EDITOR’S PREFACE Have you ever found yourself in a situation where a sweetness arising in your heart catches you by surprise? In this form of heart awakening I am thinking of, the felt sense is strong enough to loosen the grip of the mind and its persistent train of thought. A warm glow expands in your chest as your heart opens. Your consciousness seems to relax and soften. There is a profound shift in how you view the world and yourself. Edges become less pronounced, a smile creeps onto your face, and a palpable goodness seems to permeate you and your surroundings.
These tend to be fleeting moments, which seem to reflect some kind of magical transformation of reality into a warm and welcoming, sweet and tender world. A world where we feel held, where we can relax without worry, and where we can be the essence of who we are in an easy way.
By individual soul I mean our individual consciousness—that which forms our subjectivity and is the carrier and site of all of our experiences and perceptions. It is consciousness located in space and time.
When we’re dealing with the boundless dimensions, we are discovering different ways of experiencing reality as a whole, not just our experience of ourselves. There’s a shift of focus from the experience of the individual soul to the experience of the wholeness of existence.
To understand the nature of everything is to understand what the supreme being is, to understand the nature of God or the universal spirit. And when I use the terms “God,” “divine being,” or “supreme being” here, I don’t mean an entity that lives in some heaven, that creates things in time and sends emissaries to reward or punish us or anything like that. If we think of it in that way, we’re still looking from the viewpoint of the individual soul.
So why do we call this love divine and think of it as a boundless dimension? In one sense, it’s divine because it’s not the kind of love that you feel person to person, toward somebody else; this nondual love transcends the subject/object dichotomy. But the notion of divinity isn’t because it is related to something called God. It’s the quality of the love itself that gives it divinity, the quality of consciousness in it. There’s a human quality of consciousness and there’s an animal quality, but there’s also a divine quality.
But with God, well, there is no “yours.” There is only this presence, this reality, this truth that is here. Experience belongs to nobody; it is as it is.
This is something we tend not to be aware of; we take it for granted that experience is always owned by an experiencer. And that is why it’s difficult for people to understand divine being.
Because we’re not aware that our true nature is this boundless omnipresent effulgence of pure love and light, when we have something we like, we become attached to it. We become possessive. If there is somebody you love, you’re attached
Any object you love, you become attached to. So what is attachment? It’s a substitute for divine love. Attachment is a way of trying to get the feeling that I am one with this: I have it now, it’s mine, and it can’t leave me. If you recognize the dimension of Divine Love, you know that you and the object are all one thing, so you don’t need to hold on to it. But since you don’t know consciously that it’s all one thing (you only know it unconsciously), you believe you are a separate thing that can have something else. And so we develop attachments. We’re bound to develop attachments; it’s our way to preserve the closeness and connection.
When our light is dimmed by the ego principle and its sense of ownership, the desire for merging and union with the divine turns into attachment. Attachment is a substitute form of merging—one with frustration inherent in it—and it’s the only merging the ego is capable of. Even the notion of wanting union, longing for union, reflects your belief in the ownership of experience and the attachment it brings. It is “your” union with the divine that you want, and you are attached to that idea.
You want to see your attachments and explore them until you see the ahamkara principle at work—the belief in duality, of there being a you and the other. Because without that duality, there wouldn’t be any attachment.
AH: If there’s any sense of ownership, it’s more like it’s you that’s being owned—you don’t own anything. In the dimension before Divine Love, there is a sense of ownership.
So what happens when you recognize your attachment and the dynamic underlying that attachment? What happens? Does the attachment
AH: I’m sure there are many stories. But you know, whether you experience yourself as a loser or a winner, attachment’s the same. Not only losers have attachments. Winners actually have more difficult attachments. S: How can you be in relationship without attachment then? AH: The more you know your true nature, and that your true nature is everywhere, the less you’ll be attached.
AH: Exactly. That’s what underlies attachment, really. It’s a desire for God. If you don’t recognize that, then there is frustration. If you’re aware of your desire for God, then you recognize the love inherent in that. And that will bring the sweetness.
Anyway, ego structure appears in the body as tension patterns, including surface tension at the skin, which is how the ego principle appears physically.
The diamond vehicles are bodies of knowledge, or structures of consciousness, that transmit to us particular dimensions of wisdom that are needed at different stages of the inner journey. They are like hard disks, and each one contains an amazing amount of experiential information about reality. One example is the diamond guidance, which helps us understand how the essential aspects are harmonized and integrated in our personal unfoldment.
Object relations refers to the recognition that it is through one’s earliest relationships with others that the basic impression of oneself (the perceived “subject” in the relationship) is formed and that this is dependent on whatever impression one has formed of the other person (the perceived “object” of the relationship).
Inquiry cannot be fully understood until you understand all the dimensions of your spiritual nature. Every time you come to understand another aspect or another dimension, you understand inquiry in a deeper way, and the practice becomes more precise, more powerful. You come to see that the practice of inquiry is an expression of the whole teaching, not just one particular part of it.
When we confront and penetrate these basic structures, the essential aspects reveal themselves as not being bounded by our body. They are not bounded by our physical extent or by our physical location, and this reveals our true nature as boundless—pervasive and infinite, extending everywhere.
Over time, as we gradually reconnect to all the various essential aspects, they can develop and come to have a diamond-like quality—a sense of clarity and precision that reveals distinct knowledge and understanding with each aspect.
We are no longer an individual experiencing essence; we are essence that has developed something that we call a personality. We see that what we are is essential nature, is presence, but that in our early development our soul needed to develop an identity based on the external world.
It’s like the whole world, the whole universe, is sculpted from glowing cotton candy or candy floss. When you’re experiencing the world in the dimension of Divine Love, everything glows from within; the walls glow, the air glows, everybody glows with an inner light. And the delicate softness and sweetness of it feels like it melts you, it makes you surrender, and it makes you let go.
AH: No. It actually limits your ability to experience. Identification with the body brings in the structure of the self that is identified with the body. There is a network of tension patterns that goes along with this ego structure and makes the body more opaque and tense instead of open and supple.
You’re not scared of dying as much, so it gives you more courage to operate in the world. The vulnerability you are experiencing is most likely due to the body relaxing and revealing the identity structure and its history, which has lots of needs and vulnerability.
AH: Yes, the soul can exist apart from the physical body. That’s definitely true. However, at the same time, when your identity is in the dimension of Divine Love, if you recognize your true nature, that you are the same consciousness that is the nature of everything, then the concept of death breaks down altogether. Because what could die, then? If you are everything, then you can’t die. It doesn’t make sense that you’re born or you die. S: Well, in the sense that the soul is a condensation out of that, the soul could die if it was dispersed. AH: Yes, the soul can die. But as divine love, you are bigger than the soul.
And as I was working on this question, I realized that withholding myself from really letting go, being fully with the questions that come up for me and being present—this withholding is directly related to my ambivalence about truly feeling the depth of my wanting and not knowing if it was ever going to be possible. AH: That makes sense. So, the wanting and the longing is for the total and complete release, which, as I said, is really nothing but longing for that condition of divine love, which is the nature of everything. That love, that light, that freedom.
one way of approaching and beginning to open to that divine love is to recognize this longing and to allow it to happen. And that means seeing all the barriers against it.
Six: Jabba the Hutt
What is the physical world? And what is reality in contrast to our usual experience of it?
The conventional view is that there is just this physical world. It has your mommy and daddy in it, and lots of other different people.
also realize that the attempt to be free from the contraction is the same as the contraction—the desire to be free from the boundaries is an expression of the belief in their existence, which only maintains the contraction. And as I’m dealing with all this, I become aware of the sense of an empty shell—the contraction now appears to be some kind of shell. The empty shell is the experience of the personality when it’s seen for what it is. When you begin to recognize that your personality is devoid of being, devoid of presence, devoid of essence, you feel like you’re just a shell.
Instead of experiencing truth, you are truth. So there’s a shift of identity, and your sense of what you are changes. It’s no longer as if I am this individual or self that is having an experience of spiritual presence. No, I am this spiritual presence. It’s a fundamental shift in your experience of what you are, which is what we mean by “self-realization.”
No, I am this spiritual presence. It’s a fundamental shift in your experience of what you are, which is what we mean by “self-realization.”
It’s a mental construction made out of beliefs and images and their associated emotional patterns, which has resulted in you being something that is not what you are. Self-realization, by contrast, means just being yourself, which means being presence itself.
The shell usually first appears as some kind of thick layer around yourself. Sometimes it’s hard, like a walnut shell, and sometimes it’s rubbery or wooden. It can manifest in different ways, and the way it appears usually reflects the dimension you’re integrating.
And it’s not only about feeling big and fat; I begin to have the experience of it also being about feeling greedy, feeling intense greed and lust. If you remember the character of Jabba the Hutt in the Star Wars movie, he had an intense lust for food, comfort, pleasure, power, control—all the usual worldly desires.
And what happens when you get as much as you possibly can in the physical world? You get big, you get fat, and you become a power mad rat. You try to control everything and be as powerful as possible, so you can get whatever you want. You’re lusty and gross and what you want is all kinds of crude pleasures, physical comforts, and possessions.
This is the place in the soul where there’s a deep lust that is very physical and very gross. It’s similar to a very primitive animal, but here it is a human soul, and when a human soul becomes animalistic, the animal instinct is exaggerated.
They don’t keep accumulating more and more, far more than they need. But when the human soul becomes like an animal, it just keeps accumulating more and more of what it wants. It tries to hoard as many supplies as possible, regardless of need. And this is what Jabba the Hutt epitomizes, being big, fat, greedy, and full of lust. So when we’re caught by the illusion of the physical world and have the deep conviction that it can satisfy our needs, our soul becomes like Jabba—a fat, empty shell that lusts greedily for power, money, security, food, comfort, pleasure, and all the various goodies that people want from the physical world.
So when we’re caught by the illusion of the physical world and have the deep conviction that it can satisfy our needs, our soul becomes like Jabba—a fat, empty shell that lusts greedily for power, money, security, food, comfort, pleasure, and all the various goodies that people want from the physical world.
So in fact all empirical materialists are Jabba the Hutts in the depth of their identity.
The fat represents the hoarding of riches, possessions, and supplies and indulgence in all sources of gratification. It’s only physical gratification, though. Not even emotional; simply physical.
And when you do experience it, you experience the source of all your physical excesses and overindulgence in things related to the physical realm—the need for physical objects as possessions for example, but also the craving for physical contact, physical warmth, physical comfort. It’s all based on the belief that the physical world that is made up of objects and people is the only source of good things—there is no belief that God is the source of what you need.
if you are willing to look at it with a sincere and open mind—what you’ll begin to see is that there’s an underlying emptiness to it. And that’s why, regardless of how much gratification you get, you never feel satisfied.
There’s still an emptiness that’s endlessly trying to feed itself from sources in the physical world and yet always remains unfulfilled. And this is the underlying experience of the worldly person.
We try to get rid of that feeling by indulging in our excesses, but when we experience the manifestation of the shell, we can begin to allow ourselves to experience that emptiness for what it is.
So this is what happens as we experience our essential nature; we recognize that who we usually are is just an empty shell, devoid of fullness, devoid of substance, devoid of significance. Just like a bubble. Before that, before your personality is challenged by essential presence, it feels real, right? It feels like there’s you, and there’s the reality of your body, your feelings, and your emotions, and you have substance. It’s not essential, but it feels real and significant. Then, as essential presence expands and you start to recognize that your personality is all about images and identifications, you start to feel the insubstantiality of it—it becomes this empty shell, a bubble with nothing inside. This is what always happens when you recognize that something is just a mental construct.
Your constructed sense of self is inseparable from your familiar experience of the world and so all of it appears to be real. This is the reality of Jabba the Hutt.
We see that the ego’s world is as empty as the ego. It’s a world devoid of God, devoid of being, and when you recognize this, the personal shell expands to become the cosmic shell. You see the whole physical world and universe as an empty shell, with nothing inside it. You begin to recognize that there’s nothing there for you; what had been the source of everything isn’t there any longer. And that is actually the way it is, but this truth is normally covered up in the experience of the individual by trying to fill the emptiness through extracting things from the physical world. It never works, you’re never satisfied, so you keep wanting more and more and more.
The theory of holes that we use in this teaching describes the process of filling a lack in our soul through substitution, activity, or denial. When the filling with something other than what is actually missing is recognized and stopped, the lack or emptiness becomes apparent. This is what we call a hole in our consciousness: a place where some quality of our nature is not felt or experienced. Since the lack is painful or distressing, we cover it over by looking for a substitute or imitation on the outside to compensate for what’s missing. Stopping the looking allows the absence to be felt again, and that emptiness, once fully acknowledged, becomes the space within which the lost quality of our essence can arise.
We come back to the divine ocean again, but now it is not “I am experiencing it” but simply “it is experiencing.” Now there is only one. There is no separate “I”; there is indivisibility. It’s not that the physical world disappears. Things still appear to exist and interact, and the same patterns continue to arise, but they appear now as theophany, as manifestations of this divinity, which is boundless love and light.
The whole thing is wonderful and sweet and loving. I don’t need to get love from anywhere; everything is love. I don’t need to fill myself with anything, I’m already full. The whole universe is full. But it’s filled with appreciation, with consciousness, not with objects that you need to accumulate. And in truth, what’s the point of accumulating objects if it’s all one thing?
See, Jabba the Hutt is really a manifestation of the soul that many of the spiritual traditions try to deal with through renunciation, asceticism, celibacy, and all those kinds of disciplines in an attempt to not identify and go along with it. Obviously, however, if you really understand the situation we’re talking about, those things don’t necessarily work with Jabba the Hutt. All it means is that you’re not acting it out. Doesn’t mean you understand it. By renunciation and not having possessions, not having anything and trying to stay poor and not satisfy yourself, that will only work if it brings up into consciousness Jabba the Hutt and you recognize where those desires come from. And if you go through the understanding and the identification. But if you just do it as a moral and ethical discipline, it won’t work.
Our soul can experience itself as a black panther, as happens in some shamanic teachings. It is not part of the ego identity but part of the potential of the soul.
Seven: The Real World
Divine love is consciousness, light, and love, as one infinite medium. We can experience all of reality as this love and see that it is the very nature of reality.
The real God, as they see it, is one of absolute transcendence, beyond anything incarnate, so it was this lesser god who created our troublesome world in a spirit of vengeful rebellion. It’s a way to explain the world, you see, just as with some of the Hindu philosophies that say the world is an illusion. But when we understand the boundless dimensions, the boundless world of being, we recognize that the world we live in is actually an expression of the purity of being.
If you look at yourself from an open perspective, you are light, a body of light. You are presence, you are fullness, you are consciousness, you are beingness.
Looking at things without obscuration, we begin to see the world as it is.
Brahman, the formless, changeless, and mysterious ultimate deity underlying reality, but they also have Krishna, a childlike deity who goes around playing pranks and seducing humans with music and ecstatic dancing. Krishna is one manifestation of Brahman, expressing its playful and loving quality. Similarly, in Kashmiri Shaivism, there is Shiva and Shakti, and the world is the creation of Shiva, expressed through Shakti.
Is the world really an illusion? Or is it that we hold on to an illusion that makes us see the world in a false way?
But what we see is that if you dissolve the constructs in your mind, what remains is the true structure of the world.
The world is not just composed of our images of it. If you don’t believe it, I’ll just throw a rock at you. And that really hurts, doesn’t it? See, reality is physical!” And we’re satisfied with that kind of “proof.” But what about the reality in your dreams? When you’re dreaming and somebody hits you with a rock, it hurts, doesn’t it? People can wake up from a dream like that because the pain is so strong. But was there a rock that hit you? Of course not. So you see, it’s easy to poke holes in the physical, materialist theory.
Yes, things do look different. Things do feel different in different places. So it’s natural that we develop the “easy” point of view that the world is dismembered, full of separate objects, good and bad.
Having returned, you believe that you’ve just had an interesting experience instead of recognizing that, no, that wasn’t an experience, that was a peek at true reality.
And where there are two without love, there can be conflict. So it’s the belief in that dismembered world that creates Jabba the Hutt in us and keeps us identified with that position. It supports the belief that our insecurity, our need for accumulation, and our need for power and control are all real. It reinforces the idea that you should try to satisfy these needs, because that’s the only way to support and protect yourself and achieve a state of satisfaction.
But if they don’t work on themselves, they will continue to believe their wrong viewpoint. They’ll be taking a delusion as real. And we know the delusion determines your experience—what you believe is what you experience. So a person who believes that the world is out to get them, that’s what they see. And they’re gonna feel justified in protecting themselves by killing people.
if I use additional terminology such as “God,” “divinity,” “divine being,” or “supreme being” when discussing the boundless dimensions, they are just qualifications of the word “being” that I’ve already been using. And when I say “divine being,” I don’t necessarily mean what most people think of when they hear those words, which is God.
When that happens, the shell begins to dissolve, revealing the image or identification that was inside it (the shell always has in it an identification of one form or another). The shield reveals the image of a young boy; it’s the young boy I used to know myself as. This boy appears to me now, scared and holding tenaciously onto his mother’s apron. This identification has emerged as I’ve become the divine experience of myself—the love that has no boundaries, with a quality of fullness and generosity.
Some of us might therefore take this to mean that the sense of being a person is something we need to get rid of. But there’s a feeling of rejection in that, which means we’re still engaged in an object relation, one of rejection. Divine love, however, shows us that there’s no need for rejection. There is nothing saying the person should disappear; the person is welcome to stay.
But then, while I’m seeing that it is just an image, the contraction returns in my chest, but this time with a feeling of rage and anger. The boy is not just scared now; he’s angry and full of rage.
The divine loves the individual, with all his difficulties and deficiencies, but the individual boy is angry at the divine because he felt abandoned by it during difficult times.
says, “I’m really mad at you. I’m angry—where have you been all this time? You weren’t there, especially when I was having difficulties.” I can also feel that connected to the anger is a felt memory of my parents’ suffering and their own feeling of being abandoned by God.
As this is happening, what comes to mind is my father’s love for me when I was this little boy and how deeply hurt and angry at God he was. I’m seeing and feeling the hurt and anger my father had when I was around two years old; I think I was twenty months old when I got polio.
And what I recognize is that when my father was feeling hurt, angry, and abandoned by God during this time, I identified with him.
Before that, I knew he cared for me, but I didn’t actually see and feel the love—it had become somewhat diluted in my memory.
This means that the aspect of personal will is appearing as will that has the precision of insight and the clarity of direct knowing, and I can feel the density, the hardness, and the fullness of it. It feels similar to the will of individuality but without the effort of individuality. The fact that this sense of true will arises as the object relation dissolves shows that the object relation had some kind of willfulness in it.
And then the insight of the silver stupa diamond surfaces in a way that surprises me. I thought that my true will would be to want to disappear, but the feeling that comes, with a sense of calm, is, “I accept the will of the divine, whatever it is.” This shows a real understanding of true will, and I see the surrender it brings. I don’t say what I want; I say, “Whatever is, if that’s what the divine being wants, then that is what I want to happen.”
When I feel the divine in the depth of me, in my lower half, in the belly center, I feel I am the infinite and omnipresent divine. If I feel it in the chest, in the heart center, I become this pearly presence that is an extension or continuation of the divine. And so there is the recognition of what I am: the son of God.
Seeing and feeling the love of the divine for the individual brought out the love between father and son, and this dissolved the ego individuality. The silver stupa diamond then emerged, with a state of surrender to divine will. This allows the personal essence, the pearl, to appear, the true individual who is connected to the divine ocean as a manifestation of it.
AH: So that’s it. There are two ways, usually, that you could arrive at the realization: by going inward or through a personal relationship that diffuses. People lean one way or the other. In our work we mostly do it through self-realization, but we introduce the personal part as an element that helps deal with some of that identification.
didn’t know whether there was a God out there or not. But I felt, if the truth is out there, I’m going to find it. Just find out. You don’t need to believe anything. We don’t work with belief. Some people say the truth is out there, instead of in here.
But this is now a different kind of personhood, when the beingness that is our true nature becomes a person in the world without the loss of its inner identity with true being.
Many people understand the Islamic call to prayer, Allahu Akbar, to mean “God is great” or “God is the greatest.” But a more accurate translation would be “God is greater,” which expresses the idea that “God is greater than that which you have imagined.” So the Sufis say, “Every time we experience God, we remember God is greater than that.”
You see the truth, and you recognize the truth as what you are experiencing now, but your mind doesn’t come into it and say, “Well that’s it, the door is closed.” Truth always has the possibility of expanding.
The belief that you are a separate entity can be seen as the original sin, the ultimate sin. And you could say that every attitude, every action we take that doesn’t express our true nature can be called sinful.
From the perspective of the Work, sinning means not expressing the truth, not expressing your true nature. It means being inauthentic, being fake, being false.
The reason that’s so important is that in order for the individual, the separate self, to let go, for it to dissolve and recognize its divine true nature, it first needs to surrender its will. And the personality, the individual, will not surrender its will easily. We know from experience that we only surrender our individual will when we recognize that we are personally loved by that which we are relating to. Otherwise, it’s too difficult for us to trust and let go. So we have to feel personally loved by beingness, by our essential nature, by God, by the divine, by the truth. You need to feel it as a love for you, personally, before you can let go and surrender yourself to it. And when you recognize that, yes, this nature that I love also loves me, then what’s the point of resisting? What’s the point of trying to hold on? What’s the point of saying, “I have to use my will to get what I need”? You recognize that you’re in good hands. And the fact that the individuality isn’t trying to hold on allows grace to arise as divine love, which then melts the separateness and connects us to the divine.
Otherwise, why surrender? And for us to be able to do that, we need to continue to work on and through our relationship with our parents, because that determines all our later relationships, including our relationship to God or true nature.
A. H. Almaas: Yes. And understanding it. You’re attached to it because you still don’t understand that that’s not the real you. So the more you understand that’s not really you, that it’s just a structure created by your mind, the easier it will be to let it go.
We can exert ourselves and walk with great determination through the desert to reach the oasis, but none of that will matter if the oasis doesn’t actually show up when we get there. And that is not something we can make happen.
It was pure, luminous, and one hundred percent peaceful, and there was an ease and a total absence of any emotion whatsoever. Just complete freedom and complete peace with a sense that I could easily, happily, glide into that darkness. I felt drawn toward it.
So some kind of cognition and understanding was clearly possible from this place, but it was not the usual sense of thought. There was just knowingness—a knowingness of peace and a knowingness of how I felt, all while looking down and seeing that my body was in total pain.
And I’m also not saying that the ever-present possibility of grace means that we ourselves don’t need to do anything. It doesn’t mean we can just waste our time, not make any effort, and not be impeccable. While grace can give us its blessings even when we are not engaged in any spiritual practice, as in my case, generally there is a dialogue or an interplay between our inner commitment to truth and our practices and the blessings of the spiritual dimension.
not out of anger at that point. In the end this giving up comes more out of a feeling of utter helplessness. It comes at the point when I truly recognize that I can’t do it and that I simply don’t know what to do any more. Up until that point, I may think I know what do: “Ah yes, I’m being told to do this, this, and this. I understand.” And so I do all those things, but nothing happens. And then I realize that deep down,
It’s more like I fully realize that I can’t do it, and in that feeling there is a recognition of my helplessness, a feeling of my incapacity, my smallness, and my ignorance. And at that very moment something else happens. It’s as if some kind of rain begins to fall inside, an inner rainfall that is gentle, delicate, soft, and sweet. And it is that delicate gentle rain that really dissolves the problem, dissolves the issue, dissolves the difficulty or the barrier.
The exertion is not enough by itself then. But I do have to exert myself and do enough to reach the point where I recognize, “That’s it. I’ve given it all I can and it doesn’t work and there’s nothing more I can do.”
There’s some kind of energy, some kind of presence or consciousness that arises and somehow melts me away. It melts the one who’s having the problem, the one who’s trying to do something about it.
In truth, I wouldn’t call it surrender. I couldn’t surrender. I never surrendered, and no one ever surrenders. You see, to believe I’m surrendering means I still believe I can do something. But I can’t let go. All that happens is I quit, and that’s because I recognize that I can’t do it. It’s the grace, the blessing—it’s that energy that does it.
when there was a complete trust that it’s all happening on its own. And it’s not only happening on its own, it’s also pushing me and pulling me and showing me and releasing me and confronting me and melting me. This is one way grace works.
That showed immediately in the sense of ease and relaxation that came with the instinctive trust I felt in reality.
At this later point, when my soul had become completely transparent—even empty of existence—especially around the heart, the heart then became a window through which I could clearly view the inner Beloved, the nirvanic luminous black vastness.[]
And the teaching tells us that the path is not to leave this world; it is to be in the world but not of it. It is a path of embodied transcendence.
This shifted my practice from never forgetting presence to never forgetting the source, which is a much subtler thing. It’s a subtle art, how not to forget the source, because the source is not exactly presence—it’s beyond presence. And again, in some sense it happens as a gift, when the source basically integrates the soul, integrates the life of the soul, so that the soul becomes the window or the vehicle for this mystery.
And the absolute, or the source, then integrates all of that experience into what I call the nondual absolute, which is basically experiencing myself as vastness, this vast mystery, in which all that we see in the world of appearance—people, trees, animals, cars, all objects—are now seen to be nothing but crystalline glimmerings within that vastness. Everything is like a multifaceted, multicolored clarity that is completely transparent to the vast luminous darkness. And when this luminous clarity that is everything manifests the sweetness of divine love, then it becomes clear that it is itself the blessing, it is itself the grace. Divine love reveals that true nature is the source of all grace—it is pure grace. But what becomes important after a while is not these vast spaces and mysterious states of realization. What takes precedence is how to live in the world. The greatest gift is not that I recognize my nature as the absolute but in my being able to live in the world and act from that perspective of the absolute. The soul becomes transparent to the absolute, which then feels an intimacy with everything in the world.
To be with somebody else and experience them deeply while leaving them completely alone, without the interference of any reactions, ideas, positions, hopes, or fears. And to be able to bring compassion, sensitivity, love, and intelligence to bear on such interactions so that the other person can also reveal that understanding of themselves. This again is the action of grace. It’s all a gift, you see. And it becomes a delicate, subtle matter at this point, because when you get to the boundless dimensions and you experience yourself as presence itself, as true nature itself, it’s possible to forget that it’s a gift.
Well, it’s possible if the path remains based on what I call basic trust. In Buddhism they call it trustful confidence. In Christianity it’s called faith. This basic trust or confidence always involves a recognition of our limitations, our helplessness, while at the same time informing us that just because we’re helpless, it doesn’t mean it’s the end of the world. It’s not bad news. The good news is that there is true nature, there is a reality that is a source of guidance.
A. H. Almaas: The whole of inquiry is based on the presence of baraka. Without it, you just find details about your mind and nothing will happen. The fact that inquiry liberates indicates that some other force begins to function. By inquiring, we’re opening ourselves to that force to function. Which is the same thing as you said, that creative process. Inquiry basically is a creative process. It’s the creativity of our soul. Or more exactly, the creativity of our true nature expressing itself through the individual consciousness.
Basic trust is not a thought, it’s not a belief, it’s not any particular state. It’s something that is preverbal. It’s just trust that you’re going to be taken care of, that things will work out, and the best is going to happen.
If we really understand the teaching and the path, it’s possible to be aware of and experience baraka, blessing, or grace always in our lives, in all situations—physically, psychologically, and spiritually. But for that to happen, we really need to be open to it. We need to acknowledge and admit that it is there.
This is why the question of allowing, openness, and not knowing is fundamental to this path.
dimension than Divine Love—the Absolute. On the journey through that dimension, the heart becomes empty of all its previous longings. It yearns only to disappear completely into the inner Beloved, the absolute source of existence, which manifests as the dazzling luminous black vastness referred to. Divine love is instrumental in this journey of the heart, for it is the source of the yearning for the Beloved, and it is the dynamic force that expresses the Beloved’s pull on our consciousness. The mystery of this journey is the subject of the third volume of this series on love.