority, accompanied by shame about yourself, and a sense that you are not lovable. This is the basic difficulty; if you really believe that you are lovable, the specific difficulties of the other points will not appear.
Enneagram of Specific Difficulties are all particular flavors added to this sense of inferiority. Point One is feeling there is something wrong with you; Point Two is feeling castrated and humiliated; Point Three is feeling helpless; Point Four is feeling abandoned by or disconnected from reality; Point Five is feeling painful isolation; Point Six is feeling fearful insecurity; Point Seven is feeling lost and not knowing what to do; Point Eight is feeling guilt and badness.
Similarly, your specific reaction cannot be worked through fully until you resolve the Point Nine reaction, which is that of falling asleep. This reaction is the basis of all of the nine reactions. Remember, the specific reactions are expressions of distrust. The basic expression of distrust is falling asleep, not being present to your experience. The Enneagram of Specific Reactions arises out of this, starting from Point One: trying to make yourself better; Point Two: trying to get your own way; Point Three: striving; Point Four: controlling; Point Five: withdrawing or hiding; Point Six: suspiciously defending yourself; Point Seven: planning; Point Eight: blaming. All these are ways of expressing distrust, and they all involve falling asleep by functioning in reactive and defensive ways. Basically, the distrust makes the soul not want to be awake to how reality is.
When you do not trust reality, you don’t want to see it, you don’t want to look it in the face. You don’t want to see things as they are. You want to see things in a way that will make you feel safe. You want to protect yourself from the dangers and the pains and the various difficulties because you don’t trust that reality can take care of you. You don’t trust that there is love. So unconsciousness and falling asleep is the primary foundation of all the reactions.
The process of the soul’s disconnection from its essential nature begins happening very early in life, even before birth. As the disconnection happens, the soul loses its central, most basic, most primary, most primal quality—clear knowingness, clear luminous awareness. It loses its capacity to see clearly. It loses its transparency, clarity, and luminosity, and becomes dull and thick.
How does God see? Through the soul. How does Being experience? Through the soul.
This loss is very basic to the loss of the Holy Ideas, the loss of the capacity to perceive reality as it is. The inadequacies of the holding environment distort your perception of how things actually are. Either your environment affected you in ways that warped your perception of reality, or it affected you such that you don’t want to see reality. So that transparency, that pure clarity of the open and relaxed soul, is what suffered most in the course of your ego development. This loss of clarity and transparency manifests in the soul as falling asleep. So all the specific reactions are ways of expressing the state of being asleep, being unawake: They express it, support it, and perpetuate it. So if we want to be awake, we need to become aware of all these reactions and learn to disengage from them.
This loss of clarity and transparency manifests in the soul as falling asleep. So all the specific reactions are ways of expressing the state of being asleep, being unawake: They express it, support it, and perpetuate it. So if we want to be awake, we need to become aware of all these reactions and learn to disengage from them.
The soul can thus have a mirror-like awareness that is transparent and without distortion, as well as a capacity for discrimination and understanding. So the simplest, most elemental nature of the soul is complete transparency without any qualities, just the fact of its awareness, perception, transparency, luminosity. This is the soul’s most basic nature. It is also what is called “primordial awareness.”
thus clarifying the soul’s awareness, or “polishing the mirror” of the soul. The clear awareness of the human soul, then, perceives the objective view of the patterns of creation with an understanding of the place of the human being in this creation. This understanding awakens the soul to its own unfolding as the expression of Being, and its own participation in the greater pattern of unfolding whose nature is wholeness, dynamism, intelligence, and openness.